Steve_Bamlett_blog

Describe your life in an alternate universe.

Human beings get horribly stuck in the notion of binary options when they think of themselves, yet the great thought experiments concerning the identity of things all have a clear message: Schrodinger’s cat is not either alive nor dead but on a continuum of potential states of being between and perhaps beyond these options, the ‘identiy options’ possible for Theseus’ ship are legion too, perhaps depending on many accidents of material sourcing, construction and usage. Moreover, great fiction, like Ali Smith’s ‘The Accidental’ (but nearly every other of her varied career too) make this point relentlessly with all kinds of play around the issue of their published forms. Even popular genres like sci-fi and horror laugh at the notion of the binary, not because fantasy is not truth (to be ‘undead’ is a fantastically multiple option), but because it is allowed to mine truth much deeper than the genre we call ‘social realism’ (which at its best contains the fantastic options too – as in Tolstoy and Turgenev no less than Dostoevsky).

Hence, alternative universes open up the unexplored options, the roads not taken by people as they develop themselves: though their potential might be there for development – in variations of sex/gender or sexuality perhaps – they have not been either explored nor EXPRESSED as such. But it is not only in these areas where the non-binary has been already examined in the cold light of day by brave and intrepid persons (they should not have to be either brave OR intrepid) but in others – in the cusp, for instance between sanity and insanity, the psychotic and the belief in the normative product of the senses and in neurodivergence around issues of being, personality and self. That we do not explore these in life is permissible. They are the existential and ontological choices we all have to make and may settle for ignoring them. However, that we fail to explore them in descriptive discourse through any medium – in art or its alternatives in creative expression (art is such a loaded word) – is just terribly SAD.

I once thought of someone I loved as truly intelligent until he started descrying the fact that he was missing ought because he was not living a ‘normal’ life, implying that he was living one that included options he clearly though ‘abnormal’. Yet a norm in these terms is just a life-story that is regulated elsewhere than in oneself: in choices possible from the potentials in one’s socially-defined being. Albert Camus posed the idea of a choice for one of his ‘strangers’ between being a freedom fighter in the then ‘French’ Algeria or dedicating oneself to a sick family (binary choices always are the stuff of making thought experiment understandable) but the point is not that one CANNOT in truth think oneself as both – or lots of other life-defining choices and the identity labels thrust upon them – but that in serial time one cannot be both at the same instant of time. Hence the concept of facing the angst of existential choice in French existentialism. But these choices keep facing one. Usually the choices are in some way pre-scripted – we talk of ideas of life-stories as being not just cognitions in psychology but as also ‘schemas’ (since they are often mentally patterned and sometimes reproduced from creative – and therefore plastic – memory) and ‘scripts’. That man I dearly loved once then (perhaps still do) wanted to be ‘normal’ so that he could feel, as he rarely did, validated by the social groups he chose to live among in ‘real’ or virtual – digital -‘reality’. In those ways one can use language simply and with one meaning. You do not have to stretch and play with the meaning of life models and their names – even those like lover or boyfriend or even friend. You can have very fixed and regulated boundaries with no play in them.

It appears to make things easy. And that is especially the case since often these patterns and scripts apply only to ‘public’ and socially visible life. You can pretend to be ‘other’ again in Canal Street or other options for what you construct as underground living. It is isn’t that those other options aren’t real alternative lives you lead (or others are doing and whom you envy) but ones you wish not to describe or have applied to you in public. The secret life is the life of the fantasy – where you can play out scenarios of family or other power struggles – ‘Dad and son’ or ‘family romance’ sex for instance – as if they were JUST fantasy, not part of an inner dynamic better resolved into possible self-descriptions, about, for instance, the associations in one’s life between love and power relationships, love and abuse. All those can secretly live on under the cover of a ‘normal’ life. They are given names – like letting your hair down or ‘relaxing’ or playing (as if playing weren’t as G.H, Mead showed us where life options are learned even in children).

The universes I can live in, and describe myself in, are multiple because selves are multiple, but often these selves are socially and spatially distributed so that they do not contact each other; sometimes not even in our consciousness. We can act and ‘be’ differently at work or in play, with parents or friends – online or not online (the latter is a vast resource where descriptive names for oneself forever multiply in potential – just read Twitter to see that). To say ‘I am legion’ then is not to say ‘I am possessed’ (as in the script of horror films bout exorcism) but that I might renounce possession by normative scripts and live as I must for this time.

All love

Steve