I’d love to properly introduce myself to you all, but it is proving far more difficult than I anticipated. I should have expected this, as I find it just as difficult introducing myself to strangers in person too. In my provisional judgement Steemit is an applied series of great ideas in development: I have been using computers for over 30 years, and in the recent past I have dipped a cautious toe into emerging online social media, but quickly backed out, disappointed and depressed by the experience. Steemit comes along, and my strong intuition is that now, at last, the potentials birthed by net connectivity are finally maturing into something worth investing in and learning from.
… And I totally support asking that the Steemian Noob ‘Introduce’ themselves to the community - I, too, want to know, when consuming information that impacts me, something about the creator – especially if I consider following them further. What am I getting myself into if I commit my time and energy to your thoughts and creations, where are they coming from, what am I likely to learn or gain???
But I’ve now been here for over a month. I’ve coughed up a couple of spontaneous views and opinions, I’ve up-voted happily when my attention has been drawn through an entire offering, whether or not I agreed with the sentiments of the author. I will not down-vote, I cannot fathom an occasion where a down-vote would be of any use - a creative act. If someone can give me an example please do, this may be a failure of my imagination. I think destruction is overrated and overused, particularly when aimed at the apparently negative, and I believe this is an ubiquitous error made in particular in online exchanges.
So I do appreciate the value of introducing myself here – but so far my every effort to do this (long before commitment to actual writing) has been stillborn, stale and flaccid. Worse – it has all felt like lies. I mean, what to tell you that is any use whatsoever? I’m not my name – which is a noise traditionally made by myself and others to refer to my existence, embodied and potential... and it means little to me (and I don’t particularly like my given birth-name). I share this same name with millions of others. My name will introduce nothing about the actual me.
And I’m not my body. This body has never stopped changing – no-one who knew me 40 years ago would know me now. None of those cells remain – they’ve been replaced over and over, in recent years with annoyingly diminishing returns. I suspect these written words on the blockchain will still be pristine long after this body is dust. I’m not my various historical roles, jobs, relationships, talents – or stupidities. I’ve had lots of all of these. I’m not my official documents. I’m not my National Insurance number. I’m not my racial profile or cultural context. When I was a teenager I was asked where I came from on many occasions – yet I didn’t leave my hometown until my mid-twenties. For some reason I did not really have the local accent, attitudes, or indeed the general outlook, of my contemporary neighbours and even family. Sometimes I gazed wistfully at the stars wondering when they’d come to take me home, away from this insane asylum I’d clearly been abandoned in. I’m still waiting to tell the truth, and that is only partly tongue-in-cheek.
So digging into this everything I struggle to harvest for feeding the potential consumer of my ‘story’ seems to fall short, miscasting, and misleading by omission, implication and explication. It all feels like crafted, well-intentioned bullshit – and offering bullshit for consumption doesn’t strike me as very... well – hospitable perhaps? I was born British – perhaps serving bullshit would be considered a step up in culinary quality for our non-British friends out there?
In spite of this egotistical impasse I am definitely nourished reading others stories; their recollections and projections, how they linguistically dress and present and perform themselves. I know these are all partial snapshots, selective and deliberative – I expect no more than this. Except, evidently, when it comes to my turn. Rabbit in the headlights perhaps.
So I’ve had to dig deep here people (if there is anyone left here now…) - I want to commit to this cluster of great ideas called Steemit. This may strike many as gross overstatement, but it seems to me that our time and place in the sun – our here and now – is an incredibly special place to be. I think we collectively underestimate just how important our contemporary living generations really are. In this sense my intuition tells me that quality facilitation of human interrelationship has to be the primary challenge of our age – so, so much is at stake right now. We’ve rushed headlong into the power to destroy all human (and much non-human) life, forever – or to expand gloriously back to the stars and galaxies that nestle our exquisite, precious, currently battered home. This time is, I believe, critical to everything that will follow us. Our potentials and our limits will impact countless others whose imprints we will inevitably ghost. It is awe inspiring, and humbling, to grasp that our generation may be the first generation that will be read en masse and analysed and be foundationally influential – hopefully including the best of us – to millennia of descendants succeeding us. Perhaps trillions and trillions of souls, across planets and galaxies, will absorb the lives and the inner worlds interfaced here, in Steemit, right at the genesis of our computer-information-galactic age. If that doesn’t inspire the filthiest jokes imaginable committed to our permanent blockchain, I really don’t know what will.
From this orientation, which feels truly authentic to me right now, I believe I bear a responsibility to embody and introduce an iota of truth – perhaps even the merest scintilla - of how it is, right now, to be me; I am, after all, the universe’s prominent expert on that particular subject. I want to do it honestly and without pretense or regret or guilt or hubris. I don’t want to entertain or attract attention for the sake of a cutesy story I don’t really believe in. If I had a story I fully believed in this wouldn’t be an issue, and I’m not judging anyone else who has such: on the contrary I rather envy the capacity to deeply believe in a personal self, a personal story, a ‘character’. So I’ve dug deep searching for a truth I can share with you, and I’ve traced it to a basic question that impacted me... well... approaching half a century ago:
“Why am I me, and not somebody else…?”
This question truly perplexed me when I was a child. It left me reeling. In retrospect I intuit that where this question deposited me probably summarises my ‘story’ as much as anything that ever ‘happened’ to me, or was ‘done’ by me, or was ‘ascribed’ to me, or was ‘blamed’ on me! The question did not lead me to a definitive answer – rather – it seemed to leave me oscillating, internally, in a manner which likely has never settled. Perhaps I have found some stability of identity in this very fluidity, some peace of myself in the flux…
I believe I was around 7-8 years old when the question surfaced. I don’t think I was a particularly unusual child – slightly above average intelligence living in a medium-sized English seaside town with rather young, working-class parents. But as I now know, there is really nothing ordinary in our existence outside our stagnating ideas – actual reality, wherever you find it, is utterly astonishing and extraordinary. I believe I was hunted by the extraordinary as a child – and I suspect this is a universal. The trick is to remember that you have been hunted too, rather than remaining shattered in hiding from the potential terror of the experience – and this likely requires something else to intervene. What harpooned my attention in this instance, in a way that leaves you reading about it over 40 years later, was how utterly incomprehensible just that simple thought itself was: why am I me rather than someone else? The answer should be straightfortward – I’m obviously ME! And you are YOU – and we are NOT the same. End of. Now, where’s my lego ...
But obviously I think there is clearly more here – and more to the point, it was undeniable and inescapable, to my 7-8 year old self, that something had been prodded and nudged awake, something incomprehensibly vast and important and mysterious, through this particular mirror of a question.
I didn’t think about it in these terms then of course – these are not the internal musing of a 7 ½ year old. What I actually recall about this process is how it actually felt to really wrestle with the question, struggling to answer it. I definitely experienced fear, shock, confusion – even nauseau (a concept that made more sense to me much, much later) – and the blatant subjective certainty that the shadow of this question was now cast irrevocably across the rest of my life. I knew, without knowing how or why, that answering this question leads to something that actually matters. But I couldn’t answer it then.
I am trying very hard, 40-odd years on, to resist contaminating these recollections with my contemporary understanding. I will fail of course, not least because this question of identity sits in the heart of my every moment since, defining how I filter this now, how the story around me unfurls, how I explicitly and implicitly answer the core orientation of aware existence itself. Who am I right now, and where/what/why is this happening, apparently all around as well as within me? That is the ‘my story’ - it is the backbone, it is the earth beneath my feet, the air in my lungs, and the fizzle and snap of thought chasing thought. If I’m going to tell you anything regarding who I am, if I can introduce myself properly – one way or another - I am going to have tell you why I am me, and not you, just as much as I will have to find or touch on our common ground. Otherwise you already know, and this introduction is all a waste of our time...
And that is a big part of why I’ve struggled with this – and that is why anyone else who has made it this far into my introduction will either stay with me from now on, at least for a while… or leave immediately. There is treasure in the details of our moments, and apparently a deep cultural conditioning in our age to rush past all details oblivious; things to do, places to go, moments to become and achieve. Ironically we think we’re pushing forwards, but our focus is purely backwards.
You see I did discover an answer to this question – and once the answer found me I realised that actually I had always known it anyway. It is utterly obvious and stupidly self-evident. And the reason it is not utterly obvious and stupidly self-evident, until it is, explains pretty much all of the stories you will find here, and everywhere else, wherever or whenever you look… … as far as I can verify now, anyway. I discovered (and remembered) that I am not the first to tread this inner/outer path like this. And yet I am. It is, sometimes, the funniest thing imaginable. At other times I just want to puke! So many have done this before me, and there really is nothing new under the sun. And yet – this pristine, fresh moment of now is absolutely and utterly the first, without precedent or peer. Worse – it is the only one that will, can, or could ever exist. This is nothing, and an absolute waste of your time (and mine). And it is everything – terrible beyond imagination in implication. Tread carefully dear potential friend – you are but a step away from the realest of heaven or hell or indifference, and all because of my story. And all because of your story. Peekaboo.
For now I will submit this: – a formative recapitulation that is personal, intimate, and I think a real treasure. It is also a worthless fantasm from an immature developing mind from over 40 years ago: During the same period that I wrestled with why I am me, and not you? – so between 7 and 8 years old – I was struggling to sleep one night… I had a tune in my head – well, I say a tune; perhaps that’s how it started, but it evolved into something else. I remember tossing and turning in my little bed, wracked with frustrating insomnia, with this tune repeating over and over (what my wife calls an ‘earworm’). This ‘tune’ was a series of notes, somewhat like an ascending scale – it would crescendo, and then repeat, but at a brand new higher level, at an increased tempo. Our cultural convention here is of course the Octave – doh to doh, eight notes on. Surely that’s where Homer Simpson gets his, “Doh!”, from… But my ‘sequence’ was far more than 8 notes – hang on, now that I’m reminiscing on this I’ll try and remember a rough quantity… … okay, somewhere between 20 and 30 notes, meandering in a pseudo-tuneful way, ending up at a higher level that initiated the sequence again. The same, and yet never the same. Unique snowflakes in a sonic blizzard of unnerving monotony. It was driving me crazy. I just wanted to sleep, and it just wouldn’t stop… over and over… higher and higher… on and on...
(As a curiously relevant aside; later in my life - about 20 years later - I heard music similar to this for the first time since this childhood night: though objectively listened to in our shared world rather than just internal to me in my head: This was the first time I experienced modern electronic music whilst under the influence of MDMA… a form of music that was not even technically possible in the mid-1970s - at least, not with the publicly acknowledged technology of that time anyway!)
… so back in my tiny bed… then I started getting scared… really, really scared. This repeating tune just wouldn’t stop, and I was then experiencing visuals in my imagination tracking this endless, but never the same... endless, but never the… endless, but… and the thought/fear/knowledge was arising that I knew for a fact that this would never stop, and I was terrified that I would never be able to sleep again, and that my every waking moment would be dominated by… … … and then, suddenly, I discovered myself to be on some kind of rough, natural leaf-bound pathway... In the fresh, sweet open air... It is bright, but I’m aware of no source for the light – no sun – yet it is vivid and warm, and I simply accept this environment I find myself occupying. I feel crystal clear – not sleepy or dreamy – just clear and calm, but not really sure or caring where I am, or when I am, or even who I am... Just me... Like I’ve always been... Here in this place... Just this moment... Accepting. And then I seem to be in a room of some kind (which is paradoxically open to the sky), and there are a couple of (male) grown ups, who are evidently suddenly aware that I am there, that I have arrived unexpectedlyin their midst. And one of them chuckles something like, “hehehe, what are you doing here, you shouldn’t be here now, you’re going to have to go back right away....”, and the other kind of smiles affirmation to this. I sense their genuine surprise and amusement at my presence, yet they seem to know exactly who I am. They are familiar to me, but I cannot place them, and I am seriously feeling overwhelmed and out of my depth. They are so powerful, and there is no arguing with them. Yet I also intuit that I am not in any way inferior to these ‘people’, and somehow my understanding and/or memory is being blocked. This blockage is not being inflicted on me – I apparently understand this and I concur with it (I’m not really a helpless wandering frightened human child at all). I know that I really shouldn’t be here, not now; and they are both absolutely correct, I do have to go back, straight away, I have so much to do…
And the next day, as far as I remember, this night-time escapade was utterly forgotten. I didn’t think about it again for many, many years. When I eventually did remember it, it was a solid visceral jolt – a momentous shock - and a simultaneously paradoxical realisation that actually I had never really forgotten any of it. This memory was always there, just lurking in the background, like stars in the noonday sun.
This is not the only experience of my life that bears this quality – utterly forgotten, but always here, flavouring everything. And I will stress this here – I believe that this experience was blocked by the fear entangling it. The utter horror and terror that accompanied parts of the experience was so overwhelming that something in me switched it all off. From my current perspective, this terror is simply a visceral rendering of the basic message conveyed directly in feelings rather than in secondarily interpreted verbiage: “This is not for you now, you are not ready, and introducing this information now will damage your appropriate development - so you are being scared away until the time is right...”. I have certainly re-experienced this mechanism in experiences since.
So now, over 40 years later, I do not believe that what I experienced back then was in any way unique to me, or unusual even. Speculating; perhaps what is unusual in my case is that I did indeed consciously remember it years later, when most people, it seems, never do report such (at least, I speculate, in a given, single lifetime). I’m left wondering how many other earlier experiences remain forgotten and hidden in my present day; gestating, primed to emerge in turn, fully formed and as suddenly self-evident as the ground beneath my feet? This childhood exposure became a thread of deep feeling for me, and my stagnant, broken, deeply conditioned self of 25 years later pulled desperately on that ragged, innocuous thread, and began to reveal a tapestry that I could initially barely conceive of as credible. By then I had much to unlearn, and by mortal necessity begin to unlearn I did. And yet, paradoxically, I never really had forgotten... This tension has continued to define my story – a deep and direct knowledge that our human realm is but a sliver girded by a profound underlying reality that we can barely conceive of here - this is what has formed the ground of my current provisional identity.
And this is what I am introducing to you. From this perspective, I believe it is possible that I may have something nourishing to offer to some. For those who cling unaware to our conditioned verbal and conceptual structures as though they are concrete and real and undeniable, I will have little to offer that attracts you – I assume I will taste like pure poison to you. From that point of view, I surely am, and you are of course, quite right.
So this is what will drive me here. I do not know what I will write about next, but this is the source I will be coming from as I do. I know that I am far from alone in this core understanding of our human condition – mine is just one story amongst uncounted others. I reckon it is time to start counting them: I do believe that our culture, our civilisation itself, needs a drastic reminder from these fringes of assumed reality. Our conditioning is ubiquitous and dramatically misleading. I know that we are not what we generally think we are, and what is to come for us all, as a species, is genuinely astonishing and profound. We need to get ready, and we need to get ready now. Watch this space.
Love to you all, monsters and angels alike, without exception. Db