“Pavel Somov” Isn’t Pavel Somov

Whereas, one could argue that Pavel Somov is real, “Pavel Somov” isn’t real since “Pavel Somov” is just a name.  What’s real is real, what’s real is nameless, and no name-word can name the nameless…  But “nameless” is also a name-word that names nothing real.  And so is the name-word “real” – it too names nothing real.  And so is the word “is.”

What can I say about the author of this statement?  What facts, if the fact of the matter is that there are no facts?!  The mind that wrote down these thoughts has ceased to exist: you can name the river-bed but you can’t name the river.  Similarly vanished is the mind that has just written “similarly vanished is the mind that has just written.”  And similarly vanishing is your mind, my dear Reader, while you are reading this recursive example of the Writer’s self-narrative in which the Self narrates its own story.  Mind, panicked with the thought of its own non-existence, reassures itself: “but I am.”  While flowing and vanishing as it does…

The word “auto” means “Self” and the word “author” – in its original meaning stemming from the Latin “auctor” – means one who causes to grow, an enlarger, an increaser.  Thus, any auto-biographical statement is, on one hand, Self-aggrandizement.  At the same time an auto-biography is an author’s attempt to objectively describe the author’s subjective experience.  As such, an auto-biography is a form of self-objectification, i.e. a form Self-deflation.

Consciousness is like a Mobius strip: it’s non-orientable.  Imagine that you begin to write your autobiography on one side of this Mobius Strip of Consciousness.  As you keep writing the end of your narrative becomes the beginning of your narrative.

The author becomes his own fiction.  An author of an auto-biography is both the Subject and the Object of one’s own writing.  A limerick says it all:

A mathematician confided

That a Möbius band is one-sided,

And you'll get quite a laugh,

If you cut one in half,

For it stays in one piece when divided. *

So does Consciousness: it too stays undivided.  In its individuality, it is indivisible.  In its indivisibility, it is indescribable.  As such, any auto-biographical fact is auto-biographical fiction, and any attempt to objectify the subjective is an attempt to divide one in half.  Unlike in math, in reality any one is indivisible.  As to the mind that’s writing this right now…  Sherpa calls: it’s time for another assent into the Abyss of Self.

* from Michelle. Emmer, 1980, Leonard, 13(2)