Strangers to Ourselves (nous meme) - I'm Already a Ghost

More on the past, which has been truly freaking with me lately. Two things have been haunting my mind, troubling my inner senses and larger soul sense, disrupting the self-relfection I often automatically take of myself, the continual process of constructing and deconstructing the character of Me as I exist in my mind, floating what appears to be linearly through the continuum of time, the human actor, the main character starring in the Story of My Life.

Two things that freak: one, I've begun to see myself as a stranger, this person who was me in the past that other people knew but who now is a complete foreigner; and two, the struggle of seeing all ages in a person's face, both them as they were as a child, or, if a child, the haunting image of them as an adult, an older person - which thus makes it nearly impossible to indentify them as a solid individual. And if I can't identify a solid person-self in someone else, how am I supposed to do the same for me? Je suis l'etranger.

Myself as a Stranger

I've been trying to imagine myself as the person I was back when I was a child, to discern who that young kid was who had my name and family. I remember as a kid knowing who I was for the most part, having an indescribable but solid sense of myself, almost an older kind of thought process or knowlege, yet which I was unable to express this self-sense or even utliize or realize it to influence my behavior. Outwardly, I was all ascramble, wild and unruly, sloppy and energetic, mostly unconscious. If I see pictures of myself, either real or in my head, I simply cannot grasp who I was then - this person that other people knew well and remember, and yet who I don't remember or know. Maybe this has to do with seeing a lot of people I went to high school with at my 20th high school reunion, who said so many nice things about the person they remember who was me. They apparently know or knew a different person.

All Ages in a Face

One of the first times I really became aware of aging, the slow march of death of us all, not just thinking about it but really thought about it in the sense of a physical being person actually aging and inching towards death, was in grad school, when I'd take night classes with strangers. I'd see these people coming in after a long day at work, I'd look at their tired, long faces. Most of the time I'd see a face and it would look average, normal, not old really, but certain angles would show the tiredness of that person, the effects of time sagging the skin, gravity pulling down the cheeks and eyes, giving a glimpse into what that person will look like when they are old, perhaps even close to death. They were simulataneously their age then and older, at the same time.

Sometimes I also see this in children: those children who seem to have an older face, a face of an adult, as if the structure of blueprint of their older self is already mapped out, trying to emerge. ("See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,/Some fragment from his dream of human life...) And conversely, I have seen the opposite, which is a little creepy, when I see perhaps a woman in her 30's all round and overweight, thick arms, big cheeks, pretty brown hair and a happy dimply smile as she laughs with her friends, when the small face of a child shows through, looking as though she were 9. The child she was shows through.

My own mother told me she saw this younger to me once, during a Christmas where we all ended up around her piano with songs, along with my holy roller uncle with his violin (he plays classical very well), we all were singing and for a while there, and I had forgot myself - I really just let it go and sang, put away all my horrors and fears and emotions about Christmas (a huge subject), my antipathy and stresses toward and about my family, and just sang and the whole world fell away, and it felt good. Of course, it was short lived. As I looked at my mom she was crying a little during and after the songs, not blubbering or letting herself go, but sniffling with a few tears in her eyes, wiping them, though she was also smiling. Later, I asked her what was wrong and she told me that when I was sitting there on the couch with everyone else, I had this happy look on my face, this genuine and sincere look about me that reminded her of when I was a little kid and was so happy, just smiling and singing. It reminded her of when I was a little boy and how joyful she said I always was, just smiling and grinning and beaming out love. She saw in just a few fugitive moments the happy little me of the past: he came back for that one moment and this phantom flooded her heart with both love and a sadness: love for me now and then, her son, expressing such joy and liveliness, yet sadness too that the young boy is gone, no longer available, except for brief glimpses and visits in the midst of some unplanned rapture.