The Question of Identity

For the first time I will quote someone else on the Internet. This is part of a long series of firsts, and beautifully relevant to this letter as a whole.

The post in question is Birds and the Internet, by Steph Russo, whom I have the honor of considering a friend. Go on and read it; I will be paraphrasing large portions, but it’s worth savoring on its own.

Birds takes the approach of a clever metaphor to broach the issue of identity on the Internet. It’s all about birds. Little birds, big birds, fluffy and sleek, forever darting about in the branches of a Tree.

They build nests of varying proportion and size, all throughout the vast and sprawling branches of this forest mammoth. As you duck through the leaves and peer up into the golden sunlight, you will see dark nests, warm and cozy nests, hovels for the black-hearted and the loud-mouthed and palaces for the flashing famous.

You may begin to recognize a few feathered faces.

My gleeful abuse of extended metaphor will soon rival Ms. Russo’s, so onward and downward, to brass tacks.

The original post was a summary of the cycle of internet abuse and withdrawal, and an observation that the sheer depth of the ocean was frightening.

Which is true, as far as it goes. Some of my most vivid fears are of dark, deep water. No one wants to drown. But that’s not what interested me in particular.

One of the comments mentioned that biologically, it’s simply impossible for human beings to keep up with the level of non-stop socialization with which we are bombarded.

Which is probably true, for the question it answers. I am always fundamentally mistrustful of social Darwinism, but I have no particular argument with that assertion.

What interested me is something you may or may not have noticed about that post. It was a side issue, a secondary statement, slipping around the main narrative.

And that was the question of identity. Negatively expressed, it is the question of duplicity.

Why is this little bird flirting with so many nests? Why does this little bird need to be a heavy metal bird, a knitting bird, a writing bird, and a sports bird, all at different times and different places?

Did you wonder that also? Are you wondering now?

The issue intrigued me. And when I use the word “intrigue” it means my fanatical eyes positively glow at the smell of blood in the water. The whole thing was a question, a tangled tissue of questions, of Questions.

Why? Why not? How? When? Who?

My first and most instinctive reaction was to explore the issue in dualist terms. Splitting yourself into multiple, one-dimensional personalities was dishonest. I have a respect bordering on worship for the simple and impossible virtue of honesty, because I am such a cheap, perpetual liar.

I will say that I have learned to trust first impressions. But I will not say that there is no more depth to the question than that.

Why do we establish these single-minded personae?

Like the man who finds a hooded punk in his house at midnight, I have a hard time believing there’s a noble reason for what I notice.

My most solid observation is my own experience, and I’m not sure what conclusions I’ll be able to draw beyond those. Unfortunately, this means I’ll have to do my best to avoid the other thing I really like doing: engaging in sarcastic self-mockery. This practice began as an effort to be honest and to confess things I really didn’t want to say. It has turned into a gleeful exercise in stabbing myself in the back, and I can’t let that continue.

I picked a theme for this blog for artistic reasons. I wanted a Theme. My ego is screaming at me about pride and selfishness and dreams of grandeur; all things that might or might not be true. I have made the choice to let them go.

The theme is winter. Cold, aloof, crystal clear, white as snow and dark as the shadows behind the mountains. Clean and bleak like a frosted plain or a bare tree, icy like the fingers of death wrapped around the world.

By no means, as I agree, the most inviting image. But I am the sort of person who takes refuge in pride, who likes the cold, the dark, and the faceless. The idea and the image of winter has always held a poisonous attraction for me.

I believe I’ve done a pretty good job sticking with my theme. It helped that I was writing in the depths of an actual winter, and had plenty of breathless blue and gray days from which to draw mood and inspiration.

But now the lush, violent warmth and life of summer are crowding in on me, demanding my attention, and the child in my heart who has somehow survived these last few years is happy to touch the leaves and smell the flowers. There is a poetry of a whole lifetime in standing out of doors in a warm spring rain.

And I want to share the warmth with you as well. I want to share these moments when I begin again to uncoil, to thaw, to come out blinking into life and all it means. They are moments that quite literally bring me to tears. I never thought, in even the brightest spots of that bitter valley, that I could ever be so happy.

So without my inner cynic crying voyeurism and publicity (honestly, I trust that voice less and less each time it speaks. Publicity? What audience?) I want to tell you who I am. More than that. I don’t want to trumpet my failures and be forced to silence my victories. What good is there in that?

Return to the question at hand. What does it mean to separate your personality, to only say certain things in certain places? Philosophy is a discipline like gold mining. One thing that can make you truly happy is striking the big questions. The longer it takes to answer and the more lengthy words you can use, the better.

So with this question. I find it is not merely ethical but also societal and …mannerly.

Clearly, when you join a heavy metal forum, it is out of the question to begin discussing soft rock. Unless you have a sense of ethics as stubbornly pugnacious as mine, you will have no reason to do so, and you will have a very good reason not to do so: simple etiquette.

Now that I think on it, this is why so many forums have an uncategorized section. The internet is a two-dimensional medium for three-dimensional beings, and occasionally they want to discuss other facets with people they already know and presumably like.

Understandable, then, this far and no farther. Places are established for the sake of discussing one particular topic. To aid the cause of intelligibility, the citizens of such tiny city-states agree to hold off on all the little irrelevancies that make real-world interaction what it is.

And I learned something about the Internet I didn’t before, namely one of the reasons it is so ultimately unsatisfactory. It’s a broad and shallow pool – no matter how you roll or contort you can’t fit your whole self into it.

Having explained away the rational excuse for writing this at all, let us return to the personal sidetrack that was probably the real reason in the first place.

I personally felt something dishonest in the idea of keeping this single-minded focus on a blog. Perhaps you do not feel the same way.

Perhaps I was not rebelling against documenting my problems as much as the problems themselves, and my own inherent misunderstanding of my nature. Perhaps I was just throwing off something I can’t describe. Perhaps it was all the aliens’ fault. (Look! Humor!)

Not dishonest, then, just disagreeable. Not disagreeable in the sense that a honorable but difficult task is disagreeable, but in the sense of distasteful: something dirty, something mean.

I like watching anime. I like listening to happy, bouncy music. I like generally making a fool of myself in various ways which even now I can’t bring myself to mention.

These actions and tastes are the flowering of a gentle peace in what was very recently barren, rocky ground. I’m trying to come to grips with myself, and this is the sign of what even I can recognize as a sea change in my innermost self. I am laying down the weapons of self-censorship and cold anger and cold pride.

I am trying not to take myself so seriously.

More on this in a later letter – I’ll be laying out my whole life story (again) if I continue now.

 

Plague Journal – Final Entry

I’ve decided this shall be the last dirty page of the plague journal. Any further reflections, might they come, will have to be jotted down on whatever scraps I might find lying about.

Thirty days. Thirty and a handful, maybe five, maybe six. I have fallen off the wagon again. And of course climbed back on.

Do you, I wonder, do you begin to taste the metal at the back of your throat? Do you begin to wonder, with me, whether I can ever be trusted? Do you begin to feel, really feel, how horrible this all really is?

It’s not as if I lost six months. But even so, I am upset. I’ve wasted too much time being depressed to go there again, as I am beginning to learn some control over my emotional states. But I am upset.

At some point I think suicide, rationally considered, is no longer an act of cowardice. It is no longer about fleeing from a world that won’t make sense, seeking refuge from pain in oblivion.

At some point I stopped thinking of it that way, and decided I just wanted to take control in a final, decisive way. I just wanted to be the one who won. I just want – pardon my French – to murder that sorry bastard who happens to share a body with me.

This is where the colossal unfairness of all this sets in, both in its sweetness and in its misery. Taking a life is not winning. It’s not the way out, not on top at least. In order to win you’ve got to take yourself with you, as much as you hate his guts for all the times he’s betrayed you, ruined you, set you up and knocked you down. It’s the only way out.

It hurts at first, and it’s ruthless for all time. You will always live with the knowledge that you could stab yourself in the back at any moment. It will come under control with time but it will never go away.

But after a while it becomes a blessing as well. After a while you begin to enjoy the taste of simple pleasures as your senses begin to recover.

Just don’t fall off again.

I started this series of notes as an encouragement to anyone who may feel the way I do. This is not a documentary, and will not shed much light for those unacquainted with the bottom of a bottle.

It is meant as a promise both to myself as much to anyone else. The point being that you, should you ever read this, will know that it’s possible to break away. Even if you fall countless times, which you might. It’s possible. Someone did it.
To myself – obviously – the promise is that I’ll do it. I’ll shed the unclean habits of half a lifetime, break away and sail off into orbit around a distant new star.

Never give up. Never give up. Sometimes hope burns your fingers too much to hold on to. If you must lose hope then let go of it. When the time is right and you have recovered enough it will come back. But never, ever give up.

I have never felt like my will could be described as being in any way indomitable. It is a weak, frail, and pathetically tender thing, falling prey to the blasts of naked desire I am perpetually subjected to. But I have climbed this cliff before.

Do not give up. There will be more than one time when there is absolutely no spark in your soul. No rousing phrases will come to mind; no powerful sentiment will spur you on. Grit your teeth and hold fast. Even when you nave no reason not to, please, do not give up. I am right there with you.

 

Day Thirty+

I quit.

This is why it’s all worth it. This is why leaving the circle, fighting up through the wastes of desolation, fatigue, and borrowed trouble, going cold, is all worth it. Because one day, exhausted by fighting, you will break out into the clear without even realizing it. Because eventually you find out what it’s like to really live, to be alive. You find out how it feels to be normal, to breathe cold clean air like an honest man, awake and sober, the fog of clinging nightmares and pleasures a thing of the past. It’s worth it. It’s worth anything.

 

Whimsy

Wrote this on a bitter winter’s night:

What is whimsy? That laughing, leaping, daring spirit that sets up and breaks down rules wholly imaginary, whimsy is an enigmatic, undefinable impulse from the depths of the human, a thing as un-dissectable as fun.

Of course, undefinable is in this case an outright falsehood. I would not have started this digression had I not somewhere thought that I could reach an answer. Perhaps I merely thought I would have some fun along the way.

Whimsy, of course, is a thing of Faerie. Were I a more dignified and wiser scribe in an older and wiser age, I might be content to leave it at that, and trust the dark phrase to explain all to the casual bystander. Alas, ours is a more scientific time, and chalk outlines must be drawn.

As Faerie is now understood by none save fantasy readers and writers (is there one word for both literary pursuits? I must find it), and perhaps the occasional biographer of Tolkien, a digression from the digression is regrettably necessary. Those who know Faerie know that it is a place wholly beyond all human knowledge, a thing outside our ability to perceive fully and thus real. Generally what little you can understand about it is this. It is dangerous, just as dangerous as the wide world on a sunny crisp day. Faerie is a place of magic and half-understood gestures, long-forgotten languages that have the power to summon that best left forgotten. All fairy magic can be used for good or evil, and one mocks such things at one’s own peril.

Whimsy is a gentle spirit, as said above. Whimsy is what you feel when you spontaneously decide things that can be of no importance, but that are simultaneously of the utmost importance: don’t step on the cracks. But whimsy is also a vicious, cruel spirit, one which tortures and annoys. It is on a whim, after all. Here we see the value of our brief exploration of the wood realms.

My definition of Faerie, of course, is itself whimsical; I am choosing to accept a nonsensical but somehow true, and desperately true, explanation for a small part of the murkiest, most confused depths of my subconscious. What I find is that all such attempts to externalize inner conflict, to find an outside reason for strange behavior, eventually return to that frustratingly vague dualism. All are merely tools. They can be used for good or evil. Beyond that there is not much guide.

Why would I believe, then, in such a word as whimsy, in all the mystical power of chance and Fortune in that phrase? This is a question of philosophy which could fill several volumes with its own proof. But the short answer is that whimsy is more fun. The dead, dry scientific analysis I have inflicted on this page sucks all the magic out of the thing. And of course, anyone who knows what magic is doesn’t need it explained, for explaining ruins its aura of discovery. But I will say that by magic I mean that vast and glorious sense one sometimes gets that the game is afoot, that the forces are moving. One could call it Life, but that’s not even really it. It’s a wild and wonderful universe we live in, and there are things happening we dare not guess at. The glory of it is, the phrase works both ways: we don’t dare guess at the terrible, frightening things, and we don’t dare guess as children at Christmastime, for fear we spoil the surprise. Some might complain that claiming the danger and the terror and the horror are part of the fun is nonsensical, absurd. But no one ever proved that statement; it’s a merely modern assumption. Why would anyone assume the universe has been tamed? You cannot have an adventure at all worth having and keeping without some terrible danger to defeat, some horrid boogeyman to conquer. No sane man would wish that such evils existed; the grand thing is that they do exist, and (from a crucial point of view) we have been forgiven for creating them. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that anyone like me who really likes a fight can find a home here. Fighting such a terror as the Devil within each of us is a fight worth participating in, one that leaves honor and integrity intact. We are free to exult; there is no longer any shame in defeating ourselves.

 

Rain

There is a dark, biting wind across my face. The cold rain is falling, and I am deliriously, absurdly happy.

 

Gravity’s Bone and Literary Merit

Hey, look, a post unrelated to my depressing personal problems.

This is intentional, and is hopefully the start of a trend.

I played this wonderful free little game called Gravity’s Bone. If my extensive audience is in current possession of a little chunk of hard drive, I highly recommend trying it for yourself. As my recommender said, it’s best not to know anything going in. And as they say in these parts, spoilers will follow.

Gravity’s Bone

WARNING! If you have no first-hand experience of the subject described here, you will never again be able to capture that first impression. They are fleeting as it is.

So. Gravity’s Bone.

This is really going to be a discussion mostly of the ending. By now you know I go in for themes. Discussions of how effective the button-pushing was are for others less inclined to blather on about philosophy.

Literary pretentiousness is a thing quite like this other thing I was going to use as a punchy analogy, could I remember what it was. I can’t remember, so here’s the general concept: the words used to express the thing itself remain the same. Success or failure depends on context. Does this make sense? In this game, the ending itself could with equal ease be a nihilistic non sequitur, or a half-glimpsed hint at an intriguing life cut short. The only way to know what the writer intended is through the context.

This is what we see in this game. Let’s say the scene in which the main character runs across the dinner table is removed. This changes the ending, believe it or not.

You see, humor is a difficult thing for a robot to do. In order to be humorous effectively you must be human. Literary elitism (or any elitism) is a movement composed of people who have forgotten how to laugh. That is the flaw, in perfectly literal terms: they take everything too seriously, especially themselves.

The scene in which the character runs across the dinner table is humorous, and humorous in a quiet, understated, memorable way. It falls right in the middle of a very tense minimalist sequence in which the main character chases the woman who has just tried to murder him. There is no reason given, but the absolute necessity, the urgency of chasing after her, is conveyed quite clearly.

And then you fall into the midst of an astonished group of well-dressed people and spill all their drinks. Then, you remount the table, run in the opposite direction, and spill all their drinks again. It’s really quite funny.

Then you get shot.

Do you see how this whole thing could so easily be a vehicle for the ultimate expression of literary postmodernism, that loathsome annihilation of meaning? So easily you could just die, offering the stunned player nothing but a black screen, and their own thoughts on the pointlessness of life.

But this game, this bone of gravity, has already betrayed its hard exterior with a wink and a nudge. It has a laughing heart, a sad heart, a wise heart.

The game is not trying to convey that the life of the man was meaningless. The game, through its utterly indecipherable closing flashback, is not trying to cloak that terrible black point behind irrelevancies.

This was a man who had a life. This was a man who loved. His life had meaning and a definite sense of purpose, even if you never know what it was. His death is what it should be, a tragedy somehow tinged with hope.

 

Day Four

Did you know that joy is bigger than sorrow?

It’s physically larger. If you are a sorrowful person, joy just won’t fit inside you.

I skipped a trigger yesterday. That’s why I’m so happy. Sometimes it begins to feel as if there’s nothing else. And breaking out is the best thing in the world.

 

 

 

Silent – a plague

Again I fall.

In this barren hole, you see, rhetoric and diplomacy fail alike. The bombastic strains of my self-encouragement fade away. Here there is only the question. Why am I here? How could I let this happen? Again?

I have climbed out of that hole since yesterday. But it’s just too easy. I’ve just got too much on my fragile mind. I’m too ignorant.

And I can’t help but wonder – is this what is meant for me? Is this all there really is, this waste, this nauseating wreck?

I have not given up. That’s why I’m writing this. You can’t give up. This is where it gets ugly. This is where it hurts. This is where all the threads and all the knives come together and tear each other apart, where nothing makes sense except failure, where death is the only thing that doesn’t hurt, where going forward looks just as stupid as falling back. Where hope is a thousand miles away.

You’ve got to get up and do it all over again. It hurts, and it’s stupid. It’s agony. But I just can’t go cold. Some people can, you know, they quit cold and they never look back. I can’t… I’m just trying to space them farther and farther apart… I’m so sick of this whole mess…

 

 

Of Rage and Revolutions

I feel I owe something of an explanation for the rather blunt shift from sunny tranquility to desperate grimness in these letters.

Despite my external youth I am an old, old man, a sad and tired and weak soul whose battles are long over. As part of this I find that I pass through stages of life in greatly shortened and intensified bursts. I have already lived through more doubt and conviction and pain and euphoria and anger and sorrow then most men will feel in a lifetime. I was once a child, six years ago that feel like six decades.

I fell, and I ran. I drew Cain’s mark on my own forehead and I wandered alone through the world until I came up against an abyss.

Falling into it forever, I was saved by the breath of grace.

From there joy, fatigue, weariness – and then the Past came calling.

From there I have fought like a cornered animal for these six long years, fought for my soul and my life and fought so I could look myself in the mirror in the morning without flinching.

Once I read a book to which my soul responded, one of those self-help books full of positive thinking and cheerful encouragement. There was much in that book that helped me keep from blowing my brains out, but there was always one question that I could never answer. At some point the book asked:

“Where do you picture yourself in five years?”

Over the years I have almost cracked my head over that seemingly simple question. It was one of those worrying statements that make you fear someone you have been agreeing with up to now has actually been something completely different all along. Where do I picture myself? What rank idiocy. I am a romantic. I am a wanderer. My entire life has been lived in a fog of mystery and doubt and confusion. There was no point in trying to imagine what I would look like and the pleasantries I would be surrounded with when I didn’t even know who I would be.

I have had many different answers to the question of Who I Am, but I have always had an answer. I am redefining it at the present moment. But I never could know Who I Would Be, because I never knew if I could be he Who Would Have Been me. I didn’t know if that future perfect would ever come.

For the moment I seem to have won that small grace. I have become he Who Once Was. And seeing the end of that particular road coming up ahead of me I began to cast about to find my future. Who, really, was I meant to be?

And for a long time I struggled with the pacifism of those long months ago. Flynn is a Nice Guy. Hate had driven me down to where I had been. It was Hate that had continued to keep me there. Understandable, then, were I to think being a Nice Guy was the antithesis of all that I was scraping off my soul.

Pacifism is not my nature. (Neither, for the sake of clarity, is the truly horrible abyss of confusion I was plunged into over this winter. This is where my initial comment about stages ends up. I was an ultimate skeptic with my whole soul for two weeks. I was a pacifist with my whole heart for about six months.) By nature, I have determined, I am a revolutionary. I am one of those kind of people to whom Communism really appeals, a fierce and lost and desperate fighter, an idealist with fists.

I was born to be forever sailing into fights, unable to keep my mouth shut, unable not to defend the Truth, that holy relic. I need a cause to bleed and starve and break my heart for the way I need bread and water. And with the glorious freedom that came with knowing I was meant for this came the awareness of what else I was, surging up from my unconscious.

Man cannot live on rage alone. To live passionately is to live at all. But I had to learn, had to know, that hate is not passion – at least, not the only passion. That is why I did not become a Communist. I have long felt a brotherly fondness for Tim McIlrath, the lead singer of the band Rise Against. The only reason it’s not hero worship is that I know something he does not know, with the precious fund of sad-eyed wisdom I have gleaned. Morality does not grow out of the barrel of a gun, and it never will. You cannot force people to be good. Rage is not ground out of which holiness can ever grow.

This fire in my veins could not lead me up. It was too weak, too lustful, too prone to falling to left or right of my goal. It had to be tamed, made into something greater than it could be by itself.

But I learned that to be a man such as the man that I wanted to be, to be a warrior, I could not fill my veins with warm water. It reminds me of nothing more than trying to split a log. You keep swinging, striking chips off the side. If you are like me you might leap to the conclusion that there is nothing but missing or not swinging at all, even though you know in the back of your mind there’s another way. And if you keep trying, someday you might strike clean and true and hit your mark exactly.

In terms of the struggle I have been laying bare in these pages I have now come to one last decision. I already have given up hatred. Love is stronger and braver and truer. There is only one person left in the entire world who I could bring myself to hate.

Myself.

I hate myself. Worse than that. Hate is a fiery and terrible thing, grafted out of the stock of love. To its roots it can easily return. I do not trust myself. He has betrayed me too many times. He has killed me too many times. I cannot live with myself, with what I have done and thought and seen. Now I come to the worst test yet.

See what I have discovered at last, the final stained kernel of sorrow in the dark heart of a bitter tree. Listen to my accusation, to the complaints of a just man wronged. Look on this man, this animal, this thing, that has dragged my soul into a mire I have almost died in a thousand times, has dragged me back again and again, has taken from me my pride and my self-reliance, taken my reason, my hope, my faith, alienated me from my family, driven away the only girl I ever loved, wrecked the course of my life, deliberately plotted my destruction. Look at this creature that has sworn to ruin me. How, I ask you? How am I to forgive myself for what I have done to me? Is there no pill I must not swallow? No burden I must not take upon my own shoulders?

Know that if you walk the road I walk there are terrible trials ahead. Always, my comrades, always, always, always, what you need to do to heal is the one thing you swear you absolutely cannot do. You cannot be too careful in telling God you are ready, in asking God what to do, for when He points… Not that. Anything but that. We are always ready for anything but that.

This evil lives within me. It is mine and I must take responsibility for it. But the grim greyness of that duty is not nearly enough. No, a greater Man is come than that. In a clear and piercing and white light more terrible than any sorrow is the joy of the love I must bear it. I must love myself like I love others, take upon myself my own mistakes, help myself up. Otherwise half of me will forever remain in this pit. Dare any say that forgiveness is easy? Who dares to tell me love is soft and weak?

 

Day Twenty-Three

There is this about a man’s soul: it is so easy to fall down and so terribly difficult to get back up again. I have slid and slid for years. Why is it that hell is below us? Why is it that the broad and gentle road leads gently and inexorably down? Ah, for the hard-won wisdom of the medievals, who breathed the breath of the universe. There is only one thing comparable to hell, there is only one other place in the universe where the kind and broad world of men seems as far away as the stars, where it is ever so easy to fall for miles and a titanic struggle to climb an inch. At the bottom of a well.

I am journaling these plagues for my own sake and for the sake of others. There is nothing so corrosive as an addiction or even the remains of one, breaking through all boundaries and safeties, laying waste to heart and mind and soul. It even destroys a promise. I spill the secret with trembling heart, for no man should know that it will also ravage an oath, despoil the sacred house of a man’s trust. Do you know now that it is evil? For to evil there is nothing sacred.

So I do this for myself in order to keep a promise. It is not a great promise or an earth-shattering vow such as I once tried to make and failed. I look at the beginning of this letter, and it reminds me of a confession I once made to my love many long and bitter years ago when the Past first came crashing down on me. Take heart. This is not a confession. I have not failed. I will not fail you. You, whoever you are, may not read this for many long ages. This letter may slumber silent for dusty aeons. But I will not fail, and I will not fail you. I have made a tiny and a fragile promise in my own heart. It is brutally, horribly, eternally important that I can keep a promise, any kind of promise; so many have I broken.

For you I am doing this, erecting this tiny and lonely beacon against the vast and deep and raging sea behind. So many will be lost. So many will drown. To an optimist this might be cause for despair, to a pessimist cause for confirmation. I am not an optimist, and I am not a pessimist. I have passed beyond into a place where sheer numbers hold no terrors for me. If I can save even one; nay, even if I save none at all I will know that I have done something. This is a handrail out of the darkness. I am fighting my way up from beneath you. If you want to escape let it be known that it can be done, by even one so hopeless as I.