From "therefore I am" to "wherefore went I"

Here's the next page from my book of 293 Drawing Prompts. (The last page appeared just two days ago.) The prompt for this present drawing was "Charm bracelet".

Dear diary,

My name is Bryan Ray. I am 43 years old. So, for short, call me Bryan-43. In this entry, I want to reference myself at different ages and refer to those spans in my timeline as respective entities, despite the fact that they’re all part of the same multidimensional being.

Before I begin, tho, I wanna mention something that I saw on YouTube yesterday. There was this guy who recorded himself talking about all the crises that our world is currently enduring; and someone left a comment under his video which said “This dude is like your drunken uncle at the holiday dinner except he’s a genius.” Now this gets a rise out of me:

First off, I’m tired of people referring to drunk uncles as if they’re laughable. Take your drunken uncle seriously. The most central of the Ten Commandments is “Honour thy father and thy mother” (Exodus 20:12). Fuck that — I say: Honour thy drunken uncle.

Plus, who’s to say that your drunk uncle isn’t a genius? I hereby decree that the state of drunken unclehood is at once the prerequisite and the proof of genius.

(I’m glad I got that off my chest.)

Now, speaking to myself, as Bryan-43 to Bryan-43, I wanna ask this drunkard a question: Who’s doing the thinking here? For I’ve noticed that you are in the habit of saying “I think, therefore I drink”; or “I can’t think without a drink”; or variations upon that theme. But, just last year, I was reading aloud Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil at our holiday dinner, to the children’s table, and I noticed that in section 17 of Part One, he sez:

With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact—namely, that a thought comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks; but that this “it” is precisely the famous old “ego” is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an “immediate certainty.” After all, one has even gone too far with this “it thinks”—even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself.

This idea dazzles me, the way that a lion is dazzled by his tamer’s whip. (Also the lion tamer usually holds a chair in his other hand: he thrusts the four legs toward my face — why does he do this?) I think now about the phrase “I think”. My first thought is: Should I have said instead “It thinks now about the phrase ‘It thinks’?” And my second thought is: Should I have said “Its first thought is… (etc.)”

I’m trying to get to the bottom of the difference between “I” and “it”, since neither it nor I can locate any. When I say “it”, I mean the aspect of our world that’s partly out of my control; and when it sez “I”, it means the aspect of our world that’s partly out of its control.

So who’s really doing the thinking here?

Actually, let me back up and ask two far more pertinent questions, and then I’ll come back to that refrain:

We dealt with the notions of “it saying I” and “I saying it”, but what do we mean by the statements “I said I” or “it said it”? In other words, what does (or do) “I” think that “I” means, and what does “it” itself think the meaning of “it” is?

And even if we discover the answer, how do we know we can trust the truth? (Remember: the truth is what imprisoned us in this predicament.)

Alright, now I can come back to that earlier query: Who is really doing the thinking here?

Here’s the correct answer: Bryan-23 is doing ALL the thinking for Bryan-24 thru Bryan-43. Prior to Bryan-23, it was Bryan-6 who did the thinking for Bryan-7 thru Bryan-22. (I’m pretty sure this is right.) And all pre-Bryan-5 thought belongs to the real it, until you get to the previous stalemate. Let me explain:

Matter arranges itself, or rather finds that something beyond its ken has ensnared it in a harmony, which it calls a “stalemate”; and that state uses the memory function of its organism to buoy forward, or “dead-man’s-float forth” its most prominent pleasure-pain till the entity gets distracted by a chapter break in its being:

So it’s not unlike volleying a ball between members of a team: one player sets the ball to the next player, and she sets likewise to the next, until the ball can be spiked to score a point.

In this analogy, the ball is the soul, which is the mortal placeholder of the stalemate’s spirit. And the term “set”, in this context, indicates “an overhead pass used to change the direction of the dig and put the ball in a good position for the spiker”. And the Everlasting One watches, like the fans along the sideline. He and she is more or less the supplier of “it” while at once a container that’s either half empty OR full of “it”. For it enjoys endless equilibrium.

*

Was all this fancy talk satisfying for you? It wasn’t satisfying for me. (When I say “you” and “me” I mean the best parts of “it” — the exuberant “it”: the one that’s beyond good and evil, who lives in the palm tree at the end of our mind.) So what would satisfy us instead? Cuz I’m here to help — as the clown from Twelfth Night always sez:

. . . that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.

I have a hunch that we can make both you, me, and our orphan all happy, with a simple idea: Let us drop the above philosophizing and simply review the crimes that have been recently committed in our neighborhood. (Change trax; shift gearz.) Because the times are getting worse, and they’ll only get worser — as Edgar always sez, in the play King Lear:

. . . the worst is not
So long as we can say “This is the worst”.

*

So my neighbor called me yesterday and said “Bry! how are you holding up during these strange times? Oh, really!? You actually kinda like things better this way? Hmm… Well I just called to let you know that there’s been an increase in neighborhood crime, in the last week or so. It’s probably because people are getting desperate. Nothing too bad has happened on our street yet, but there have been a string of car break-ins. What’s happening, the police officer told me (I just talked to him yesterday cuz we had to report the damage to our daughter’s car: she parked at the curbside, and some vandal keyed her door) is that some young kids are apparently skulking thru our street under the cover of darkness, in the middle of the night, cloaked in gloom, and, as they tiptoe past each vehicle, they check to see if its doors are unlocked; then, if they are, they snoop around inside to see if there are any valuables. So far they’ve only taken a couple of wallets, which only had a few bucks in them. Nothing big. But I just wanted to call and alert you that this is happening. So park in your garage, if you can: not in the street. But if you absolutely must park outside, either in your own driveway or at the curb, then make sure you lock all your doors, and don’t leave your wallet on the armrest or the center console.”

“Thanks for the heads-up,” I answered. “We always park our snow-white hybrid indoors.”

“Alrighty, bye-bye now!” & my neighbor hung up.

So I got ahold of the official crime report for our suburban street (no such report actually exists — I’m just making this up in an attempt to help the entry end a bit funner); and it turns out that, during the time period of April 11 to April 17 of 2020, the following petty crimes were reported:

• Dan, who lives in the turquoise saltbox house, had his wallet stolen from the front seat of his Toyota Aurion. He lost fifteen U.S. dollars and three credit cards.
• Jan, who lives in the yellow ranch house at the top of the street, left the trunk of her Elfin Streamliner open, all night long; and it had two grocery bags inside, both of which got rummaged thru. Her wallet was stolen from her purse, which she had left at the top of the bag at the left (if you’re viewing the vehicle from behind) — it’s the bag with all the cans of black beans in it. None of the cans were missing, however; and only the wallet itself was taken, which contained two U.S. dollars — the purse and all of its contents remained unmolested, according to Jan’s sworn testimony.
• Mr. and Mrs. Bromance got both of their wallets stolen out of their Goggomobil Dart. One of the wallets was sitting on the dashboard of the Dart — a definite no-no: drivers should always hold their wallet close to their vest — and the other wallet was, like Jan’s wallet above, taken out of the purse, which, in this case, was left dangling from the driver’s side mirror. The mirror was cracked, but the couple assured the authorities that this crack existed when they first purchased the vehicle, back in November of 2019, from a used-car lot. None of the other items inside the purse were stolen. (It contained four canisters of lipstick, and an overripe avocado. There were also fruit flies in the purse.)
• Jake R., a butcher by trade, occupies the eastern side of the light puce duplex that is located six houses away from Bryan Ray’s place. Jake left all the doors of his Volkswagen Country Buggy wide open one night; and his wallet was on the floor, right next to the accelerator, on the driver’s side of the vehicle. This wallet got stolen; but nothing else in the vehicle was touched: at least no fingerprints were found; and there was no sign of any vandalism. The stolen wallet was very large, and it was bursting with banknotes: Jake’s entire life savings was inside it. But he did not cry when he found out that it was gone. He just set his alarm for 4:30 a.m. and went to work the next morning as usual. He’s a tough egg to crack.
• Sonya J. pulled into her driveway and left her HDT VK Commodore SS running while she dashed inside of her blue house to use the ladies’ room. After this, she felt so relieved that she forgot to go back outside and shut off her engine. Instead, she flopped down onto the sofa, switched on the television, and immediately fell asleep. When she awoke the next morning, her car was still running, but her purse, which she had left on top of the hood, had changed position — this struck her as strange, so Sonya unzipped the purse & held it upside down & shook it violently: but nothing came out. This was because its entire contents had been stolen. According to Sonya, the purse had contained one wallet, in which was a five dollar bill, sixteen credit cards, and a picture of her step-daughter. But, oddly, the thief (or thieves) had gone to the trouble of refilling her gas tank; for Ms. J. purports that, on the prior evening, when she had parked the Commodore, its tank was one quarter full, however, the next morning, the fuel gauge said that it was three quarters full. And multiple eyewitnesses from the area say they saw two nondescript figures approach the vehicle with a gas canister at midnight and very carefully fill the tank. There is currently a thousand-dollar reward for the capture of these two suspects, dead or alive.

I’ll just do a couple more and then let this entry go so that I can eat my breakfast.

• John Pope who lives across the street diagonally from us also got his Humber Vogue burgled — that is, the driver-side door was left unlocked, and some robbers came and opened it and stole four coin purses from its glove-box. The purses contained a total of 800 billion euros.
• Pip and Al from Newark, who now live in the gray split-level down the hill by that dead tree, parked their Nissan Pintara next to the mailbox, and some hooligans crept up and bent the mailbox back so that they could access the passenger door, which was unlocked, and they took the wallet that had been lying on the front seat. It contained a number of erotic playing cards, plus a folded napkin with handwritten directions to “Blip’s”.
• Lastly, Doug and Rita from over in Woodgate stored their firstborn in the back of their Standard Vanguard, and the lad got stolen by rebel aesthetes. No wallet was found on his person, at the time of his taking. His economic value is non-transferable.