“Identity is a dream that is pathetically absurd. You dream of being yourself when you have nothing better to do. You dream of yourself and gaining recognition when you have lost all singularity. Today we no longer fight for sovereignty or for glory, but for identity. Sovereignty was a mastery; identity is merely a reference. Sovereignty was adventurous; identity is linked to security (and also to the systems of verification which identify you). Identity is this obsession with appropriation of the liberated being, but a being liberated in sterile conditions, no longer knowing what he is. It is a label of existence without qualities. Now, all energies - the energies of minorities and entire peoples, the energies of individuals - are concentrated today on that derisory affirmation, that prideless assertion: I am! I exist! I’m alive, I’m called so-and-so, I’m European! A hopeless affirmation, in fact, since when you need to prove the obvious, it is by no means obvious.”
Touch me, hold me, sorrow and sorrow, the emptied, emptied again, touched again. / The hunger, the rising, again and again until again itself seemed to be need and hunger[.]
- C. K. Williams, from “With Ignorance,” Poems 1963-1983 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988)
People who feel empty never heal by merging with another incomplete person. On the contrary, two broken-winged birds coupled into one make for clumsy flight. No amount of patience will help it fly; and, ultimately, each must be pried from the other, and wounds separately splinted.
Irvin D. Yalom,Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
But to row the dark river
with the current against you
to go blindly an obstinate traveller
by the unknown road
and to seek words out rooted
like the knotted olive trunk—
leave them to laugh.
And to long for the other world to inhabit
the suffocating loneliness of our days
in this vanished present—
leave them.
The sea winds and the cool of dawn
breathe without their asking.
- George Seferis, from “Summer Solstice,” Novel and Other Poems (Aiora Books, 2015)
