I am realizing this blog is a part of my personal rhythm, part of my beat, and that I have some choices in how I interact with it, in the feeling tones I associate with it. This is positive.
I am consistently inconsistent. That is less positive.
The question I logged on to ask is this: in what does maturation, which I would conflate with psychological individuation, consist?
The background is the hellish “The Angels” chapter of Milan Kundera’s “Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, which I personally think was filled with bitter remembrances, even if he in effect told the odd joke. As he said, the book was about Temina, and she drowned in a river trying to escape a Communistic Lord of the Flies island.
Hitler Youth, Communist Youth, Antifa: all the same emotionally. They are psychologically infantile and angry.
What makes them different from adults who have bad ideas? From adults who are neurotic and carry scars across their lifetimes? Where, to invoke Kundera’s metaphor a bit imprecisely, is the border?
Here is what I will suggest: the process of individuation consists primarily in learning to see with your own eyes. It consists in taking responsibility for your own experience–not necessarily controlling it, although that is an advanced and highly desirable skill–but in learning to allow the world to speak to you unintermediated by the ideas and feelings of others.
As Kundera notes, you can have sexuality without sex, and sexuality without adulthood or maturation. Sex and the ability to procreate are certainly not useful metrics.
And to his theme and point, one’s memory and one’s individual hopes are perhaps also factors.
What seems certainly true is that when everyone is saying EXACTLY the same thing, that childishness is present. And that childishness leads to anger, and bespeaks anger. It is a cage people learn to love, but since people are not meant to live in cages, rage roars out regularly.
What a fantastically uncertain time we live in. It’s horrifying. But it may yet be amazing. I guess we just have to [insert cliche].