The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. Doris Lessing

again on my grandmother, and so me – and I thought how that couple, my parents, could have given birth to – how many? – children, thousands, perhaps millions, every one slightly different – it was the slight difference that intrigued me in this private game of mine, and I imagined as I stood there looking at my face, my body, how stretching behind me, to each side of me, in every direction away from me, stood slight modifications of me, some very similar indeed, some hardly at all. I filled a town with these variations of myself, then a city, then, in my mind, whole landscapes. Doeg, Doeg, Doeg again, and mentally I greeted these nonexistent never-to-exist people, people who had not come into life because I had come in this precise shape of body and face, with this particular set of mannerisms – I said to these people, all of whom resembled me more or less, closely or only slightly, being the same height, or a little taller or a little shorter, with variations of the same hair, eyes in an allotment of possibilities – I said to them: Look, here you are, in me … for the feeling of me, of I, that feeling I am here, Doeg, would have been your feeling had the chances of the genes fallen differently, and if you, your particular shape and mould, had been born instead of me. What was born, then, to those repositories of a million years of the dicing of the genes, was a feeling, a consciousness, was the self-awareness: here I am. And this awareness was later given the name Doeg – though I have used many names in my life. That particular feeling was born into this shape and style and set of inherited attributes, and could have been born into any one of that multitude of others, the possibilities who, in my mind’s eye, stand, and stood, like ghosts, smiling perhaps a little wryly, watching me who chanced to succeed. But they are me and I am them, for it was the feeling of me that was born …’ And I lapsed out, went away then, for a time, and came back with: ‘… And yet you say, Johor, and of course as soon as you say it, it is true, it must be true, that this precious thing, what I hold on to when I say: I am here, Doeg, this is the feeling I am, and have, and what I recognize in sleep, and will recognize as myself when I die, leaving all this behind, this precious little thing, so little, for awaking in a thick dark night out of a sleep so deep it takes a long time to know where and who you are, all there is of you, of your memories, of your life, of your loves, of your family and children and your friends – all that there is this little feeling, here I am, the feeling of me – and yet it is not mine at all, but is shared, it must be, for how can it be possible that there are as many shades and degrees of me-ness as there are individuals on this planet of ours? No, it must be that though I do not know it, this consciousness, here I am, this is I, this is me, this sensation that I cannot communicate to anyone, just as none of us may communicate to anyone else at all the atmosphere of a dream, no matter how familiar the dream, and how close it is to you, or how often it comes during a long life – this sensation, or taste, or touch, or recognition, or memory – this me-ness – is nevertheless known very well to others. But they may not know who else shares this particular taste or feel – this class or grade or kind of quality of consciousness. Meeting me, they do not know that I share what they are, their feeling of themselves; and I, meeting them, being with them, cannot know that we are the same. Nor can we know how many we are, or how few – nor how many grades or types or kinds of these states of consciousness there are. This planet of ours: are there a million different me’s here? Half a million? Ten? Five? Or do we all share the same quality of self-consciousness? No, that is hard to believe – yet why not? – since we know so little of what we are, what, invisibly, we really are. It is as possible that there are a million different qualities of the consciousness that is all we are when we wake into a dark out of a deep sleep, and are unable to move for a while, let alone know where and why we are – as there are ten or five. But perhaps, Johor, when you look at this planet with your Canopus eyes, you do not see us as individuals at all, but as composites of individuals who share a quality that makes them, makes us, really, one. You look at us all and see not the swarming myriads, but sets of wholes, as we, looking into the waters of our lake, or up into the skies, saw there groups and swarms and shoals and flocks, each consisting of a multitude of individuals thinking themselves unique, but each making, as we could see with our superior supervising eyes, a whole, an entity, moving as one, living as one, behaving as one – thinking as one. Perhaps what you see of us is just that, a conglomerate of groups, or collectives, but these collectives need not be – it seems to me as I sit here thinking these thoughts, Johor, with you saying not a word – yet I would not be able to have these thoughts or anything like them were you not here – it seems to me that the wholes or groups or collectives need not be geographically close or contiguous, but that perhaps an individual who has precisely the same feeling of herself or himself as I do when waking in the dark out of a deep dream, knowing nothing of his or her past, or history, all memories gone too, for just that brief space – this individual might be one I never meet, might be living in a city on the other side of the planet where I have not been nor ever will go now. Might be someone, even, that I dislike, or have a repulsion for, just as easily as someone I feel drawn towards – for this business of antipathy and likeness is a chancy thing, and sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between attraction and repulsion, liking and disliking. But what a dimension that adds to the business of living, Johor, this idea of mine – this idea of yours? – that as I go about my work and my business, looking after this or that, doing what has to be done, meeting a hundred people in a day, then of these people it is possible I am meeting, not strangers, not the unknown, but myself. Myself, all I know truly of myself, which is the feeling here I am, I am here, – all that is left of you when you wake in a thick dark with your limbs too weighty with sleep to move, and unable to remember what you are and what you are doing here or in what room you are waking. You said to me, Johor, that the terrible feeling of isolation and loneliness that comes over me when I understand that never, no matter how I tried, could I convey to any other being the atmosphere, the reality, the real nature of a dream landscape, those landscapes where we wander in our sleep and which are more real than our waking – this isolation must be softened, must be banished, by knowing that others too, must use these landscapes in their sleep, and meet me there, as I meet them, though we will never, perhaps – or seldom – know it when we meet in the day, and so, too, my loneliness is softened when I reflect that in saying I, here I am, here is what I am