When I first began to write my autobiography (which is accessible on the right), I was reaching back to days which seemed to me more innocent. Knowing whether or not those days were genuinely more innocent, as they might have seemed, has been the bane of my life. It’s hard to correlate a level of objectivity with experiential states. What, after all, is “objectivity”? There are no doubt childish states and adult states, and it would seem we all have to go through a stage of cracking out of our eggs, breaking shells of prohibition and learning to think anew. In any case, I felt the violating pain of being misunderstood — and wholly rejected — when I first began to write the autobiography. Had I not felt so emotionally violated, I certainly would not have begun to write. My turn to writing certainly had an apologetics streak. I wanted to demonstrate (at least to myself) that I was not as bad as I had been painted to be. As it was, I certainly felt bad. I had a very fragile sense of self identity, and a very fine and delicate notion of what was right or wrong.
The problem was that by walking upon this hairsplinter notion of right and wrong I’d inadvertently fallen off it. I’d cracked my skull and vertebrae – I’d done my head in, somehow, blood dripping tranquilly from the canal of the right ear.
I had to retrace all my steps: Why had I put a foot here and not there? Who was I that I’d fallen off a hairsplinter, when everybody else was walking lightly as on ice?
I felt that my own innocence had actually betrayed me. At the same time, those times in the past appeared to me more viscous, dense, intense.
Who was I, then? How could I, twice, have lost the essence of who I had been?
