"Identification, Please."

 Dear Reader,

    What is identity? Why is it important? Why is it personal and subjective, but also requiring of acknowledgement by our peers and the greater, collective society? Why is identity such an intimate apparition that we instinctively attribute it to any other we observe?

    The answers to these questions and more will be covered in this blog post so that you can each come to a final resolution in your thinking on the matter.

    Just kidding. I am no where near that confident in my understanding of this integral human condition, which has been labeled in so many varying ways. Anyone who claims to know a distinct, immutable state in which identities can be defined is not to be trusted. I simply wish to write, and write I shall.

    I think that we each identify in a broad array of contingency. Some identities that we discover for ourselves are self-evident - which, in my mind, means an observed reality that I can touch and understand without cross-reference or abstraction. I say that we "discover" our identity because I feel that the arrival at an understanding of who we feel we are is not primarily something that is defined by an outside source, so it is not only taught or instructed to us. Identity does not take its complete structure from an external supplier through any conduit, as conditioned belief (which I consider "assumption" more than true "belief" - but more on that another time) may assert. Identity is realized by questioning regardless of an answer, without or within. If that is true, then identity is never fully known, but is always a question and a modulating one at that. It's a reality that we form along with our observation of it, but a status that never fully materializes. If it does, then it can no longer be identity, and quickly becomes ignorance of the nature of correlation.

    A status may be one thing today and assume itself completely changed tomorrow. Similar to how I swear my coffee yesterday, ground from the same bean with the same coarseness, slurried through the same fixated temperature of water, unbleached paper filter, and designation of time, tastes very different today. This is not a mystery of science or something based wholly on my changing taste buds (another non-mystery). It's fairly common knowledge in our post-third-wave society that coffee beans off-gas the CO2 trapped in their cute, little, brown husks, and this directly affects the molecular structure experienced by smell and taste receptors, to the tantalization of our brains' flavor stations.

    So identity is like taste? Maybe. I would say it's similar to something so fascinating, but less available for such shareable-y expansive consumption. And less adjustable, but just as flexible - as in, it isn't as easily altered in a tangible way, but is a condition that stretches and modulates within the known confines of time and space. Identity can be "flavored", but is also less variable in a subjective sense, to each their own invariability.

    The truly perplexing thought next appearing in my consciousness is how preposterous is the obstinance toward this personal quandary with which the each of us interact. The individuality some of the human race ascribe toward their special (read: spee•shul) counterparts abruptly ends at an assertion of identity that has not been codified through years of constantly and significantly shifting language - written and spoken. Just like my use, in the first sentence of this very paragraph you now read, of an article prefixing the unit type I selected to describe all individuals, a description not fitting the accepted arrangement of attributes, worded without proper context and grammatical inference of placement and hierarchies, can be troubling to those who've become accustomed to the idea that their education has ended and foundations are settled into the deepest granite.

    •

    Oh, Centre of Worlds, yours knows not the ends as we.

    But ice and soot, such are these firmaments to your Appropriation.

    The Fall fixated inside our striving, for on floating convex are we.

    Without we are in knowledge and shivering, while what is known within is naught.

    And you will absorb the unbreakable things.

    Breakage conditions itself beyond unto not.

    •

    So, you see? While I relate identity to flavor and perspective, there is yet a deeper structure on which the concept is built, and deeper yet an unknown force that binds and consumes the depths of it at will. Knowing which unknowable thing, you or any person cannot tell me that a mere idea, a spoken interpretation of experienced inferencing, can be strictly defined based on any thing or idea, and, less so, even insignificantly by the mortal and malleable anatomical portions by which we know the very most surface realizations that only begin to point to any truth of motions, tendencies, and intentions.

    You can't tell me that a penis or a vagina determines gender. There it is without riddle, philosophy, and subtext, so that you can anchor to what I'm referring. Though, the reference does not end there, as identities vary just as broadly as that.

    Speaking about what identity is should demonstrably confirm to us why identity is. Or, at least, why it's important.

    Virtues, such as wonder, humility, patience, care, and maybe even contentment, can arise from this vernacularistic web of understanding that is identity. It is sacred. It is intimate. It is who we are. Being the essence of each ourselves, it is also a point of focus that can assist in harboring room for commonality and understanding. And the whole of an identity is tied up of a multi-tiered structure of what I might call "sub-identities."

    On the one hand, I can understand from this- my extremist camp of questioners and thinkers -the importance and independence assumed upon my own, and so, likely, on many others' own self-identification, the ownership and invariability from what we feel today/this year/in my lifetime concerning our identities. This worldview can be as munitions supplying the bombardment of projections we each launch at a myriad of states we're subjected to throughout a single day. My assumptions of identity, being certainly one of my most sacred visions, might be the haunting through which any other assortment of structural biases, owned or observed, are considered, even judged, an apparition of my own jurisdiction.

    But identity is not standardized by authoritative legislation and territorial responsibility. It may be weaponized, both defensively and offensively, and appropriately so in certain scenarios. We're not talking about national identities, though. These state-assigned versions of the topic are mere derivatives of an internalized validation of parts of a whole - the identity structure.

    I'm discussing the partitioning of property on a metaphysical level and realm referred to as soul and spirit. Due to the significance of this sacredness, we have constructed replicas honoring its importance in shadows and forms, referring to it as law, societal norm, holy and acceptable; sacred. Identity's importance seems indisputable when its prevalence is observed next to civil policy and warranting of legal merits.

    And here lie the hard-lined contingencies we consecrate as immutable, because law is immutable, in most cases. That invariability, the definition of appropriate practice that law escorts into thought and behavior, brings us comfort through security and assurance of outcomes, through justice and forced restraint. It is certainty in an existence where we invent gods, celestial planes, and theories of parallel universes to give us a bulwark against the existential dread of the finitude that accompanies a life.

    The Absolute defeats Death while Wondering allows it.

    Wonder is frightening.

    So then, my understanding of others in their pursuit of maintaining this absoluteness, this conquering of Death, even for those individuals with which there is no potential relationship, is made clearer. And the clearer it becomes, the more empathetic I can be toward the person who identifies with the Absolute. For they, like myself, are merely uncertain. The difference lies in our responses to that uncertainty. While a foundation is established through tradition and normalcy, laid out upon ancient, written truths that claim their own self-sufficiency, we who hold Wonder above Absolute have founded persistence of motion and striving after truths that we don't know, and can't know. I'm not sure what comes first, though; acceptance that we do not know to allow a search for truth, or an observance of truths we didn't accept at one time in the past that lead us to a comfort in knowing we do not know.

    Initially, I think it's accepting that a truth could exist that breaks our creed. It's recognizing that acceptance of the finality of death seemingly infers a belief in absolutes. It's allowing the contradiction between that denial of consciousness' end and rejection of the same to dissolve - because acceptance of the thing our instinctive selves fear most releases us from hiding behind stories that maintained the illusive wall of confirmation and continuity, and we can begin to imagine, in a true sense, which is to depress the intellect from a sacred contingency. Because it's not a belief in an end at all that we achieve upon migrating away from the notion of eternity, but an expansion of honest reflection on the memory of what we saw and its correlation to what we see, and clearer observation overall of future potentials.

    Acceptance of others' need for, or, at least, dependency on contingency only builds toward a more complete awareness of the uncertainty and utter infinity of the constantly compiling, moving, and expanding Question. Inquiring of the unknown, by the nature of what it means to ask anything of that faceless reality, creates independence from contingency by releasing presupposed ties that, upon deeper observation, may not exist. It may be true, at even further extrapolation of the data of reality, that each existence we could describe might persist purely based on sentient, or, even more exclusively, sapient observance of these ties between realities, which places even more individualistic responsibility on the definition of each their own identity, and less on the observer's insistence on that of the observed's.

    And so we arrive back at identity. We've discussed just how important it is, but that got really confusing, let's be so real right now. To break it down a little more simply for us, somebody's internal identity is their own and outside observation of their self-status does not determine its structure in any useful way beyond assigning an assumed contingency to its existence.

    So, I guess that's about it. I find it perplexing that there exists a large group of self-proclaimed teachers and arm-chair experts on the matter of gender who purport to know, with greater accuracy than the owner of said gender themself, the ascribed gender of each person.

Oh, and "themself" is a standard English word recognized by Chicago Manual of Style. Take that, you who may argue that "they" and "them" are mainly applied for a plural effect.

Don't be a fool.