The Present is Monologue (Personas, Pt. 2)

We are all trying to find what the Greek philosopher Archimedes called a ‘lever and a place to stand’ so that we can move the world just a little bit. The world would be much worse off if we did not do this first and important task.

Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

This is part 2 of my persona series. You can find part 1 here.

Last time, we discussed the personas of characters seen through the lens of time and logue. (Logue is the totality of human interaction as recorded in the greater written narrative.) Personas are brutally difficult to capture, both in fiction and reality. The past is indeed a prologue, which bleeds into both the present and the future. While this blog series is segmented into three parts, it is impossible to fully differentiate between the harmonization of time and logue. Monologue and dialogue are creeping into the equation, as are present and future.

It could be said that a human being’s next words spoken are the beginning of the future that we control. In that same vein, the past is all that we have experienced in our lives. If that is indeed the case, then where does the present fall? Within our current thoughts, of course! The current jumble of information and perspective that fills our mind as we think is the unspoken and monologuing present. It lasts for the briefest instant, cataloging itself as the past after being experienced as a thoughtful monologue. If this sounds too neurologically convoluted for you, then imagine filling out a grocery list one item at a time. Racking your brain for the next item on the list (it’s probably milk) is the present monologue that you are proceeding to consciously catalogue!

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling or changing or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo, even when it is not working. It attaches to past and present, and fears the future.

Richard Rohr, Falling Upward

This is all well and good, but how does monologuing impact personas? It comes down to ego, which comprises a part of personas. Per Merriam-Webster, the ego: “serves as the organized conscious mediator between the person and reality especially by functioning both in the perception of and adaptation to reality.” As Richard Rohr states above, the ego is a strange beast that fears the future. Our personal monologuing is the ego negotiating with future reality, clinging to the past, and fighting in the present. This of course hugely impacts the trajectory of each monologue, presenting the persona in question with a choice: accept the truth of reality as it is perceived (perhaps with metaphorical baggage), or distort it through its own twisted lens to preserve the status quo that the ego so loves.

Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series does an excellent job of capturing the monologuing persona. The first three books of the Stormlight series each center around one of the three major protagonists featured in the narrative, giving extra attention to that character through prologues in that specific book. For instance, the female protagonist Shallan is covered in the second work Words of Radiance. Throughout the work, her backstory is slowly revealed, bringing to light a very complicated persona that continuously monologues throughout the present. Shallan’s past constantly haunts her, but her ego clings to her experiences and fights in the present to warp the dreadful future. Sometimes her monologues are the most bizarre of the entire series, manifesting themselves as separate personas arguing with one another.

He’d once believed he had been four men in his life, but he now saw he’d grossly underestimated. He hadn’t lived as two, or four, or six men—he had lived as thousands, for each day he became someone slightly different. He hadn’t changed in one giant leap, but across a million little steps.

Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive)

The third book, Oathbringer, features the commanding middle-aged protagonist Dalinar, who lives in the past as much as he does in the present. Early on in the very first book Way of Kings, we learn that parts of his memory have been altered tremendously by magical forces, but by the time Oathbringer occurs his past is starting to return. Dalinar’s current monologuing and future dialoguing are always at odds with the people around him, as many of them have a better memory of his prior actions than he does. Slowly the book unfurls the layers of his protected and censored ego, which is completely fine with the status quo of blissful ignorance. By the end of the book, Dalinar has to deal with his dark and tragic persona or risk losing everything he currently has. It’s a perfect analysis of the aged ego that Richard Rohr describes as the dangerous “loyal soldier.”

Naturally, dialogue (and the future that it exists in) cannot be ignored even when we are in the past and present. The past contains what was once the future, and internal monologuing is often a response to external dialog. Much of our present comprised personas are also in reaction to prior dialogue, as superstructures of our identities are poured and molded by others outside of our inner little universe. Next time, we’ll discuss the clash of personas and the implications it has for the future that is one second away!