First Self

If selves are anything at all, then they exist. Now there are selves. There was a time, millions (or billions) of years ago, when there was none — at least none on this planet. So there has to be — as a matter of logic — a true story to be told about how there came to be creatures with selves.

– Daniel C. Dennett, "The Origins of Selves"

Slowly, purposefully, my mother unbuttons her blouse. The blouse is blue with small white flowers, and the tail is tucked firmly into the elastic waistband of her salmon pink pants. Beginning at the top and moving down, she works carefully at each of the small plastic buttons.

"Mother," I plead with her, "you don't need to do that."

She smiles at me and continues unfastening buttons. Beneath her blue blouse, her padded cotton and elastic bra begins to appear. Her breasts swell pallidly above the brassiere.

The room is not well lit. The curtains are drawn, as they always are, against the sun. But I can see more of my mother than I wish to. My father, sitting here with me, says nothing. My wife, Gina, and the two other women in the room also sit silently as my mother undresses herself.

I smell my mother's perfume as she works at her blouse, her perfume and the lotion she slathers herself with every morning. I see the wrinkles beneath her arms, the flaps of skin at her elbows.

She pulls off the blouse and stops, standing before us all, the blouse hanging in her right hand. "Isn't it pretty?" she says and turns slightly so each of us can see her brassiere. My mother is eighty-two years old and mostly naked to the waist in front of her son, her husband, her daughter-in-law, and two perfect strangers. Her gray hair sprays from her head in nearly every direction. Her back is littered with small brown moles. And her dark eyes, fallen far back in the sockets of her skull, flutter from face to face.

"Do you need a brassiere?" she asks, grinning thoughtlessly at my father. His breasts, sagging with his eighty-six years of life, nest like doves beneath his gray knit shirt. He lowers his eyes and looks away from her.

* * *

This is not, of course, my mother. My mother would never have bared this much of herself in front of strangers, and certainly never in front of her son. My mother was quiet, shy, prudent.

And this is, of course, my mother. Nearly naked in front of me and strangers. Proud of her new bra, badgering my father. I know it is my mother, because it is clearly her face, her hands, her dried-out, fungus-ruined feet here before me. But things have changed.

The nondescript, nappy, brown carpet is just as it always has been. The counters are still lined with the detritus of a middle-class life. The cheap fan still chops at the air overhead, and the plastic draining board — with its plastic dish rack — still drips dishwater into the same stainless steel sink. The clock, with its three golden globes, rolls on the ball bearings of the hours, just as it always has. But my mother is mad. And the five of us have gathered here today to evaluate her for custodial care. Custodial care — that sounds as though we might turn her over to the janitors at the university where I work. As though they might know what to do with her since we don't. Repugnant or not, though, we have no more time to twist our tales.

The Meanings of Self

Among other things, I am immunologist. I have spent my life studying the intricate paths by which we protect our selves from this infectious world. Self, nonself, and why the two should never meet. But as a son watching his mother disintegrate, I am cut adrift.

My mother's self, the thing that was her for all these years, the thing I had imagined fixed as flint beneath her bones, has fractured. Shattered like a crystal vase on concrete. It is one thing to watch feathers grow from chicken-skin grafts on self-confused nude mice. It is quite another thing to watch your mother undress herself in front of total strangers.

* * *

Merriam-Webster says self is "the entirety of an individual, the realization or embodiment of an abstraction." The realization or embodiment of an abstraction. I don't know what that means. It seems woefully incomplete and miserably metaphysical. As though only abstractions will do to speak of my mother's disappearance — no matter how concretely and obviously she is disappearing.

Beyond Merriam, Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnett, considering the same issues, chose a laboratory and microscope rather than the caverns of the mind for his explorations. Through the lenses of that microscope, Burnett watched as an ameba devoured and digested another microorganism.

The fact that one is digested, and the other not, demands that in some way or other the living substance of the ameba can distinguish between the chemical structure characteristics of "self" and any sufficiently different chemical structure as "non-self."

Biological self self-evident in the simple battle between devourer and devoured.

And here's Burnett later, in contemplation of an immune response:

The failure of antibody production against autologous [self] cells demands the postulation of an active ability of the retciulo-endothelial cells [immune system] to recognize "self" patterns from "non-self" patterns in organic material taken into their substance.

Biological self, not as concept or thought, not as abstraction, but as the solid fist of antibodies as they take hold of infecting germs but leave the body itself untouched.

In other words, even the most primitive of us don't regularly eat ourselves. And even the most complex among us don't regularly mistake our bodies for infectious enemies and destroy the very thing that sustains us. It is the unique way of our being that our digestive and immune systems ignore us while they chew away at the rest of the organic world.

Something substantial, a thing apparently very different from Webster's self. The fact that, on the surface, these two selves — the abstraction of Merriam-Webster and the rock-solid self of Frank Macfarlane Burnett — seem incommensurate, we probably owe to René Descartes.

Where Micro- and Macroorganisms Separated: The Divided Self

Descartes, a mathematician and philosopher, found himself one day deeply concerned with the reality of things. What could he truly trust? What was rationally and irrefutably real? We all know that we make mistakes at times about what is real — the monster under the bed, the shadow in the closet, mirages, purpose. Most of us just shrug it off, but Descartes was not so easily mollified. He wanted to know for certain. So Descartes eschewed the laboratory (he missed the...