Beautifully Broken Issue #24: Expanding Identity To Embrace The World

IDEAS, ART & WISDOM TO REPAIR OUR BEAUTIFUL WORLD

Aug 17, 2024

Happy Saturday! Welcome to Beautifully Broken Issue 24: Expanding Identity.

IDEAS: Expanding Identity To Embrace The World

There are two kinds of people who seek identity. Both of them are adrift in the world, seeking something. Then there's a third category of people, those who don't feel the need to seek an identity other than the one provided to them by circumstance.

From the outset, let me state that I’m not casting aspersions on any of these categories—as John Lennon says, “Whatever gets you thru the night, It's all right”—but it’s worth unpacking the idea of identity to better understand what we mean when we use the word and how it can affect us and the world we move through.

First, let’s talk about the third group of people, who don’t feel the need to question their identity.

For most of human history who you were was determined by the geographical location and culture you were born into. If you were born in England and your surname was Smith you were a blacksmith’s child. If you were a male child you would become a blacksmith like your father; if you were female, odds were you would marry a male of a similar or related trade.

Since everyone had an enforced identity in terms of profession and class (from chieftain/king down to peasant), the focus of identification (who am I?) was on tribal identity, being part of the collective.

Because being part of a tribe improves our chances of survival, individualism in a tribal environment is suppressed. It’s much more important that you identify with the group than you think too much about yourself or, for that matter, how you think about yourself.

This collective, tribal identity is still available to us now. We can always choose to accept the identity proscribed to us by our family, country and culture and if we are happy with it, more or less, then we don't need to ask questions like: Who am I? Why am I not understood? Where do I belong in the world? All these questions are already answered, and the benefits of going along with the answers outweigh the negatives of asking new questions, seeking different answers. And there is nothing wrong with that at all. Belonging and acceptance are powerful forces and can lead to a happy, stable life.

If, however, we do not easily fit in as a member of our culture or family, for whatever reason, then we have to find our own identity in a rapidly changing, multicultural, globalist world. Now we are one of two kinds of people: those “seeking a new tribal identity” or those "seeking self”.

When we say “I identify as…”, we are generally seeking to align ourselves to a new tribe where we hope to find acceptance.

Or we may fall into the “seeking self” group, along with humanity’s philosophers, artists and spiritual types. People who don’t fit in anywhere because our role is to observe from the outside and report back to the larger group.

IDEAS FOR ALL THREE GROUPS (TRIBAL, SEEKING A TRIBE, SEEKING SELF)

Life is seldom simple and neat. The three categories described above can overlap in many ways, but regardless of where you lie in the weave of identification, we can all improve our mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health by expanding our preferred boundaries of identification.

Instead of saying, I am part of this group, I identify as this or that person (insert national identity, political alignment, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, work identity, etc.) and making that your primary identifier, why not expand your bracket of self-identification and start with the idea that you are a human being first.

“Human being amongst humans" is the first identification that we tend to overlook and ignore as it's very broad. The ego seeks the satisfaction and power that comes with a more specific, individual identity, but in overlooking identifying with humanity we can miss our greatest chance at happiness and acceptance. If life is suffering, then moving towards identification is, in part, an attempt to move away from suffering. The smaller the group we identify with, the more we are likely to feel protected, secure in our sense of ourselves. The larger the identification, the more we risk being exposed to the misery of the world—all the people who we feel are not like us, who we have nothing in common with, who make us uncomfortable and whom it is easier to not be around. A popular term now is "toxic people".

Turn this idea around though and if we can look at ourselves and humanity squarely, we will see that one reason that we wish to run from difficult people is that we have more in common with them than we care to admit. This is unsurprising because we each have far more in common with any other human being on this planet than any identifiers that might separate us. We are all participants in the great folly of humanity and everything that happens, good or bad, is part of that journey that we make with our fellow travelers. We are all one family.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts

-Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II Scene VII

Choosing a fixed identity is as much about saying what and who we are not, as it is about saying what and who we are. In the end, it may not be possible to exclude ourselves from so much of humanity without increasing our burden of suffering. However, if we work on expanding our identity towards a universal inclusion, one that doesn't seek to hold onto a fixed idea of ourselves and others, then we are moving ever closer to peace and enlightenment.

Bonus Content: Actress Tilda Swinton with her take on identity.

Katherine Matilda Swinton (born 5 November 1960) is a British actress. Known for her roles in independent films and blockbusters, she has received various accolades, including an Academy Award and a British Academy Film Award, in addition to nominations for three Golden Globe Awards. In 2020, The New York Times ranked her as one of the greatest actors of the 21st century.

Tilda Swinton has been in many fantastic films but my favorite is this documentary she made with the art critic and thinker John Berger. I saw her recently at The London Library in St. James's. She was passing through days after the death of author A.S. Byatt, whose short story was adapted into the film Three Thousand Years of Longing in which Swinton starred alongside Idris Elba. A.S. Byatt wrote many of her books in The London Library. Swinton's body was very grounded and she had an unmissable energetic presence.

HEADLINE FICTION #9: A Spiritual Home

Here's a new format for short fiction that I've invented. It's a 70-word story in three panels with a pattern of 7-16-47 words, where the first 7 words form a headline style title, the 16 serve to fill out the headline information a little more and the final 47 contain the meat of the story and resolution. I think I'll call it "headline fiction". These micro stories of mine are based on dreams (and nightmares!).

ART TO MEDITATE UPON

Enso (Zen Calligraphy Circle) by Nakahara Nantenbo

The poem within the circle reads:

Born within the ensō of the world
the human heart must also
become an ensō

Nantenbo (1839-1925) was a Japanese Zen monk of the Rinzai sect. A disciplined Zen teacher and prolific Zen painter, Nantenbo learned to use painting and calligraphy as means of expressing the Zen spirit that lies beyond words. He created most of his paintings and calligraphy when he was in his late seventies and early eighties.

The enso ('circle') is one of the deepest symbols in Japanese Zen. The enso is the revelation of a world of the spirit without beginning and end. The Zen circle of enlightenment reflects that transforming experience - perfectly empty yet completely full, infinite, shining brightly like the moon-mind of enlightenment.

Other works by Nantenbo:

WISDOM OF OTHERS

Excerpt from by Barry Lopez's Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World: Essays

Barry Holstun Lopez (January 6, 1945 – December 25, 2020) was an American author, essayist, nature writer, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. In a career spanning over 50 years, he visited more than 80 countries, and wrote extensively about a variety of landscapes including the Arctic wilderness, exploring the relationship between human cultures and nature. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist. He was a contributor to magazines including Harper's Magazine, National Geographic, and The Paris Review.

“The courage behind curating American Geography, for me, is the decision to address unflinchingly the troubling future, to prompt a reconsideration of what will work for us now, what we will freely abandon, and what we will hold on to at any cost.

In contemporary art today, internationally as well as here in America, I have noticed opposition to entertainment for its own sake and a burgeoning desire to create art of consequence, art that does not trifle with us or exploit our grief. More prominent in the arts now than the desire to inform and to illuminate our predicament, or to indict its causes, is the desire to probe it, and to identify previously unconsidered approaches to managing it, to offer metaphors that open out onto workable solutions. With this different kind of orientation it is then possible to regard the dark underbelly of the Industrial Revolution and understand that that radical change in social organization, alongside the sheer scale of industrial production, is now presenting us with a medical bill for all this change, for the treatment of mesothelioma, black lung, pollution cancers, and the rest. To consider that the honeybee and the wild horse have their own integrity and perhaps even their own aspirations, and can no longer be viewed as subjects, willing to participate in the construction of a world built to serve the needs and desires of human beings alone.

At the heart of the lifework of many artists I have known is a simple but profound statement: “I object.” I have studied what we have done to the planet and I object. I object to the exploitation of, and the lack of respect for, human laborers. I object to the frantic commercialization of the many realms of daily life, I object to the desecration of what is beautiful, to the celebration of what is venal, and to the ethical obtuseness of the king’s adoring enablers. I object to society’s complacency.

I would ask you not to give in to the temptation to despair, not to retreat into cynicism or settle into disaffection, but to recognize in these photographs the resilience, determination, and concern for the fate of humanity that these photographers possess…It was during the Scientific Revolution that Art, as a distinct and enduring form of truth-telling—as important for us to consider as the data sets Science has produced in its own ongoing effort to plot a viable future for humanity—began to lose its stature. Since then we have come to regard the voice of Science as definitive. Now some are saying that we appear to be on the verge of another kind of orientation, resituating Art in a position of authority. We are seeing this in photography, in musical composition, in fiction, in dance and theater, in installation and performance art, and in painting, as artists make our existential predicament more apparent and point us in the direction of radical social change, for which, frighteningly, we have made virtually no preparation.

The photographs in American Geography are not an indictment of human enterprise, nor are they a critique of industrialization or a condescending assessment of humanity’s failures. If anything, they reveal the artists’ sense of implication in whatever they confront with the camera, and in some ways the grief that they share with the viewer. In American Geography there is no one to blame. The project is an invitation, instead, to reimagine our future, to identify a different road than the one that the prophets of technological innovation, or global climate change itself, are offering us. It’s the road to our survival.”

PHOTO HAIKU

Colored balloons caught

in great pine tree. Peace, the sea

wind will set you free.

Ideas To Live By In The Coming Week

When we have a negative encounter with another person, don't retreat into identity - don't assume that they are a certain way because they are different from you, instead do the hard work, think back to time when you have behaved or thought in a similar way. Try to understand what might motivate a person to think or act in such a way. This is not the same as accepting or identifying with evil or abuse, but rather an exercise in radical inclusion. If you can understand the source and possible context of another's negativity then you can remove the power it has over you.
Don't seek belonging, assume belonging. You are a human being in the world and given a lifetime to express yourself within it. Expand into the world as you express yourself.
Use love and peace as your watchwords as you undertake the initially difficult path of expanded identity. Hang in there, open your heart to the love that creates and connects everything in the universe, including us.

Please note: Beautifully Broken will pause subscriptions for a while I catch my breath, take up a short residence in a monastery and then travel back to France. We will return on Saturday 7th September with Issue #25.

Peace Now,

Morgan ,

17th August, 2024

Beautifully Broken