Storm House

It is hard to imagine, I know.

From Mirror, Mirror:

'It is the path of virtue to regard some options as closed. What if the self is unknowing, all the way down?'

Which is to say: one must take into account the passing of time. How do you do so, though? We imagine or posit some deep structure underlying all that is ephemeral, the blue skies behind the passing clouds. There has to be something more to all this. For Christ's sake.

"I was not myself" we say to ourselves as we recover from some bout of confusion. But who were we, then? Who were we all this time? You fall in the direction you're leaning.

You veer from one extreme state to the other: you are everything, the centre of the world; you are nothing. The intellectual history of the world is not so different: materialism/idealism.

'..the Real Me, a butterfly escaped from the chrysalis of the social and conventional, a self untrammeled by the artificial restrictions of society, beautifully free from the sleepwalking and the mechanical drudgery of modern life.'

Not the repetitive and predictable bourgeois self that leads a crab-like existence, half-resigned to mediocrity and plain speaking, a self that looks forward to "special deals" and whose only escape from it all is a daydream or a drug-induced stupor. 

We think of ourselves (but not others) as inhabiting some special zone, as having the ability to shake off the powder to reveal a wild, romantic, creative and wholly original-but misunderstood- person. Underneath all that dull metal was gold all along. You have my word for it. Just waiting, waiting to be discovered, recognized, spoken to in the right way. The storm was over, order was re-established. No ambivalence, only the surety of undivided desires, the clarity of sound thought.

But what if there is no high road, no low road to the True Self? The purification, the analysis, the cool self-reflection, the mind straightened, the honest attending to all that has passed, the grieving, the lapses and the harshness finally owned. What if there were only fragments, stories along the way, one no more real than the other. Where we are is where we are. 

To imagine wholeness today, an image, peace, is to strike out against the dominant tendencies of the age. We love our brokenness, the fierceness of our conflict-ridden inclinations, the fragmentary point of view, tentative, resisting all absolutes, all definitions. A rose is a rose. Anything else stinks of metaphysics, childish stories of simplicity, or old rehashed ones of completeness and redemption. Men and women without qualities. Everything is reduced to the question of power or is mere play, a game, a stage in which we stagger, drunkardly, half-forgetting our words. "Every answer is a part-answer". Nothing to say; everything is for its own sake and ends there, or it is for less, the way everyone is for themselves or sold on something.