My feeling is that nothing is going to change this repetitive history of mass murder, or nation against nation, until the illusions of “who we are” dissolve. Not that identity itself would disappear. But identity ceases to be an illusion when it’s held more lightly, as passing reflections on our behavior. But when they become stuck in idolized forms, illusions multiply.
Rather than constantly relighting these fuses of Us against Them, we need to allow that fuse itself to dissolve in a broader vision than us and them. Because every political or social movement starts from the same rotten assumption – namely, a belief in the reality (not mere fictional reality) of a separate Self (whether national, political, religious or racial self, and so on). It’s this belief that is the fuse. And it’s a delusional belief. We are not who we think we are.
And the dissolution of these illusions of identity would snuff out the various fuses before any of them can lead to war.
But almost everybody finds this level of criticism absurd or far-fetched or unrealistic, or even offensive, and so on. Because people primarily look at nations, tribes and other group entities as if they were real. It’s the psychology underlying this illusion that attracts my interest; not the geopolitical dramas carried out by these fictional entities.
So, I’m going to keep talking about these illusions, without proposing any additional solutions (which are inevitably political or social solutions). Because the solution in this case is the problem. The solution of politics is the problem because it always reinforces the illusion of separate identities; and these solutions are never any better than mere truces.
“…something that wants to rise and shake itself free” (William Carlos Williams)
I had a fairly disconcerting experience when I was a 9th grade spectator at our school’s varsity basketball game. It was a rural school, Kindergarten through 12th in the same building. Maybe 30 kids per grade, so we knew pretty much everyone, or so I thought. But as I was watching the game, one of the players, maybe two years old than myself, a member of our church, our mothers were friends, became instantly unrecognizable.
I lost the flow of the game and became hypnotically focused on this one person. It’s probably a widespread phenomenon. It’s what some call “wordnesia.” Except in this case, it’s not the word that looks suddenly mispelled or inexplicable or weird, but a human being. Someone I knew on the periphery.
And even if it’s common, I want to magnify the moment, because there’s something almost pleasantly psychedelic about the experience, and also significant in some way that otherwise I ignore.
At any rate, I had this Wordnesia experience of a person when I was in 9th grade. I tried to juggle the knowledge of his “familiarity” with his sudden alien strangeness. His bearing no longer conformed to anyone recognizable. But I was also noticing him for the first time. Noticing the discrepancy between the mask of confidence he was trying to wear (the identity he was trying to present), my interpretation of his projected identity, and the unfamiliar reality of himself, which I’d never noticed until that moment.
And the alien feeling spread to the entire gymnasium. My hometown crowd, all familiar faces, looked like they were all struggling with masks. It was as if the known character of each person was peeling from their bodies, revealing a routine pretense, which was their public persona, which also revealed something of the real human being struggling with fear and doubt.
I don’t know if that’s how I would have interpreted all this at the time. But I’m doing so now, because I recollect a feeling of dislocation, and alien estrangement in myself, when I looked around the gym.
In the disjointed chaos of the moment (and I think it was a close game, so the energy of the crowd was high-strung, I started to notice the chaos of myself more than anything else, because the isolation turned me inwards, where I found nothing but a bundle of herky jerky movements that I vaguely but not gladly recognized as myself.
I tried to snap out of this alternate reality, but it stuck around for a long half-hour and then perhaps a milder version never fully dissipated the rest of my life. At any rate, thereafter I became even more self-conscious, more herky-jerky, and felt more like a fraud who didn’t know how to stop being a fraud.
But at the same time – and this is far more important – the effect was not one of haughty disdain for myself or others, but an unprecedented feeling of sorrow for the real human beings I’d never noticed before. Beneath the smiles and cheers they looked sad or tired.
This self-ennobling observation can’t be fully corroborated. But I did (I insist) feel sad in the midst of this somewhat pleasant natural high.
Sheer forgetfulness may have been the accidental drug, but it did seem to open a glimpse into more subtle realities simmering beneath the surface presentation; beneath the scripts that often trap us into being people we weren’t meant to be. Where familiarity once was, now bewildered human forms could be discerned. The vague outline of a soul writhing in a spider’s web or a cocoon, depending on whether they would emerge or not.
Negative Geography 