Josephine Emery

Henrik Ibsen,  Peer Gynt, Act V.

[Peer  Gynt takes an onion and pulls off layer after layer.]

………………..

[Pulls off several layers at once.]

What an enormous number of swathings!
Isn’t the kernel soon coming to light?

[Pulls the whole onion to pieces.]

I’m blest if it is! To the innermost centre,
it’s nothing but swathings—each smaller and smaller.—
Nature is witty!

[Throws the fragments away.]

The devil take brooding!
If one goes about thinking, one’s apt to stumble.
Well, I can at any rate laugh at that danger;
for here on all fours I am firmly planted.

[Scratches his head.]

A queer enough business, the whole concern!
Life, as they say, plays with cards up its sleeve;
but when one snatches at them, they’ve disappeared,
and one grips something else,—or else nothing at all.

Looking back at my finished memoir now, I have discovered more layers that need to be peeled away. But Peer Gynt’s onion came to an end. There was nothing left. Yet I find that my own inner onion goes on and on.

I shall switch metaphors. Writing my memoir has been like plunging into a Mandelbrot Set. The deeper I go, the more each element in it opens up to reveal greater and greater dimensions of both beauty and terror. A ride into this fractal set is a ride that challenges everything. And, unlike Peer Gynt’s onion, it is bounded yet endless.

This gives the lie to the idea that, ‘life is a journey’. It challenges the subtitle of my book, “A Personal Journey From Man to Woman”. Journeys take place in linear time. But the life I have discovered is one of a flowering, a constant opening up within an endless ‘moment’. It runs differently to my first intimation of it when I read Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’.

‘For all things that can run must also run once again forward along this long lane.’

‘And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must we not all have been here before?

‘ — and must we not return and run down that other lane out before us, down that long, terrible lane—must we not return eternally?’

For the Self that returns to meet itself is different to how it was at that first meeting. We cannot return unchanged and be our previous self. When I now come back to face a memory I had previously interrogated I find new depths within it, new revelations and insights. I am no longer myself. 

The journey that is not a journey goes on.

Zoom into the Mandelbrot Set here

I thought that I was striving towards becoming the person hidden inside me.  But when I got there I found a person who was not striving to be someone else. So I could not recognise her as, “Me”. My concept of “I” or “me” was predicated upon striving. For many years I was a man striving not to become a woman. Then I flipped and became a man striving to become a woman.  Now I suddenly find myself as a woman with no striving to do. I can’t cope! 

What do I do with the past that is embedded deep within me? There are memories that are important to my core sense of being, but there are also feelings and reactions that are no longer suitable for my life. I have no need to be secretive. I have no need to be guarded and quick to take offense. I have no need to be closed. There is no need to seek out people who will close themselves off from me. All that has gone.

This recursive mental loop that is “I” tries to dip back into memory and feed upon that constant stream to strengthen itself. “I”, the ego, the sense of who I am can only keep itself alive by cannibalizing my past. Those old synaptic links wave frantically: trying to call something into their maw. But “I”, or “It”, don’t/doesn’t want to go there any more. They’ll have to go hungry, wither and die.

That’s it! There’s stuff dying inside me. It’s like a forest fire has raged through me. Nights of sweating fevers and hideous dreams and hours watching the digital clock blink over. I’m now burnt out. The crunch of burnt grass beneath my feet. Blackened tree trunks and the frail bones of animals that didn’t make it clear.

And here, on this gaunt and twisted limb, a tender shoot of translucent green, its tip glistening toward the sun. And here another, and another, A fuzz of the palest green now coating the black. In the soot and ash soil, tiny shoots breaking through and beginning to uncoil.

This is the new ME growing out of the remains of the old.

And that old ego turning back on itself and sniffing this new life and not recognizing it. “This is not Me!” it says. Self and Ego meet and do not recognize each other.  They circle warily. 

“Who are you?”

“I’m you. You’re me.”

“No you’re not. No, I’m not! I’m not like you at all!”

“You never wanted to be me?”

“I never knew it would happen. I thought it was just a fantasy. One I hated! One I wanted to get rid of – and yet couldn’t. It was like I needed to have you hiding away in me. That was important to me. But it was a…a thing I was ashamed of. I didn’t want it to be seen!”

“Well, here I am, and you and I are going on a journey together. We’ll get to know each other on the road.”

“A journey! I’ve always loved traveling. How did you know?”

“Ahh! I know a thing or two about you. Just follow me.”