I come as a multitude. My identity is not fixed. I contain many moving parts. And those parts can sometimes pull in opposing directions.
‘Cast your eyes towards the horizon,’ Mother Anthony told us in year eight. ‘Use your right hand. Separate your thumb and fingers like this.’ She raised her arthritic knuckles, jointed stones under her skin.
‘Hold up your fingers and thumb at right angles, then hold your hand along the line of the horizon to calculate the angle as it reaches towards the Azimuth.’
I knew the word horizon, but there was not one to be seen below the roof tops of houses fast erected in the back blocks behind my home in Cheltenham. Roof tops reaching skywards.
There I stood on the concrete veranda that took you down some five steps to reach a bare back garden in a house newly built with all the trimmings of modernity.
It stays in my memory as one of those experiences where the moving parts of my body cooperated, while my mind joggled in uncertainty.
I had no idea what I was doing. Night after night on the back veranda measuring the azimuth.
I made a few guesses each time and wrote a figure somewhere between 90 and 360 degrees, as I understood the range of angles possible. Then wrote down the figure in my notebook.
After a week we were to add up all figures and divide them by the number of days to find our average.
One of those exercises you complete as a child without any idea of what you’re doing or why. The why of it was the most potent for me. So many things the moving parts of my body directed me towards, and I did not have a clue as to why.
Even at university I found myself guessing at the why of things. It was not until I was in mid to late adulthood that pennies began to drop. A second stint at university when I began to read the theorists of the day, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous.
When I began to read on the significance of the post-modern, the meaning of the modern and the idea of grand narratives as constructions. Then I realised there was more to the many things we did and understood in the past.
Although I had abandoned religion long before, even its dictates began to make sense to me, and with that the possibility of seeing why people might adhere, and why many, including me, might not.
And not just out of laziness or a reluctance to believe, because belief is central to any religious doctrine, belief and faith as the nuns taught. And if your faith failed you and you lost it, somehow then you could never understand the significance of faith.
One of those weird things. You needed to have it to understand. And if you did not hold it tight then you could not understand.
The same it seems with our understanding of things in the world that change over time. Attitudes and views rooted in belief systems held across generations. The firm black and white beliefs of masculine and feminine as two distinct polarities.
Gender binaries that are in the minds of some people as fixed as the sun and the moon. As clear cut as the seasons. And over time I began to challenge this notion of a fixed self.
I have begun to move away from any form and fixed belief in the certainty of boundaries in binaries.
We all come as multitudes, only some of us prefer to hold a more fixed sense of identity, one that feels immutable.
It can be challenging when you encounter someone who travels under a different frame of identity one that shifts over time from the masculine to the feminine or vice versa and in between.
Born with a sexual apparatus and determined at birth, to be a he or a she, yet choosing otherwise over time. And often from early days, though not necessarily to embrace another, the opposite seemingly, or something more mixed, gender-neutral determinants of the they.
I come as multitudes, not just one but many.
We can sense it more in our dreams where we might find ourselves as a female sporting a penis, or as a male carrying a baby in utero. Our mind’s defiance of the fixed rhetoric on how we must be.
There are some who would say it’s only a dream. It belongs in the land of the mystical, the extra-terrestrial, not the real. Think Freud’s reality principle.
And then we might argue what is real. What’s fixed. Even time as much as in the chronological appears to be fixed, while elsewhere in our unconscious it is not.
But how do we know what’s unconscious when it is by its very nature unknowable, only we might catch glimpses.
And why are so many people fearful of the nature of transitioning or morphing from one gender identity to another, especially in children.
It begins in children, for any number of complex reasons. Some might say it’s born of a troubled identity. Or problems in the family. Or the intergenerational transmission of trauma.
We don’t know why it is that one person born into a particularly identified body at birth and thereby assigned their gender and treated accordingly with all the hormones that accompany the female form or the male form choose to abandon their ascribed identity at birth and then identify with other characteristics to which as a woman for instance they’re not entitled. Or as a man.
And the trans person who seems almost more than the single entity of female or male to which they have been ascribed can become a ‘they’.
We binarians might cringe because we do not understand the complexity of identities and how they are not fixed. Just because you’re born one way does not mean you must stay that way forever.
And some might argue the only thing allowed is the course of ageing.
Ageing is a given even as many people rail against it. Some argue death is inevitable. Lives are finite while others with money and perhaps delusions of grandeur or dreams of coming back to live in corporeal form once dead might have their deceased bodies cryo-vacced and frozen over time until such day when scientific advancements allow them to be thawed and revivified.
From here it seems fanciful. And most people I imagine will not or cannot afford to travel this route.
Not something I desire.
The many multitudes of me are not yet ready to die. As if I will ever be ready. Though perhaps one day I might. Be ready, that is.
And in the meantime, I recognise the inevitability of death, and find comfort in the idea there will come a time when I might not need to strive in the way I strive to settle the multitude of forces in the me, the many moving parts and voices that can create a cacophony of ideas and movement like a tornado to interrupt my sleep as if thought grenades are dropping on my need to retreat from consciousness for a time.
A time after death when I will cease to exist except as a memory and some of my name continues apace anywhere it will become a figment of the imaginations of the few who come ahead of me who can know something of the fact I was once here.
Me and my many multitudes.
As much as I’m reconciled to death, I’m reconciled to being forgotten. In some way it’s a comfort, the thought of blending with rocks, earth, and sky. A blimp on the horizon a small measure of the azimuth and my many multitudes wanting to rest.
As I send this piece to my computer I remember today is the anniversary of the day on which my mother was born.
She has been dead now for almost a decade. I remember her well. But she fades from the memories of my children. And when we are gone i will fade into a similar blip. One of the multitudes who have passed by here. All of us specs in the universe.
