Living and ceasing to live are imaginary solutions; existence is elsewhere.
(Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism)
We pass into one another, you-and-I, the haze of two Selves coupling side-by-side, gift-giving the gift of Self. A dream breathing in synchronicity, intersubjective sense-painting participating in the Self-song of the world-soul. (Hallelujah, etc.)
Think. Do the command. Think ‘Think.’ Now. Good. Back to reading. Thinking ‘think’ orchestrates an interactive history of aggregates (No-Self) into Self. To think ‘think’ we must bring together disparate sensations and perceptions and memories and faculties into the act of signing-within-ourselves, the thought. The thought is a sign of Self, a chord in the symphony of being-aware. The No-Self forms One out of Many and so positions the Many as a subject — as an agent in the world and a confidante to itself, revealing its unity-in-multiplicity by whispering thought and desire and awareness within the mode of relationship, like a lover saying “honey, I’m home!” and her beloved replying “I’m so happy to see you.”
The Self is more Zizioulas than the Cappadocians: the essence of being-you (that which we point to when we say we are ourselves) is formed through the overlapping relationship of those which form us. The No-Self are hypostatic persons — enfleshed processes of proto-consciousness that reach out to the world as one within the Many even as it together composes the One that forms its essence. No-Self aggregates in the sense that musicians together form an orchestra; each musician is separate and concrete, playing with their own goal, instrument, and mode of expression, but the role of the musician is determined by the whole that it forms.
It is not solely the Self that composes the soul, any more than Symphony No. 9 can be performed without reference to those who perform it. Symphony No. 9 is expressed as a symphony by musicians in an orchestra, by a relationship between part and whole where neither is primary, but which (per)form a greater unity. Likewise, the soul is a perichoretic-kenotic hylomorph of Self and No-Self, reducible to neither the parts nor the whole but generated through their relationship. The soul is not the Self nor the No-Self that composes it, but something that Self and No-Self form together.
Or, more formally:
- No-Self is the constitutive contradiction of difference that is resolved in:
- Self, the identity-in-difference that coheres the history of No-Self into an agent that:
- self-narrates, reflexively becoming a Self-to-itself;
- acts, builds Selfhood by dwelling in the world as a Self-to-itself;
- wills, authoring their Selfhood as a Self self-naming, co-creating world and Self;
- and desires, wants to know, to become entangled again in the constitutive contradiction of difference that begets the Self, which in turn, together with No-Self, expresses;
- the soul, the compositional unity that makes possible being-in-placetime.
Time loves the seasons-greetings of spiritmatter becoming-melody, when in advent we herald the theophany. Branchbrown, the roughhewn marigold. Tense, fiber, muscular percussion flexing absence into the immediate. Becoming now, this-here lays bricks in the courtyard of meaning as water seeps through the cracks.
Please, sit with me and take a second to think. The leaves are pretty this time of year.
more each particular person is(my love)
alive than every world can understand
and now you are and i am now and we're
a mystery that will never happen again, a miracle which has never happened before—
and shining this our now must come to then
(e.e. cummings, XAIPE 69)
Image: Carousel of Pigs by Robert Delaunay (1906)
Fish In the Afternoon 