The Idea(s)

Justine Clarke one said to me ...

(*clang* – we are starting out absolutely on brand. I will admit to being a name-dropper par excellence. A product, I suspect, of believing myself to be uninteresting: only by virtue of the dropped name, I believe, do I merit being listened to at all. I both do and don't believe this. I always have. And haven't. Sorry, where was I?

Justine Clarke once said to me "You've lived multiple lives". I'm pretty sure she meant it as a compliment, partly because she followed up by saying "Lots of people barely manage one."

She's right, in a sense. I seem to be unable to decide who I want to be. Who I am in any present moment I'm mostly fairly certain of, but that has the capacity to change several times a day. One thing has never held my attention long enough for me to fully live within or define myself by the shape of it. I've somehow remained unmoored from things many never question their secure attachment to, whether that be a gender (of which I've had at least three), or a profession (I've had five or ten, the main few being theatre director, waiter, actor, sex worker and event producer). As some have no doubt already deduced I have ADHD. That could be the cause of this inability to settle. Maybe so, but as an identity itself, before anyone suggests it, I didn't find out about it until recently, am not sure I believe in it, and my mother will tell you I only acquired it in adulthood in any case. I have never fully settled in one city (potentially attributable to growing up in Canberra, historically a place noone calls home, or an adolescene living 'week and week about' with separated parents). I have had various addictions (work, alcohol, methamphetamine, probably sex) and though I'm sure there are many consistent traits and fields of interest that family and friends could name, and for that matter a fair few family and one or two friends have remained consistent through my life so far, I've always felt peculiarly undefined.

Or put an other way I've always been endlessly curious. In Existential Kink (a source of sin-spiration to which, like ADHD, well no doubt return in time) Carolyn Elliott describes a yearning to experience everything. Something she attributes to be a symptom of the fact that one is, undeniably, part of everything. She suggests (though not in these terms) that, metaphysically at least, if one is part of everything then everything must be a part of one.

The pronoun 'One', used, as I have used it above, is usually just a pretentious way of saying 'I'. More exactly, it's an old fashioned English language construction suggesting that the speaker's experience is their own, but also neutral and universal. This is the kind of nonsense only old white men pull these days, and that fact probably contributes to the feeling that I become more masc and geriatric each time I use it. (Discussions of the male-ness of English, taking cues from Jessa Crispin and Alice Birch, are also a likely topic of future musings, as indeed are pronouns). Above, however, it serve a specific illustrative purpose.

When one considers what "one" and "everything" fundamentally mean, the idea – that one is (or if you prefer 'I am' 'you are' or 'we are') within everything, and everything within oneself/me/you/us – seems to make perfect sense: all is one, one is all.

In the way of metaphysical paradoxes, the thought is as simple as it iscomplex and as true as is its opposite. Exemplified by the fact that when reaching for an alternate phrase to express what I meant the first to spring to mind was the truism that a person 'contains multitudes'.

The images evoked in my mind by 'multitudes' is of a large and diverse horde. The word 'diverse' in that sentence is doing a lot of work to remind us that one thing can be different from itself; 'horde' is a collective noun, which is a word by which we turn a plural into a singular.A diverse horde is possible only because of the transubstantiation spell cast by the use of a collective noun.

In summary, 'everything' is incredibly different to itself, or rather every thing is incredibly different to every other thing.

and further contributes to the but here serves to illustrate a point) nand equally as fascinated by an opposite as I am by its thing. and it's always felt like both a strength

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