All our lives, we wonder at what we and others might be. Who are we? Who might we be and become? Who are we to others? With others? To ourselves? Who are we when we are alone? Who are we or what might we be after this brief physical identity has been shed?
Identity bedevils us. It troubles us because it remains so difficult, even impossible, to pin down. Owls hoot to us messages from the dead, but even those who have finished with this life before us tell us nothing definite. Hooting in the night can be as vague as fog beneath the moon. Amorphous. Nebulous. Such tricks hath strong imagination. Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ th’ name of Beelzebub?
Who indeed? Desdemona hears the knocking, hears the ravishing strides of approaching death, while Emilia only hears the wind.
Affirming or denying ourselves, our name, Montague or Capulet. I am not what I am. We are spirits of a different sort.
If I say, “Call me Ishmael”, it does not necessarily mean that I “am” Ishmael. What is a whale? A composite of its constituent parts? A vengeful ghost? A god? Perhaps we ourselves are conglomerates, assembled and morphing, heaving with change and temper, at once a one thing of a many.
We often define things, ourselves and others, like lists of characters in a play. The King of France. The Duke of Florence. Bertram, Count of Rousillon. Yet, perhaps just as often, we seek to transcend or defy prescription:
Deny thy father and refuse thy name.
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.
Usually, we think we or others “are” something or someone, even grinding down identity to the point of being or not being. Poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. But he has gone somehow, leaving only this relic and my memory of him bearing me on his back a thousand times. Kissing his lips. Where are his or Gloriana’s lips now?
When we meet, we so often ask, “What do you do?” In the United States especially, but in other places as well, this tends to mean “how do you make a living?” How do you earn the money around which our society seems to be predicated? We might do better to ask “What do you know? What do you understand? What could you show me? What might you teach me? How might contact with you expand my own understanding of who and what and why?
This might only ask a small shift in the thinking. A small shift in perspective. A shuffle of the feet, moving our weight from one foot to the other. The tiniest alteration of a tone of voice. Yet, the benefits might be enormous for both ourselves and others. How might we recognize others as the beacons that they can be, and the potential guides they are, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.
Wherefore art thou Romeo? Art thou Romeo? Or art thou many perspectives, ways, engagements, spirits, all of them the like of which I may not ever yet have known? The bell may toll for all of us, but we might do well in the meantime to try to hear what lies behind the wind.
