LIVE FREE OR DIE
Years ago, I was an ardent fan of the BBC TV series, Foyles War. The title character was a police detective who searched for the truth with an admirable combination of cynicism and compassion. Each case he investigated entailed a civilian criminal act with WWII as the backdrop. In this way the series brilliantly combined the personal and the political, an intersection that has always fascinated me.
Today I am taking on the role of both detective and perpetrator, albeit not criminal, of my own destiny, with Britain and America as the backdrop. As a holder of both British EU and American passports I am equally affected by the dire events in both nations. Just as a starting point, I realize that these 2 nations bear a metaphoric resemblance to my personal history. England is my birth mother, the one who raised me, educated and clothes me, instilled its values of prudence and common sense in me. America is my adoptive mother, the alien parent against whose demands I continually rebelled, yet to whom I finally found compassion and gratitude for all that it/she gave me.
Like the birth mother I never met, I cling to my idealization of England. As for my adoptive mother and my adoptive country, while neither gave me a sense of belonging I nonetheless continued to hold out hope that some basic sense of fair play that both had demonstrated, would hold. Just goes to show you how hope and expectation can let you down.
Britain’s vote to leave the EU hit me hard. The sense of abandonment I felt, while I certainly was not the only one feeling this, surely held a tinge of the original abandonment. Likewise the revelation of a vast section of the American public’s seething hatred of anything “other” which has been exposed by the certifiably insane Trump makes me want to run as far away as possible; much like I ran away from my parents’ home at 16.
The feelings of bereavement I feel with regard to England and America certainly mirror, even magnify, the sense of not belonging I experienced as a result of being abandoned by one mother and mistreated by another. All of the “pain” described above, comes, of course, from the human desire to attach: to have roots, ancestry, nationality. So it is ironic that at this moment in my life, when I am daily trying to let go of attachment to identity, vanity and achievement, that two countries are obligingly giving me a kick up the arse.
As the detective, I am searching for clues as to how to solve the mystery of my existence. I must admit, to myself at least, that this process is stubbornly complex, at times frightening, and at others seemingly a waste of time. Yet every once in a while I get a brief vision of the possibility that liberation from identity holds: One’s sense of identity being the most tenuous, demanding and frightening attachment of all.
Can one really detach? Since I stopped writing for recognition, I have filled the, at times, crazy-making emptiness with gardening. In other words, the garden became yet another attachment, indeed the only one right now. As such I immediately became a servant to the need to make the garden perfect, so that anyone wandering into it would exclaim, “What an amazing achievement!” But, as of today, after years of bullying my way through the pain of damaged thumbs, I can now barely wield a pen, never mind pull a weed. My days of gardening are done. The detective in me wants to know who am I now? I have no idea.
The echo of my own absence is hovering between terror and excitement. The terror stemming from the belief that without an identity I will go mad; the excitement coming from the belief that if I can maintain the courage to live unknown, then I will merely live, until I don’t.
