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Blur | Feb 27 2003

There are two of me. One knows this, the other does not. For the one who knows (let us call him A), the situation is painful. Alone in his knowledge, he tries to share it with B, but B ignores him, believing A’s voice to be his own. Sometimes A tries to disguise his voice, but this too fails, because B has come to think of his voice as several voices. This follows from B’s theory that, as he puts it, a person is a crowded place. A has the same theory but for different reasons.

In B’s version of the theory, all the persons in the place are himself or aspects of himself; he, B, is the amalgamation of all such persons or aspects, known or unknown; he is the place that contains the amalgamation. And since this amalgamation is in flux, B is in flux. In a sense there is no B, as B sees it, for there is no moment at which a box could be drawn around B such that the contents of the box would define him. A photograph of B would be a blur.

To A, both A and B are selves described by B’s theory. They share the same body but are in other respects distinct. They are something like Siamese twins who overlap to the point they occupy the same physical space. Other selves share this space as well, although B is the only one A knows. The way A thinks of it (and all this is intended by way of analogy, like the way physicists speak of billiard balls and mushy pool tables to describe the curvature of space/time), B is his closest neighbor. He, A, assumes the existence of other coextensive selves (the place is crowded, after all), but has no direct experience of them.

It is surprising which one is writing this.