We have sold the boat and the cars. We let the flat to a friend in the hope of his taking care of the books. Éva doesn’t fancy the idea of bringing a couple thousand kilograms of intellectual status symbol to Santiago. I have downloaded the most regularly read ones to Kindle and am parting company with the rest.
I always thought of identity as an infinite number of group attachments in a constantly changing hierarchy of importance. I am a member of the group labeled “fathers” and I am also a “waterpolo fan”, just to pick examples from the extreme ends of my current group attachments hierarchy.
Attachments are attachments for a reason. They define us in a very radical sense: if all the ties are cut I cease to exist. No essence are there left, levitating in vacuum. Not even a bosón de Higgs size Prádpál or Pozsonyi or whatever. Cutting ties is dying, creating new ones is being reborn. Signs and symbols have death and life importance, signaling our fluid group attachment hierarchies.
Advice: if you ask someone whether he or – yes, sometimes she - happens to be a Freemason and the answer is yes, then you can be sure he or she is not one. Or at least not a seasoned one. A true and seasoned mason – as they say - would answer by saying “I am taken to be such by ….” other people who know me as such.
So who am I? Others from the swarm will tell.
From Jacques Derrida we learn that there is not a single word in whatever large a dictionary in any language that is not defined exclusively by other words in that dictionary. There is no outside reference point, o sea, “There is no outside text.”
“We must die as egos and be
born again in the swarm, not
separate and self-hypnotized, but
individual and related.”
Henry Miller, Sexus, appearing - significantly - as a motto to the introduction by Mark Seen to Anti-Oedipus by D&G
[Miller] was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new type of semi-autobiographical novel that blended character study, social criticism, philosophical reflection, stream of consciousness, explicit language, sex, surrealist free associations, and mysticism. Wikipedia