Across the street there was a field. It was an endless playground for me when I was a child, and it was truly glorious. Weeds rose like little temples. The dirt was dry, rugged, and populated with red and black ants, beetles, grass hoppers, and all sorts of creepy crawlies that my friend and I loved to catch. They buzzed in the afternoon, reaching a crescendo in the evening and night. It was a calming music--music which I will never forget. On a cold winter's night in Bozeman, it is sometimes nice to think I am sitting with a friend under the moon, listening to the sound of the bugs. That field, in its emptiness, was so easily transformable to my young mind. Once it was a podracer course. Another time a massive arena where we battled our Pokemon. It could even become a launching pad for our spacecraft, jettisoning us far into outer-space. Of course, like most things when I was a child, this 'massive' field was much bigger in my head. It stretched on forever, and there were places I was afraid to go--"the dark territories" of my mental mind-scape. There was no reason for my fear, other than my mom warning me about not going too far.
Sometimes kids tried to light the place on fire. I remember my next door neighbor yelling at two boys playing with matches next to the road. They looked up at the small man with welling eyes. He knew how to put the fear of Mark into them. But one day, as Murphy’s Law dictates, there was a flame. The whole neighborhood gathered to watch it as it surged across the field, making its way to several of the houses on the other side. Suddenly, a tree literally burst into flame. Smoke billowed upward, blackening the sky and reddening the sun. It was a vision of hell. But that one, like all the others, was put out. Fire fighters arrived in a big truck, causing a collective sigh of relief. Near the Southern rim, which was covered in trees and sandstone, I would sometimes find large sections of ash where lightning had stricken and caused another fire. This area, however, was a notoriously fun place to be. High school kids would race their cars through it at night and drink, throwing beer cans, condoms, and graffiti on the sandstone walls. During the day, little children walked through the brush with paintball guns, shooting at each other. A ‘hobo den,’ as we called it, was set up further below in a copse of trees. It had a campfire, lawn chairs, and empty glasses of booze. People would dump their trash out there—couches, chairs, old toys—so there would always be furniture to lounge on. Perversely, there was this strange little shrine made of rock that I would destroy every time I saw it, but would almost always be rebuilt when I came back. It was also a place of danger. When I was in Middle School, a kid slightly younger than me fell out of one of the trees and almost died. Another time, when I was in a tragic mood, I sat perched on the loneliest cliff, wishing to be alone. Of course, two men and a child decided to scale this ‘loneliest’ cliff with wall-climbing gear. The older I became the more special this place became to me. I took my girlfriend out there, scaring her as some kids walked by with paintball guns when her top was off.
Being a blank place that I could fill with imagination, I often anthropomorphized the trees, the rocks, and the animals. The bugs I use to play with, move around, and lets face it, torture, were warriors in my mind. I would construct epics of their doings, of their grand wars, and wondered why no one had made a war movie or video game dealing with their violent lives--it was almost Tolkien-esque. The creek which ran by my elementary school and this area, "Alkali Creek", there lived a killer beaver who loved to eat children. The trees near my house were populated with demons and ogres, a tense sensation I still get sometimes when I am out there by myself. But this place is in the process of being transformed. Across the street from my house now contains rectangle lawns and concrete houses with panel siding. The dirt road, which I used to race my bicycle, has been left to decay, and near the South-West section, a local church is building a swimming pool. Where before the wild tangled weeds, brush, and trees appeared to stretch all the way to Airport Road, they are cut up by development. Since I have left for college, Alkali Creek has two new bridges crossing it and much of the territory I described has been covered by concrete and the sound of automobiles going 30 miles per hour. My grandparents' house, at the end of a lane and visited by deer, raccoons, pheasants, and fox, has the comforting sound of car tires on pavement. The night is filled with headlights and revving engines instead of the nothingness. I am not saying this is bad. It is simply change. And maybe most importantly, the change I described this place undergoing is a metaphor for my own transformation into adulthood. The uncivilized child being goaded into 'acting' like an adult. This field represents everything I cherish. It is the place where I can hang my ideas and concepts because it is a pure representation of something.
This paper, in turn, will be about identity and how our perceptions of it are often wrong, based on the masculine 'ego.' The field, the forest, near my house was untamed, a commons for all the people in the neighborhood to do with as they pleased. But the houses themselves, with their geometry and structure, were predicated on the belief of a static world. In the West, we often base our person around the idea of the pin-pointer, the hunter. This 'person' is a mash-up of their memories, emotions, narratives, and hopes. However, identity is free-floating. What science has shown, and what many post-modern theorists have theorized, is that identity is not something that can be easily defined as existing solely in the head. Hypnosis, stories, and online communication have gone far to prove this--that identity can grow, shrink, or even move. Post-Modernism has been seen by some as nihilistic. What I sense in its detractors is a fear of meaninglessness. What Post-Modern theory really says is that everything changes. The perceptions we hold will not stay constant, cannot stay constant, and this is beauty of all life. This is the beauty of the Mother, of the wood, river, and animals. Everything dies and is resurrected in some form. What man's structured realm shows us is the exact opposite. It is the realm of the static, for when man holds power, he wishes it to stay the same. His perfect world is one of ideas and concepts, one that would result in a material hell. This is not to suggest that the world of the Mother is an ideal state either; it is to suggest that we have forgotten about her, and this has led us down a dangerous path.
Ouroboros--a snake eating its own tail. It is a symbol of eternity, of the constantly repeating cycles of life and death, and the perception that the end is written in the beginning. I try to picture this image when I am lonely or depressed. It reminds me that every moment is temporary, a scene in the play. I see the snake's triangle head devouring its tail, the green stripes on its back, and its scales shifting like a stream. But then my mind starts to wander. The scene transforms. Sand picks up in the air. There is a blazing hot red sun in the distance. An ox moos and a coyote howls. A tumbleweed drifts lazily past a saloon's doors and a cartoon cowboy picks up this snake wrapped around itself, using it as a lasso to wrangle up the evil sheriff. For some reason I have a vision of Kaa from Disney's "The Jungle Book" with his flashing eyes hypnotizing Mowgli. Since hypnotism is a concept which will be specifically covered in the next section of this paper, I find this linkage tantalizing. Oops. It is often at a point like this I realize my mind has wandered into 'inane-ia' yet again. I must return to ouroboros--a monstrous snake encircling the universe. The tip of its tale slips into his fanged mouth and its slurps it up. Oh! How disgusting it must be when the snake has to use the restroom! I am reminded of "The Human Centipede" and if that 'monster' is a modern day ouroboros. Person after person is lined up and I want to gag! Wait, wait, ouroboros. "Ring-a-ring-a-roses, A pocket full of posies; Hush! hush! hush! hush! We’re all tumbled down." Summoning circles. Wombs and temples. My mind will not stop, creating another relation, and then another. The human mind is wonderful at making these connections, and maybe negatively, going off on tangents. This is the conceptive spark of imagination and story, and ultimately the breaking down of identity that I will discuss in this paper. A paper I shall begin with hypnosis, initiating you into the realm of the subconscious.
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The culture from which you are born puts you in a haze. It can blind you to every other point of view, like a sheet over your eyes, or a kaleidoscope which you see the world from. It is the framework which you use to construct your own personal story. In this cultural climate, it seems people are caught up in gut reactions. They don’t take the time to gather the big picture—that their identities are by and large illusions and, in fact, death is inevitable. It is so easy to pick sides and hard to recognize anothers vantage. I return to the Hindu concept of the ‘net of Indra,’ where nothing happens in independence of anything else. It as if there is a mind moving things forward free of one person’s will. College has taught me a lot, not necessarily rote pieces of data (though I also received that), but to be independent, to think for myself, and to never take anything, especially things you depend on for your own view point, for granted. I was shredded up in a blender, beat up, bruised, a puddle of goo on the ground ready to be reshaped by new world views. I was built up so high, so there had to be a fall. Things that I considered important to me turned out to be a poison in my veins. There was a girl. A girl I loved very much. A girl that I had to let go completely and forever. I had always thought, as long as I can remember, that love was timeless and would never end. This was a concept that in the end would destroy me if I did not let it go.
That is what unbreakable concepts do. Life, in all its inscrutable insurmountability, is constantly changing. Sometimes it happens over large stretches of time, other times in a sudden schism that leaves scars on the land. There may not be literal bruises or gashes on my body, but there are the echoes of the past. Sometimes a smell, a voice, a car passing, will revive within me that symphony and song. A song on the radio. The way someone touches their hair. A show on television. Events. Places. Emotions. Peoples. They are echoes of what came before. Constantly repeating archetypes that gain more and more significance as I continue on in my life. They prove that there are no static things in this universe. Everything changes, and to attempt to stay in one place, unmoving, is impossible. It is a delusion, a sickness, which will rot away. This is what college taught me—to accept everything, the good and the evil, because it already exists inside me, and to try and deny its existence would not only be a disservice to myself, but also unachievable. I always warn myself not to get too caught up in fancy language or sentimentality. In this one passage I wish I could dive in and give you an image of a setting sun or the treetops in the Amazon. But I can’t because it would be pointless. You have to experience these things for yourself, really see those leafy tops or the waning sun. Stories can expand your mind into new planes, but the only way you can get there is to live life yourself.
This paper was a work of love, one which I would like to continue in some capacity in the future. There really is a magic in story-telling that reaches beyond the typical scientific explanation of it. When you are reading a story, taking in sublime nature, or witnessing a miracle before your eyes, you know—there are spirits, angels, and demons. There is magic out there. There is. some great consciousness who loves you with all its being, flowing through you, enlivening your limbs, chest, and head. You really are loved. Sometimes I ask myself why I became an English major, especially at Montana State University, not a place known for its English department. There are many reasons for why I ended up where I am. I always had a great love of writing and constructing tales, be they in picture form or with language. It was a great passion to bring disparate ideas together and make something greater—to link it all and give my life significance. I was never the smartest, the most analytically detailed, or social. My great ability was to recognize patterns and to observe. That is why I know everything repeats and somewhere this exact same room exists with the same exact ‘Nick’, writing the same exact thing. Why? Because I can write about it. Stories are the verbal or written expression of a divine event happening inside your skull. Reality is subjective, it is only when you give your perspective and try to place meaning on it does it become significant.
The next 100 years will be a century of transition. It will be a new era of magic and the stretching of identity to its limits. It is impossible to see whether this transition will lead to Deleuze and Guattari’s black or white square. Will it be the material hell of Saturn, the spiritual Mother, or a linkage of both? What we do know is that things will indeed change. It might be a gradual shift or one that happens overnight. Like one person's life, we are about to enter the new, logical phase of humanity's growth. I am excited to be there as I also continue on my journey. As an attempt to be appropriate to what I have tried to do here, I will end with a quote from the user GSnow who posted this last passage on reddit.com, speaking of grief, loss, and ultimately renewal:
When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.
Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.
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