In his novella “The Game of Time and Pain” author Samuel Delaney traces the history of his frequent Neveryon character, Gorgik the LIberator. Gorgik is Delaney’s archetypal man, and the outline of his life is as follows:

1. The dark-skinned Gorgik is raised on the docks of the capital port of Kolhari, where his father is a successful shipwright.
2. During a violent regime change in the empire, Gorgik’s parents are assasinated, and the teenage Gorgik is sold into slavery to work the new Empresss’ obsidian mines.
3. A powerful noblewoman passing by the obsidian mines purchases Gorgik as a sex toy. She grows to admire his intelligence and begins to teach him the arts of politics.
4. When she tires of him, she frees him and arranged for him to serve as an officer in the army. While there, he frees his first slaves.
5. After resigning his commission, he leads a violent movement to end slavery in Neveryon. During this time he gains a reputation for favoring sadomasochistic homosexual practices.
6. After several years of growing success, the Empress invites Gorgik to become a minister of state, where he will have the responsibility of ending slavery once and for all in the empire.

“Time and Pain” finds Gorgik at the end of his career: the slaves freed, his mission completed. But somehow Gorgik senses a loss of self and purpose, even as he travels to attend his political arch-rival’s state funeral.

To a passing stranger he recounts his discovery of his self while still a teenage mine slave. Some young nobles were passing by and asked for some slaves to amuse themselves with. Amusement for one noble meant sodomy with Gorgik. During the act, both recognized in themselves and in the other their desire for just this sort of fetishistic, role play sex. In that moment of recognition, Gorgik realized himself to be an equal to the aristocrat. And moreover, he desired the aristrocrat’s power, his freedom. Gorgik would spend countless hours trying to recreate this epiphany of recruitment over the course of his adult life.

But now that strong sense of self has dissolved, displaced by years of struggle, loss, and success. Yet, paradoxically, to notice that loss, he must still have a self, perhaps a self behind the self, a watcher of the watcher.

He’d defined himself so long by his opposition to this dead lord, it was as if — at the death — he’d been pushing against a mountain to have it collapse into a field over which he’d gone staggering and reeling; as if, running across a plain, he’d gone over a cliff, into the air, flying, flailing, falling; as if he’d woken with an unspeakable power that felled all he looked at so that even as he gazed around to assess the damages, he’d only wrecked more.

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 finally he came to this most primitive proposition: 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?

This seems to me a unique notion of self: the self as the tear or rip in the soul (using “soul” for lack of a better word). The fundamental questions, then, for this model of self are, what is doing the tearing and where is the tear?

Who is doing the tearing? Social forces, individual choices, and happenstance. At times they move slowly, like tectonic plates, only gradually revealing any tear. At times they move violently, clashing against one another in bids for dominance. At times they conspire to prevent any tearing, fearing the assertion of a new self. (Perhaps no one has done more work trying to map the tearing of the soul than Foucault.) But always comes Trickster, like a thief in the night.

While this model of self is not especially hopeful, it’s not especially damning either. The tear in the soul can be life-giving or not. Above all it will shift and change, this time shrinking, that time expanding. But it will not be absolutely damned or absolutely saved. Paul and Augustine mistook their selves for sin. And Calvin thought his self was damnation itself.