Forming an Identity / Sophie Jungreis

For years I’ve been influenced by outward

expressions of the death instinct as manifested in

those beings through whom I lived,

dead people, whose dead spirit nourished me.

My soul yearned for the light, but I remained in darkness.

My work is an attempt to create life within me.

It is a yearning for and a creation of a SELF

that was not spawned by a natural process.

I was born into a dead world in which human spirits wander,

a family of six million dead, whom I embraced

and from whom I received the love I so required.

Eugene O’Neill’s words convey my feelings:

“Man is born broken.

He lives by mending.

The grace of God is glue!” *

The stone is my mother,

petrified and cold.

It is also those petrified layers within me.

I am outside the circle, striving in,

wanting life, not death.