‘Muslims going to prayer’ he points as he speaks. Across the road I notice different groups of people: familes, men together and singularly, couples, all well dressed. People in patches, all moving with a purpose in the same direction, down the road past the police station, past Icelands, disappearing around the corner.
‘You know why we dislike them?’ he asks as I look, and he watches them disappear. Before I can retort that I am no part of this disliking we, before I can make my carefully constructed speech of tolerance and acceptance, he continues, ‘Because they have something we don’t. They have an identity, they have a commonality. Where, I ask you, is our faith? Our identifying mark? I see no outward sign, no observable, empirical, undeniable ‘thing’ that tells us, tells them who are not us, who we are’.
We have no such mark. We have bathed so often in the waters of our faith that we have cleansed ourselves of our difference, of our communion.
Now, is this the time of Abraham. The time of soft sounds from the upper room. Dark forces, lie unseen on our tongues. the ti the tim e of ma chin e es
breaki inb d own fading out
bl ack and blkue ed
green of the dead,
lying
to save themselves. Lying
naked
in a strange unfamiliar pose. I am a foreigner.
The visitor.
The voyeur.
The tourist.
And what sight do I see? Not what I think,
I wish to see.
I see.
Myself.
Looking back at me …
I completed this self portrait while supervising the art class at the prison. I had a great time – such a change from teaching ESOL as there was minimal interaction with the students, although as they got to know me over the time of the four lessons I taught, they did start to ask for more and more assistance (which I felt completely untrained to provide!) Even so, I would guess I perhaps spent about 20% of my time actively involved in supervising the class, and the other 80 occupying myself, hence this self-portrait.
Gotta say, it was GREAT to get the space and time, and all the resources, materials and atmosphere needed to simply sit and paint for hours on end! I’ll stand in and cover art class any time they want!
That’s what I’ve been doing the last week or so. Enjoying a bit of self indulgence. Of course I knew that along with the enjoyment would be suffering. I knew by going there – indulging myself – life would become a little less easy. And sure enough it did.
Self indulgence as a conscious choice. Was it worth it? Most definitely, now that I am here out the other side. I learnt a lot. I learnt that I can never go there again in some unconscious way – I can no longer be fooled by my self into thinking that this is all there is. And by this I mean the reality I experience that reflects my self back at me. And for the last couple of days or so that reality was ‘life sucks’. ‘life is a struggle’ (which reminds me this is the title of a book by Stuart Wilde – and is great reading for anyone who thinks that way), ‘life is too much of an effort and best thing to do is retreat’. I wasn’t fooled, although Cari would probably say I was giving a damn good impression of being 100% there the other night!
And by going there, by indulging my self, I was reminded that the self, my self, your self, all our selves are constructed identities. Our selves are made up of all we experience, all we have ever experienced, and the myriad of ways in which we have responded and processed and regurgitated those experiences. Our fantasies, dreams, and memories are all part of our selves. Most importantly it is our selves that move through this world. It is our selves that judge – what is beautiful to us, what is sweet and what is not, what is right and what is wrong. We exist in the here and now through our selves (and just let me say I absolutely LOVE my self for that gift).
I learnt this to be true. I exist, I am through my self. And I wondered that if I exist, if ‘we’ exist through our selves, then who are ‘we’. Who are ‘we’ if not our selves? Hmmm a deep philosophical question – with all sorts of answers. Nevermind those, the answer for me today is LIGHT.
brilliant, gorgeous, illuminating LIGHT
Before today I have always known ‘the other’ as dark. When I searched for it, all I found was nothing and that nothing was a black hole. I vividly remember standing in the middle of a very small student flat in Ada Street in Palmerston North, only days after having left Bronwynne and my two young sons in Auckland, 400 miles or so to the north. It was the end of my marriage, I was alone, afraid. I missed my sons terribly, so much so that I would sob in despair. In that moment I searched inside myself, trying to find who it was who had caused this. Who was I really, beneath all the bullshit, beneath all the things that I thought I was? In the turmoil I dug so deep. I dug and dug, deconstructed and I remember finding nothing. Not simply nothing but a nothing, A hole. An empty space. A void.
And in my mind I associated this void with darkness. Vast empty space, BLACK vast empty space. And since then, and before then the place I always went to when I left my self behind was black – sometimes a room, sometimes a cave, sometimes just space. Always dark, and I associated with this darkness – safety, protection, security, nourishment, rest, quiet. And it was all of those things. Over time (a long time) I came to know and love the darkness. It was in this darkness that I meditated. It was in this darkness that I lost my self once again, and in those moments of meditation when my self was gone I experienced intense bliss. God bless the darkness.
Now I know that inside us all is a place of intense light. An illuminating spark at our centres. I learnt that I have nothing to fear from the light. That to bathe in the light is also restful and safe and secure and quiet and nourishing. Even more amazing I learnt that to recognise and radiate the light from within is enriching, empowering, enlivening.
Toby and I were talking a little while ago about ’Spore’ the game. I’ve seen it advertised and haven’t given it much thought. That’d be because I’m kind of selective about what I am mindful about, about what I retain in my consciousness. Well we all are aren’t we?
And this process of selectivity got me thinking of ’self’ and ‘non-self’. The way I see it, I create, maintain and develop my self through that which I choose to be aware of. That which I choose to ignore (and by that I do not mean things I am aware of and disregard, but rather those things I am simply unaware of), these things DO NOT EXIST for me. These non-existent things make up my non-self.
Simple really.
These things that make up my non-self do not exist. They are nothing to me. Yet at anytime something can move from my non-self to my self, in fact things are constantly moving between the two. When I was younger stuff was mostly transferred from non-self to self. My self grew and grew. And this did not cause any noticeable shrinking to my non-self - well it couldn’t could it, as I (my self) am totally unaware of what constitutes my non-self. Although I think of it as vast, infinite in it’s nothingness. As I was growing I just kept drawing things from it (as we do).
And then a time came when I noticed I was giving stuff back. Stuff that had been part of me was jettisoning off. My self seemed to be shrinking. Things I could no longer remember, and things I simply chose to forget. There came a time when I consciously stopped growing, I had accumulated enough stuff, now it was time to let some go. And the edges between self and non-self became blurred. The border between what I was aware of and what I was unaware of swelled, like a limb asleep and numb. And it was this borderland between self and non-self that increasingly became my comfort zone. Albeit a very numb comfort zone!
And where does all this fit with Spore and the god delusion and genes? Hmmm who knows? Though I think it does some how, because it seems to me that Spore provides an opportunity for us all to play god, which of course we are. We are gods of our own universes. We are. We are the centre of our own universes. No one else is. No one else can be. We see things, we create things as we want things to be seen and be created. Spore it seems to me just gives practical expression to this truth.
Spore lets us create our selves and create our non-selves, perhaps. Ha who knows, that’s the joy of it. So I hope someone is keeping track. Because what we have here is one great social experiment. As far as I understand it, sometime in the not too distant future, we, us, you and me, are all going to take part in recreating the world. I mean, its not that far-fetched is it?
Some day soon a game will begin. There will be enough of us playing to make it meaningful, as meaningful as anything else. And in this game we are god and do whatever we want, and as more and more people play, the characters they create, the traits they emphasise and de-emphasise will aggregate. And then a forgotten dream will come true.
There will come a time when the technology we have created will give all a voice. An identity free from judgement and discrimination. All will have the opportunity to be present. As individuals. As gods of their own worlds.
