The Identity in Silvered Faces

There is a belief that has held sway for an unknown length of time.  Perhaps it has been centuries in the growing, or it may have been less that fifty years since its inception.  It is a belief in the fundamental questions, those who are the foundation for all other questions.  Everything is but a variation of one of these five questions, the roots which form the tree that reaches for the sun.  It is no coincidence then that each of these questions are so similar to each other that they each begin with the same letter.  W, the 23rd letter of the alphabet and as many know 23 is a number of unnatural significance, but that is not the only poignant note upon this letter.  One has but to speak the letter and hear the sound your mouth crafts.  W...double U...double you...each of the fundamental questions begin with you confronting yourself.

Who? This is the most important of the questions, it is always first when they are grouped together. The question that is always at the end is why. Think about this for a time, all questioning begins with having to ascertain identity, while motivation and reasoning are left until the very end, almost as an afterthought one could say. What then of the questions in between? Let us look to them, we have already begun. What, When, and Where, at first glance seem to cover different ground, but they are not so very different from each other, or from Who. What is merely the identity of things, when is the identity of time and where is the identity of place. Thus the five questions deal with identity and motivation, and as motivation is the least important, the why of things is not something that matters in the end. What matters is identity and the heights and depths that lay within this concept.

Identity is the condition of being oneself or itself, and not another. It is the dividing line between you and all others, that which separates you from them. Identity is the drawing of borders and the declaration of war, for when that which lays outside the borders of the self press in and invade past those boundaries are we not uncomfortable or angry at the breach? Do we not resist, push back, fight to maintain ourselves against the onslaught of that which lays beyond? Some do, some but not all. Far too many, some believe, will allow themselves to be annexed into a larger sense of self, to allow others to define who they are. Yet there are those subsumed by a larger identity who draw strength from it and who become more. Identity is chosen by you through your own actions, or by others through your own inaction; either way the choice to act or not act is yours to make.

I do speak of what the manufactured screaming mouths will claim is identity politics. There is no politics here, but for those who are small-minded enough there is the table where they can sit with their ilk and play with the blocks of imagination and build their own melodramatic plays. To those whose minds are more broad, the wisdom of recognizing that how one sees oneself is a potent image which resonates with mystical power. When one can embody a concept as well defined The Captain or The Fool or The Mother, and do so with such clarity of purpose that one ascends to become that which they embodied, please pray tell to me how the unwavering belief that one was born the wrong gender can thus contain not a shred of meaning and importance? If this most simplest of concepts eludes you, then you are not ready to move more than one square at a time. The concepts of the soul and the consciousness are beyond you.

Human sentience is something people have struggled to define for as long as they have thought What makes us different from the animals? Sentience is the culmination of soul, consciousness, identity, fear, rage, nobility and obsession. Each piece a facet of the self, reflecting and refracting light, slowly but surely making a cohesive picture, a form over which light shines and casts a shadow upon the wall of Plato's Cave. Are you the form, or the shadow, or perhaps you are the light? None of these are the truth, or perhaps it is more accurate to say all of them are. You are all of these things, individually and as a whole. Identity is not a singular thing, it is made up of the many as the unclean man spoke unto Jesus, I am Legion for I am many and many exists within me. Identity is the purest form of gestalt, for it is greater than the sum of its parts.