I'm diving without a light.

I was in high school when I learned about Sigmund Freud's theory of the consciousness. How what you could see of your own consciousness was just like the tip of an iceberg above the surface of turbulent, dark^ waters. I learned recently that Ernest Hemingway utilized this idea in writing, calling it the iceberg technique. Skillful use of this technique means “say less, not more”, in order to introduce to the reader a path down which they can journey as themselves within their own space of realities and potentialities — their own minds, hearts, memories, and more — their native Khora — and that describing “just the tip of the iceberg” would enage the reader more deeply. I imagine that if this is really done well, that while what occurs in the reader is really up to them, that which happens inside of the reader would lead towards some similar kind of end or be similar in some kind of way across different readers. I don’t imagine that any author would want the field of possible imaginings to be so vast and formless and open to individual identities that identity rules over the whole creation. That the spoken word which leads to possible encounters with unspoken words could mean, “She was someone whose life was driven in all aspects by fear — fears she learned in childhood — that her needs would not be met, that crisis was around every corner, that those she trusted most were as weak as she was, so how could they protect her?” just as much as it could mean, “Whenever you stop at a gas station, try to avoid looking at the advertisements. They have intended to lure you into the store to spend money you hadn’t planned on spending.”

I promise that I am not being silly.*

Since then, it dawned on me that our persons, our relationships, our communication, our sharing are all very much operating by this same kind of notion. There is only so much that I am telling someone when I tell them what I do tell them. Even in the most intimate and bare moments when I share my heart and soul with them, there is only so much that they see — that they gather — that they understand. There is an entire world teeming, forming, dissolving, and reconstituting Me underneath the tip.

We can spend a lifetime developing into a skillful Person.**

What does that mean, then, for my own understanding of myself? I am indeed diving without a light, exploring the flank and face of this iceberg, of this Me. The same as though my eyes were closed, my palms flat against the wall as I make my way through my house in the middle of the night. The same as walking through the woods — hopefully a more perilous space than the hallway in my home — with tufts of grassy noggins, branches, brambles, and limbs, stony inclusions (also occlusions?) in earth’s gaping mouth. The witch-like claws extending out before my face. My hands now so inept, my Self again a child.

We have futures that we are always moving into. We cannot see all that far into them, and even what we can see is uncertain. The decisions I make today are aimed at ends I hope to reach. But it is not a sure thing that I will ever get to this or that end, whether because of an untimely death (of body, attention, or will).

I am diving in the dark even trying to describe this experience. And yet this act of reaching out into darkness is already bringing me an anchoring and sense of home. I am finding where I am. I am triangulating. I am geolocating. I am clearing the ground, I hope, in order to be able to plant a flag. I am diving in the dark, and though it remains dark, and though I am constantly moving into the unknown and the unseen and the unseeable, and though my hands are insufficient to guard me against every danger and every misfortune and every uncomfortability, they are nevertheless My Hands, and they are nevertheless gathering data in witch twigs, earth teeth, and framed pictures, brushing the surface, getting to know the difference between mine and not-mine.

I may see none of where I am going, but I am not going nowhere. I may see none of that which will come to me and which I must do, but I am not seeing nothing. My eyes see darkness, but because of my hands, my mind is formulating images to give me ground to clear and tools to clear it with and flags from which to choose that I may plant in this Son of the Earth

Man>.

*Not silly in a more classical sense, but in a closer-to-modern sense like, “frivolous garbage” or (Will I be a grotesque judge if I say) “brainrot” (?). **Person as “true person” or “mature person” or “real boy”. Person as, forgive the clumsiness here: relationship-haver.