The self is a kind of occasion which everyone experiences. The sociological field of Symbolic Interactionism, without using the term “occasion”, nonetheless succinctly explains the self’s composition as an occasion, as well as the process by which that occasion changes. The Interactionists refer to the self as a composition of the “me” and the “I”, me being the objectified part of the self, I being the active, subjective part. Like Sartre did before them with a different set of terms (the in-itself and the for-itself), Interactionists aver that the two parts never wholly unify, for the “I” can never be known, being instead the “know-er”, the instant it is looked at becoming the object “me”, a set of static characteristics or events that no longer live. The “me” is the passed occasion, the “I” the present one. One might represent one’s self mathematically in a lengthy equation, with earlier occasions bracketed and parenthesized, each inside another with the equation proliferating as consciousness reflects upon itself, always adding the present moment to those past, ad infinitum, eventually becoming the equivalent of the Buddhist vijnana—the river of selves, which Heraclitus might say is so ever-changing that it can never be stepped into in the same place twice.
The self, while it may be a river, might also be viewed as a string, looping upon itself as it reflects, unknowingly creating a “knit” or “stitch”, loosely or tightly woven. If one continually reaches back into the memory of a specific time, that particular occasion knots, becoming as difficult to unravel as a tangled kite string. This may seem paradoxical, but while one is always in the present, one’s present can be mired in the past—though, strictly speaking, that past is only a representation of what once was. The artist is acutely, even pathologically, aware of this process of entanglement between present and past occasion, having to return to a work-in-progress again and again, each pass through the old occasion with the new self threatening his work with a fresh intrusion. Can he re-summon the same talents, the same vision once present in the old occasion?
If the self is a string, the path it takes creates a pattern of lesser or greater beauty which we might call its degree of health. In denial, it slips a stitch; in obsession, it returns too often to an original occasion, crowding the loop that holds it and threatening its integrity—in sickness, the design suffers a diminished symmetry. Nonetheless, in dis-ease it may be more interesting than the healthy and perfect, its knotted areas or gaping holes being place of difference that snag our gaze as we turn our eyes from ourselves to the selves of others.
We turn to others’ occasions because we are unable to apprehend our own, and suspend our own interactions with the world to witness those in novels, in movies, in plays, or in athletic events. To the extent we are into another’s occasion we are out of our own, sometimes experiencing the alien occasion more intensely than we do our native self. This sharp intensity arises from the occasion’s boundedness—secure in a theatre as we are not in everyday life, we set the play or movie in the hands of a fully attendant consciousness that need pay no heed to the manifold dangers of normal experience. In a novel, in a play, we imagine risk without experiencing risk, feel fear without being threatened, experience love without performing the long series of actions required by love.
Many species experience a similar subset of action—an occasion within an occasion—when as littermates they play at fighting (violence that is not-violence), but only man as thoroughly complicates the hierarchy of consciousness that nature provides. Only we can see plays within plays, read the critiques of those same plays and then critique the critiques, so intertwining imaginary affairs with the exchange of real discussions about them as to strongly influence our actions and manner of being—read, for instance, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and be spurred to suicide; listen to Metallica and be inspired to violence; see Love Story, and fashion our emotions to emulate it; take the Bible or Koran as impetus toward piety or war, as we may choose.
But the same intermingling of art with reality that drives us to act can lead us not to act. In the strange, voyeuristic act of peeking in on others’ occasions, the border between subset and set, between meta-occasion and occasion, sometimes erodes, giving the passive spectator the impression of having acted. Rather than stepping back from the artistic bubble into “real life” and using the forms and structures he has witnessed and experienced as models for the everyday, the reader, the listener, the viewer may instead just shift his voyeurism from the artistic moment toward his inward self, remembering the subtle passage of emotions he experienced as he watched, mistaking the results of others’ actions as expressions of his character. The tears he shed as he saw footage of starving children give him a sense of being charitable and pious—without having performed a charitable or pious act. The spiritual exaltation he experienced as he listened to Beethoven makes him feel like an exalted being—though he has done nothing but listen. A triadic world develops between him, the occasions he witnesses, and what he aesthetically feels when he experiences them.
And the self that is a string knots in upon itself, tying not to the physical world but to the less stable tethers of emotion and imagination.