There’s been a flurry of stuff posted about selves and unselves recently. Sarah Perry did this great piece on the Essence of Peopling and the same day David Chapman wrote beautifully about Selfness. And I noticed that they both coined phrases and words related to (not)-self-(ing)-ness.
Some days later, writing a tweet in reply to a conversation between @KevinSimler and @sarahdoingthing (in which they were clarifying which type of a loss of self had been referred to further up the conversation tree) I wrote ‘selflessness’ then deleted it for ‘self-loss.’ Then the tweet turned into several in which I also used ‘non-self’. Then I deleted them and started writing this, which gave rise to the birth of the unself.
We’re using vocabulary that doesn’t yet exist because we need a better lexicology of the unself. ‘Self-loss’ ‘no-self’ ‘not-self’ and ‘non-self,’ and ‘selflessness’ get used interchangeably, often get confused with each other, and can mean different things.
Here’s some of their meanings:
idletwilight 