Selves Delusion

 “And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”

― Khalil Gibran, The Madman: His Parables and Poems 

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It's a cool September evening with rain looming in the forecast and the phantom presence of summer lingering in the air; ****** and I have unintentionally embarked on another one of our dérives. As our legs carry us onward through Scarborough with almost no direction, he leads the conversation into a new-ish topic.

"Not to get too morbid or anything, but do you ever think about what people will remember of you, you know, when you're gone?"

"Of course. I thought everyone did..."

"Well, what do you think they'll remember?"

"Hmm...Inaccuracies."
 

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“My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear--a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence.”

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I contemplate this exchange between ****** and I over and over again for the days following. I've quickly come to appreciate the ways in which our conversations manifest themselves into endless thoughts long after we've parted ways. Beyond that, I appreciate the sense of freedom as we mutually expel the ideas that can otherwise cause undue alarm among the others. The more I consider it, the more I can conclude that the source of my comfort lies in the fact that there are versions of myself than can exist unrestricted in the company of this friend. My fear isn't necessarily that those versions don't feel safe when shown to the others--or, any less safe than the rest of my selves--but that they might somehow endanger those they're exposed to. I've employed a new strategy over the last number of years in anticipation of this disconcertedness: show the most challenging versions of myself right away and see if they'll run. This seems to have worked out even better than I imagine...few remain. But then, what about the stubborn ones--the ones who wholeheartedly cling to versions of me I don't even recognize.

I can hear Don Draper's raspy voice uttering those lines about people showing us who they are and our failure to believe those versions, because "we want them to be who we want them to be."


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“I would not have thee believe in what I say nor trust in what I do--for my words are naught but thy own thoughts in sound and my deeds thy own hopes in action.”

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Sometimes I am so overwhelmed by the absolute boring-ness of the selves others have construed of me, I can't begin to imagine how these versions can satisfy them. Perhaps there is an element of self-delusion at play in this claim. My favourite line to thwart the advances of interested, but not interesting suitors was always "But you don't even know me..."

I once made it a mission to avoid those people at all costs, the ones who project their version(s) of me, but I soon learned how Sisyphean a task that would be. It simply doesn't matter how much you assert yourself--or, the versions of yourself you think to be more accurate than those perceived of you externally--because that self is still subject to their own sensibilities.
In one of my favourite scenes of Waking Life, Timothy 'Speed' Levitch closes his monologue with the haunting lines
"as one realizes that one is a dream-figure in another person's dream - that is self-awareness!"
I read somewhere that in ancient Ubuntu philosophy, humans are born without ‘ena’, or selfhood, and only acquire it through interactions and experiences with others in the external world. Even in more Western schools of thought and disciplines, self-knowledge is most always constituted through relationships with others.
  
 The Self as a kaleidoscope (of versions) is an image that has its abundance of iterations in this post-, post-modern world...


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“In the stillest hour of the night, as I lay half asleep, my seven selves sat together and thus conversed in whisper...”

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Growing up, we are fed a steady diet of well-intentioned axioms that basically tell us to be ourselves and disregard what others think of us--to "dance like nobody is watching". Of course as we get older and (hopefully) develop some critical thinking skills, we soon realize how unavailing these messages are--what is a subjective self?. Sometimes, though, we default to these as coping mechanisms when we feel overwhelmed by the burden of perception. Or as pseudo-intellectuals might otherwise identify as being subject to a dangerous gaze of some sort.

If you've ever been in an abusive relationship, you may recognize what I'm getting at. Sometimes, an important part of surviving some of these experiences is by convincing ourselves not to pay any. attention. what. so. ever. to what is being said about us. This is a lot harder than it sounds, and I think it becomes even more difficult over time. Sure, it may be easy to disregard the fuming vitriol being spewed in our direction as meaningless ire reflecting only the inner turmoil of the abuser, that we are simply casualties of that inner war. The only problem is, the 'abuser' is also usually the person who knows versions of ourselves that others have not accessed...


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“You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen--the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives. I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”

Thus I became a madman.”