On Solitude

On Solitude

It has been hope that distilled errors, farce and truth of life experiences into the sort of scathing insight I always wish to put to paper – a personal journal to always recall.

The most important topics which plague and enrich my human experience range from bouts of introspective self-analysis of nightmares coiled under my pillow, my childhood and its complex neuroses and bruised happiness of youth. Often my self-analysis is aimed at investigating the evolutionary origins of my social exclusion and voluntarily reclusive demeanour towards society.

I always wonder if I am a victim of my own repressed neurosis.

And as victims often broadcast victimhood involuntarily, how can I best mirrors the best of myself in mind, not the worst of someone else?

But there is a fierce pleasure when the mirror is in effect looking into itself; seeing beyond the flattering distortions upon the lake of memory, rejecting the role of passive reflector for the acquisition of that “self yet to be”.

This journal is not only a tool through which language employs my memories to exist, but serves as a mirror not of the world, but of other mirrors and of the process of mirroring. When living mirrors gaze into mirrors, as when language stares only at itself, only mirrors and mirroring will be visible.

For a man raised primarily by women, a self-suppressing recapitulation of masculine expression and an autonomous resistance to the conventional truths and methods of maternal inscriptions create a complex conflict and dissension for the mind.

Existing at that pivot, suspended between an effeminate masculinity composed of rudimentary lessons from a homosexual foster father and masculinised femininity cleaved from lessons from my mother, lingers a self-scrutiny that requires a space to view the mirror in silence, and silence is often acquired through seclusion, exclusion and solitude.

For a first born male child, there is an imposed obligation to often take the role of mother to your siblings. That maternal instinct tends to become heightened during this tenure of inadvertent parenting, and this vantage point also provides efficient insight into the feminine yet hideous wounds of my ego. It often deprives one of basic adolescent times, and once you have discarded any ideal of “being alone”, the need for growth in solitude is postponed. Throughout these times, I had a perfect mirror of acquired parental and social standards of a responsible young black man – a father figure. But my ‘fatherly’ prowess were designed by an upbringing populated my female perspectives of what the male-inscribed attributes of manhood.

I guess in the end you always think about the beginning. My mother's guilt-inducing refusal of polygamy saw my family being fatherless from an early age. Those abandoned stages of growth come with their own conflicted self-identity caused by social pressure to reconcile the competing obligations of masculinity and domestic life, and they made me recollect my mother’s gaze at me in embittered self-search.

Was she aiming at designing a prefecture of masculinity which has ‘a woman’s needs in mind’ through my immersion into the domesticity attributed the female gender within a patriarchal black community?

I mean, I still find having more than one partner at a time quite insulting to both ladies, but is this a symptom of an implanted defence mechanism developed in corroboration with a mother’s sentiments translated through my masculine elements?

‘Once vanquished, the final human question remains, our last and deepest hungry doubt rises up, and in gratitude, brightly falls away: What of human suffering?’

Rich Norman – The Tangible Self