Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Identity

Have you ever just stared into a mirror, and looked at yourself? An almost sublime sense of selfhood emerges. A realization that you are really you, bound to this body, and to no one else. It is both incredibly limiting, and incredibly freeing, at the same time. Truly, truly sublime. I couldn't help but smile as I did it. I seemed so... unfamiliar... as I looked at myself. Yet who could I be, but the person staring back?

...

Consciousness, the existence of such, has, I think, always been the main source of my inspiration. I am just truly fascinated by what it is, what it means. Everything I have been trying to unwrap has boiled down to this very specific question. What does it mean to experience the world subjectively?

...

I have been thinking about Father, off and on, lately. He always comes back, it seems in waves, ebbing and flowing. More intense and more intense, then less so. Well, lately, Raymond Frederick Raven has played heavily upon my mind. I have been thinking about the normal person, how their conception of a distant parent differs so drastically from mine. How they see their absentee parent as at fault in some way. That is not the case for me. It is strange. I feel that I am constantly inundated with people whose stories of parental disconnect are so much worse than mine, yet so much better. Everyone is still alive. Sometimes, it feels exceedingly, fatalistically cruel, that I should unabashedly love my father so much, and yet be denied him. Everyone else seems so unaware how lucky they are, yet I can't help but feel that, given their blindness, that it is I who should be grateful, for I knew, Before, just how lucky I was, to have both of them. And though I feel sometimes, a resentment , born of my own stagnation, I know, KNOW, that without them, specifically, I would have been dead long ago.

Thank you.