What's It LIKE to be a ONE?

Dear Trans-romantics, Fictioners,
Linguists & Colleagues Across the
Curriculum.

Courses w/o Borders
& Local Food-for-Thought Series
( I presume to assume these Ideas
I spam are trans-disciplinary
whether physicist, math-person,
chemist, biologist, sociologist,
psychological, historian, religious,
artist or philosophical, which of
course we all our: as the P in our
Phdegree is witness & testimony
or what’s a college for?)

Eco Logic: House Divided
(differentiated, so as to stand it)

What it LIKE to be a ONE?
Moreover a Conscious ONE?
Moreover Conscious of Consciousness
which is to say Self-Conscious of the
Particular One one is?

Can you imagine a system that can talk to itself?
Tell itself lies and jokes, turn itself on?

How would you represent that happening, going
on & on? Draw a picture of a self talking to itself,
telling itself lies and jokes, turning itself on. It’d
have to be indicated by surface phenomenon, true?
outward appearance, superficialities, symptoms,
signs and symbols of what’s going on within, invisible
to the naked eye.

It would be LIKE trying to draw a box that can
box itself. A bubble that bubbles its own self
bubbliciously.

Imagine A system scolding itself.

Bad Self! Bad Self!

You might want to identify with the Scolder and not
the Scoldee—or maybe you prefer to identify with
the Scoldee scolded, in which case would the Scolder
be an enemy you love/hate? Or merely some Other?
Stranger? Alien?

Or do you just split your self and say: both Scolder and
Scoldee are ME, Myself; and I am the Solomon-like 3^rd
person (so to speak) pronouncing this unity of doubleness?
I? (Latin: ego)

.........I
...(gamester)
ME Myself
means........end
processing..... finished product
.......Game

The end and the means, the gamester and the game—
life is made up of the inter-mixture and reaction of
these two amicable powers, whose marriage appears
before hand as monstrous, as each denies and tends
to abolish the other.

We must reconcile the contradictions as we can,
but their discord and their concord introduce wild
absurdities into our thinking and speech.
(Emerson )

What is it Emerson is observing & writing about?
Environmentalism?
The environment of SELF, Self, self trying to
Just Get Along?

The House of US?

Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher gets as close to a
representation of what it’s like to be a ONE as
Plato’s Republic gets to representing the
nature of VIRTUE.

Plato imagines in terms of a STATE (polis)
Poe imagines in terms of a HOUSE (ecos)

Both are environ-mentalists: coming to terms with
inner habits and habitats. (Not to confuse either
of these representations with Life of the Body Polite
Policed Politic—a horse of another color.)

Emerson’s brief quote indicates the hostility &
“monstrous” marriage among the “amicable”
powers SELF, Self, self. –or however you
want to characterize & represent.

In “The Fall of The House of Usher;” Poe uses
Madeline, Roderick, and the Guest to pose &
observe the conflict between affect and intellect
(twins and yet “enemies”)

And Thoreau:

With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a
sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind
we can stand aloof from actions and their
consequences; and all things, good and bad,
go by us like a torrent.

We are not wholly involved in Nature. I may
be either the driftwood in the stream, or Indra
in the sky looking down on it. I may be affected
by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand,
I may not be affected by an actual event which
appears to concern me much more.

I only know myself as a human entity; the scene,
so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am
sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can
stand as remote from myself as from another.

However intense my experience, I am conscious
of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which,
as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing
no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no
more I than it is you.

When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over,
the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction,
a work of the imagination only, so far as he was
concerned.

This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors
and friends sometimes ("Solitude," Walden)