LIFE IS NOT A JOURNEY…I AM NOT MYSELF

 

Henrik Ibsen,  Peer Gynt, Act V.

[Peer  Gynt takes an onion and pulls off layer after layer.]

………………..

[Pulls off several layers at once.]

What an enormous number of swathings!
Isn’t the kernel soon coming to light?

[Pulls the whole onion to pieces.]

I’m blest if it is! To the innermost centre,
it’s nothing but swathings—each smaller and smaller.—
Nature is witty!

[Throws the fragments away.]

The devil take brooding!
If one goes about thinking, one’s apt to stumble.
Well, I can at any rate laugh at that danger;
for here on all fours I am firmly planted.

[Scratches his head.]

A queer enough business, the whole concern!
Life, as they say, plays with cards up its sleeve;
but when one snatches at them, they’ve disappeared,
and one grips something else,—or else nothing at all.

Looking back at my finished memoir now, I have discovered more layers that need to be peeled away. But Peer Gynt’s onion came to an end. There was nothing left. Yet I find that my own inner onion goes on and on.

I shall switch metaphors. Writing my memoir has been like plunging into a Mandelbrot Set. The deeper I go, the more each element in it opens up to reveal greater and greater dimensions of both beauty and terror. A ride into this fractal set is a ride that challenges everything. And, unlike Peer Gynt’s onion, it is bounded yet endless.

This gives the lie to the idea that, ‘life is a journey’. It challenges the subtitle of my book, “A Personal Journey From Man to Woman”. Journeys take place in linear time. But the life I have discovered is one of a flowering, a constant opening up within an endless ‘moment’. It runs differently to my first intimation of it when I read Nietzsche’s ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’.

‘For all things that can run must also run once again forward along this long lane.’

‘And this slow spider that creeps along in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you at this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things – must we not all have been here before?

‘ — and must we not return and run down that other lane out before us, down that long, terrible lane—must we not return eternally?’

For the Self that returns to meet itself is different to how it was at that first meeting. We cannot return unchanged and be our previous self. When I now come back to face a memory I had previously interrogated I find new depths within it, new revelations and insights. I am no longer myself. 

The journey that is not a journey goes on.

 

Zoom into the Mandelbrot Set here

 

 

 

 

NAMING THE UNNAMEABLE

Several years ago I was invited to make a presentation at a 3 day workshop on facilitating creative organizational change. I took as my theme, “Gender Change Management in an Organizational Context”. But I asked them not to advertise my theme, choosing instead to describe me as “Director of Literature Board talking about narrative, conversations and organizational change.” My discussion would be over lunch on the 3rd day. For me it would be a test of my ability to have such a discussion amongst people with no prior knowledge of gender dysphoria.

I got there at 9.20 and walked in on a group already under way. I was scared. My way of handling fear in public is to put forward the most stylish face I can.  I’d got up early and given myself a mud mask, washed and blow-dried my hair, chosen my tight Escada skirt and form-fitting Hugo Boss jacket, used my best beauty products. I felt good about myself and knew I looked good and that gave me the confidence to walk into this group of total strangers and prepare to strip myself naked.

For 3 hours I was just “Josephine Emery, Participant”. Then, over lunch, I showed the 20 minute DVD cut of my gender change documentary. It begins with a very uptight, suffering man with receding grey hair and a lined and worried face, saying, “A transgendered person is someone who wakes up in the morning, looks at their body and says, ‘Get me out of this’.” It ends with me standing on a hillside as the sun sets, saying, “I’ve given myself up to my mother’s love and through her love to universal love…”

Along the way it visits my memory of watching a woman raped and murdered when I was two, and thus learning fear and terror around, “what it would mean to be a woman”.

At the end of the DVD the 30 participants were silent. Of the 15 women, not one did not have a tear-stained face.

I then talked about living the change in the public arena; about the differences between men and women in anger expression; in the use of voice in corporate power; etc.

Afterwards half of the women spoke to me privately, 1-on-1. “You have made me realize what I have not valued in myself as a woman. You have empowered me.” “You spoke about the real differences between men and women that are not acknowledged in the corporation.” These were the reactions I had anticipated.

But they also said to me, “You have named the unnameable for us. The fear of rape is always present somewhere in a woman’s mind. It’s there whether you are at work or on the train or walking down the street. You have brought it out and made it visible. Thank you.”

The next time I flew I watched the news on the video console. A report on a celebrity murder where a beautiful young woman was thrown off a cliff by her lover. An acid attack somewhere in the world on some women. A brutal rape and an appeal for ‘the public to come forward with information’. A well-groomed woman read all this into the camera and smiled at the end.

We landed and retrieved our work bags with their little wheels and headed off to our meetings, all of us corporate women looking so smart and in control. The men in the boardrooms all waiting, smirking and easing their crotches as we approached. And that whisper in the back of our minds…