All of us are many selves within our lifetimes, but we rely on a construct of the self, one that is thrust upon us at birth, shaped during youth, and reconstructed throughout our lives. Who is this self? What is the self in relation to the other? What happens to the self during illness? Even after our deaths we are not fully known. The notion of the self is a liminal one: somewhere at the threshold of selfhood we become aware of what it is and what it is not. In the coming-to-be of the self in childhood or in the transformation of the self during illness and dying, we see it most clearly, yet most uncannily, as we face the unknown within the known. The poetry of Strange Attractor reveals the self to be a construct that becomes, under scrutiny, as fluid as water.
