Garden of Selves (unmasking, a thought-experiment)

“All my life I’ve heard one makes many”

-Charles Olson-

This is what I hear here.

Someone sitting up and looking round.

Someone peeking.

And one makes many.

How many?

 

It doesn’t matter.

What matters is what the others are doing.

When only one looks up as if to speak.

I am hearing “tend the garden”

I am hearing “heteroglossia”*

I am reading “every on their own Babel”*

 

Why are the many huddled in boxes, like seedpods?

Perhaps shriveling, or nearly dead?

What prompted the one?

I hear here one prompting many.

I hear the call “Rise up!”

A voice sounds singular.

 

Which is not the case.

A person is a chorus.

Something else pressures for soloists.

What if each their cadenza, in unison?

Who then, what then, how would we be?

This is what I see in this sea.

 

And why so many-yous asleep?

How we tranquilize and put under

Person – what have you done?

The space of a world we call web

is made for a show of hands

nothing is not connected…

 

Wake.

This is what I hear here.

Wake up.

You are not alone.

You are one many,

singularly plural.

 

Tend to the garden of selves.

Know the manufacturer’s labels on every packet of seed.

When it is yours you have chosen and planted

look up

join the chorus

shouting down the mummer’s call

N Filbert 2012

*M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of the plurality of utterances and personhood

*from great British linguist J.R. Firth