Congratulations on catching sight of the hare again.

I don't quite know when the idea for this story first came to me, but I was asked a while ago to write something on the subject of Identity - actually under the heading 'Who Do You Think We Are?'. It was was published in a collection called 'Identity Papers', British Council, 2001:

The hilltop

I am haunted by an image: oak trees on a hilltop against a sky full of thunderclouds. (The longer one practices the art of fiction, the less one is able to think in anything but specific images.) In this first sentence of mine, I disagree with the choice of the word ‘haunted’ - I don’t like its metaphysical implications; or rather, I am uncomfortable with the thought that I might be prepared to admit its metaphysical implications. This landscape is an English landscape; it is a construct, idealised. The English landscape, too, is a construct; as is Englishness; as is English; as am I, etcetera etcetera. We chase the hare down the hillside, with no expectation of catching it. The hare of Identity. We are haunted by images, which maintain their ambiguity. Hence, when a haunting is this powerful, the intrusion of the metaphysical. One either believes in the worth of the ghostly image and therefore grants oneself worth, or one disbelieves, and is left with a headful of the crassest phantoms. (One either admits one is in Plato’s cave or one simply caves in.) The oak trees on a hilltop against the sky full of thunderclouds are a construct, as is this sentence, this this, this you, etcetera, etcetera. The hare is already out of sight, but we keep chasing it. Descartes’ ontology is replaced by Derrida’s hauntology: the latter being the spectacular contemporary re-vision of the former. Which is only to say that, Identity is the totality of indispensable things within us, or, Identity is the totality of undisposable things within us. The best we can hope to do, given such circumstances, is recyle the bits of who we are that we can get to. Nostalgia, for example, can become critique of nostalgia. The image of the trees can become the subject of a text. There is, of course, the possibility of complete disappearance, if one pursues oneself (as subject-text) to the end of oneself . Shell-people exist (and not just in Chekhov); the shell can collapse. Yet this seems in some ways less false as a pursuit than allowing one’s nostalgia to become a nostalgia for nostalgia. The hilltop trees are a nostalgic image, from my childhood. But they are a false, agglomerated image bodged together from at least a thousand different times and places, films and photographs, album covers and videos. I recognise this, and am haunted by how much this, the image I have chosen of my deepest Identity, no longer belongs to me.