House of voices

A colleague was explaining why he's not interested in blogging: "I could never put all my private thoughts out there for everyone to read," he said. "It's too personal."

So I explained that what he sees on my blog is a public persona that may not be exactly identical to my private self.

"I wouldn't want to have a public self and a private self," he said, "because one of them would have to be fake."

Fake? Maybe "partial" is a better word. The essence of me sits ensconced in layers of personae--the teacher who wanders around the classroom waving her arms, the scholar who hunts down obscure references to forgotten authors, the mom who checks to see if her son's car got fixed and commends her daughter on her custard pies, the blogger who tries to twist the chaos of daily life into coherent and entertaining prose. They're all me, or pieces of me, but some of these personae eagerly come out in public and play while others prefer to hide under the bed and whimper.

I'm reminded of the Billy Collins poem "The Night House" (read it here), which imagines the body sleeping soundly in the bedroom while its restless heart goes to the kitchen for some warm milk, the mind grabs a cigarette and studies engineering, the conscience "awakens / and roams from room to room in the dark, / darting away from every mirror like a strange fish" while the soul "is up on the roof / in her nightdress, straddling the ridge, / singing a song about the wildness of the sea." Daylight brings all the parts back to the sleeping body, "that house of voices," which sometimes pauses "to listen to all its names being called / before bending again to its labor."

In this space my public personae can hear their names being called and put their restless energy to creative use, allowing my private personae a few moments of peace so I can bend again to my labor.