In our last post someone wrote this…

Let’s look at that lonely little pronoun, our. First-person pronouns are something we enjoy around here. The We in that previous sentence is one of them. It’s what some people call the Royal We, though I prefer Majestic Plural to describe what just occurred: one person, aka: I, writes in the voice of many, aka: We. 

Don’t worry, we’ll work hard to keep the language in check. This sort of talk can quickly and easily become turbid, and if we’re not careful we’ll soon be muddied in Continental Philosophy’s tongue-twisted contortions. However, we should note that the pronouns we typically use are far more flimsy than we admit. That’s best seen in the singular I, where the I referred to is far more complex, multifaceted and shifting than the staid stability implied by ”I” alone

This would normally be a good time to invoke Whitman, who insisted that he contained multitudes, but we prefer to think of the poor bastard mentioned in the Bible who was possessed by demons. When Jesus asked the demon’s name the man responded, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”

Jesus subsequently cast Legion into a herd of two-thousand pigs. Before we finish this story we should note that two-thousand is a huge number of pigs (2,000). If we imagine a one to one relationship between pigs and demons, that’s a massive number of demons stuffed inside one man. If we’re stingy and cut that relationship down to one demon for every four pigs, that’s still enough to put your average carnival clown-car to shame.

After the demons left the man and entered the pigs, the entire herd “rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.”

So…

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This isn’t the part where we talk about the similarities between the mentally ill and the artistically inclined. Others have discussed that at length much better than I could do, and I don’t think art or mental illness is a factor in either man being so “large,” as Whitman put it. The difference is not in how artists or the mentally ill exist, but how they express themselves, for both typically articulate their internal complexities more clearly than the rest of us. 

Like everything, being many or containing multitudes can only occur in time, which leads us to note that we’re one person now and another person now. The space between the nows is the passage of time, and frankly that’s all it takes. 

There’s no point trying to prove that each of us contains multitudes or is many. That experience is intuitively available to anyone who’s conscious, so take a moment here and try that out. Don’t worry, it’s free. There’s also nothing mystical or philosophical or religious about it. It’s simply how life is experienced. 

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You may counter that selves is an abstraction; you may even suggest such things such as selves don’t actually exist. 

Selves may be an abstraction, but bodies, which house or contain or embody selves, are not; so this approach only seems to punt the question from the concept of selves to the reality of bodies. But both are subject to the same laws of time, which is to say, the body that’s reading this now is different from the one that reads this now. You may counter this is simply one thing that changes, and that’s true. It’s also one thing that, as it changes, remains enough of the same thing to not require a completely new label (Aaron 1.0 vs Aaron 2.0, etc). 

To the idea that selves don’t exist: I suggest you ask yourself if you really don’t have a self that’s experiencing this?

This sort of reductive materialism would argue that self is just a conglomeration of biological whoops and pings that, despite the reality of our experiences, are somehow non-existent facades or illusions. But if that’s the case we still have to explain how the hell we know what an illusion or a facade is, on a categorial level, which itself would rest on understanding the category of distinction (reality vs illusion), which would continue downward to the very reality of language itself, once again as a category…frankly I’d rather go kick a hornet’s nest.

If you’re just joining us, the title of this post is “v,” which makes it the 5th in a series of increasingly aimless essays; the phrase ‘kick a hornet’s nest’ is explored in previous posts, and if you’re interested in backtracking you can start from the beginning here. 

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If we’re ready to move on and accept that 1: we have selves, or, more aptly, are selves, and those selves are 2: not static, because they occur in time, and 3: are more-than one, in the sense of displaying variety and difference, then what the hell are we to do with all that?

(The nice thing about being an artist is that I get to wonder about these things and muck around in them, but at no point should anyone [and that includes all my-selves] expect that I’m going to put forward definitive answers.)

It’s very common for most of us to say some variation of the following phrase, I want to become more myself. We view this as a positive goal and encourage one another toward such an end, but it takes a little peeling-back to figure out what exactly that means. Become is clear and more makes sense, but we’re still stuck with that self, in all its multitudes. 

Instead of answers, let’s end with a few curious questions: Do we become more our-selves if we distill down toward the singular or prism out into further branches? Do we have to accept the binary implied in that question? Could the answer be Yes-And?