Notes from Source: […]it is less a philosophical question than a rhetorical one, inspiring the autobiography to ask not just “Who am I?” but, rather, “Who can I say that I am?” In other words, autobiography must reflect upon the conditions through which self-writing is made possible, offering insight into the terms by which a self might be said to possess itself in language, even as it is possessed by a life that it will never fully comprehend. A performative contradiction destabilizes the categories of truth and lie when Stesichoros declares, in effect, “In truth, I am a liar!” The ironclad law of noncontradiction flies apart, an effect, surprisingly, that does not seem to worry the gods; Stesichoros’s sight is restored in any case. […]in the Greek context, “truth” is free from what we might recognize as a moral injunction to “tell the truth”; simply stated, Stesichoros might merely have been “in error.” Originally, he writes, humans experienced a “natural unity[,] … a ‘primary layer’ of sense experience which precedes its division among the separate senses” (Phenomenology 227). […]we speak of colours as “atmospheric”; they evoke feelings and invoke memories for us, much as smells can do. Like the autobiography of which it is a part, it is not a look back at a single moment of the past but a looking back that also stretches forward in time, pointing to and suggesting the future present, an extended moment of becoming. Because of such ecstatic temporality (which Carson draws in part from Heidegger), identity is not a stable category: it is not something that can easily be captured unless we admit that the time-lapse exposure of the photograph is in some way phenomenologically true to the temporal “thickness” of life, of perceptual experience, and of the modes by which we would qualify and characterize a thing (for instance, as red).

Further Notes: Place: Edmonton Publisher: Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English