The repository
April 03, 2023
“the starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory… it is imperative to compile such an inventory” — Antonio Gramsci “Prison Notebooks” (1930–1920)
I might have missed that point of critical understanding and re-invention of myself. This process started two and a half years ago and with all the good and positive changes I made along the way, there is still something fundamentally anchored in my consciousness that only rarely comes into my thinking process. That is something that will require me to look beyond myself and my experiences as seeing and understood by me and look even deeper into things that made me into the person I was and still am.
On the surface, critical re-invention of oneself cannot be any more personal and intimately connected just to the person in question. That is the point of the whole process — to see, register, analyze, decide, and finally implement internal ideas about one personhood to achieve better wholeness of personality and humanity. Outside stimuli shouldn't take place in this at all. It should be just about a being in its totality condensed into a particular person.
On the other hand, no one grows up and becomes a conscious person and can live a full life in the vacuum of one’s mind. There are shards of fragments of debris from countless generations past, all contained in us, in our vast depository of conscious and unconscious minds and desires and emotions. Some might be dull and barely noticeable, even with the deepest internal search. Some are sharp and painful, even when well hidden from our notice and understanding. We are repositories of all that happened before and we are tasked with forwarding it all complimented with our experiences into the future. But how can we know what are we made of and what can we know about ourselves without first knowing the path that led us here today? I think I want to step back, just a little, and take stock and an inventory of what made me as a part of a historical process. Traces of this process are all there in my mind, some already well-noticed, some just underneath the surface, and some buried deep behind a mental wall of shame and pity.
