Linda and I were jawing along during and after dinner when I veered off, as I too often and annoyingly do, into my “unique” childhood… not so much that no one of earth has ever had another like it, but that of anyone I’ve read, no one has recapitulated what I recall of being a child – of hating being a child, of feeling that I had no relation to a world – the world – that I could understand.
Somewhere into talking with Linda – always a revelation – I started to realize that, through all these too many years, I’ve consistently viewed my childhood as having held no definable self; that this internal whatever had no reality that I could pin down to anything, to measure any thing or anyone else against. That I was a cypher, an absence.
But a bit later – lights out, on the edge of sleep over which I would not plunge – I suddenly decided that actually as a kid I had a huge sense of self – an almost monstrous one that obliterated or devoured the rest of the inscrutable world. No, I hadn’t just alienate the outer world to the side, as I’ve seen it for so long: I had actively negated it.
I had feared all external life, yes, but it was less a failure to accept the outer than a failure to believe in anything outside myself.
After this revelation [or whatever the hell it was], I realized how this fits with one of the main strains – what I think is the underlying yet overwhelming strain – of my current novel: that memory makes the self, that memory is the self, that anything I didn’t personally experience as a kid was non-self, because I was no one before my memory solidified, and that may be why I am still fettered by an obsession with memory.
It goes well beyond nostalgia or what someone else [not me, ever] might consider the trauma of my youth, but the understanding that without the constant play of memory, I would not exist as self.
[I’ve written previously about the most wonderful teacher I ever had, Robert Cantor, a grad student in math who taught a summer course in calculus, totally focused on every student learning every bit of what he had to teach.
[He later shot and killed one of his math profs and himself. One press report – only one that I recall – stated he was found with a handwritten note in his shirt pocket. It had to have been taken from the 3×5 spiral notebook he always held in his hand throughout the class. The note read, “I am not who I am.” The report may have been fancy, not truth, but I believe it without reservation. Robert Cantor is one of the great sorrows and losses of my life.]
If, in my own mind, I was not real, as I looked at the situation for so long, then there was nothing I could do to change or move forward, or become – no way to interact, since there was nothing to react with. Yet, had I alternately accepted that only I exist, that would have been far more malign, a massive negation of reality.
So how do I look at it today, when the terrors of childhood have returned, in lesser form, but as a possible second childhood of terror? Is there a way out of this self/non-self confusion? More important, should there by a way out?
If only I exist, then reality doesn’t matter, because reality is a glam within my mind; but if, as rationally tells me must be the case, that outlook is haywire, what’s left? Is anything left, should anything be left?
This confusion works so well with my novel that it’s mightily invigorating, though it may seem brutal and negative. For writing – and for living whatever years remain to me – it’s a relief. I doesn’t matter which side of the trail is true, or if neither is.
I’ve never wanted to die, even when things were at their most precipitous. It’s not so much a fear of death as a fear of the world continuing without me, a world I’ll never be able to know. But should there be no reality beyond myself, I have no reason to care. Alternately, if reality is real, it will chug along without me and without my need to monitor it.
Whoops! Tigger, my all-time wonderful, wise, and superlative cat, just sauntered in to devour his evening snack: a freshly snapped-up mouse. Now, I know Tigger is real – it’s simply impossible for Tigger to be other than real – so everything I’ve written above is beside the point, whatever I might have thought the point to be..
Good night.
lickhaven 