The Divided Self

All my life I have felt ‘split’, fractured and tossed by the currents and riptides of this vast ocean of experience called human life.

I believe this sensation of perpetual bifurcation and chronic desire for psychic exploration is deeply rooted in my identity as a writer and artist – indeed, it is why I am an artist and a writer.

I was ejected at a very tender age into a very strange and illusive attractor that threatens to tear my soul apart at every moment. Its gravity is immense and often terrifying.

I remember vividly even now, as a child of 5 or 6, lying on my parents bed, deeply relaxed, half asleep, late summer afternoon or evening, when suddenly I experienced my first ‘vision’ – for want of a better word.

I felt a warm shimmering glow wash over my prone form, and then I absolutely knew I was both very old and very young simultaneously. I know how strange this sounds, but it is the only way I can describe it.

I also knew EVERYTHING during those few moments. I knew that I had a place in the cosmos as everything has a place, and all is truly one. This sense of vast connectivity was so beautiful and intoxicating I felt like bursting into tears. But all the time I was aware of lying on the bed in that room at a certain time, in a certain place.

I now realize, that all my life I have been attempting to discover a psychic trigger, an exotic little butterfly that flaps its diaphanous wings for a brief moment, to release and explode that fractal landscape of connectivity once again.

My journey has been one of interrogation, the deconstruction of archetypes, the search for Hermes, the messenger, that sneaky little trickster who leaves briefly scribbled notes in my dreams and eerie synchronicities in this so called ‘waking life’.

If I do finally confront Hermes, stare him/her/it in the face, then this particular journey will be over. I know that now. But then I see a bifurcation once again, a fractal cascade into other islands and estuaries of baroque complexity.

The tunnel at death is the Jungian Mandala, the universal symbol of psychic wholeness, as above so below, the circle is complete…for now. The lesson is learned.

Hermes only allows glimpses of the great elsewhere and otherwise. He is the creature of masks, the figure in the crowd with the beckoning finger, the odd graffiti scrawled on the bus shelter, the brief epiphany in the banality of the life-world.

Once you’ve been shown such riches, once you have been sensitized to this possibility of wholeness, most of this human life is empty triviality and artifice.

I have a compulsion to write and paint, because I am so desperate to experience that psychic melt of connectivity that I felt as a child. I want to dissolve into everything and return home. I wish to be an ‘aspect’ of the cosmos, not a lonely, discreet object for someone’s subject. Maybe God collapses the wave function?

I catch glimpses occasionally, and I try to join the dots, become an architect of my own soul. But I realise it will only be finished at my dissolution and ‘graduation’.

The journey has been fascinating but often painful and absolutely terrifying at times too.

I am the divided self, torn by civilization, the Id, Ego, Superego, the aesthetic impulse, Eros/Thanatos and the overwhelming drive for connectivity and communication - Gnosis.

Like Nietzshe’s Zarathustra, once you have been to the mountain top, life in the valley is a trifle dull. Lets hope for an Eternal Return, but with a fractal aspect – self-similar but not identical.

parallel worlds anyone?