Fantasy manifesto: The urge to be an identity

With everything there is in the world, the entire cosmos, to be curious about and enjoy, why do human beings spend time – sometimes every minute of their lives – focused on themselves? On their ego, on their pride, on the buttressing and admiring of an identity? On small scales, and from the perspective of origins, this seems absurd, even ugly. Does a four-year-old child watching, spellbound, a praying mantis’s slow-motion devouring of a grasshopper, think: “I am special to see this”? “This accrues to my list of accomplishments”? “My friends will be jealous of me”? “I’m the boy genius who understands praying mantises”? Hopefully not. He exists to live and appreciate life, to be driven to see, to feel pleasure and disappointment, boredom and anger, to wonder about that little ball of flame burning the block of wood under his magnifying glass. He does not need an ego to get in the way between his sight and his feelings.

Obviously the answer is neurosis and damage, early in childhood. I believe our parents give us an identity, more than they show us the palette of existence, then judge its worth. I remember reading in a child therapy book this notion: It can be problematic for a parent to say “I’m proud of you” for getting A’s on a report card, rather than “You should be proud of yourself.” The first remark makes the child’s value contingent on the parent’s appraisal, while the second grows the child’s internal sense of goodness. But what if both attributions are unhealthy? What if, instead, the response was: “Wow! You must really like science, or history, or art!” Is there a need to even point to the child’s worth or quality?

That’s the theory. But of course we live in a world of injured egos needing bolstering, revenge, repair and nurturing in childhood and adulthood. We live in this hospital ward of punctured identities.

In a parallel dimension, which I hope we never intrude upon, people enjoy the cornucopia of existence and therefore excel to their individual nature: Enjoying and doing and excelling would be identical. It never occurs to the unwounded soul to have self-referential pride or superiority over others, as all focus would be on the enjoyed or loved other. In this place, they would be like our animal kingdom, though with heart not instinct.

I know it sounds so distant from us, but as alternate dimensions are, it is also immanent in our reality. Sometimes I sense how nice it would be to exist only for the curious and the loved.