Trying to figure out who is this one

Dear diary,

It reveals something about the soul of the writer: the decision to title an entry “Trying to figure out who I am,” rather than, say, “…who is this one.” I’m agitated, awake in the middle of the night, it’s half past three; and I’m trying to put my anxiety to good use. But is this good use?—penning these thoughts, in hopes of eventually sharing them as a blog post? Maybe introspective writing is a bigger waste of time than simply remaining abed and staring into darkness.

About eight hours from now, during the next full noon, my family will gather for the controversial holiday, which, in my youth, I was told to call “Thanksgiving”; then in my middle age, when I got fazed attempting to break from my Cocoon of Innocence (I’ve not yet managed to permeate the Realm of Experience), I was re-taught to call the day “Fourth Thursday of November,” because certain celebrators awoke and realized that there’s nothing to be thankful for, in the past or the present, and I concur. Plus, you gotta admit, “Fourth Thurs of Nov” does have a catchy ring to it.

But, in this entry, I wanted to try to figure out who I am; not appraise the holiday that occasioned such a dodge. So who am I? What is my purpose? These are questions that nag me, when I begin to worry about having to visit with family. What have I done with my life? Where have I been, and where am I going?

Is it necessary to travel right back to birth, or to early childhood? I’ve met more people who despise Sigmund Freud than who can tolerate him, so I fear a backlash if I admit that I love him; nevertheless, this is MY public-private diary, and I permit myself to speak about what seems important to me. Freud, in my misreading of his pataphysics, places great emphasis upon a person’s infancy—what I gather is that my life as a baby determined practically everything that followed. In short: I was doomed from the get-go. But what exactly happened, which caused me to become this nervous wreck? I do not believe that I was abused; I think that I’m just more sensitive than a normal soul, so treatment that would feel acceptable to another feels callous to me. But this leads to that old crux: Nature vs. Nurture: Was I simply born hypersensitive (I mean: is my fearfulness due to the makeup of my nervous system itself: the balance of chemicals, etc., which were the work of Luck), OR did womb-life and early childhood make me like this (in other words: May I blame my parents)?

All this hemming and hawing to say that I don’t remember the key parts of the story which fix my plot. If there’s a guardian daemon or over-soul who’s been monitoring my travesty supra birth-death, THAT fellow will be able point out the culprit; all we can say is it’s either God or my folks.

Perhaps is it telling, that, at this point in writing, my instinct before continuing was to research the definition of the word “trailer trash.” Noun; U.S.; informal, derogatory. “Poor lower-class white people typified as living in trailers.” I even like the fragment showing the term in action: “…their parenting style has moved the family from upper-middle-class suburban to trailer trash in one generation.” Why does a trailer have this negative connotation? And what’s the opposite of trash?—is there such a thing as trailer gems …assets? Trailer treasure?

I was not born in a trailer park. But neither was I born in an “upper-middle-class suburb.” So where the heck was I born? I guess I’d call it a plain middle-class suburb – nothing upper about it.

But why do I immediately pounce on the notion of trailer trash when I want to begin to unearth my long-buried life-bone? It’s because I relate to this class of people. The author Cormac McCarthy set his early novel Child of God in Sevier County, Tennessee. If there truly are souls who live in the Appalachian Mountains, I’m sure they’re not much like the way that I myself imagine them; but I relate to my own idea of mountain-folk, the same way that I relate to the concept of trailer treasure. Those people are my true ancestors – somehow they’re in my blood. And when I read William Faulkner’s masterpiece As I Lay Dying, I recognize a slant of my own family’s essence. My family IS the Bundrens. And I am Darl. ...I am also the “bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator” of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. (I’m always ashamed how much I relate to that guy.) And, although I venture this next assertion while still only partway through reading its source (so take it with a wink), my kinfolk are true Karamazovs. I’m referring to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s chief work, which coincidentally was also (I’ve heard) my pal Freud’s favorite novel: The Brothers Karamazov.

Listing literature. No, I’m not getting sidetracked from the search for myself: it’s insightful to note the depths that I must plumb to set the mood… to find a soil to produce a life like mine.

I’ve never researched my genealogy, family tree, ancestral bloodline or history – I’m half afraid what I will find, and I also like to guess what might’ve been; whereas, if I ever discover the facts, I’ll lose the freedom to wonder with such abandon. As it is, I imagine that I hail from the monsters of the deep. Yet I don’t envision my lineage this way because I favor vulgarity: on the contrary, transcendence is my goal, and not even the sky’s the limit; but my aspirations are so beyond the beyond that it’s vitally necessary for me to offset my superego’s demands with self-congratulations, and to make even a passable flower appears the highest triumph if one has stemmed from ignoble roots.

But what is my flower? And is it passable? These aspects of my life I can address without conjecture, because I rough-hewed them. (Probably I did not rough-hew them in actual fact but only felt as though I was rough-hewing them.) For a while, I assumed my life’s flower-work was two blossoms: the audio works that I made, and the text works that I made. But now I am not sure that I have managed to flower at all. I don’t mean this in a sulky way; I don’t say this to be self-deprecatory, in hopes of receiving a compliment, like if I were to murmur “I’m ugly,” and you reply, “No, Bryan, you’re pretty.” I know that I’m pretty. I mean, I’m physically unattractive (permit me this truth), but my spirit is gorgeous.

But that’s only the case if WILLPOWER is beautiful. (I love but disbelieve the quote from Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: Beauty is truth, truth beauty; and now I puzzle over whether power might be beautiful, or beauty powerful.) Because I’m strong in will, no doubt, yet my spirit lacks grace. It wants the charm that comes from an upper-class upbringing. Devoid of all “up-” words, I’m intrinsically DOWN. I have a trailer-trash soul. I am the spirit of the Appalachian Mountains... a real mountain-man... a mountaineer. Is all this true? No, for my soul is not the low thing that my body was doomed to be. (I wish I were better at distinguishing “soul” from “spirit”—I need to work on keeping those terms separate and more clearly defined; I should not use them as synonyms: I like the idea that the soul is mortal and was fashioned by the demiurge Ialdabaoth, the bungling creator of our broken world who is also known as Jehovah; and this soul is a flawed copy of the true immortal pearl or spark of the Ineffable, known as Endlessness, the alien deity who encompasses the entirety and of whose “mind” Jehovah is but an erroneous thot.) But it rings true to me when I say that I’m DOWN. Anyone who’s known me since preschool can vouch for my negative bent. Why does everything seem such a washout to me? Maybe this bad attitude is proof of my infancy having been very good. TOO good to last. Yes, how else would the whole farce that follows acquire such a gloomy hue?

Or maybe I just miss the womb. Why wouldn’t we? It’s like hovering in a soft, warm spaceship with red-draped interior and bronze decor. (I stole that last phrase from my favorite poem, Wallace Stevens’ “Of Mere Being”; umpteen sleepless nights and a nonstop knocking from my floorboards forced me to admit this.) You’ve got a plug plugged into your stomach which supplies all your nourishment: you’ve got no responsibilities but to pretend to press buttons, pull levers, and turn the knobs of your ship’s control panel, with your eyes closed, dreaming the phantasmagoric dreams of the fetus. And some fetuses even get cocaine or alcohol, free of charge. But I wasn’t so lucky: My owner fed me well. And when I got born I cried.

What’s being born like? Is it like crash-landing your rocket? I don’t think so: for what would the ruined casing be, the placenta? I think a vehicle demolition in outer space is too jagged and rigid to represent live birth. No, being born is like nothing so much as dying. Enduring the shock of expiry when you least expect it: THAT’s like birth. It’s not even close to waking from a dreamless sleep: that’s more like imagining; for fancies enter and leave the imagination effortlessly, they appear and disappear without consequence; and no pain, no gain: which is why it only counts if you bring your thoughts to term, that is: get them out into the world, lure others to entertain them in their own mind – an uncommunicated thought is a dead thought; tho thoughts cannot ever be truly communicated: one can only, as it were, coax other woodlanders to play in a comparable grotto; provoke them to decree the building of a similar pleasure-dome. Yes, being born is unlike waking from dreamless sleep; but it is a bit like interrupting a bout of somnambulism: for, in that case, you’re terrified; suddenly everything’s changed, everything’s inexplicable and you must immediately LEARN FAST how to nurse or be nursed.

Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.

That’s another of William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell”; it came to mind because I’m talking about womb-life and live-birth. But the act of impregnation precedes even the womb. Conception. To conceive. I’m brainstorming backwards now – I intended to give a hard look to my life after adolescence, because that’s what worries me so much when the holy days strike; but fear of the task at hand is manifest in the way I’m retreating from earliest childhood back through birth before the time of impregnation. Back to the days when I was dead. Is that the right way to put it? How would it be more accurate to say that I was NOT dead? If I wasn’t dead, what was I? Surely not alive, because… Well, maybe alive, but not in control. And yet, am I in control at present? Am I as aware of myself now, as I was aware of myself when I was King Josiah? An asshole I was then: forgive me, for I knew not what I was doing. (II Kings 22-23) And yet, in a sense, at present, I am not aware that I was King Josiah; but neither will I be aware that I was once Bryan Ray, when I have become the Beast out of the Sea (Revelation 13:1).

P.S.

I got torn away from this entry after writing the last sentence above. The holiday attacked. (Again, I wish my writing had ended in mid-word, rather than after a full stop, so as to emphasize that it’s unfinished.) I have now returned only to add this postscript with the following decade-old pseudo-gangster rap-demo (from an album whose base positions, theses, & arguments I articulated elsewhere).

NOTE. All lyrics are on the album's Bandcamp page; just hover your pointer over the song title & click the word "lyrics" when it appears.