Think of Madonna — the pop star, not the Mother of God — and then think of your first association after the triangular breasts.
That’s right: reinvention. Madonna is a kind of musical Clark Kent, periodically stepping into the little telephone booth of fading public memory or a marriage or a divorce or a mood, only to burst back out as a compelling new person with a compelling new set of powers, and definitely one up on Clark in the underwear department.
Reinventing yourself, partly or entirely, is a form of resistance to time, predictability and inevitability. It has got to be one of the world’s top favourite fantasies, right up there after finding yourself on a deserted island with George Clooney or Uma Thurman. (Think Robert Pattinson or Miley Cyrus in your bedroom, if you were born in the 21st century and have never heard of George Clooney or Uma Thurman or a deserted island.)
Who has never yearned to metaphorically, or really, show everyone by stealing off in the middle of the night with a little cloth bundle tied to a stick, hopping a freight train and blowing into a new town? The lure of the tabula rasa is a powerful thing: it’s a chance to erase history, ditch your usual parameters and play out some of your secret desires. If nothing else, it’s a chance to outrun your police record.
Imagine the thrill of entering the corner store with a new moustache as if you’ve always had it, or going out in strappy high heels even though everyone in your old life only ever saw you clumping about in Birkenstocks; or pretending that you never ran a company but were always the sort of person who had a tattoo and did odd jobs for a living.
Imagine, on the plane to Bogota, becoming somebody who is not best known for being slapped with a restraining order; or somebody who doesn’t hesitate to ask people out on dates, even though you never had the nerve to talk to a girl back in Lucknow. Imagine no longer having to listen to your friends tell the same old stories about you, or no longer having the relatives you didn’t really care for.
It can’t be any fun to have your identity wiped for you under duress — as a protectee in a government witness protection programme, for instance, or by someone who stole your wallet, blocked your credit cards and bank account, and hacked your email and Facebook accounts. But if you choose, totally compos mentis, to appoint yourself a new one — ah, the freedom, the possibilities! The sheer audaciousness of it.
However you do it — dye your hair and get conical bras, quit your job and move out of the house, put your hand on your heart and swear allegiance to another flag — reinvention is a way of fitting more than one life into your one life, and that’s worth waking up for. Of course, if you’re Hindu you’ve already got more than one life, though you won’t have the satisfaction of knowing more than one at a time, and are stuck with a certain amount of karmic drag.
A monk in Rangoon explained the Buddhist idea of rebirth to me: he said that the soul travels like one candle lighting another: same flame, but different flame. At least I think that’s what he said; I was having some trouble concentrating on his words because I was busy imagining all the things I would do with my upcoming new identity as someone freshly released from a vipassana camp.
