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(4)
The house that I'm currently living in is divided into four
apartments – one each on the uppermost and bottom floors, with two
additional ones on the second. The first-floor apartment is
separate from the rest of the house in that you enter it by the front
door; the upstairs apartments are entered by 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;
then two lesbians took up lodging and stayed until, some six months
later, and following a series of rather spectacular fights, they split up
and went their separate ways. Next 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 man is short and squat, his face broad and flat, his
fair, reddish hair cut close to the scalp. He's a friendly
fellow, but seems perpetually nervous in my presence – though why
this should be, I cannot 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 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 for certain. 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 the philosophical and the spiritual.
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 the dream reality
in which I literally live. I have never been to the basement of this
house. A basement exists – I have heard the landlord offer its
use for storage to other tenants – but such an offer has
never been extended to me. This is indicative not so much of
subconscious realms being rendered unavailable, but of the fact
that their energies now suffuse the entirety of the reality in which
I exist. 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's tenants are mentally disabled
(I leave the reader to draw from this such conclusions as he or she
may); and in the third-floor apartment lives . . . who, exactly?
The young eccentric? The recluse? The layman's
monk? The princess in the tower maybe, waiting to be
rescued? Or how about this: 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 to
create a healthy, sane 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
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 for focused consciousness, i.e. self-awareness as it exists
when brought to the forefront of my attention. Of course, to
say that "ego" is a collection of our various selves,
joined and made whole, is to have said nothing 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
"I" am both real and an illusion, and that the world in
which I live is, likewise, both real and illusory. 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 – that is, the reality of the Here
and Now. It becomes, not a matter 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 believe myself to be taking the first step towards living
my life in that state of "heightened awareness" which I have stated
before may be brought into actualization – as the state of
"hyper-dreaming" may be brought into actualization when asleep –
while I am yet still in the waking state. NOW I KNOW ME
now I know me/who I am
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