Monday Aphorism: Why Character Disappeared

December 29, 2008 in Next Places, aphorisms by Harvey | 3 comments

Who I am, who I was and will be, replaced somehow by a what-ness, much due to questions of scale in the cityscapes of life’s living. The bureaucratization of life as I became some cog in others’ imagination – whether it fits me well, or not so well.

Losing some war in which I found my self thrust, between who I was and who I thought they thought me to be, I abandoned thinking about my being. Often I invented a new war between what was left of some notion of myself, and my refusal to be that depiction. And the war became my entire self…or its replacement.

I, growing older, flirting with problems of death and life, became the observer of my living, as I experienced the pains of tension’s tension, and entered also into war with my bodily being. Always a few seconds from pain, it became my enemy, someone to avoid, and I was then two: myself and my pain. As pain became my master and guide, I felt lost.

Recovering, yet recovering, I learned to stretch my muscles and joints and ligaments, and studied the pain which was my guide, until I learned it and it became me. As it did, I could remove my self from the pain or the pain from my self, and gain a distance from it, which I used to locate the character which had disappeared.

  1. Scott’s avatar

    Scott on December 31, 2008 at 9:39 pm

    Is the act of recovery a constant one? Is the concept of victory nothing more than a figure of speech that is used as a carrot-and-stick, or can it be ascertained? I do wonder to what extent physical pain and intangible pain–emotional, psychical, spiritual–become intertwined, reflexive, metonymic.

  2. Harvey’s avatar

    Harvey on January 21, 2009 at 6:13 pm

    Scott,
    In my (awfully long) experience, recovery is “around” fairly often, if not constantly. Questions arise: did I, was I, why not, why wasn’t I, didn’t I? How to deal with them, “put them away” for a bit or to banish them from thoughts?

    How they become intertwined: recovery, but from different contexts, or with various persons – some very present, some like the memory of my father who never really recovered from the market crash in 1929, and was often “angry” that he was not as he thought and hoped he would be – and i got “caught” in his lashings out more than a few times.

    Recovery: important, poignant…

  3. Harvey Sarles’s avatar

    Harvey Sarles on March 9, 2009 at 3:51 pm

    How to grow – pursue and develop one’s “character?” – life-issues which can become particularly fragmenting whenever one is working toward becoming: famous, who one is – I am. Questions of truth and integrity can often seem at-war in the apparent competitions between who i (think I) am, and think I might or would be. It’’s so tempting to hop on Nietzsche’s-Zarathustra’s mountain, where the sage might expand for…ever; so much easier/harder to become, as Nietzsche said and was a “posthumous author.”