The Lie of Self-Identity

light spoilers for Book of the Short Sun to follow

ADDENDUM: As has been brought to my attention, my terms are not well defined. I'll attempt to define the most important one: Self-Identity. By Self-Identity I mean a constriction of yourself to what you think of yourself. I am not using Self-Identity as a noun, but as a verb that indicates a toxic toxic attempt of self-smothering so you may continue to retain your illusion about yourself, including suppression of experiences that would change how you see yourself and the world, trying to change your environment (or yourself) to match an image you have of yourself, lying to yourself that you didn't mean to do whatever mean thing you very clearly did on purpose, etc. Hopefully that clears things up.

I don't recognize the person that looks back at me in the mirror. I just don't. I haven't for decades. The person who gazes back at me isn't who I feel myself to be. The person people seem to know and talk about with my name attached to it I haven't recognized in even longer, and when I do recognize the person they're talking about it's the raging thing I work as hard as I can to restrain (which means I've failed yet again), or this deeply insightful person who is really just the byproduct of decades of heartbreak. There are memories people try to share with me that I find myself completely ignorant of. All I find when I look into my memories is a dark pit. How do you tell someone that you recognize them, but that may really be it? So I smile and play along. The memories I do retain most people don't seem to remember, to the point to where I wonder if I didn't just make them up. Maybe I did. Maybe my memories just aren't real. 

Maybe you're not real.

I've no way of knowing, the vast majority of the time.

Retreating doesn't seem to do me much good, so I just throw myself into whatever situation it is, hoping I'll figure out what's going on. I frequently don't. But I didn't back down. And that means something to me, whatever that's worth.

Gene Wolfe, an infantry vet of the Korean War, has always dealt with identity. What is it? How do you define it? Can you define your identity? Is it an individual's choice, who they are, or is it the community, your relationships, some weird combination thereof? Book of the Short Sun deals with these questions the most directly of the Solar Cycle, and I'd argue it is the point of Wolfe's science fantasy series. We follow along with Horn as he runs smack-dab into the fact that he's not who he thinks he is, over and over. Bad or good begin to blur as Horn's self-conceptions prove to not just be lies but damnable lies, causing more trouble than they're worth, but yet how are you supposed to move about in the world?

How are you supposed to act if you can't develop a proper conception of you? And never will? 

What if your ideas of you don't matter for being a person at all?

I'm not sure what exactly I'm driving at with this blog post. All I know is that the ending of On Blue's Waters, the first volume of The Book of the Short Sun, stopped me dead in my tracks. That first volume is watching someone's self-identity crumble. Horn does truly heinous things that are truly beyond his control but he did them and he experienced doing them and nobody can tell them they weren't his fault because fault doesn't matter and never did. 

He experienced it. 

And that was enough. 

Fuck the whole concept of fault, period.

The rest of the book shows Horn trying and trying to grow beyond his (supposed) misdeeds and failing, over and over. He wants to be the person that he thought he was and he knows he can't do it, but there's just no other thing for him to do, right? If you aren't who you think you are then why live? Why even bother? But he holds onto this mirage we call identity, fighting for it harder and harder. Horn doesn't ask what seems to be obvious to me now: why does what I think of myself matter, at all? But he doens't ask. He gets a lot of people killed over it.

And at the end of that volume Horn finds himself looking into a pool of water. And he doesn't recognize himself. What's staring at himself is a broken shell of a man who Horn does not want to accept.

He failed to retain the mirage.

I put the book down and sobbed for him. And me. There wasn't anything to be done. Self-identity is not real. And it never was. There is no way to sum up a person, especially if it's the individual in question. Because we all want to be something that we're not. And it does us no good, even if we think we achieved it. 

The rest of the Book of the Short Sun delves into this concept much harder and provides an answer, of sorts. I'm not really going to get into that now. But the beginning of self-knowledge is to be able to let go of the concept that you know who you are. And that you will ever fully learn who you are. You are larger than you know, infinitely so. So am I.

And no cheap thing like self-identity is going to even scratch the surface of the depths.

Every translator is a traitor, and that goes double for the lie of self-identity, which is when you try to translate yourself to yourself.

What a miserable concept.

Idolatry, in one of its purest forms.