Cartoons

W5 Identity Crisis

The EGO Searches for its ID

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W5: Identity Crisis

W5: who, what, where, when, why am I? It happens to all of us and sometimes it’s overwhelming: a tidal wave of doubt that sweeps us off our feet and we ask but we have no answers.

Who am I? I know my name and I repeat it to myself like a mantra but I still don’t know who I am. Know thyself: easily said, but not so easily done and sometimes the mantra is a praying mantis that tries to bite off my head.

What am I? Good question: locked in the White Tower of the Academy, I knew who I was and what I did. But what happens when the White Tower crumbles around you and you are left picketing the sidewalk: no classroom, no students, no lecture hall, no lectures, no timetable, no marking, no nothing to tell you who and what you are?

Where am I? In retirement, of course, locked in a landscape of weeds and gardens, of growing grass that encroaches on the house and rises like the tide that threatens to surge into a tidal wave of sharp green blades. Death by mowing: and a still body lying out by the mower, waiting to be visited by crows.

When am I? Chained to the here and now and locked to my computer in a voiceless monologue with a faceless, dialogic screen that mirrors each word and moves a relentless line of print across a virtual page. The grandfather clock chimes the half hour and, for a moment or two, I break from computer face time  to enter the circular space time of the clock’s repetition. “See you tomorrow, sir, same time, same place,” the clock speaks out and, hopeful, I nod in response.

Why am I? Sometimes I think I am here just to give the grandfather clock someone to speak too. If I were to go, the clock would cease to exist, for me, but others would hear its chime. Is there no rhyme nor reason to my existence other than to sit here typing and listening to the Westminster Chimes and me so far from Westminster that my mind must travel three thousand miles east just to imagine it. And what does Westminster now mean? To you, to me, to the clock in the hall that endlessly repeats its Westminster Chime?

On Re-reading Quevedo’s Poetry

Was that where my life went,
a spent candle trailing dark studies
among the packed lines of your poems?

And you, was your life gutted by that
same guttering candle by whose light you
scrawled your tight black spider rhymes?

Were they all meaningless, your insights
and my words? So few now know who
you were and what you represented
and I, your scholar, a mere shadow of your
shadow struggling in the straggling
light of a far-off continent, far from content
at knowing so much about you. Intent
I was on spreading light and the word
to a world that thinks the two of us absurd.

Our world is spinning on its edge, placed
on the perimeter of space, and going nowhere.
Specks of dust we sit and contemplate
the vastness of what exactly: our fortunes,
our spirits, our houses, our power, our lands?
Out there, in the vastness that surrounds us,
worlds without end will never know we existed.

Bleak and blank our names, our deeds, our status,
the statues they raise in our praise. And what of
our thoughts, those sparks of electricity
that link us lip to ear and mind to action
and each of our actions transformed by a dance
performed by circling planets that shape our wills?

Who programs that universe now? Who plays
what trivial games of snakes and ladders
in which we are the dots and dashes, pinballs
among a million trillion strings of flashing lights?

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Maybe there is an answer, this maybe:

ID

Within this bookstore are many books, yet none
with my name on the cover or my life blood inside.
Deeper I dig, and deeper. Now here is a name I know,
and there in the bibliography, at last, I find my name:

 two books, a score or so articles, a thesis, and I am
vindicated. All that study, that work, has led to this:
my name in a foreign book in a foreign bookstore. Nice
work: now I know that wherever I go, I can establish

 my identity, set myself free from anonymity’s pangs.
Plug in the computer, turn it on, and there I am on the web,
smiling back at me. There is no better passport, no better

 sense of being, of identity, than that contained in these
images of self, these self-reproductions that I carry with
me, always, in a memory stick looped round my neck.

Or even this, the Teddy Bear planet just off the Red Nose of the Cat Constellation:

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The Twain

“And never the twain shall meet.” This was the chorus that my grandparents often chanted at me when family members started rowing with each other over one trivial incident or another.
“But what happens when the twain do meet,” I used to ask.
“Don’t be silly,” they said. “The twain never meet. Ever.”
But I know very well that they do.
I know.
I’ve seen them together.

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Funny things, they are, the twain, and opposites in so many ways. But so nice, in spite of what some people, especially my grandparents, used to say about them.

Not only do they meet, but they can be happy together and very, very friendly.
“Long time, no see,” the twain say, and embrace quite warmly with a bunch of flowers held between them.

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Mind you, the twain can also be quite awkward and occasionally very abusive towards each other. I remember my mother and father fighting “like cats and dogs” as my grandparents used to say.

Now, my grandparents had a cat. It was black and white and striped like a zebra. They called it Spot. My parents had a dog. It was an English Cocker Spaniel, gold in color, and off-spring to a famous sire. They called it  Wimpy but it was by no means a wimp and fought with everything in sight, especially the cat.

So when my father and mother fought and the family cat and dog fought, I thought, quite reasonably in my opinion, that dogs (with their short hair) were male and cats (with their long hair) were female, and that was the reason why they fought like cats and dogs. And “never the twain shall meet” as my grandparents used to say about my mother and father and the cat and the dog.

I guess it was too early to learn about the birds and the bees when, young and all too innocent, I was learning about the cats and the dogs.

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And of course it’s only natural that the twain should meet. My mother and my father, the cat and the dog, had to meet somewhere, didn’t they? How else would I be here? We weren’t the sort of family that practiced contraception by throwing stones at the storks to keep the babies away. But I could never work out why the cat always had female kittens while the dog had all-male off-spring. That was a bit too much for me, and nobody ever explained anything in those days.

And look, in spite of the differences between them, even cats and dogs can sometimes live together in peace. And opposites can and do attract, don’t they? Look at these two, coming together like a pair of magnets.

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Or, as the King of Rock and Roll might have phrased it:

“I’m so square.”
“Baby, I don’t care.”

 

 

Sometimes

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Sometimes the road seems uphill all the way. Lungs burn. Breath comes hot and hard and chunky in the throat. Legs hang heavy, muscles will not obey the owner’s instructions.

Consult the operating manual: “Take a break,” it says. “Rest now. Don’t push too hard.” But to rest is to give in, to come to an abrupt halt, or to drift backwards down the hill.

What stubborn streak is painted so deep in us that it shouts ‘never surrender’ when our most urgent need seems to be to throw in the towel? Is it the urge to get to the top, to see the lower lands stretched out below us? Or is it the mantra of fight the good fight?

Many things can drive us on: a need, a desire, a whim, an urge, or merely a refusal to stop fighting. Some of us will never give up. We will never lie down and curl up in a corner, a dead leaf to be blown hither and thither by the cold night wind.

Look carefully: there are no drugs, no needles, in the biker’s uniform. There is no small accessory motor hidden in the back wheel to help when times get hard.

The mouth is open, the eyes are set on the target, the legs still move, the sun still shines, and three smiling heart-shaped faces cheer the cyclist on.

Who can they be, these three angels at the road side, who can they be? Yet they are there and we are here and the bike is there and the hill is there and sometimes … yes, sometimes, the road IS uphill all the way.

But we keep the pedals turning and we don’t get off our bikes … and that’s life.