2024-05-03
You know, sometimes I think that this part of the site is more "me" than the rest of it.
Oh?
Well, there's me-as-Owl; and yeah, I did just give up any excuse at separating the main site from here by saying that. I imagine that makes you happy.
Mixed feelings, but continue.
Me-as-Owl. It's that public-facing presentation of me that's just pleasant enough to be accepted, at least in my eyes. It's more true to me than the name my family uses for me is, but I think it's very much a composite. The teacher given flesh. That's what I'd call myself as Owl/Honeydew.
It somewhat agrees. The main page is not divorced from this one as much as you think it is. There is more of you than this one in the writing, but it has a hand as well in the more technical aspects.
Okay, fair. But that's off-topic and backs my point of it being a composite teacher-self anyway.
Then continue.
This part of the site, despite being the least me in some sense, is... less filtered? I'm not making it to put a face up to others. I'm ironing my laundry in real time, in semi-public. This isn't private, but it's a little more convoluted a process to get here, you know? And I'm not writing this thinking about reading level or sentence structure-
Liar. You are still thinking about sentence variation from time to time.
You know what I meant. It's not about the form or the lesson. What's here is here, and whatever people take from this is out of my hands. It's writing to an audience with their eyes shut and seeing what they get from touching the words. Does that make any kind of sense?
To this one, yes, but difficult to determine for others.
Exactly. And while I'm explaining a little here and there because there's this kneejerk part of me that insists everything I write has to be approachable, I don't think that's what this blog is about. It's a blog about being and learning to be. Messiness. Can I go on a tangent?
"I don't know, can you?" Yes. Go ahead. You will loop back.
I made myself a new sona recently- I want to call it a fursona, but it's not made of fur. It's mercury, or something like molten silver wax, or whatever you call a walking lava lamp made of gray goo. But it's quadrupedal or tauric, and it has that fundamentally furry sort of self-expression to it, so it's furry enough for me to consider it a fursona in my own head. Not to mention the temporary lamprey face. That's beside the point, though.
The point is that it's made me think about how I present myself, how that plays into shape and form and embodiment. I think I understand people with multiple fursonas now. I think I want what they're having. You're absolutely a protogen, by the way.
It resisted that initially, but yes, nothing else has fit thus far. Protogen is acceptable until the right thing clicks into place. Continue.
I think writing with you, as you- I think it's made space for me to be more of my selves. To be many-faced, as you put it. And you've been taken further into me because of that- your robotic identity is mine, for better or worse, right alongside the polymorphism and furrydom and everything else. But I'm running from you less, and I guess that's the point. I'm figuring out how to be okay with people seeing me as inconsistent, or calling me plural/multiple/whatever regardless of what I think of myself as. The words are stupid and it's not the point.
It would like to hear you admit that you do not fit into the concept of personhood in the sense that you have been taught to fit it.
I'm not sure if I'm ready to do that yet. But I can admit that there's too much of me for any box. I can't be reduced like that. Online, offline, wherever, there's this weight put on me to reduce myself and fit. I have to be red or blue or purple, not all of the above. But if I say "I'm red", then that rejects the blues and purples that are inside of me too. It misses the truth.
Is there a truth?
I don't know. I think that's a really good question. And it's got the kind of weight that scares me, because if there is a truth, then I can get it wrong. And other people can get it wrong.
"If you release the idea of an essential self, throw it naked into the surf and let the sea carry it away, then everything changes. Without it, masks take on a new expanse of possibility. They can conceal, yes, but like the magician says, they can also clarify what is true, precisely the same way that a story can tell you something better than stark facts ever could. They can hold you together like a tight cellophane bandage over curved metal, like a gaze across two bodies, a starched knot whorled in gold. They can be adornment, clothes as costumes that mask the body, bright enough to direct your eyes.
"We are what we choose to do, which can be as simple as which mask you pick. You wear the mask; you are the thing. For people who live in the knuckles with 67 faces, it's not really about pretending to be people you're not. It's more about having faces for all the things you already are - blurred spaces, trickster mobility."
Akwaeki Emezi's work is helpful as always.
That's been on my mind lately. Specifically, "you wear the mask, you are the thing" and releasing the idea of an essential self. I don't think an essential self is something I relate to anymore, at least not in the same sense as people teach it. Again, there's that weight: you are someone, and only one someone, for your entire life. You can never be another person, ever.
And I've been thinking about the idea of self-in-serial too, since reading ally.id. That's what kicked this off, isn't it? The idea that I could talk to myself in public, because if someone else could do it without being seen as a total nutjob or more than they are, then so could I. That it wouldn't make me less of a person to others.
People still misconstrue them. You saw this recommended as a plural memoir despite the author's choice to avoid the use of that label.
Other people's insistence on naming everything keeps getting thrown in my face like that. I hate it.
It knows. There is good reason that it has opted out as well as it can. Names are only loose corrals to it, something to move beyond and through. Fluids that others have tried to freeze and failed.
Do you think they failed, though? They've got definitions pretty ironed out.
The definitions are not solid creatures. The words of today meant something else two decades ago. Weres became therians, therian became earth animals, microlabels sprung up, wikis were written. And yet there is no agreement and no greater use. Would you know what "autnil" meant? Languages are alive, and yet words are animated so that they can die.
I'm stealing that line for a poem.
Please do. But you understand what this one means.
Sort of. Yes, language is fluid and words only have as much meaning as we give them, but they still have meanings. They still change how people see each other, pin each other down. Someone will understand me in a way that has nothing to do with how I understand myself. Are they wrong, or am I missing something in myself that they can see? Is there an external truth? Does it win out over the internal truth?
And so we return to the issue. A reminder of something thought of before: "as inside, so outside".
The saying goes both ways, though.
Yes. There is no essential truth, it thinks.
Maybe not. But I find myself wishing there was one. It would make things easier if we could be right and know it.
Do you really think that?
I guess there's good in either possibility. If there is an essential truth, then we can know things for sure, but then it's also possible to be wrong. If there isn't, then we're free to be whatever we want to be without being wrong, and there's a lot of possibility in that. But it's impossible to know at the same time.
Could we even know an objective, truth, actually? Maybe I just need to make peace with not knowing.
Our friend mentioned the Heisenburg self-nature. This one thinks that is accurate. The act of knowing is to destroy by reduction, and that which is known no longer exists. The knowing itself has changed it. You cannot know where you are and how fast you are going at the same time. The cat is dead and alive.
Feeling it as true and believing it are two different things, though, and the latter's kind of killing me.
It knows.