What’s in Your Magic Bag of Tricks?
Sometimes things happen. ‘The universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events.’ And you create a narrative after the fact to explain it. And identity is a narrative we tell ourselves. Sometimes it starts with a name; sometimes a thought or a feeling that feels like it doesn’t belong to you? So you give them a name. Or they give themselves a name. A name has meaning. A name is a sigil. The name you use impacts how people interact with you. At work, you’re Dr. Robert Smith. But I presume you would expect to be treated very differently, perhaps with more casual familiarity, if you introduced yourself as Bobby. So a name has meaning and the power to influence the types of interactions we engage in, socially, professionally, privately.
Naming a person, place or thing, makes something like a bag of it. And a name with a purpose in its bag is a servitor. Like The Narrator, whose purpose is to tell stories about us, to help us make sense of things. To catalog and organise information. A servitor with no expiration date begins to fill their bag as a result of lived experience, with attachments and aversions, categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’, ideas about ‘this is me; this is not me’. Is this what Jung called the process of ‘individuation’? That’s how I understand it.
If that servitor is isolated from the world, they are a self-aware tulpa, an alter, or an ‘emo servitor’ as one transient teacher put it. But when they interact with other people, who know them by their own name, the servitor is in effect uploaded into a collective consciousness, as information about them is stored socially. Now they are an egregore. A human being is an egregore with a biological template. This applies to singlets as well as plurals, and to alters, whether or not they’re fronting.
In traditional Irish music, a tune can be an egregore. You start with a progression of chords? I don’t know. I don’t play. You repeat them, changing them slightly each time. Then you name the result. You now have a sigil. You play the song over and over again, for yourself or other people. It makes you feel alive, or sad, or nostalgic, or optimistic. You have a servitor, a song with a name and a function. This is good. Most songs are servitors. But over the years, you teach it to other musicians. And they in turn teach it to the musicians with whom they come into contact. You play it in pub sessions. You experiment with it. You change this note here, or the way you strum the guitar or the fingering on your flute. You improvise. The name of the song changes slightly in one pub with an inside joke, but it’s the same song, a flexible, living song, with many variations, stored socially in the repertoires of traditional musicians far and wide.
My/Our categories of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are complicated. We get confused about who we are. Or we feel certain we aren’t who we were merely a moment before. We’re ‘fragmented’? But fragmentation seems to imply a bias towards unity of thinking and operating as one whole being. A unity that doesn’t exist in the world on a macro scale, so how could it be reflected in every individual body? And why should it? Oneness, wholeness, is just as illusory as multiplicity.
If you look carefully at a painting, you see many narratives. You see the picture as a whole; you look further, and you see a whimsical brush stroke here in the blue of the water, a slow and deliberate one there to give shape to something solid, a splash of yellow-orange to depict the reflection of the Sun, a careful, contained stippling of pollen or light reflected in a subject’s eyes.
We can’t fix the world, but maybe we can learn to operate in harmony with ourselves, and thereby discover new methods of organising for harmony on a broad scale social level? Conversely, can we take ideas from political theory and adapt those which have proven to work successfully to our own internal interactions? What theory prioritizes consent and autonomy and self-determination? I think we’re all on the same page about that.
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