vivyen

Get used to your body, forget you were born, suddenly you got to get out!

Put on my tie in a taxi, short of breath, rushing to meditate.

6. Greek mathematicians did not think one was a number because the concept one did not involve number. To them, two was the first number. And the hybrid marriage of one, which was not a number, and two, which was, begot three, the second number. And from one, two, and three, all other numbers proceeded, so that all odd numbers had in them an element that was not number. This is why Plato said that the leap from one to two was the leap to rationality.

Leonard Bernstein, speaking of music, said that two was a rhythm of the body and three was a rhythm of the mind. This has been contested by people who say that three is a rhythm of the body and two a rhythm of the mind. Not everyone has weighed in on this subject. But it seems intuitively right, doesn’t it? To say that three is  a groundedness in the symmetry of twos, off which threes seem to play, seem airier.  

5. The hidden paradigm of the single line is the completed sentence, without which idea there would be no enjambment.

The sentence imitates insight. It is the mode of individuation, the thought that separates us from others and gives us a self. To say it another way, the sentence is being, enjambment is excess of being, or being in process, reaching toward itself. Which is its basic characteristic. Excess and instability and movement and change. The sentence moves and it arrests movement.

The sentence is also an action, an event in time. In one way of thinking, being is stasis; in another it is movement, that is, the only being we have is becoming, and the self is movement (we are not things but processes). However, the sentence is the instrument through which the self-as-a-process mimics being-as-a-process, at the same time that it arrests it. A sentence, unlike actions in the world, is a proposition of finitude; it has a beginning and an end. The tension in the sentence between its action and its stillness is a source of endless paradox. 

In another way of thinking, being is movement, but the self is not movement. There are two ways of saying this, quite different from each other, and they bear on what we think both the sentence and the line are for. 

One way to say it is the currently out of favor “essentialist” position, that the self is, and can be accurately represented as, the still point from which movement is perceived. The existentialist version of this is to say that the self wants to be (and can never altogether be) the still point from which movement is perceived, and that is the energy and the torment (or the dance) of this desire that constitutes it. And is the problem inherent in representing the way perception happens, since something happens to something in the English language and both somethings are moving targets. 

The other way to say that the self is not movement is to say that is nothing. Looked at, it’s nothing. And this fact—experience, really—has been a traditional way out of instability and change. For some the impersonality of form echoes an emptiness because it’s not personal. Form feels different from subjectivity. It feels like it belongs to other, larger rhythms. This is the reason some Buddhist artist/thinkers like John Cage have been attracted to the most arbitrary forms. 

And in this way there are perhaps three basic attitudes toward form. First, that is being, or mimics it, elaborated to a fullness. Second, that it is the emptiness against which being plays, through which it courses. Third, that it is made thing, the work of man the maker constructing a world out of the paradoxical movement and stillness of the sentence: 

       These fragments I have shored against my ruin

And there is a fourth idea, associated with Oulipo and other experimental practice, that it is, like everything else, a throw of the dice (or of the device) and so the more arbitrary the formal principle that generates it, the better. 

Portrait of a twenty-four-year-old girl

19 | 21 | 22 

your voice sounds distant on the phone. it’s a ten minute call and there is substance to the conversation but somehow i get the feeling that you are out of my life forever. it’s your birthday and it’s your year and i won’t be part of it. 

i forgot how to be myself when that bigger feeling took over. 

Not long ago, just 8 months to be more exact, over curry on countertop seats, L asked me if I had a defining moment in my life, the kind of moment that separates a life into a before and after the event kind of way. L was a math major, so if we think about our lives as a line defined by some function unique to us (or, at least, our thinking of our own lives and hence our own selves), then is there an event X that turned that function into a piecewise one, with one person living up to X and that same person, but distinct from their first self due to the event, living from X onwards? 

I wonder if I have an X. I wonder if my sense of self has ever been continuous except for the piling of age from the inevitable steady coming and going of the day by day by days. The question was posed 8 months ago, and my struggle to answer lies in that time too. 8 months is now 2.85% of my life up to date. 8 months ago, 8 months was 2.94% of my life up to date. Somehow I gained 2.94% more life in that time, and lost 2.85% of life to the past. I probably remember about a similar percentage of what has happened in that time, and yet that probably makes up a bigger percentage of my memory than the percentage of my life that it is. I guess what I’m saying is, it’s hard to remember my self and life. In some units, so much of me is who I’ve been lately. In other units, so much of me is the growing accumulations of me. Am I the line of the function, its slope, or the area underneath it? Most likely, I’m some transform of the function that takes in the decreasing weighted average of a unit of time over the sum of my time so far and so on, and the disproportionate memory space that the recent past has over the memory space that my life (or the qualia of it) can be stored. 

I said to L, I can’t really remember who I was 8 months ago or 8 years ago. Those mes feel so far away, yet within me, too. Divergent from each other, yet converging all the same to the asymptote of a self that is itself. Maybe there’s before college me and college onwards me. Maybe there’s childhood me and pubescence onwards me. Maybe it’s not just an X, but an X, Y, Z.  Or maybe I’m more continuous than I thought.

And what about L? L told me about an X that happened about a year before our conversation. Something inside him shifted because of X. He became a piecewise person.

X is the kind of thing, often subtle, sometimes drastic, that distinctly changes your approach to life. Like an insight that becomes a force of will that gives what’s alive inside us purpose, or an experience of grief that makes life a suddenly tender thing. X changes our understanding of life, changing our lives onwards, changing our from-X-on selves, hence changing how we look back at our lives and selves.

Transience is a scary thing, its promise shadows our present, highlights and obscures our past, makes vulnerable our future.