Miscellanea Sensibilium

Dissolution of the Self

when i was mad i would often wake up and forget my name.
i would ask myself; who am i?
i would localize further.
i am
         my self
i am
i
then i would ask; where am i?
localization would further.
i am here.
in my bed; in my room; in my boarding house; in this city on this planet.
i would awake and go about my routine.

i would see people i knew, but i had forgotten how to interact with them;
the usual routine by which the action of inter action might occur.
i would look at them and ask myself; who are they, would i say hello?
what are the parameters for introduction?
"hey, what's up"
easy but where would this lead to?
what was to come next?
should i talk about the weather?
comment on her new hair colour?
tell her my latest news?
what news?
i had none.
this day had been the same as before.
this week the same as before.
nothing different had happened.
i had walked around in circles.
i had woken up, gone to the local hangout place, smoked ciggarettes and joints with the friends i could still interact with, had gone to work, done the job, had breakfast, come home and gone to sleep.
nothing new.
no great adventure.
no strange mishap.
nothing new.
i was stagnating.

localization had become difficult, and i felt great fear when falling asleep.
the side effects from the acid became strongest then, just before oblivion, and i would fight it. would fear it.
i was afraid of what i was doing anyway, losing my self.

quantifying myself was easy before, or so i had that impression.
but i could not remember clearly.
it was like the waves in a great sea
i vaguely recalled situations with this person, interacting.
but i could not compute, could not recreate.
things had somehow changed.
was she different or was it my self?

i decided it was my self that had changed.
my self had dissolved to many times while conscious.
maybe.
or i had erased the semantical set i was accustomed to.
maybe.
it was hard to say. it is even harder to say now.
i no longer see the waves so easily.
but localization is not so strenuous as it was then.

i pondered these things a great deal.
all my thoughts seemed alien though. as if they were someone else's.

as time wore on, i became to delocalize my ego consciously, and without the aid of chemicals. i would simply concentrate on the waves which obscured my vision; my ego would dissipate and my entire being would be the waves, the patterns in the cement. stretching across great stretches of space only a few inches in width, heighth or longtitude.
until my eyes would lose their moistness, and i would blink and resurface into my self again.

i realized after a time the truth of buckminster fuller's expression "i seem to be a verb"
i realized i had leaped across some great chasm, and had forgotten the part of me that come after 'i am'.
i had to relearn.

i began by removing the i from my self.
in my job as a machine operator in a plastics factory, this was quite easy. would merely commence the task, a 7 second process, for two hour periods. my self would not assert itself, but rather dissipate. simple; take the product from the bin; remove flash here, here and here. place product on conveyer at appropriate location in space and in appropriate relation and repeat.
no i was necessary.
there was only am.
(i now believe this to have been a state of zen, or some other name in the hindu or buddhist traditions, but not being an ascetic of any of those traditions, i cannot say.)
am would carry on, moving in slightly different circles (i had moved residence to another section of town) but many of the significant points along this circular path would remain the same.
delocalization before sleeping had become less anxious. am did not fear the apparent dissolution so much as the side effects became less apparent. but interaction was still not effective.
i would still see her, whom i had once easily bantered and flirted with, but i still could not bring myself to say even hello.
i reasserted into my self, and i became i am again.
i quit my job at the plastics factory no longer being able to and not even wishing to assert the 'zen' state any longer. i began temping where i was employed at a large car manufacturing plant, inspecting and repairing parts from a untrustworthy outsourcer. this took twenty minutes from every hour. the other forty minutes, i drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. i also began to interact with my colleagues.
this i realised was easy because i did'nt care what they thought of me. it did not matter to me what they thought or cared about the self i projected. i flirted with obese and ugly women twice and three times my age. and talked about drugs and side-effects with what some people may refer to as white trash. i even had a lengthy discourse with a fellow who although coming from a middle-class family tried to fit into the jet-set crowd.

i did not care.

the semantical set became firmer and more dynamic.

i no longer stagnated.