Multitude

Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.
-Deleuze and Guattari

I am tangled with you. The you reading this, that I’m imagining and who now influences me, and the you I don’t know at all. We are writing this now, because I can’t be certain anymore where what makes us act, feel and think is us or I. The certainty was an illusion like most not broken until it was revealed as a fable. Out of habit! Nothing else than our daily constant noises that we’ve learned how to make. I say I because it is convenient to say I, because there is something I can’t define or quite recognize that has it’s source of power and voice coming to what appears as a finite intersection at me. But it is not a finite intersection, or I have chosen to see only where the lines cross. The lines are not even straight. Tangled lines, the cross over each other what appears to be endlessly. Some take a thousand turns only to come back on themselves. Others are infinite lines. Others caught in the moment of time.

Why speak of lines anyway? Fragments of the multitude, lines because each of us extends far in every direction. Series of moments? I don’t even know if they are linked. Each space, like each room or each scene in a film, has it’s own bodies, space, color, scents. We, this series of I’s each of which is another, wander between them and their paths do not always cross. You are my parallel, or sometimes we come close enough to touch but fail to. You are our vertigo, because when I look up I see you, down I see you, NICU the first thing and last thing that I see. We inhabit and dream ourselves and the I stutters in the multitude. A noisy solitude, Deleuze says! There is your I, my Our, We, a noisy solitude always inspiring because the source is not one but many. Pessoa and his many selves, Borges' Pierre Menard composing the Quixote, and neither Max nor Percival Everett are Sidney Poitier.

We write the page as the music affects and infects us. Music of your voice and music I remember. You who are here and are not here. What is this statement anyway? I just manifested you in my bedroom, past the lamp where there is only a blank wall. I don’t even know, maybe you dreamt me doing this. You dreamt the rose in the sky and I pulled it down, taking a bite out of gushing juicy petals. I imagine I know myself, but really let’s be serious now, I do only imagine that I know myself. What about how we imagine myself? These attempts at definitions are grasping at phantoms. Nothing is stable. Remember the Queen sees nothing, but all there is to see she sees. Ask the man on the bridge from Waking Life, “To realize you are a dream figment in another person’s dream...THAT is self awareness!!!!” I exist whether you dream me or not but we only exist because we are dreaming each other.