Space-time and Circular Beingness.

In an article I once read titled ‘Doty, Deleuze, and "Distance": The Stevens Intertext’ David Jarraway compares how Mark Doty (1953 – present) and Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955) explore the ‘paradox of identity’ in their various texts.

Two American poets, two queer poets, two men in different generations fascinated with the same issue. I was fascinated too, not only with their portrayal of ‘Americaness’ but their wider exploration of sexual identity and identity at its deeper existential core i.e what does it mean to ‘be’.

It is, I think, a perennial question, one that sits in the geological layers of the collective human mind, beating away in its dark ancestorial soil – ‘what is the self’, ‘who are we’ ‘what do we mean by ‘I’? Then there are the accompanying questions: what is ‘Other’, what is the relationship between ‘I’ and ‘You’, ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, what is nothingness, what is beingness and are they diametrically opposite? These are questions which warrant entire books, and brilliant essays to be written (referring here to Sartre).

The paradox of identity - isn’t it a delicious beast of a concept to reckon with as we slouch towards our figurative Bethlehems in search of self-revelation and meaning? The thing is, I don’t think we will ever reach self-revelation or self-actualisation until we recognise that the paradox of our selfhood elicits an ongoing movement of the ‘self’ which oscillates between self-distance and self-proximity. In essence, there is no stillness to identity, no fixity, but rather a fluid ongoing sense of shift, movement and travelling. This movement, is not literal, but temporal and spatial. So, what do I mean by this?

Here are five statements of how I understand subjective reality or our sense of ‘beingness’:

1) We can travel through time to the past via the vehicle of memory and inhabit, in that moment, a different spatial reality. Have you ever daydreamed of the past to the extent that you uninhabited the present and travelled to that point in time with all the accompanying visuals and smells? In fact, think of this, if you’ve ever remembered anything, then you, my dear, are a seamstress who has sewn a patch of the past into the fabric of the present. We also dream and when we dream we inhabit entirely different worlds, and entirely different spaces or layers within the limitless cave of the mind. God, aren't we terrifying but brilliantly so.

Dive into me I dare you.

2) We also go on journeys, albeit psychological ones, which both distance and bring us closer to ourselves. The only way I can simplistically conceptualise this exhaustively complex sense of psychological movement away from (self-alienation) and towards the self (self-actualisation) is by thinking about the self as a small dot travelling around a circular meridian (drawing here on the wonderful German poet and theorist Paul Celan). This meridian is a spatial concept. We therefore move away from a fixed point on a journey that takes us far away from the self only for that distance to then eventually bring us back into proximity with ourselves as we circle back round to that original point, albeit a little changed.

Here is a diagram of how I think about the journey described above:

Firstly, for anyone who has suffered from depression, the ultimate departure from the self, we come back, we return to ourselves – it takes time, you’ll get there. Secondly, the process of oscillating between proximity and distance is circular and ongoing, but it is through this that we achieve growth. The circularity is therefore not to be mistaken for stagnation. Thirdly, this journey is a spatial journey consisting of a perpetual cycle of leaving and returning ‘to’. If we want to be fancy let’s call it a psycho-spatial journey.

3) The ‘Other’ is often thought about as an external presence i.e. something that sits outside of the ‘self’. In fact, the concepts of ‘Other’ and ‘Self’, ‘I’ and ‘You’ are widely considered as opposites. Our interaction with the external ‘Other’ can however, shape the ‘I’ or the ‘self’. Often, we have an impulse to alienate the ‘Other’ because we fear it will interrupt our own self-making process or our own sense of self-understanding. Think of the way this country treats immigrants, think of racism, homophobia – the desire to alienate the ‘other’ because the ‘other’ threatens our own sense of identity. I think people who choose to be sexist, racist or homophobic etc just have a very fragile sense of self. The ‘Other’ which exists outside the ‘self’ therefore highlights to people an uncomfortable ‘otherness’ that sits within the self that they may not have previously been consciously aware of. Otherness is therefore also part of the ‘self’ as well as something which exists outside of it.

4) Notice the terms ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ used above. Interestingly these are spatial or geographical terms. Then think about this – the UK is hellbent on ‘protecting its borders’ but those physical or geographical borders, keeping the ‘Other’ OUT and the ‘British’ sense of selfhood IN can also be understood psychologically i.e., that we don’t want an ‘Other’ crossing a boundary or a border that would reconfigure our understanding of ‘self’.

5) Conclusively, the psyche, space and time are intricately connected – in fact sometimes ‘time’ can seem to inhabit a certain ‘space’ in the mind or we say ‘I’ve got a gap in my memory’ – by which we mean a space in time that eludes the psyche. Space relates to time and the psyche is itself a ‘space’ that processes ‘time’. Remember too that time is indeed physical and that there is such thing as ‘space-time’, so therefore our existence or beingness within ‘space-time’ necessarily creates a relationship between ‘space-/time’ and the psyche because ‘beingness’ requires we comprehend our relation to space and time. Our subjectivity means we inhabit both.

My thoughts above are loosely influenced by Deleuze’s notion of ‘positive distance’ defined as the ‘distance [which] is, at arm’s length, the affirmation of that which it distances’. Let’s unpack that and apply it to identity. Positive distance is therefore a form of distance which in bringing the self AWAY from the self creates an ironic proximity to the SELF that affirms the self it has become distanced to. In analogous terms: imagine you are standing close to painting ‘X’ – you step away from painting ‘X’ and in doing so you gain significant distance from it, but in standing back from Painting X you see it in its entirety. The journey away, ironically brings you closer to the painting because you understand it from a different perspective which therefore creates an ironic intimacy with it you wouldn’t have had when standing so close to it. If you then return to the actual proximity to Painting X, your perception of the painting will have changed. It is odd to me that Deleuze never refers to ‘negative proximity’ only ‘positive distance’ because if we never moved away from the self or never interacted with ‘Otherness’ we would never progress. Imagine never moving out of home (spatial) – it would be debilitating. The same goes for the self. If we think about the self as ‘home’ it is essential for our self-growth for us to journey away from that home to enjoy coming back to it. Sometimes we have to travel back to the past to understand ourselves in the present – this is what psychotherapy helps with. Sometimes we detach or distance ourselves from the present by thinking too much of the future as if taking a boat out from its mooring into a separate sphere of space-time. Sometimes we fantasise and decimate the self by spreading it into the realm of the hypothetical. But we always come back to the present, back home to the self, and we should love that feeling of having travelled so far, and bought back home, something new, something changed, something brilliant.