The minute I heard the word ‘subpersonalities’, I was fascinated to find a concept that allowed me to explore different aspects of myself as if they were actual people. The idea of different inner ‘me’s is something that I had been aware of for a little while. My name lends itself to multiple nicknames, and it fascinated me why people chose a particular diminutive (interesting word) and what it meant to them and to me. I also recalled my childhood love of playing roles from The Great Escape; I was fascinated by which role was chosen by which sibling, and by the potential revealed in those early choices. I was aware too, of the odd diversity of my reading, which over the last two or three years has encompassed all my childhood favourites, mountaineering literature from the 1950s, Russian history and culture, stories from Bletchley Park, and several times, The Happiness Project. The choices seemed so disparate as to belong to different readers, yet they were all me.
Since I started writing extraplorer, I’ve had the phrase ‘inventory of subpersonalities’ in my head as the starting point of a kind of poem. Now that I’ve had a look back at the sheet of paper where I first drew and labelled them all, it occurs to me that it might prove interesting at some point to give each one an actual voice and see what happens.
A couple of notes on the poem: The mixture of capitalised and lower case first letters is intentional as the words appeared in my mind complete with the variation in these aspects and I think it is significant. Also, originally I just wrote down the list of subpersonalities, but it seemed incomplete. Then I added the story of their discovery, but still the list itself seemed too clumsy, too concrete for something experienced as fleeting, shifting. The addition of the inverted commas made the poem coincide with my inner feeling. This makes the subpersonalities relational. You can hear the poet identifying them, rather being faced with a flat kind of list. This made the poem feel complete in a way that I felt happy with.
The inventory of subpersonalities might initially seem a bit spooky – after all we are reaching towards the fringes of our consciousness – but really it is merely a development of our ordinary everyday experience of the different roles we play – daughter, sister, worker, friend. Some of the ones in the poem are everyday – (‘businesswoman’ for example) and some are metaphorical (‘enigma code-breaker’, sadly). Each image holds a kind of magic and fascination that is big enough to grow into, or evocative enough provide a warning (it is not healthy to spend too long as an orphanage worker or speck).
extraplorer 