become me.

Silly, isn't it? But remember, my reader, whom I hope to have travel far
with me through time and space--remember, please, my reader, that I have
thought much on these matters, that through bloody nights and sweats of
dark that lasted years-long, I have been alone with my many selves to
consult and contemplate my many selves. I have gone through the hells of
all existences to bring you news which you will share with me in a casual
comfortable hour over my printed page.

So, to return, I say, during the ages of three and four and five, I was
not yet I. I was merely becoming as I took form in the mould of my body,
and all the mighty, indestructible past wrought in the mixture of me to
determine what the form of that becoming would be. It was not my voice
that cried out in the night in fear of things known, which I, forsooth,
did not and could not know. The same with my childish angers, my loves,
and my laughters. Other voices screamed through my voice, the voices of
men and women aforetime, of all shadowy hosts of progenitors. And the
snarl of my anger was blended with the snarls of beasts more ancient than
the mountains, and the vocal madness of my child hysteria, with all the
red of its wrath, was chorded with the insensate, stupid cries of beasts
pre-Adamic and progeologic in time.

And there the secret is out. The red wrath! It has undone me in this,
my present life. Because of it, a few short weeks hence, I shall be led
from this cell to a high place with unstable flooring, graced above by a
well-stretched rope; and there they will hang me by the neck until I am
dead. The red wrath always has undone me in all my lives; for the red
wrath is my disastrous catastrophic heritage from the time of the slimy
things ere the world was prime.