Identify 1
At the risk of committing an act easily filed under “punk rock cliché”, here are some choice Against Me! lyrics:
Please tell me why we couldn’t stay
Don’t let this feeling ever go away
Let this memory forever be inside of me
Through every hour of every day
It’s with the company of these friends
That we drove on through the night
We were carried by the wheels of Armageddon
…
We’re gonna force ourselves to live
Thankful it’s hurt more than we’ve ever felt
It’s just our means to an end
…
And honestly we were armed with our best intentions
Maybe those intentions alone
are just enough to get us anywhere but here
In the middle of America
Six cylinders will take us further than any president
The same promises that we forgot the last time
There’s no difference between staying and a bullet in the head
…
Maybe it’s gonna come from the radio
Or the next 8 hour day
Driving to the next town
A collect call home to your best friend
We are the company we keep
We could live off of dumpsters if we have to
Sell our blood by the pint to make rent
This kind of dignity doesn’t come easy
But you’ll never find it for sale
…
And that’s why we couldn’t stay
But never let that feeling ever go away
Kept to memory, inside of us
Through every hour, through every day
Until we die
It’s with the company of those friends
We drove on through the night
Behind the wheels of Armageddon
***
My final summer sojourn will end in less than a week, and I’m weighing the past three months mentally. If I haven’t gleaned insight into my own identity, I have at least struck upon the way I define it, the way we define it. Allow me to deconstruct.
The initial division of identity explicitly defines the roll of the divider. There is first and foremost the internal identity, and then there is the external identity. The internal identity is the Self, the I. Able to examine nothing but the external identities of others, and through reflection only estimate the external identity of the Self, the view of the internal identity is limited. Even reflection upon one’s own internal identity is colored by the mind’s eye.
The external identity is a projection of the internal identity as it is rendered by context, communication, physicality, and analysis by another autonomous self. Because the external identity is partially shaped by the observer, and at the same time never fully visible to the internal identity, integrity is impossible to assure. This does not mean it is not worth striving for, or that it is required.
That being said, the separate and yet inexorably married internal and external identities are not static portraits. The internal identity is constantly being reinforced or altered by feedback pertaining to the external. Constantly and fluidly changing, the internal projects a free-flowing and adaptive external. The internal casts the external through circumstance and presence. The external is then reflected back toward the internal and interpreted. This can elicit a response that adjusts, evaluates, and readjusts the internal. If the development of identity (both internal and external) can be considered a positive change, then a systemic analysis would consider this a positive feedback system. While this system does rest in an unstable equilibrium, it may not be fair to say that the growth or development of identity is exponential, though it is certainly cumulative, and will in all likelihood never return to its initial state.
But what does this have to do with my summer, or Against Me!, or you? I’ll write in the morrow. Now it is 2am in Pennsylvania, and I have a headache to sleep off.