True Self Humanist

One fine day Jill got a letter, which she sent to Franny who sent
it to Mona. Cause Mona always knew the response. One thing she had learned
from her daddio Deleuze was the law of courtesy. Mona was tired of
addresses with empty mailboxes. Her lover Michel Foucault had been coming
home for weeks now, but she could not imagine her lover asking
sociological ridden queries. What, pray tell, was the point of those sorts
of inquiries, if the recipient could not be bothered, to one, answer, two,
to at least acknowledge the receipt of such an extensive reply. Mona got
her Hegel and stamped all over it. She read the question: Is there a real
or true self? Laughed, and tossed off an answer into the usual void:
Thus Mona said very fast to her empty air letter box:
Do I think we have true or real selves? That's a goody-two
question, and there could be lots of ways to answer it.
Anyhow, apart from how anyone [but why ask such a silly question, she
thought! and huffed and puffed her house off into the cloud of
unknowings!] might construct that question, I think we have more or less a self that
strives toward wholeness, and that the ego, the ego, and the roles one
takes on in life create a social self. The word person, in Greek, comes
from the word mask; but does that make it or enforce a need to see it
dualistically? I think not necessarily. Cooper [as in David Cooper, who I
was lovers and lovers with many omoons ago and more; and note the
resemblance between D.C. and C.D.] - who I am re-reading [with all his
annotations from his days in the Communes of Argentina and cave life!!]
these days, because he is inspiring in this writing I am doing and trying
to do, well he speaks of the need to see through the idea of the self as
having any substance in and of itself. Well, Mona agrees with that; and I
would call [No No ! shouts JillFranny from the back room! its the Fourth
pierson singularss!! the universal singular!! The fourth personsingle from
Ferlinghetti's book HER -- what otehrs call the Third Mind] that the egoic
self; and that is a very Buddhist idea as well.
But you[as you mighthaveguessed] know all these words like real, true, and self, and so on, well they are
really just social ways of speaking of experience which seems to be
wordless and wordfull - paradox and not contra-diction. So one seeks
something that is 'truer' in the sense that it is not conditioned solely
by our social experience. This can get complicated, don't you think? For
me, I see it as a multiplification of self to more and more levels of
continuity and experience. WE grow and grow and then there are the gaps as
well, the spots that are missing. I think that is the cruz of the matter
perhaps... how does one account for the gaps... but I think these are old
old questions age-old, and that we each of us find our own pathways of
understanding, and styles of constructing our understanding of them.. so
that perhaps the true self is the sense of we I me that keeps moving and
changing and reflecting on itself, its selves. BEcause we are plural, ' my
selves the grievers grieve' as Dylan Thomas said in one pome. So we are
many as Walt Whitman said,a nd the same with our sexual being, we are a
thousand tiny sexes, we are genderless and gendered in the gendering of
our being and beings, not caught in the limited dualisitic notion of
man/woman; but we are metamorphosed a thousand times each day as we pass
through cultures of self and memory, chaning body images, and indeed our
changing bodies. We are both our body and not our body as we are more and
less always as we move and change, and the idea of substance as something
inhering in something, 'deep down inside' our body in some cavity
somewehre is a mystification; the soul as Blake said is the body and vice
versa of course. SO where is the body,a dn where is the soul, what are its
limits?
She as a woman who has carried a child and given birth knows
[I SHOUDL EXPLAIN THAT MONA IS NOT GENDERED BY MALE OR FEMALE PARTITIONS
BUT IS BOTH A SLIDING SIGNIFIER AND SIGNIFIED;THUS SHE-HE is IN Transit as
her freind Brigid Brophy once said; and though she claims to be a author
male, she is indeed a feamle author in transit as all writers are whores,
especially poets, but not with any control of their labour Sex for Labour
Ladies?? Labour for Sex?/ Pick yer Exchange ValuablesWho knows one lose
hold of the series in the midst of the melee]
something You don't know about bodies and their mysteries and flows and
the pain of something You have not experienced, not even in proximity.
She has
not even been a father, has not known, yet, that approximate or
beside experience type of experience. The question gets deeper of course,
and then we can go and ask, what is the meaning of all that historically.
And then we can construct it all imaginatively and on the fantastic
level, and the level of Fancy, and it whirls on to ever more profound
levels of learning and understanding... Questions of matriarchy and
patriarchy and so on, and the multiple selves we seem to be creating now..
a new understanding of ourselves and history, we need that it seems to
me... One of the reasons that I have been so interested, passionately
interested in the philosophers of immanence is because they point to the
here and now for understanding, all this starts with the Kierkegaard and
Nietzschean lines of thought, as you know. And it has gone on since then.
Now if Mona mixes up persons you will forgive her and know why her
transcendent lines are mixed up with her immanent lines of consistency,
after all she has an endometrium to take care of!! And zygote blastula
thing! And she is the serpent sperm maker of choices! and voices! and Most
of all Mona is a humanist! One like you never seen before!! She is the
Human!! ALl Too Much and De Trop! Mister Beauvoir bellevue Sartre!
So yes, she said said and yes, I am my gramophone because you are too
consumed too taped to record My celibate Recording Angel of Angelical
Theology and Geologies. As I scooper down the earths of all my professor
Challenger and other spaces of strange and strain. Oh that sound it had a
dying fall in the blues bucket days. Are you sick? She asked? Is something
the matter. as It folds down the rapture of the lionloneliness of her
speech.

********

Fictions of Deleuze and Guattari and Mona

Copyright @ CLifford Duffy 1998-1999.


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