                           20050526.00

     The six volumes of Georg Misch's Geschichte der
Autobiographie have been standing on my shelves virtually
unopened for more than fifty years, I have read snatches of St
Augustine's and Rousseau's Confessions, and Goethe's Dichtung und
Wahrheit.  It had never occurred to me to write an account of my
own life, and on the occasions that it has been suggested to me
that I do so or try to do so, I have resisted the suggestion,
convinced that everything serious upon which one discourses is in
fact autobiographical.

     Ones writing is never exhaustively understood: At best only
marginally, sometimes not at all.  The significance of ones
writing is reflected not in the number of copies sold, nor for
that matter not even in the fact of publication, not in the
judgment of more or less disinterested readers, but that ones
writing is to be taken seriously to the extent, and only to the
extent that it expresses and sublimates ones own experience.
This criterion is applicable not only to poetry, to fiction, to
pseudo-fictitious or pseudo-truthful composition, but also to
purportedly impersonal, objective, scientific discourse, down to,
- or up to, and including the axioms of mathematics.

     This postulate (axiom, assertion) may even be extended to
the assertion that the value and validity of what one writes is
proportional to the accuracy with which it reflects subjective
experience and inversely proportional to the degree to which that
subjectivity  remains concealed or inapparent.

     By these standards, I have occupied in composing my
autobiography now for many years; I am uncertain of the extent to
which I have succeeded or even what success in such a project
might mean.

     The salient characteristic of formal, conventional
autobiography is that its author purports to give an account of
his own personality and in so doing sublimates, or more likely,
confounds the distinction between subject and object, between
inward and outward, between inside and outside.  For the person,
as etymology tells us, is a mask by which the individual is
recognized and addressed in public. This mask cannot be removed,
and the attempt to do so turns into a traumatic flaying of the
spirit which reveals not the inside but a new, scarred,
disfigured surface....  The inside, of course, is not susceptible
to demonstration.  By definition it remains concealed, and the
only intimation of it is through art, through poetry, fiction,
painting, music; requiring the reader, viewer or listener to
furnish (provide, make available) his own spirituality
(subjectivity) as a template or a framework for the apprehension
of that of the artist.

     If one undertakes to compose autobiography nonetheless, one
encounters various more or less insoluble dilemmas:
Exhibitionism, self-consciousness, obscenity, self-destruction
and the mendacity of self preservation.

     Exhibitionism: One writes, even if not for publication, with
the implicit expectation of being read not only by oneself but by
others.  So one displays oneself, one shows off.  One looks at
oneself as if in a mirror.  Why should one not be embarrassed?

     Arguably, a primary function of autobiography as in the
Flanders Notes, might be to create a chronicle to assist and
support and sustain ones own fleeting memory of events, and that
purpose would invalidate the charge of exhibitionism.  At the
same time, the circumstance that one is a social being is
inescapable: one cannot truly speak only to oneself, for the
words that one speaks are the words of ones family.  Whenever one
speaks, one speaks not only to oneself, but also to them: and
whomever one speaks to _is_ that family.  (family is created by
speech)

     There is, moreover, the (inescapable) circumstance that
speech is amplified and extended by writing. The written word, in
contrast with that which is spoken, not only endures, it also
spreads far beyond the range of the word which is spoken.  This
is true of the handwritten document, more so of that which is
printed, and most recently, by that which is published on the
Internet.

     =============

     These events are now so remote from me that they have taken
on the patina of antiquity, of art.  Donald and Sara Flanders
have died.  Peter, Ellen and Jane will now be so old, if they are
still alive, so much will have happened to them, that they too
will contemplate the account, if they recognize themselves in it
at all, as if it had happened to others.

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