A Life as an Onion

Meade Fischer

In a personal history strewn with life-altering moments, one stands out both because of its clarity and its visceral shock.

 It was the late seventies, and I was alone in early spring, headed for Salt Lake City, on a small vacation, planning to spend a few days skiing, attempting to put aside the mixed emotions involved in the fact that my father was dying.  My old car was droning down the almost deserted highway, somewhere between Las Vegas and Saint George Utah.  I was running “I” scenarios in my mind: I will make it to Salt Lake tonight; I am hungry and will look for a place to eat; I miss my girlfriend, who recently broke up with me; I hate my job, one taken out of desperation.

 Watching the canyon lands slide by my window, I realized there were two layers, both flat. One could be the tops of mesas, the other the default ground level. Or, one could be the default, the other the bottoms of canyons. This juxtaposition sent my mind into an internal loop, and the whole notion of “I” became suspect. What do I mean when I say “I?”  Who is this person I claim to be, and how do I define him, myself, I.

With all radio stations out of range and many miles to go before another town, I decided to literally get to the bottom of this. How can I define myself in a meaningful, real way?

My first thought was to define myself in terms of what I do. There was the crappy job, but that wasn’t me. I was a skier, surfer, writer, but those were only activities. I saw this as a superficial layer, like the outer layer of an onion, and I mentally peeled it away, looking for the truth buried beneath it.

Then I thought my feelings might define me. I loved a woman who had broken up with me. I was touched by certain music. I loved authors who spoke to me. There were things that made me laugh, that made me cry.

But quickly it became obvious that these were just manifestations, surface layers, window dressing. These defined how I felt, not who I was. So, I peeled another layer from my metaphoric onion.

 Feeling stripped naked, I went deeper, the landscape outside more and more resembling my psychic landscape, a land of unforgiving, stark contrasts. 

I tried to explore my core psychology, first from a Freudian perspective, and finally through a Jungian, archetypical perspective. Layer after layer of my personal onion was, in that way, stripped away. And yet I realized I hadn’t touched my essential self.

 I can’t recall the number of subtle layers I explored, only to reject them and strip them away. I do know that at some point, many layers deep into myself, stripped to bare bone, with literally nowhere to hide, I reached a point I thought was the ultimate me, the bare essence of who I am, the core underlying all my fears, goals, dreams, glories and needs, the person who was born, is living and will someday be no more. I was there. But no.

 I realized once more that this was only superficial, that there was at least one more layer, something so fundamental that it existed only once, only now, only here, only in me. I mentally reached to pull the last layer away, to reveal the “I” behind all the layers of masks, but then I froze. Gripped with a blind fear, I couldn’t do it, and it wasn’t because I feared knowing the truth of who and what I am. That, in retrospect, would have been easy. What made me too fearful to continue was a feeling that welled up in me, a feeling not that I would reveal the final layer, but that if I peeled away that last layer, there would be nothing below, the great eternity of personal annihilation, that vast infinity of non being. I knew, instinctively, that if I opened that door, crossed that threshold, I would step into the void, and once there, there would be no returning, possibly no me,  perhaps no existence in any form.

 Gripped with that cold fear, I returned to the sound of my engine, the look of the enigmatic landscape, the thoughts of hunger, the approximate miles to Saint George, and all the other things that distract one from questions too big, too deep for human understanding. I live today as most people live, part psychic explorer, part cosmic coward.