Matutinal ontogeny:      : : :  the daily recreation of self, or the choice of personality for the day.

 

Who knows what effects the nocturnal life, the alternative life, the oneiric, Doppelgänger’s ontological impression, has on our Self, the person and personality we are once we wake up each morning and put on our Self? How much of our personality is of our own choosing, as much as choosing our “look” for the day? Who am I today? Jim Reid used to introduce himself as an assassin. It was something between a joke and a cry for help. It was not a fiction, however. He was a SOG and worked the Phoenix, doing in a village cadre in the middle of the night, leaving a black calling card with a white eyeball in the center of it, in the slit. Imagine a 250 pound ninja! But it can be off-putting to some to announce what you really are. Yes, he had been an assassin, but he was also a father, a husband, a student, a veteran, a friend. We are all an assortment of things, so each morning we decide what we are for the day. Will I be positive today? Will I be a curmudgeon? Will I be the person I was yesterday, more or less? Hopefully, we keep within the parameters of the Self we have been perpetrating all along, or they’ll think we’re just nuts.

 

 

 

Affliction is a treasure,” wrote John Donne, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction.” —–What do I know of affliction? I am humbled by the stories of the Mormon pioneers, all of them, but more especially by those who suffered the most. But who did suffer the most? The sister whose feet were amputated when she arrived in the valley? The parents who buried children on the plains, hoping the wolves or the Indians would not disturb the grave? The children who buried parents along the trail, and then went on alone? Or the ones who arrived in the valley, hale, but having left family behind forever, cut off from them, disowned rather than renounce the faith? Affliction of the body, or the heart? I cannot enumerate my past and present afflictions. It’s too complicated.