Between Solipsism and Ego Death by Alex Strub

A Permission to Be Powerful Community Post

EDITOR’S NOTE: Permission to be Powerful is growing fast. In that spirit, a bunch of writers came together to show their support. I’m immensely grateful. I’ll be sharing a new piece every day for the next 10 days.

Now, let’s get into it…

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Dear Permission to be Powerful Reader,

It’s a café—the setting, that is—that overlooks the ocean. I find myself drowning in potential metaphors to use. The horizon, time immemorial, reverberates through the watery medium until it finally, fleetingly, crashes at the base of my perception.

Or maybe it’s in how the wave recedes the moment I become aware of it—as if some God were sharing a secret, and the moment I could grasp it, I already lost it. (If one could lose a secret.) The polysemy of the oceanic invites a multitude of interpretations, each clamoring for its own day in the sun, but most falling into the abyss. Yet in this café, I find myself unable to articulate any meaning, even before such proliferation. The ocean sings a chorus of natural wisdom, and the symphony exceeds my being-there.

The background chatter of the café is as overwhelming as it is soothing like floating in the lazy river of everyday commotion. It’s why I like to come here. I’m far more productive in my apartment, but the writing I do there has become more and more ungrounded, hollow. My mind doesn’t wander there, it sprints. Sprints toward nothing. Sprints away from nothing. Circles before I can even find the starting point. Far more efficient, yes—but in the mad sprint I lost meaning. Misplaced it in the everyday.

So I’m left with the question—a question asked again and again, one my lips can’t help but begin to formulate, like I’m reading a poem by John Ashbery in that strange out-loud whisper some people call a defect in silent sustained reading. But before I can even ask, I have to remind myself of the utter honesty required. To actually ask without assuming the answer I prefer. The question I am truly not prepared to ask or answer is the question of meaning. If lost, can it be found?

I think the waitress’s name is Becky, but it could be something else. She was kind and gracious, but she interrupted me. Without even knowing. She asked, “How is everything?” How easy it would have been to see my head down and pen moving—and yet she still had to ask. Every time the question is asked, its meaning becomes lesser. So repetitive now she knew the answer already. This was routine for her. I doubt she ever hears anything different. It is always: “Fine.” “Delicious.” “I’m good for now.”

Part of me wants to give a real answer, but I’m unprepared. A therapist might pull it from me, as if my deepest thoughts were a creature held together by the pressure of the abyssal Mariana Trench. A pressure whose signification lies somewhere between the words solipsism and secret. An inner world developed and articulated in the deepest recesses of the ocean (of the psyche), only to unravel the closer it gets to the surface. Closer to presentation. To you, in short.

Yet I’m doing the same thing. Repeating the same question about meaning, lacking the courage to really ask it. The fear is that every repetitive asking will diminish its power. The difficulty with the question of meaning is not answering it, but finding an answer that lasts. An answer worthy of being remembered.

Someone once told me—I was too young to remember who or when—that memory was like a path in a field. The more you walked it, the more a trail formed. I believed in that efficacy, but I don’t think the setting was right. It’s more like sand on a beach. You could walk there every morning and evening and still find that most of your path has vanished. A footprint here or there might induce remembrance, but the sandy erasure of the beach is a better metaphor for memory than the pristine field ever was.

Clarity and purpose are rarely felt in the here and now. In retrospect, the lone-self sinks into itself, swallows itself, but does not break. It simply exists, in secret. Unconscious. In thinking only of what I have and have not done, I can give the illusion of being complete. In glancing back, solipsism appears as self-assurance. I exist, in all my glory, in the whence of my history.

The whither is the looking-forward past the crashing waves. The security of self is always already fractured in the forward glance. Yes, death is the example here. The nothingness that marks the end of my life is also that which is outside of my experience. Thinking of mortality becomes impossible, for My-death and My-self will never be at the same café at the same time. The only access to a future in which I am not present is from the possibility of you reading my epitaph. The possibility of a future in which I am no longer is from the reader, and every other who persists after I expire. If I am to have an afterlife, it will be your voice echoing my words.

While the past, in the narrow sense as my past, sinks further into the high-pressure depths of myself, the flow of time forces me to bob at the surface. A multitude of modes and ways of being shine through like a setting sun radiating its full spectrum of color—but only if one is open to such serenity. If the Ego suspends itself long enough to let the creature, whom we typically call homo sapiens, leap from the murky depths of subjectivity like a dolphin showing what it really means to play.

It could be meditation, or something else, that holds the totalizing force of the Ego at bay. As if the mind’s eye is by default closed and takes time to open. I overheard a table mention ego-death as some cure for the malediction of modernity. Perhaps they were right. In the same breath, another table mentioned the idea of just being yourself. Although unsaid, they revealed the heart of the problem. Individuation is both self-assured subject and ego death, past and future, colliding in the present. Over and over again in every moment. The always-slipping moment is life and death mixed together—like oceanic water both contained and spilling out of my cupped hands.

In that alchemical collision between what has been and what is not yet, the Moment exists not as an isolated "now" point on a long line, but as opposing currents reconciling as a whirlpool. The autobiography attempts to chart that history. To show how some previous captain navigated their own tempest in hope that lessons learned populate the night sky for the reader’s voyage to come. Possibilities others have surely trod in their own way, and even those rare possibilities only I can bring to reality.

So meaning is both lost and recovered in every moment. Something we choose to host—again and again—as a guest we cannot name until it is gone. A bacterial life that persists even in the emptiest parts of the ocean.

If I am ever to find meaning, it will be in the infinity—even if that infinity is infinitely small, like a limit approaching zero—which escapes yet exceeds and overwhelms presence. Meaning is withheld behind the surface tension of white-capped waves until it shatters and fills the footsteps of the sandy beach.

In writing, the tension is brevity. Years of living reduced to words that can’t help but be at the mercy of an interpreter. As if it is some creature being pulled from the high-pressure depth of self-hood, only to fall flat and mangled before the reader. Therefore:

Solipsism,
Ego whole unto itself,
Shattered by possibility.
Ego death—life bare.
Thoughts unobstructed
become reason to become.
Articulated. Autobiographical.
The self flickers—
between what was,
and what dares to be.

— Alex