(Excerpt from Three Short Reflections on Art, Philosophy & Literature)
What bloody soul?
Okay, boys. Just this morning I was sitting tearing calluses from my toes with fingernails, splintered and greasy-black with dirt – don’t get the chance to keep them tidy in this hole, must be ten weeks, maybe ten months since last I had them cut – thinking if I could get away, just for an hour, only once, so I could get my mother back for those old clogs she had me wear year in, year out: look how they busted up my feet, all hard and covered with sore corns – callus, I thought and then it flashed into my mind: there goes one part of me. Of course it does. I was sitting here callosities and all, and one blink later the callosities went flying, a dead waste into the corner, me no longer what I had been until then, sure as hell not. Certainly not. I was me minus callosities, i.e. not me complete. See if I can’t make that a little clearer now, hold on. The callosities were me minus that putrid pile of flesh that remained seated on the floor, you get the point?
I don’t know, is this me speaking or my head up there on top of my torn body (is there really any difference in the end?), as I go riding on this cart towards the scaffold. And all this time the crowd is roaring all around me, naturally. They lick the words from my cracked lips as eagerly as the cheap whores of dusky gateways sucked the semen off my prick – those days! – with the one difference that the whores knew pretty well what slush they swallowed, whereas these people clearly don’t have any idea. They lick the last words from my lips voraciously, but they don’t listen, imbeciles, they take the bait and guzzle all and never think.
So, honored citizens, hear me! In what distinguished part of me will my soul/self remain or linger? In the part castrated of callosities? Then: on what grounds? Based on its greater volume maybe would you say? (But that’s fascism! my voice roars, predicting ages yet to come. The multitude, gathered in thousands, responds instantly and seethes, working itself into a violent fury.) Or on the fact that in this part there is contained a greater sum of vital organs, their degree of specialization far above that of dead skin? (Some kind of master race thinking between life organs – i.e. again purest fascism! – and again the crowd’s immediate response!)
But, all right, be it the case. Say that the hypothesis sticks; now where exactly would you people put the limit? At what exact point does one part of me stop being part of me whereas the part that lingers on lives on as me? Could one imagine a set case where I would be cut in two halves, using the newest, most refined methods of modern-day science, whereby the self would remain puzzled for a second, not so sure which of the two bodies it should fling itself into? (My throat feels dry, and all around the crowd keeps roaring without stop, frantic, insane as we approach the crucial issue of free will: the abstract one-cow versus two-identical-haystacks thought device.)
Perhaps two evenly extended selves/half-selves, both of the halves halved in intensity; or two half-mes should you prefer? And if I’m split in three, what happens? First into one big part and one small part, and then the bigger part into two smaller, each of them now smaller than was the smallest part (originally)? Will my soul/self appreciate its blunt mistake, will it regret its bad decision, rectify and relocate back to the part now larger than the other parts, from which same part it for a while had been missing? Because, you see, the smallest part is now the one of greatest volume and the highest individual grade of differentiation – the greatest power! Pair of pistols! The big man in short!
Or say we split my trunk in four (not leaving out my head, of course). In five. In sixty thousand tiny pieces. My self will leap a headless goose from one part to the next, completely lost, completely desperate and unable to decide how to withdraw into the body that would be its safest dwelling.
And, what the hell, now that I lay my head onto the block. The famous fraction of a second when the guillotine has hit and separated head and body, during which I’m still alive (to the reality of which we have appealed above), where am I? In my head, or in my body short of head? (The body, in all reason, is much larger now in size.) Or in the heart’s condensed self-substance, so renowned among the poets? “Here I go,” the head is thinking as its mouth screams: “Live the Republic!” but the whetted guillotine blade, which just before touched only me, one instant later touches two parts of what formerly was me, then just my trunk, from which my self has now escaped. “Such a pity,” the trunk thinks, but of its thoughts the head knows nothing; there it rolls (who? me?) and now the crowd kicks it around like a football.
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