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(3)
Despite my various attempts to locate and define that aspect of myself
which partakes of an experiential mode of consciousness, I feel less
and less confident that any theoretical construct can either properly
describe or contain it. I have come to feel less and less certain
that I accomplish anything worthwhile by continuing to postulate theoretical
constructs with regard the internal processes revealed to me through
self-examination. In both form and intent these constructs are, to
use a punning simile I think entirely to the point, like that of an eye
that's trying to see itself see; and a scientific understanding of how
the eye operates does not necessarily bring one any closer to an
understanding of the experience of vision. Consciousness is fluid,
and any attempt it makes to deconstruct itself will result in a kind of
"blind spot" being created precisely because of this fluidity:
consciousness is too slippery to be pinned down. Consciousness
may perhaps best be defined, simply, as "the state of being
aware"; but when one endeavors to define what that awareness
consists of, or, more particularly, what it is that causes the
existence of awareness in the first place, one is bound to discover
sooner or later that the quantifying language of theoretical
definition rather misses the point. Because of the self-referential
nature of the task, all attempts to reveal the causality of "self"
are doomed to failure. Self defies, in the essence of its
experiential existence, all logic, all scientific reasoning. In
fact, I believe that it is best described as being of the realm of
the miraculous: for in its essence, the self of experiential
consciousness exists – regardless of arguments in favor of its
need for a life-form to sustain it, or of a theoretical construct to
define it – without any specific support: it simply is.
I don't mean to imply, by the vast simplicity of this statement, that all
theories as to the nature of the self and consciousness are thereby
rendered invalid. I do mean, however, to suggest that they
are likely to have been limited by any number of varying factors:
cultural bias, personal and historical limitations of knowledge, the
idiosyncratic nature of individual personality, the changing nature of the
contextual field of the psyche's own self-knowledge – to name only those
possibilities which come immediately to mind. The story of my
own attempts to quantify "self" is, in the end, just that: a
story. My particular story will be judged successful only
insofar as it has successfully transcribed the transformations of
self and consciousness which have occurred during, and through, that
story's telling.
The house that I'm currently living in is divided into four
apartments. The first takes up the entirety of the bottom floor,
two more divide space on the second floor, and a fourth unit has been
made from what used to be the attic. The first-floor apartment is
separate from the rest of the house in that you enter it by the front
door; the other three apartments are accessed by entering a side door
leading to a flight of stairs. The first-floor apartment has
been occupied, during the time that I've lived here, by a variety
of tenants: when I first moved in, a young interracial couple
was in residence; next, two lesbians took up lodging and stayed until,
some six months later and following a series of rather spectacular
and very noisy fights, they split up and went their separate ways.
Then a young heterosexual couple, newly married, came and went;
currently another married couple, this one with a small child, is
living there. The two second-floor apartments were, until
recently, occupied by single women – one, an elderly lady in
failing health; the other, a middle-aged office worker. Both
these tenants, each of whom was so quiet that I was barely aware of
their existence, recently left – the older woman to enter a
nursing home, the younger to take up residence in a house she'd bought
in a nearby town for herself and her mother. Two mentally
disabled people now occupy these apartments – one a young male
of about thirty, the other a young female of similar age. The
young man is short and squat, his face broad and flat, his fair,
reddish hair cut close to the scalp. He's a friendly enough
fellow, but seems perpetually nervous in my presence – though why
this should be, I cannot precisely say. Perhaps he senses my
distaste: he goes about all day wearing only a pair of boxer
shorts (and nothing else); I know this because he leaves the door of
his apartment open – wide open, all day, every day – so
that I'm more or less forced to look in at him every time I go by.
The woman is a blowsy sort of blond, wide in the hips, her breasts
protruding in front of her like large, sagging balloons, wisps of
curly hair floating about a face most notable for the extreme roundness
of its vacant eyes. She too leaves the door of her apartment
wide open, all day, every day. I assume this habit to be somehow
connected to the mental incapacitation of these two tenants:
perhaps they lived at some point in a group home, where leaving the
door to one's room open was the norm? I do not know. They
make acceptable neighbors on the whole, though I must admit that I am
still middle-class enough – that is, still fastidious enough –
to feel disconcerted by their total lack of need for privacy; and by the
consequent intrusion I feel them to make, each time I go up or down the
stairs, upon mine.
When houses appear in the landscape of my dreams, I generally find
them to be, unless they make specific reference to the house in which
I physically live, symbolic representations of my psychological
"living space" – i.e. they are representations of how I
"live inside my own head." If I dream of going into
the basement of a house, for instance, I'm sure to be examining the
resources of my subconscious mind. If I dream of the uppermost
floors of the house, I'm in the realm of my "higher"
thought processes, the realm of philosophical and spiritual thinking.
The floors in between represent the psychological spaces I inhabit on
a day-to-day basis. I find the makeup of the house in which I
literally live to be, symbolically speaking, entirely appropriate
– if ironically so – of what I might call the "dream reality"
that I seem of late to be inhabiting more and more. The first
floor's tenants, living in the part of the house with the front entrance,
have provided a sort of amalgamation of the various kinds of sexual
couplings and family units possible in society today. The second
floor of the house – which, when this was a single dwelling unit,
would have been taken up by bedrooms and bathrooms, i.e. would have been
given over to the more private and least socially accessible aspects of
living – are now inhabited by the mentally disabled. As to
the basement: I have never seen it. I've overheard the
landlord offering it for use as a storage space to other tenants, but
such an offer has never been extended to me. I am therefore obliged
to "live" with and within the contents of, so to speak, my
subconscious – i.e. all those leftover remnants of the past which
I have not yet discarded. But also, as the tenant of the highest
floor, I live in the realm of philosophical and spiritual thought.
So I am – what? The young eccentric? The recluse?
The layman's monk? The princess in the tower perhaps, waiting to be
rescued? Or how about this: I am the madman in the attic.
I do feel sometimes as if I might, quite literally, go mad one of
these days. Mad, that is, in both senses of the word:
i.e. "angry," and "crazy" too. I feel
"maddened" more or less all the time, what with all the
crazed anger I keep bottled up inside me towards what I tend to think
of as "the stupidity of the world" in which I live, and by
my own inability to change either it or myself – not to mention by
the process I've been undergoing these past months of disassembling
my own ego in order to examine its various parts. I sometimes
wonder what will become of me should I be unable to understand this
"madness" before it gets the better of me and I simply
begin, one fine day, to start raving like a lunatic. I feel
like doing this more often than I want to admit. My anger is
constantly on the boil; anything might set me off. But the
question I keep asking myself is this: Do I register the
pain and stress inherent to living in modern-day society more acutely
than the average citizen because I have a greater degree of
sensitivity to it – or am I merely being self-indulgent?
But then it comes to me one day, rather suddenly (as these insights
always do), the understanding of how I might reassemble my ego in order
to create a healthier, saner whole (though by "ego" I mean
of course not any conceptual, transcendent idea of self, but self as
it exists experientially in the Here and Now). What I have come to
understand is that, in order to reassemble my ego, I must simply glue
together all my disparate selves – my physical self, my emotional
self, my psychological self – using, as my "glue," my
ability to focus consciousness in such a way as to consistently keep
self-awareness at the forefront of my attention. Of course, to
say that "ego" is a collection of our various selves,
joined and made whole, is not to suggest anything new; what's been added
the mix is the knowledge I have gained, through such insights as I
have discovered via the process of disassembling my ego, that my
"self" is both real (ever existent in the Here and Now) and
an illusion (is an artificially constructed mental concept), and that
the world in which I live likewise has both real and illusory dimensions.
When I bring this knowledge out of the realm of intellectual understanding
and into the realm of physical and psychological realization, I bring it
into the realm of reality as lived – and thus it becomes a
matter not of theoretical but of experiential knowledge.
Existing this way, within the knowledge of an experiential reality that
is both utterly real and completely illusory, I come one step closer to
achieving that state of fully realized consciousness which, as I have
suggested before, I believe may be brought into actualization –
as the state of "lucid dreaming" may be brought into actualization
when asleep – while I am yet still in the waking state.
NOW I KNOW ME
(Ritual Chant)
now I know me/who I am
here I am!
here I am!
now I know me/who I am
I am here!
I am here!
now I know me/who I am
I do what I say
cuz what I say goes!
now I know me/who I am
the man he listens
cuz the man he knows!
now I know me/who I am
his thighs are heavy
and his back is long!
now I know me/who I am
his body is mean
and his need is strong!
now I know me/who I am
he shakes his stick
and he rattle his bones!
now I know me/who I am
the earth it tremble
and the sky it moans!
now I know me/who I am
here I am!
here I am!
now I know me/who I am
I am here!
I am here!
now I know me/who I am
I shake my stick
and I rattle my bones!
now I know me/who I am
the earth it tremble
and the sky it moans!
now I know me/who I am
my thighs are heavy
and my back is long!
now I know me/who I am
my body is mean
and my need is strong!
now I know me/who I am
I do what I say
cuz what I say goes!
now I know me/who I am
the man he listens
cuz the man he knows!
now I know me/who I am
here I am!
here I am!
now I know me/who I am
I am here!
I am here!
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