Sometimes you seem like images in a funhouse room of mirrors—multiple images that show many perspectives. Those images in your daily life are reflected from others, people that see you from different angles. Is there a “real” you? You can, if you wish, coalesce multiple images into unity by eliminating the extra mirrors and paring everything down to a simple reflection. Are you the reflection you see or the many reflections others see?
Today, we hear talk in wellness centers, in some circles of friendship, and in stories about lost souls that people need to “find themselves,” to “find the true Self.” The expressed need to “find oneself” seems to stem from the idea that there really is a single Self, some deep-down essence, the ultimate reality of YOU. Yet, I guess that using a single reflection to capture your essence would somehow make you feel incomplete. You might even resent those who would limit you to a single image reflected from a single perspective. What if there is no real “YOU” to find in a single mirror?
What if there are as many versions of you as there are linguistic ways of portraying sounds, just as dipthongs sound very much like single vowels (say, dye). Just as there are multiple mirrors that reveal different YOUs, so there are multiple ways to represent sounds, some that even divide a single syllable into a phonetic glide. To native speakers of English, for example, the pronunciation of you is very much the same as the pronunciation of the letter u. Should we assume that like the mirror images of you all versions of any kind hide an underlying resolvable unity, just as dipthongs represent sounds that can be resolvable in a single letter? Is there an underlying, definable “YOU” that is like a language without dipthongs?
You probably don’t make a big deal of your letters. You say the alphabet automatically, “A, B, C....” If someone asks you what “B” means, you most likely respond that it is just a sound placed second in the alphabet of sounds. There is at least one language, however, in which a letter’s sound also has a special meaning. In the Greek alphabet you can find upsilon, which is both a letter and a word that means “bare u” or “simple u.” The name distinguishes the sound from similar, but dipthong versions.
“Bare u,” or “simple u.” Reflected by multiple mirrors, the many YOUs are difficult to resolve into a single image. And your alphabet? It has dipthongs. Don’t let anyone call you “Upsilon.” I don’t like that. Do u?
Today, we hear talk in wellness centers, in some circles of friendship, and in stories about lost souls that people need to “find themselves,” to “find the true Self.” The expressed need to “find oneself” seems to stem from the idea that there really is a single Self, some deep-down essence, the ultimate reality of YOU. Yet, I guess that using a single reflection to capture your essence would somehow make you feel incomplete. You might even resent those who would limit you to a single image reflected from a single perspective. What if there is no real “YOU” to find in a single mirror?
What if there are as many versions of you as there are linguistic ways of portraying sounds, just as dipthongs sound very much like single vowels (say, dye). Just as there are multiple mirrors that reveal different YOUs, so there are multiple ways to represent sounds, some that even divide a single syllable into a phonetic glide. To native speakers of English, for example, the pronunciation of you is very much the same as the pronunciation of the letter u. Should we assume that like the mirror images of you all versions of any kind hide an underlying resolvable unity, just as dipthongs represent sounds that can be resolvable in a single letter? Is there an underlying, definable “YOU” that is like a language without dipthongs?
You probably don’t make a big deal of your letters. You say the alphabet automatically, “A, B, C....” If someone asks you what “B” means, you most likely respond that it is just a sound placed second in the alphabet of sounds. There is at least one language, however, in which a letter’s sound also has a special meaning. In the Greek alphabet you can find upsilon, which is both a letter and a word that means “bare u” or “simple u.” The name distinguishes the sound from similar, but dipthong versions.
“Bare u,” or “simple u.” Reflected by multiple mirrors, the many YOUs are difficult to resolve into a single image. And your alphabet? It has dipthongs. Don’t let anyone call you “Upsilon.” I don’t like that. Do u?
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