The Pagan City

A young matron went into a costumery on the High Street. Bells jingled on the door as she stepped in. An old man, deftly gluing beads onto a leopard mask, look up. “May I help you?”

“Yes, I need a costume for the Masquerade on the riverboat next week.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place.” He got up from his workbench and began showing her his latest designs: emerald-crusted elephants, papier-mâché old men, gazelle goddess from another continent..

“Who do you want to be?”

She paused, fingering a fox mask cleverly contrived out our feathers.

“I want to be me. The real me.”

Frowning, the shopkeep asked her, “Are you sure you don’t want to be a tree nymph? I have these masks of elder, ash and oak.”

“No, I want a mask that shows the real me.”

“But what would that mask show? A young mother who is slightly embarrassed to be on a boat with other minor courtiers and mid-level bankers instead of at home with her children? A young lady who is bored with her life and half-heartedly imagines illicit love affairs under the stars but is too scared to do anything more than a mild flirt? A little girl who still hates mathematics and her teachers for making her do algebra? A teenager who envied her best friend in school for having larger breasts and thus more attention from the boys? A woman who undertips waiters in cafés, telling herself she needs the money for her two toddlers, who really uses the rest of her allowance from her husband to buy posh frocks? The old woman with wrinkles and age spots who looks like your mother, the old woman you see in the mirror every evening you apply your face creams? My, dear, how many masks do you wish to buy?”

Her hand, unconciously touching the string of freshwater pearls draped under her chin, slowly moved back to the feathery fox mask. “How much is this one?”

“Twenty.”

“I’ll take it.”

The Other and the Self meet each other in the Collective Conciousness Bar & Grill. The Other looks at the Self and asks, “Who are you?”

The Self thinks, “Ahh, I must identify myself. Who am I?” It reaches into its satchel and pulls out a Dymo label maker and begins to print out the following categories: American, 39-year old, gay, white…

“Stop!” says the Other. “Visually I can see you are a white male who looks to be under forty. Contextually I can tell you are American from your accent, your Steelers t-shirt, your cargo shorts. I am cosmopolitan enough to have homosexual acquaintances so your more subtle cues I also pick up on. Who are you?”

“I’m a blogger.”

“I have a blog.”

The server comes by and takes an order for coffee. The Other and the Self both order coffee, black.

“We both like unadulterated coffee. Now we are getting somewhere.” Smiles the Other. “Who are you?”

At a loss, the Self considers the possibility of pouring out his heart to the Other but that would leave him vulnerable and leave the Other quite bored. So, the Self says, “Who are you?”

Piqued, the Other answers, “I know who I am. I wish to know who you are. Do we have any affinities in common? Do we share world views? Will we get along? Are you part of my tribe? Are you friend or foe? …Who are you?”

The Self scarmbles to come up with a better answer. “I paint.”

“I love Art. Who are you?”

“I just finished reading Paul Scott’s The Towers of Silence, a fascinating book about the last days of the British Raj.

“I prefered A Passage to India, it was less gossipy and Forrester had the idea first. Who are you?”

“I’m a Pagan.”

The Other wrinkles his brow. Thinking.

Got you, thinks the Self. Now we move from “Who are you” to “What are you?” Any move from the abstract to the concrete has to make this conversation easier.

“Ah,” says the Other, satisfied. “Wicca.”

“Uh, no, actually…”

“Those two labels are mutually interchangeable, at least to me. If they mean something different to you, I’m not sure I care enough to learn the difference.”

“I beg your pardon?”

The Other, clearing his throat, begins, “You misunderstand the meaning of this dialogue. You think I ask you “who are you” so you can proudly claim to belong to this group or that group and yet still be an individual. Right?”

The Self nods, slowly.

“That is self identity, and is all well and good for you. But it is not that important to me. You cannot tell me who you are, so instead you use categories of association hoping that I can use some sort of interpersonal taxonomy to decide you are an okay person. I am the Other, and I am just as obsessed with myself as you are. So, I seek to classify you according to social identity. I lump all New Agers, Wiccans, et cetera into one group in my mind and think they’re all daft.”

The server brings the coffee. The Self and the Other glare at each other.

Finally, the Self asks, “You were okay with me until the subject of religion came up?”

“Correct. Until them we were the same.”

“So, when you ask me, ‘Who are you?’ you really want to know ‘Are we the same?’”

“Precisely. Identity comes from the Latin identitas, meaning sameness. Think of the expression ‘identical twins’ and you’ll see where I’m going with this.”

“And you have no interest in my explaining to you the difference between a Druid, a Celtic Reconstructionist, and a Dianic Wiccan?”

Sipping noisily, “Oh, I might. It depends on which Other I am on which day. Today: not so much.”

“But they are important to me.”

“Yes, I’m sure they are. And if I were a different Other I might care. But you fail to realize that how I see you is more important in a social context than how you see yourself. It isn’t fair, I know. Remember, when you are someone else’s Other, how much time do you give them to label themselves before you have already gone and done it?”

With the barest of farewells for politeness’ sake the Other slides away leaving the Self with self-esteem issues and the bill.