I would like to introduce you to alex, who capital letters forgot.
They are a poet and performer and they controls the keyboard of this very laptop, on which I write to you now, whenever the mood takes them. Often that’s at odd times in the night, or in coffee shops on miserable afternoons. They differ from me, especially in the way they portray themselves to the outside world, greatly. They’re an idealised version of the real, seminar-attending, employment-fulfilling, toilet-going Alex who composes this post now. I do so to explain myself: to explain the distance between the two versions, and yet also the closeness of these writer-personas.
It is not uncommon to have an author persona. In fact, many would suggest it is inevitable; even if an author does not take on a pseudonym, there is still the self who writes and the self who does everything else: the publicity, the meetings, the taxes. As Margaret Atwood elucidates in Negotiating with the Dead, “All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read.” Time, Atwood says, gets in the way. We all grow and are no longer the person who wrote that book, that poem, that article. In the same way that Hyde was around last night: this morning, you have Jekyll.
alex existed last night, when they penned a poem, but Alex has woken up this morning and they left a glass of wine half-drunk on the floor by the bed. Having alex in the room is like having a hamster with thumbs let loose from its cage, if the hamster could occasionally empty a bottle and write some dramatic monologue or a terrible joke disguised as poetry. It’s an enjoyable experience for the most part, to have company, not to feel so terribly alone, but cleaning up the mess and editing drafts of scripts emerging from the subconscious is odious and tiresome.
I think the hamster analogy may have escaped my grasp. Besides, it’s something alex would write: it’s ridiculous.
Throughout literature, throughout history, doubles have personified an internal struggle. Romulus and Remus or Cain and Abel fought for dominance. All I can hope is that alex is not trying to oust me from my spot as the one who walks around during the day. I’m happy to continue with the current arrangement, they’re a better writer and story-teller than I: they don’t blog, for a start. To be frank, I think they’re too lazy to deal with the day-to-day nonsense of living, so I’m probably safe for now.
Having said all that, is Alex really that different from alex? Are we not one? Do we not inhabit the same space, the same atoms? We are, we do. Is it not problematic to suggest some split in my psyche, that I can’t write unless I become them? ‘A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures,’ Lord Henry states in The Picture of Dorian Grey. And perhaps that’s the crux of it: people are complex and nuanced. And that’s why I’d like to introduce you to alex, who capital letters forgot, who I have been all along.