On being a self pt. 2

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
    enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

2. Identity

At a retreat in UK sometime last year, a speaker shared his journey to faith. He recounted the moment it began - lying awake at night in his university dorm room, he realised how inconceivably terrifying it was to think that no one in the world could see inside of him, apart from himself. How unbearably alone he felt. An unspeakable heaviness.

And that story really resonated with me. The thought of how very lonely it is to be a self, in a world of seven billion other selves. An infinite deck of cards thrown up into the air, tossed by the wind - and descending, each one on its own course. No two the same.

Somewhere deep to our defences, lying dormant, is a longing to be known as we truly are. But what is the "self" in us that needs knowing? Where does "I" end and where does "not I" begin? Pascal muses:

 What is the self? A man goes to the window to see the people passing by; if I pass by, can I say he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in particular. But what about a person who loves someone for the sake of her beauty; does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will destroy beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to his love for her. And if someone loves me for my judgement or my memory, do they love me? me, myself? No, for I could lose these qualities without losing my self. Where then is this self, if it is neither in the body nor the soul? And how can one love the body or the soul except for the sake of such qualities, which are not what makes up the self, since they are perishable? Would we love the substance of a person's soul, in the abstract, whatever qualities might be in it? That is not possible, and it would be wrong. Therefore we never love anyone, but only qualities.

Somehow, we know that who we are goes above and beyond our qualities, i.e. our personality. That you are more than the sum of your affect, behaviour and cognition. More than anything that could ever be phrased in words, envisioned in art, re-enacted through interpretive dance.

That no matter how tightly you embrace someone, you could never engulf a person whole, crawl into his skin, see through his eyes, think with his mind - as much as you understand them, you could never truly understand what it is like to be them. And even if you could, would you still remain you? (A scenario now more plausible than ever before apparently, according to this article.)

Questions. What is identity? How do I identify myself - or rather, what do I identify myself by? What makes me - anyone - matter, in either sense of the word? Do we matter? Should we matter? Are we made to matter? We know so little of what, who we are.

I wish I understood more. But all remains uncertain to me save the knowledge that there is a core to all things. An apple. The Earth. Existence. And that all questions are satisfied and searchings stilled every moment my eyes lift, and I find my self held secure, suspended within a sunbeam-gaze of perfect love. An object knows its purpose only through the eyes of its Creator. For now I see in a mirror dimly, but then -

The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.

Even as I have been fully known.

On being a self pt. I

“It is my growing conviction that my life belongs to others just as much as it belongs to myself and that what is experienced as most unique often proves to be most solidly embedded in the common condition of being human.” - Henri Nouwen

I remember waking up on the morning of my twenty-first birthday with one thought:

I am glad I exist.

It had not occurred to me before, with a tone of such sonority, that it was a wonder to be anything at all, let alone a self - to have a name, face, a place in the world. That each of us is not something, but someone. No matter how small we ever come to feel, we remain irreducibly, relentlessly human.

So what does it mean to be a self? Every notion of the self eventually ends in paradox. A duality. On one hand, distance and isolation; on the other, intimacy and connectedness. The impetus for every relationship arising from the tension between the two.

This train of thought led me to two separate, but not disparate concepts regarding the self which are frequently conflated - Individuality and Identity.

1. Individuality 

I have always been fascinated by the psychology underlying individual differences. Temperaments, traits and types; enneagrams, assessments, inventories.

Personality tests appear to operate on a principle akin to that of the classification of music across genres. Pop. Punk rock. Electronic. Blues. Sure, the divisions may be arbitrary and often misplaced - but not reductive in the least. Rather, they capture in their stride the diversity of different styles, laying them out across a spectrum, visible and plain.

I think it's the same way with people - while our present knowledge of human personality is far from exhaustive, "categorising" people can often provide a framework through which we can appreciate the nuances of human behaviour and tendencies. Instead of diminishing individuality, it deepens it. Even the beauty in Art stems from a representation of chaos, organised into a form in which it can be presented, studied and perhaps even understood.

But is introspection a well? Do our attempts to know ourselves help us any further along our road towards a purposeful, well-lived life? Henri Nouwen writes:

Self-affirmation and self-emptying are not opposites because no man can give away what he does not have. No one can give himself in love when he is not aware of himself. Nobody can come to intimacy without having found his identity.

In searching inwardly, we narrow our gaze. One must do so in probing depths. But the limits of self-awareness lie in the strange metaphysical notion that who we are - who we really are - has nothing very much to do with us at all.

As the first line of Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life reads: It's not about you. And if that is true, we have to look much further, higher, beyond ourselves for answers. 

On faith

"Faith is therefore no aesthetic emotion, but something far higher, exactly because it presupposes resignation; it is not the immediate inclination of the heart but the paradox of existence." - Søren Kierkegaard

Inspired by a quote of his, I attempted Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling a while back. Flailing in my struggle with a philosophical discourse beyond my depth, there was one particular notion of faith I found within grasp.

Expressing what he termed the "paradox of faith" in analogy, Kiekergaard writes:

It is said that the dancer's hardest task is to leap straight into a definite position, so that not for a second does he have to catch at the position but stands there in it in the leap itself. Perhaps no dancer can do it - but that knight [of faith] does it. The mass of humans live disheartened lives of earthly sorrow and joy, these are the sitters-out who will not join in the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers too and they have elevation... But when they come down they cannot assume the position straightaway, they waver an instant and the wavering shows they are nevertheless strangers in the world... But to be able to land in just that way, and in the same second to look as though one was up and walking, to transform the leap in life to a gait, to express the sublime in the pedestrian absolutely - that is something only the knight of faith can do -

It took many readings and re-readings afterwards but this description really spoke to me. I love it because in a single picture it captures the tension of living the everyday in light of eternity.

According to Kierkegaard, Faith is the concentration of our heart, soul, mind, strength into a single, precise movement in which simultaneously assume two postures at once - to be wholly not of the world, but to live wholly in it. Fully detached but fully engaged. Finding in the finite pearls of infinite value. Counting all as loss, but all for Him as gain. Etc.

It all sounds right somehow - in the way that some of life's deepest truths are formed from paradox - but it's still pretty abstract stuff to me. What does a life of Faith really look like?

I often wonder if religion is a retreat from reality; simple solace for real-life sorrow, ready relief from real-life pain. But more and more I'm being taught that belief is not a balm for suffering, or even an explanation. Instead of removing suffering, it enters into it and fill it with meaning - because He chose to enter into it and fill it with meaning.

"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden" - the weightier the purpose, the lighter the load. It's been said that our deepest fear isn't of pain itself, but of empty pain - without sense and without purpose. As Nietzsche put it, "He who has a why to live can bear almost any how".

Overall, a reminder that a life of Faith is not one of resignation, but resolve. Not being afraid to join in the dance. 

On writing

For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind... That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough. - Franz Kafka

It's been a really long time since I've written anything substantial; so much has happened in the past year or so that I haven't quite found the words for yet.

I remember a time when I was younger in which I decided I would write an original story. Like every kid who loved to read, I harboured aspirations of becoming a writer. How hard could it be? I thought, There must be about a gazillion possible permutations of character and circumstance; surely there is a story that has yet to be told.

But in place of inspiration I quickly discovered a dullness. The inelasticity of my own imagination astounded me - I was unable to devise a character who did not bear a distinct resemblance to myself and whose internal processes were not patterned after my own. I would struggle to cough out words - only to choke them back down when I realised they were my heart's deepest.

I've heard it said that fiction reveals more about a writer than non-fiction. Soon the thought of having a cross-examination of my innermost thoughts thinly (and unconvincingly) disguised as those of an imaginary persona was unthinkable. The process of writing became too risky, too invasive; offering too much exposure and too little defense, and, by then, I had already grown too insecure to allow it to become second nature to me.

I found I couldn't write from a place outside myself, and outside myself was the only place that seemed worth exploring.

So somewhere along the way I decided that I wouldn't attempt a story until I could recite my own, in first-person, as a consistent and continuous narrative. Not out of principle or anything, but out of an incapacity to do otherwise. I couldn't make any sense of another life until I had of my own. Until I saw the tiny bubble I grew up in burst bright upon the sharp edges of the world.

So nine years ago, I thought I'd start a blog, and write myself into it - just like how I would a story. I later found the term for it - "confessional" writing - but to a twelve-year-old girl it was just putting words to feelings. Words understood better than people, it seemed. They were better listeners; more sensitive to subtleties of expression and shades of meaning, more discerning.

I'm twenty one now. And language has somewhat lost its lustre - tarnished, it often reveals beneath its sheen a hollow, full of meaning but devoid of truth.

With every year that passes, I grow more certain of my limits, more uncertain of my merits and altogether afraid to think for myself. The thought that a year down the road, what I pride as knowledge could be put to shame and what I perceive as insight could be pronounced redundant often deters me from attempting to know anything at all. To write anything at all.

But I've missed writing: the pen-point precision of words in pinning down those vague, meandering thoughts onto a surface - on display, visible; the way that language concretes concept, giving it outline and character. And I've found that I now read effortlessly-worded prose with a strange, sinking, sentimental envy. It made me think what envy really was - the bitter-tasting remnant of a life un-lived. A raisin in the sun.

So maybe it's time to start again, recover in part the necessity that writing once was to me for the sake of re-discovering how words can really heal. And continue inwardly on the search for Truth, deepening my course always in hope that I would arrive, in the end, somewhere proximal to her core. Because there is great freedom within the bounds of great grace.