Who Are You?

Who are you? What are you?
Who are you? What are you looking for?

Who are you?

I can see I.
Eye can see eye.
I can see I.

Who are you? What are you looking for?

(Now I know, and I’ll go, and I’ll see.
I never knew what you needed from me.)

In lieu of an original poem, I’ll build this entry around an original song. I have been getting into producing music recently. I’ve found it to be a very engaging creative outlet.

When creating a song, I start from nothing, and I create a beat. The beat is always first. Next, I fiddle around on guitar until I find a nice part that goes with the beat. Then I’ll layer another guitar part. From there, the song generally takes on a life of its own. By the time there are three or four voices, a song structure begins to appear. Vocals are typically the last thing that I add.

Each time I am creating a part, I don’t have future parts in mind. I am simply finding another voice that goes along well with the existing voices in the song. I don’t begin with a grand, overall vision for the song, which I then build. Rather, I build the song brick-by-brick, each time following the contours of the previous pieces. The process feels less like creating a song and more like letting a song come into existence through me.

The song “Who Are You?” is written like a poem in three parts, with silences between them like stanza breaks. 

The first part begins with nagging, teasing voices of self-inquiry. After a time, more tender voices come to ask, “Who are you? What are you looking for?” When I recorded this set of voices, I was thinking of Jesus’s words to Mary Magdalene at the tomb in the Gospel of John: “Whom do you seek?,” as well as Jesus’s first words in the Gospel of John, “What do you seek?”

The second part introduces a new voice, proclaiming, “I can see I. Eye can see eye. I can see I.” When I recorded these voices, I was thinking about claims of self-knowledge and the paradox of self-reference. In particular, it seems that an eye can never see itself directly. It can only see a reflection or recreation of itself. Likewise, it seems like a subject (an “I”) cannot see itself directly, but rather can only view a conceptual rendering of itself (sometimes called an “ego”). Yet there is a sense in which the very impossibility of self-knowledge, and the realization that we nonetheless engage in this process of ego-creation, reveals itself to be a kind of self-knowledge. The recognition of our inability to fully grasp ourselves becomes, paradoxically, a profound insight into our nature.

The third part returns to the questioning voices, but now they carry a different tone—one of warmth and acceptance. A voice then emerges that answers, “Now I know, and I’ll go, and I’ll see. I never knew what you needed from me.” This voice speaks not of definitive self-knowledge, but rather of a different relationship to the questioning itself. It speaks of embracing and taking action in the face of uncertainty: “I’ll go, and I’ll see.” The last line, “I never knew what you needed from me,” refers to the cost of this freedom—namely, the lost reification of the ego.

The song’s structure mirrors the journey of self-inquiry. It begins with persistent questions, moves through a stage of attempted self-perception, and concludes with a sense of acceptance and forward movement. The circular nature of the lyrics, ending where they began, but with new understanding, reflects the often cyclical process of self-discovery.

Musically, I played with reverb, harmony, dissonance, and space in an attempt to create an ethereal atmosphere, like the inside of a grand cathedral. The layering of voices—some questioning, some asserting, some harmonizing—represents the multiple facets of consciousness engaged in self-reflection.

Of course, what I have offered here is just one reading of the song—I’m sure there are others. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it! Thanks for reading, as always.