Fantasies of selves
From Spirited Away
I took shrooms the other day and reality became like jelly. What usually mattered in life fell away and there I was, bare. The simulation of the senses was apparent: the load of moving my armature, skin draping fat, fat hugging muscles, muscles clinging bone. Concepts like “meditation” and “enlightenment” (I had just spent the past 5 days in retreat) became like crumpled paper — they lost their weight, their sense.
We “make sense” of things (Vervaeke). It’s a constructed act. The altered state temporarily unconstructed some things and stuck forth others. The goals that scream their priority are ephemeral and dependent — they can shift easily, sometimes with just a few pieces of fungus.
+++
I realised on my walk today that I no longer find it discouraging that I have to re-present myself to new people. As I’ve said before, I now find it a delightful process, one of flint against steel — sparks of fresh recognition, communion with a new soul.
I wonder what’s changed? I think I had some self image that I clung to before, one where I felt that people viewed me favourably, an opinion that had taken much time and effort on my part to make real. That clinging is still there, but I think the gift of the idiot is that my self image is wearing a barrel as clothes.
Clothes. Masks. I no longer really know who I am, what I am, and I think the past year has been a process of both moving towards that and finding joy in that. To follow the “spiritus” — the spirit, the breath, the wind that blows indistinctly in directions unknown. To have faith in something so ephemeral — I’m astounded that the ancients drew such a connection between something so essential to something so impermanent.
As graduation nears I’m forced to consider how I sell myself. All of the projects become framed in that way for the marketplace of human talent. Rather cynical “evo-psych-y” view that I don’t hold really, but the instrumental taste has reality to it.
The curse of staring at the instability of the “real” me is that I can no longer construct some ‘professional’ self to hide behind, because what am I hiding? And if the self is multiple, then which self am “I” hiding behind?
Often we talk with some goal to get something, status and so on. Many modes of self-expression (in the broad sense) could (and is) often framed in those ways. We might think of conversing for status as an act that feeds the little status spirit (goblin, daemon) within you.
Authenticity might then be thought of as self-expression not for such goblins, but from the “true” self.
Problem is, though, the true self is itself (for me) a nebulous thing. The true self is more some action between parts than some stable thing — a patterning than an object.
And more to the point I don’t find the “self” all that interesting right now — what’s authentic to me is what some god decides to do with me at this moment.
I think many past design-related ambitions has fallen away. Tools for thought, reshaping the browser, changing how we think about the web.
In my head, there’s some idealised version of the farm life. I hang out with a lovely family and help them with their farm. Grounded. Real. Direct physicality. My ambitions have shifted from wanting to Change The World to simply being okay. And that okay-ness feels typified in that quiet, hard-working farming life.
It’s another fantasy, of course.
+++
That it’s “fabricated” doesn’t make it worthless, arbitrary. Where there is meaning, there is fantasy, as Burbea says. That we get such vibrancy at all is awe-ful.
In the matters of the self, I have to feel out how I relate to my “fantasies”. What do I prioritise and how? In some ways they’re out of my hand, but the sources of influence is no longer solely the values inherited from my parents or from society, but rather that unspeakable “spiritus”.
In some very particular ways, life feels like a trip. Dark clouds roll through and I have to stick with it. The difference is, though, I can’t just sit it out. I actually have to Do The Thing. But, eventually, eventually, I have a sense that it will unfold itself, stretching towards the sun.
January 11th, 2023. 9:18pm
Thank you Christine for giving me the space and for your unending support, Pranab for your hearty encouragement, and S.A for your thoughtful feedback.
Geez i love this