Caetani’s (Sveva Caetani, “Recapitulation”: A Journey, Coldstream Books, Vernon, BC, Canada, 1995, 128 pp.) different-coloured women (“Presences in the Maelstrom: Angels of Poetry”, pp. 80-81) are the possible multiple counterfactual selves of her mother, an aspiring but unfulfilled artist. We all have multiple possible selves, potential personalities which go unfulfilled. This may become a multiple-personality disorder under pressure of some trauma or abuse, but the milder presence of the alternative personalities is enriching, like overtones to the main song of the dominant personality.

The alternative ego crystallizations result from the pattern-seeking activities of brain circuits aiming at integration, filling in the the blanks in data through pure imagination. (A left-brain integrator is described by Michael Gazzaniga “The Mind’s Past”, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1998, 201 pp.) But this integration can happen in various ways, like visual figure-ground inversions, or the different valleys of stability in Kauffman’s diagrams of autocatalytic nets – islands of order in a sea of chaos. (See Stuart Kauffman, “At Home In the Universe”, Oxford University Press, New York, 1995, 321 pp..)

Each of these personalities, the women pictured by Sveva Caetani, is in a different colour; but the yellow is tinged with red, the blue with yellow, the beige with black, the brown with white, as they interpenetrate.