What is it that makes me me? Interestingly enough I came across a piece by Michael Barnes in the Month yesterday where he says that identity is not discovered by rational introspection but in relationship.
“Very quickly one moves beyond the futility of the ‘ego’ searching for its own ‘ego’; rather one finds that identity is not discovered through a process of rational reflection but in the fact of that reflection itself. What confers human identity is the experience of looking for it – in and through the relationship formed with another person.”
This is true. Relationship is the key. It is also the essence. Which is why my sitting gazing inward does not get me very far. The only point of solitude is reculer pour mieux sauter into the midst of people and relationships. An interesting paradox. One of the reasons why relationships are so difficult is because no single relationship encompasses the whole me, is exhaustive of all that I am. (One of the reasons why being in love is so exhilarating is because at the time it seems to do just that.) Each relationship draws out particular aspects, plays particular chords, makes demands – some satisfying, some creative, some irritating, but is not exhaustive. And so one longs to escape into solitude to find the elusive me, the me underlying all these relationships but who is never wholly fulfilled in any of them, only to discover that this me is not there to be found. There is only emptiness and the realisation that who I am is the multiplicity of relationships that make me me.
And yet… And yet… In the silence of solitude, in the emptiness, there are intimations that all this is a very shallow way of putting things.