Why I'm Me

Why I'm me

I think that most of what I write is stuff that should have been brought up years ago when I was a teenager. It's really a bunch of self –self in all the basic ways -- absorbed, conscious, flagellated and fish. I’m still struggling through the Nietzsche and Sartre phases of personality development and doing it much too late in life – I should be at the Niebuhr stage and coasting comfortably into my old age; all compromise and apology to the forces that demand my surrender, be it gravity or guilt.

Granny used to say that I was just a “willful” child, but I’m thinking it’s much deeper. Granny had the gift of understatement.

All true, though I’m trying to be pleasant about it. I am just trying to figure out what the point is.

I not interested in the big bang, I want to find the big vagina that it shot out of. I’m not interested in time, I want to find out who’s keeping the score. I don’t want to know where I’m going after I’m dead, I want to know where I was before I was born.

It seems too human to focus on explosions and not consider the source. At times, on nights alone, I look at the stars and consider god. I consider everything. At sometimes, I get it – the bigness in the small of my head. Then I ask – is there more? What’s beyond everything?

There’s at least a couple of ways to go with this:

Without end, always, infinity and forever seem platitudes for, “You are too dumb to get it.” Absolutes are the lazy way of getting out of doing the work – it’s a way substituting. “I know” for, “I’m working on it.” Yes, it’s simple, but it’s not that simple.

Life seems, at minimum, to involve cycles -- It may be spirals, if you think progressively, but it does seem to basically have a circularly way about it. Things come around, seasons change, and meteorologists predictably get the weather wrong.

The law of fractals implies that what we see in the small is just a scaled model of the large. If true, and it seems right, then the things we see around us, the principles we use to guide us, -- all should be universal in their applicability. What is everything? – Well, just about what you’d expect after looking around a bit.

So, understand, the point of it all is -- to see the patterns in the chaos. (This isn’t much help, but it’s better than infinity.)

Or, we can accept things the way they are – surrender to the thing that’s bigger than us – life, god, whatever. Give up and get on with it.

This might work – all of us have enough to do without worrying about crap like, “what was before anything was?” Kids need to be loved and clothed, jobs all have their own focused stress, and the comparing of what’s in us to what others have outside them, seems to fill us up enough. Looking for the big stuff is almost a criminally negligent act, when you think of it.

But I believe that everything is a part of everything else – that we are all one big thing – and this includes the things that are not there – the big disappearing vagina in the sky, the place we were before we were – all of it. I also believe, like the old timey Jews, that you can’t say what “it” is, that any attempts to say it, limit it – the answer you get when you ask is, “Yes, it’s that, but it’s much more too, you blasphemer of a reductionist.”

But if we are everything, we are also nothing.

Which brings us back to me. From a list of all the forms of self, I choose to seek self-awareness. To whatever form of god there is, or what form she takes, she’s only going to accept my awed surrender if I’m the one who shows up to give it.

I don't want to get absorbed, I want to show up at the front door with flowers. I want to ring the bell.