draft: chapter i

by ibull

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Interviewer: So, tell me about yourself.

Interviewee: Could you have asked a more difficult question? [laughter]

I suppose the easiest way to answer that question requires some account of who, or what, I once “was”… [gestures to emphasize use of quotation marks]

I version of “me” once “walked” through walls—not really walked, but passed through floors, too. Every surface was permeable, porous. “I” wasn’t everything—don’t suppose I could exist so egotistically. But before anything could “be,” I emerged through them, and then “I” was overwritten with relation—always still there, but covered.

Everything was me, at one point. You might say I was overdetermined every moment that anyone ever took notice of me, but when I was ignored, I had great liberty to pass through the universe, tracing the contours of unity and coherency. Well—tracing is a bit generous. I didn’t connect or relate anything—I existed at every point, but I did not reveal them in relation to spacetime.

There isn’t any knowing or determinacy that explains my transition—my becoming of something …. else. Adhering to the conditions of the—my—universe, “I” became “in relation.”

Ah, hahaha. And, again, the English language fails miserably to explain the universe. “Became” assumes linearization—the conformity of spacetime and all of its complexity to model that of a line. “I” is imperfect in the same way. These words create fictitious relations, which is to say: I never existed in one dimension of time, and then decided to transition or transform into another dimension of time. Rather, there was one dimension of which I was, and then another dimension came into relation with mine, and by relating to this first dimension, the relation made relation writ large possible.