Everyone and No one

In Jorge Luis Borges's short story 'Everything and Nothing', Shakespeare meets God, at the end of a life spent always feeling like he did not belong.

"He started out assuming that everyone was just like him; the puzzlement of a friend to whom he had confided a little of his emptiness revealed his error and left him with the lasting impression that the individual should not diverge from the species."

Lacking any real sense of self - and finding it difficult to fit in with others - Shakespeare first becomes an actor, "and pretends to be someone else in front of a group of people who pretend to take him for that other person." Later he invents and inhabits other personas: "Caesar who paid no heed to the oracle's warnings and Juliet who hated skylarks, and Macbeth in conversation on the heath, with witches who were also the Fates."

In his final moments, he tells God, ""I who have been so many men in vain want to be one man only, myself." But God's reply is both cryptic, and revealing:

"Neither am I what I am. I dreamed the world the way you dreamt your plays, dear Shakespeare. You are one of the shapes of my dreams: like me, you are everything and nothing."

The greatness of Shakespeare lies in his ability to inhabit and understand so many different and fully-realised characters. The men and women he conjures and places on the stage are flesh and blood, in their agonies and in their ecstasies. Kings and gatekeepers; teenage lovers and old men in their dotage; heroes and villains.

In our autobiographical age - when the cameras on our phones are most often turned to our own faces - writers are encouraged to be personal and confessional. To write as and of ourselves. I want to do something different with my poetry and to strive towards what Keats called Negative Capability. To escape the self and write as others. DUGGAN - having no gender, race or nationality - can be the voice of a young woman in her early twenties looking back on her adolescence. Or a middle-aged father. Or... anyone. Everyone and no one.

As an autistic person, I also want to challenge the persistent prejudice which tells the world that autistic people - people like us - are unfeeling. Incapable of empathy. Incapable of understanding others' emotions, dreams or fears.

The previously-published poems on this website are examples of what I am trying (and no doubt failing) to do. 'Broken?' is the voice of an older teen or a young teacher telling a young person struggling with depression or anxiety not to despair. That however bad life is now, things will change, that

"flowers and freight trains [are] both hastening in our direction

while we are looking the other way."

The voice in 'Our house (has become the kids' house)' is a young mother or father marvelling at how their life has transformed, and how their passion for each other has led to a different type of love, where children's toys strewn about the garden are

'like scattered clothes upon some lovers' carpet'

In 'Seagulls', the voice is that of an older man or woman following an unspecified upheaval or change in their life. (A divorce? The beginning of a new relationship? This is for the reader to decide.) Hearing the cry of a seagull - and realising that cry can be interpreted differently, depending on the listener's mood - they are confronted by the knowledge that their "new life" is not as content as they had told themself

"just then to realise that I was not, in fact, happy

merely happier"

Shakespeare and Keats set a high bar which no poet of our age could realistically hope to attain. But the example they set - of looking beyond oneself, and attempting to understand and articulate the inner lives of others - seems worthy of the attempt.