The money quote from a very thought provoking piece in the New York Review:

The personal essay’s historical and aesthetic function has been to persuade us not just that personhood is beautiful or good, but that it is primordial—that individual subjectivity and its expression exist prior to the social formations that gave rise to it. This is a lie, the lie that subtends bourgeois individualism and all its intrusions into language, art, and education…. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/11/03/the-illusion-of-the-first-person-merve-emre/

Ten Dollar Words

How will I unravel?
I mean, finally unravel.
I tend to think of my ceasing
in the frames of my favorite
ten dollar words.

Will I deliquesce?
Turning to liquid
seems like a relaxation; 
a flowing surrender
leading to a merge. 
Or, will it begin with
incontinence and shame 
and dissolve 
all borders between 
words and body
meaning and confusion?

Will I dehisce?
Blowing my top
could feel like a fruition;
righteously releasing
moral certainty 
upon a world barren
of sense and care.
Or, will the shards
of what I once was 
slash and burn 
on their way out,
the ballistic ejecta
of a madman?

Will I dissociate?
Ah, word of the day.
A least effort release.
Daily steps into the woolly fog
will stiff arm the aging body’s cries
and mute the sound of Others.
Inside the final 
self-soothing bubble,
distance will define me.
Drinking helps.
			

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