The search for identity is an old and persistent quest, and it brings to mind a simple question: Do we discover who we are or make who we are? “Both,” you say.
During a conversation when we were in college, my wife framed an answer to the question this way: “You never know who you are until you are.”
The search for identity is a persistent theme in literature, one that goes back to Sophocles and Sappho and forward from then to Nietzsche, Freud, and even John Updike. It takes many forms, but it includes two kinds of wandering and two of wondering.
Some wander purposefully to seek by traveling away from their place of birth. “I-want-to-find-myself” kind of people fill hostels and tents today. There’s a tradition in this that harks back to communes like medieval monasteries, like Brook Farm in the nineteenth century, Jonestown in the twentieth, or those gatherings of “hippies” during the 1970s. For whatever reasons—suppression, repression, lack of opportunities—being “at home” for such wanderers doesn’t seem to coincide with an envisioned identity that can be found in other places. Wandering in this manner implies that there must be another place where one can establish an “ideal” identity, and it starts with a self-imposed exile.
Others wander by an imposition of exile. The latter doesn’t have to be anything more than moving where work or love takes one, that is, an exile by necessity. In mobile societies such as the community of recent college graduates, this wandering is common, just as it is in times when long-standing manufacturing plants close or move, forcing workers to make their living elsewhere, requiring the wanderers to “start over.”
That brings me to the two kinds of wondering. Some make their identities the goal of a conscious effort; others simply wait for identities to reveal themselves in reflection. One looks forward; the other, backward.
In the former, there’s always the danger of “wearing a mask,” just as one chooses a character costume for Halloween. I suppose all of us have worn such masks at times as we attempt to enter any society of strangers or attempt to maintain an “established” reputation or image. Masks are the product of conscious efforts. In the Freudian sense, masks hide underlying desires and histories. But masks can play a positive role, also. Parents wear them when they wish to present a consistent model for their children to emulate. In such instances, they are consciously aware that the masks are essential to the lessons of life they want to teach by example. You have probably worn such masks in your conscious effort to frame an identity.
The second kind of wondering centers on reflection. It’s the product of that idea my wife expressed. “You never know who you are until you are.” Take Sigmund Freud’s burial site as an example. Sigmund’s ashes were in an urn damaged in 2004 by vandals who apparently tried to take it from the Hoop Lane Cemetery in North London. Not a plain vase, it was a Greek urn decorated with images of Dionysus and at least one maenad, a female member of the Dionysian thiasos, or worshippers. Why Dionysus? Was Freud influenced by Nietzsche’s youthful interpretation of Dionysus in, as Camille Paglia argues, the chthonic, or dark, sense? Did Freud decide that burial in a Dionysian urn was more apropos to his identity governed by deep-seated desire than to his identity as a rational human that would have been represented more accurately by an Apollonian urn?
You can’t, however you try, put your identity in a single urn. You are more than Dionysian or Apollonian. You can look at who you are currently, of course. That’s the “you never know who you are until you are” identity. Of course, that assumes that you actually know yourself completely, a condition Freud would have rejected even though he chose a Dionysian urn.
So, how do you define your identity? Do you do so on the bases of others’ definitions of who you are? “No,” you say, “because no one knows the ‘hidden’ me.” And if you are still wandering and wondering, I guess not even you can define your identity except on the basis of what you now see, what you believe you have become in this place at this time.
You looked different when you were five years old. Different from that at 13. Different now from ten years ago. In all that change which identity is yours? Do you argue that you are the culmination of all those identities, but that you are still forming an identity? In Toward the End of Time, Updike draws an analogy between identity and quantum wave theory. At any moment you are a collapsed wave function, a particle. The wave allows you to identify yourself as that five-year-old, the 13-year-old, and as the person of ten years ago: All of them “you.” But in the current moment as in each of those moments, the wave had collapsed in the particle of your identity at that time.
Considering the wave is a bit of a psychoanalytic thing, something Freud might want you to do. Considering the collapse of the wave isolates the identity particles you have been and the one you are now.
And the future you? Well, if you think about it too much, you might as well get out your Halloween costume, because you’ll be wearing a mask. Why don’t you just wait to see who you are when you are?
During a conversation when we were in college, my wife framed an answer to the question this way: “You never know who you are until you are.”
The search for identity is a persistent theme in literature, one that goes back to Sophocles and Sappho and forward from then to Nietzsche, Freud, and even John Updike. It takes many forms, but it includes two kinds of wandering and two of wondering.
Some wander purposefully to seek by traveling away from their place of birth. “I-want-to-find-myself” kind of people fill hostels and tents today. There’s a tradition in this that harks back to communes like medieval monasteries, like Brook Farm in the nineteenth century, Jonestown in the twentieth, or those gatherings of “hippies” during the 1970s. For whatever reasons—suppression, repression, lack of opportunities—being “at home” for such wanderers doesn’t seem to coincide with an envisioned identity that can be found in other places. Wandering in this manner implies that there must be another place where one can establish an “ideal” identity, and it starts with a self-imposed exile.
Others wander by an imposition of exile. The latter doesn’t have to be anything more than moving where work or love takes one, that is, an exile by necessity. In mobile societies such as the community of recent college graduates, this wandering is common, just as it is in times when long-standing manufacturing plants close or move, forcing workers to make their living elsewhere, requiring the wanderers to “start over.”
That brings me to the two kinds of wondering. Some make their identities the goal of a conscious effort; others simply wait for identities to reveal themselves in reflection. One looks forward; the other, backward.
In the former, there’s always the danger of “wearing a mask,” just as one chooses a character costume for Halloween. I suppose all of us have worn such masks at times as we attempt to enter any society of strangers or attempt to maintain an “established” reputation or image. Masks are the product of conscious efforts. In the Freudian sense, masks hide underlying desires and histories. But masks can play a positive role, also. Parents wear them when they wish to present a consistent model for their children to emulate. In such instances, they are consciously aware that the masks are essential to the lessons of life they want to teach by example. You have probably worn such masks in your conscious effort to frame an identity.
The second kind of wondering centers on reflection. It’s the product of that idea my wife expressed. “You never know who you are until you are.” Take Sigmund Freud’s burial site as an example. Sigmund’s ashes were in an urn damaged in 2004 by vandals who apparently tried to take it from the Hoop Lane Cemetery in North London. Not a plain vase, it was a Greek urn decorated with images of Dionysus and at least one maenad, a female member of the Dionysian thiasos, or worshippers. Why Dionysus? Was Freud influenced by Nietzsche’s youthful interpretation of Dionysus in, as Camille Paglia argues, the chthonic, or dark, sense? Did Freud decide that burial in a Dionysian urn was more apropos to his identity governed by deep-seated desire than to his identity as a rational human that would have been represented more accurately by an Apollonian urn?
You can’t, however you try, put your identity in a single urn. You are more than Dionysian or Apollonian. You can look at who you are currently, of course. That’s the “you never know who you are until you are” identity. Of course, that assumes that you actually know yourself completely, a condition Freud would have rejected even though he chose a Dionysian urn.
So, how do you define your identity? Do you do so on the bases of others’ definitions of who you are? “No,” you say, “because no one knows the ‘hidden’ me.” And if you are still wandering and wondering, I guess not even you can define your identity except on the basis of what you now see, what you believe you have become in this place at this time.
You looked different when you were five years old. Different from that at 13. Different now from ten years ago. In all that change which identity is yours? Do you argue that you are the culmination of all those identities, but that you are still forming an identity? In Toward the End of Time, Updike draws an analogy between identity and quantum wave theory. At any moment you are a collapsed wave function, a particle. The wave allows you to identify yourself as that five-year-old, the 13-year-old, and as the person of ten years ago: All of them “you.” But in the current moment as in each of those moments, the wave had collapsed in the particle of your identity at that time.
Considering the wave is a bit of a psychoanalytic thing, something Freud might want you to do. Considering the collapse of the wave isolates the identity particles you have been and the one you are now.
And the future you? Well, if you think about it too much, you might as well get out your Halloween costume, because you’ll be wearing a mask. Why don’t you just wait to see who you are when you are?
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