Yes. You can dissolve one without question. You can perform a small ritual in a variety of accounts, you can bitch if you have to, but you can in fact erase an identity if you really want to. The faith we place in our tools to reveal us is the proof of how much ignorance we are willing to accept. People who scream for privacy online, miss the point entirely. Online, each of us is an entire generation of children, each of us can be reborn to any age we choose. We can be dumb and happy and entertained and tweaked and random as all get out.
It has it’s marvels. Who isn’t seduced by the tendrils it snakes into our lives. Who doesn’t want to play checkers or tictactoe with a stranger across the world? Someone who doesn’t care who you are or what you are, your race, your age, you sex, your religion. Someone who is as happy to believe whatever you say you are.
I can say I am severnspoon and I am almost surprised to acknowledge it. I could be someone desperately in need of setting himself behind, because he feels compromised somehow by circumstances. A hundred years ago, you moved to a new town and no one had any idea who you were. America was about blissful and constant resurrection.
Men could cross the country and leave behind a trail of aliases that might just one day catch up to him. Never give them your real name. Leave a hobo sign for the next guy.
Somewhere the country got tight and fat and everyone started to know each other and it kind of compromised our American spirit. America is all about free open spaces where anything could be happening and it was likely to be something marvelous. The country was full of such promises as the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon and Death Valley and Miami, Florida: all the landscape of our American mythology has settled into place. We all know the stories now and they have settled out of their tall tale veneer and we wonder now at George Washington and his cherry tree the way we wonder after the cannibals in New Guinea. Who were those people who believed in such things?
We can even watch it on television. On the news. Presidents understand that it doesn’t matter what you mean so long as you say something that is nothing. Your job is to spew bullshit all day, bullshit written by highly skilled and talented individuals certainly, but come on, who buys this? But then you hear it repeated back to you 40 times, from 40 different mediums and the truth just stops mattering. There is enough to worry about with just the constant boiling of breath.
So, yes, you can leave an alias behind. Who cares about an alias anyway? An alias is exactly like an LLC. And why shouldn’t it be? If corporations can get away with virtual facades, why not people? We should all have such freedoms, freedoms at the very frontier of what we are becoming as human beings. I have a greater capacity for personality than anyone in history. The risk is that it is all random somehow, devoid of real character. Cheap, played out, weak. I thought I might lead with intention in some grand effort to defeat the crumbling granularities of our value system. We are only concerned with minute details anymore. Are we going blind to the big picture again?
And at the same time, history seems to accelerate and fade into the background as if it were dissolving into us, as if we were creating history every day. As if we had become great squirrels, storing up for some future drought.
I don’t know about all that and I feel my own interest in the future waning. I have such research facilities at my disposal. I want to sort it all out. I want to try and answer some difficult questions for myself. Pathologies of the psyche, lets say.
I think the world needs to be exposed to it’s great personalities, Napoleon, Magellan, Cortez the killer. What a great and wondrous conjunction of aliases there. I am growing very interested just now in the Aztecs. Montezuma.
I read just today a thing from Magellan’s voyage around the world. One of their ships got lost in a storm and fell several days behind the others. It had found safe harbor and was in need of serious repairs. Eventually, the main fleet turned about to find them and there they were. The limping ship, led them back to a lovely harbor where they beached the smaller vessel and burned it, so the irons could be recovered. Then the captain of the small vessel was taken, and though he was a close personal friend of Magellan’s and the two men liked each other immensely, Magellan had this captain decapitated for mutiny.
It isn’t clear from the recounting that the author, who was present at the events mind you, just what had led to this event although an obvious explanation seems to me that the man had wrecked his ship and Magellan had no use for an extra captain and the man must go down with his ship after all if he is fool enough to ruin it. We are ships, Magellan is telling the captain, we are a part of our ships and can not survive them during the voyage. We can retire one day perhaps from who we were. But while we are shackled to the pilot house, we must tie our fates together or all is lost.
Severnspoon is my ship and by all rights I had to see her through to the end. Our fates were conjoined. Though Severnspoon has a touch of doom in him that intrigues me, I would rather leave it behind just now. Fernando Pessao must have had poets he despised himself for creating. It is a valuable and dangerous lesson. Pessoa.
Severnspoon is a facade though, a thing that requires maintenance, a thing that must be stuffed so it looks human. A tiresome act after all. Keeping a decoy.