One's own mark

Growing up, I've always thought my identity through knowing who I'm not, rather than who I am. The latter concept I've always found a bit vague anyway. How does "knowing who you are" work? Are you the total of your actions, your thoughts, what you experience, what events befall you? When is it clear, when are you "transparent" to yourself? When you "feel" that something "isn't you", when you decide something isn't you? Is what I did tonight somehow "inside" me, like water in glass? If I don't remember tonight's events, will the water spill out?

This is a stanza from Louise Bogan's "The Mark":

Loosed only when, at noon and night,
The body is the shadow's prison.
The pivot swings into the light;
The center left, the shadow risen
To range out into time's long treason.

Bogan points out how I've come to my own identity. The shadow is the substantial part of the person in the poem, the body the constricted part, like a bound figure on a white sheet. The shadow, though, shortens and lengthens, expanding and contracting through the waves of time, like periods of elation and despondence, of joys and sorrows, marks of time all.

The only problem is there's a cost: at the height of transparency, at noon, the shadow disappears, while at night, the shadow is exiled in the surrounding darkness. This is the treason of time, that time itself subverts this whole identity process.

Of course, we all know this is the problem, since our identities not only change over time, but seem to be ruined by time. All the questions I asked above have something to do with time, insofar as we wonder: do my experiences, which are fleeting, have any permanence?

That's why we say 'I want to make my mark' - implying that only in etching something, in developing some memorial to our actions in an external thing, will we be remembered as a self at all. It's this drive toward figuring the body as the focal point of a host of shadowy experiences, events, thoughts, and desires, that enables us to have any identity at all.

Yet, we must remember: as Bogan tells us at the height of this focal point's visibility to others - at "noon" - this same body is invisible to ourselves.