Provisionally: A Something-Writing

-What I Have in Me to Write Now-

            I am Melville, I am Aristotle Dostoevsky.  Address me as Plato, Poinsot, Peirce.  Franz Ferdinand Pessoa.  I don’t care.

Call me Person.  Anyone madly bearded and wielding a pen.

The one writing, saying, speaking.  The gesturer.  Being-doing-becoming.  The Nothing-sans-audition.  The Singer-without-ears.  Seer-without-vision.  Images – begone!

Call me Person.  Listen! – it becomes.

Wrapped in filthy sweet meconium and lies, lays, swaddling undone.  Wrapt, swaddled, held: Become.

It begins.  A sighing and a sound.  A saying and a listener.  Bronk, Bakhtin, Blanchot.  Call it what you will.  Call me Person-with-a-Pen.  Number me “Frail Parcel.”

I utter, you reply.  I gains an “I.”

She responds and “I” becomes a “He.”

Call me Shakespeare, call me Tolstoy, call me Sterne.  I yelp a Joycean Woolf!  It begins.

Call me Person.

Damaged, swollen and undone, without a reason, and yet a flailing voice.

We translate love and I become.  We cobble names.  “Honeywizz,” “Beastyballs,” “Xanadu.”

Say a word, and say again.

It sounds like singing.

Cry out Jeezus! Aquinas! and let us move.

Heidegger, Hegel, Haar.  William Dewey, Tomas Pynchon.  Another ring, another rung, another syllable.

Translation, transmission, footnoting insertions, assertion.  I am John James, Alfred South Hampton.  Bewildered and Amazed.  Immanuel (God-with-us) Nietzsche, Darwin D. Descartes.

Just call me Person and I will answer, becoming “I” and I become.

The whisper and its hearing,

you moaned and I perked up.

“Yes?” “No!” Otherwise.

We are here.

Call us Person(s).

I/You, Self/Other, He/She, Says/Hears, Touches/Felt, Imagine the memory.

Begin.

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            At long last, we arrive.  Gilles and Jacques and Simon.  Luce and Helen and Clarice.  Paired, impaired, distorted.

            You may call us Person(s).  We are named.

            Once called, for a response.  The asking is the telling.

            I cry out.

There is echo.

It begins.

Frail parcel.

            Laurence Carlyle.

                                    Samwell Bronte.

                                                            Simone de Cortazar.

Someone sings, it garners litany,

“We are here.”

please call us Person(s).

At first I was a scientist: a philosopher of stories,

for you I depicted scenes and portraits,

invented tools.

Everything a bridge.

The word “between.”

We gestured: “Call us Person(s)”

We said Moscow, India and Greece.  We stuttered America.  We shrieked of Arabia and England.

A run of names and numbers, symbols and beliefs.  We made equations, normatives, reliefs.  We consulted, constructed, and revised.

All us People.  Call me Person.  Calling “you.”

I made an image of yourself, and you became…along with “I.”

We shouted slogans, rafted rivers, swam the seas.  We scaled the peaks.  We dug beneath.  We drifted out.

And kept on calling, calling back

and calling forth, all the asking that is telling, and the stating towards inquire.

It began.  It formed a we, and that resulted in an I and a Thou, gone either way, but none other.

It plays with brain and body is the brain the body,

call us “Person(s)”

A kind of beast and gentle species.

We, animal and saint

because we said so.

“Call us Person(s)”

for the asking and the telling

the query-and-response

its to-and-fro

and the becoming

We will be.

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What we intended – -ologies and –isms and parades.

And “we” begins

Call us People, call us Person(s)

The beasts, alive for NOW –

a simple Zone,

a sphere, an angle,

our “perception” as we say.

I am Maurice and Piaget, von Uexkull van Beethoven

Call me Person

And drunk on signs

(that We developed)

in-between

so we might BE.

(Let’s call them “words”)

Let’s call them breaches, bridges, dreams.

Let’s call it Love.

(and its undoing, its location, its domain)

Let’s call it governance or law.

Let’s make a Zoo with separate cages, create a Zone for disciplines and fields.  Feelings.  Cultivating crops and crafts and musics.  Let’s call it “Science” and beg for silence, and beg for naming and for names, more names and names and things, more names and names for things.

Let’s mix them up and cause explosions.

Me + You.

and co-created.

Please call us “Person(s)”

And let us mark and underscore: Disprove.  Debate.  Erase.

Let’s say “adjust.”

Let’s try to capture or discover – now we’re we.

But call us “Person(s)”

We will be.

I have become.