Shriram | Week 3 | Murder in the Mountains
It’s time to reinvent myself.
The plan is simple: take a trip to the Himalayas, disappear for a month, and come back better than ever before. I’m not exactly sure what the trip would do for me, but what’s clear is that when I return, I’ll have improved so much that I’ll be unrecognizable. My old self will have wandered into the mountains and never returned… as if he was dead.
Richard Siken, in his book of poems titled War of the Foxes, posed the question “how much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it’s some kind of murder?”
I’m in the mountains, and I can feel the change happening already. I’m not as sensitive as I used to be, and I no longer keep bad company. Thankfully, I’m not alone. My friends are here too, all traversing their own paths—some of us even climbing over the same obstacles. Soon enough, we all change, leaving behind the self that started the journey. To abandon so much of oneself in the mountains, to leave someone behind when we emerge is, understandably, comparable to murder. Removing habits and certain personality traits is an undeniable facet of how people change, even if those traits were closely tied to their character. Consequently, the change may appear drastic.
Over the past two years, I have murdered the version of myself who had no conviction, no confidence, and no sense of direction. In doing so, however, the self who would spend hours perfecting photos of flowers and birds and who was trusting to the point where he could not fathom flaws in other people if they weren’t glaringly obvious has been murdered as well. I appear to have gotten away with it.
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| a sign by my house was always overrun by flowers. |
On the other hand, Gabriel García Márquez claims that “human beings are not born once and for all on the day that their mothers gave birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” This quote offers a rather different perspective on character development, perhaps focused on a different aspect.
When my past self was “murdered,” I didn’t simply disappear—I changed. Old habits weren’t just removed, but replaced with better ones. Admittedly, I don’t have as much time to dedicate to photography anymore, but I have other hobbies, such as playing sports and teaching others, into which I’ve become deeply invested. New relationships formed and new interests emerged; the significance may not be in the fact that I have lost my sensitivity but in the fact that I have become articulate about my emotions—in other words, I was not murdered. I was born again.
Neither of these perspectives is necessarily more “correct” than the other. The processes of destruction and creation are both vital to change; not even the atoms around us could rearrange without them. Unlike those atoms, however, I will always inherently be myself, no matter how many times I’m born… or murdered.
First off, the photo is absolutely gorgeous; all the contrasting light and shadows as well as the blurred flower in the foreground add a sense of depth to the image. Are these the flowers mentioned in your poem? But regarding your blog, I really enjoyed how your view went from “murder” to “birth”; instead of a spiteful obliteration of an old identity, it’s instead an emergence of a new self to be proud of. As I was reading your poem, I was constantly thinking about the Ship of Theseus paradox. Is it still the same ship after all its parts are replaced? If you were to take the discarded parts and form a new ship, which one is real? But it does feel different when it comes to human identity; both past and present selves, old and new, are still, undeniably, “you”. The constant strive to become a better individual is treacherous, yet will always be admirable.
ReplyDeleteHi Shriram! I really enjoyed how you contrasted two different opinions regarding changes in identity. When you talked about your plan to reinvent yourself by going into the mountains, I couldn’t help but think of the anime The Summer Hikaru Died (italicized), where Hikaru went on a trip to a mountain and died, but a mysterious spirit took over his body. What really brought my attention from this anime to your blog was the fact that the spirit that took over his body was essentially Hikaru.. but not truly him. The spirit had the same personality traits and characteristics as Hikaru and even retained all of Hikaru’s memories, but his best friend Yoshiki still managed to recognize the foreign spirit in Hikaru’s body. I wholeheartedly agree with you in that we don’t just simply kill our past selves, we just change (I interpret Hikaru as the same person, but slightly changed… the anime is complicated). No matter what changes you make, the important thing is that you embrace yourself and learn from your past selves, as cliche as it sounds. In a way, we all have our inner Hikaru that stays with us, but it’s up to us to determine whether we alter our identities for the better or worse. Thank you for sharing!
ReplyDeleteTo me, death is a natural part of life—it comes for us all. The dilemma you present is similar to the Ship of Theseus: how much of yourself can you change before you’re a different person? I like to think of it not as a death, but rather as an evolution, like how the caterpillar morphs into a butterfly. I think that even despite all the change we undergo, our old selves are still right there, buried deep in our psyche, reminiscent of the rings in an old-growth tree. In the end, we are not human without progress, and if that means dying a few times along the way, then so be it.
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