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
