“When the old definitions are gone, he thought, how we grasp about for new ones! What am I, then? And what is this 'I' that asks? Despite their separation, the questions seemed one. Yet to articulate them was to be aware of the split between them, between the mystical that asked them and the historical they asked of, between the unknowable hearing them and the determinable prompting them, so that he finally came to this most primitive position: only when such a split opened among the variegated responses to a variegated world was there any self. But, on such a morning, where do I turn to find it (he wondered), to limit it, to seize it and secure it? Where do I look for a model, a mirror, an image of the questing self seeking self-knowledge? Do I turn to the corpse I'm out to meet who'll dominate my day? Or to the live and lusty youngster who slipped away in the night? Should I search in the ever-rising, ever-encroaching green and gray stuff of nature, or in the ever-falling, ever-failing stone and metal works of hand? Will I find it in my own body, which, though it is the register of all pleasure, whether of head or heart or flesh, is nevertheless a site of increasing ache and ailment; which grows more anesthetized to sex as it grows more sensitive to pain; which, no matter how bad it looks, always looks better than it feels?” SelfPainSelf Knowledge Author:Samuel R. Delany (introduction by George Zebrowski)