I in the mirror, you in the mirror, who is in the mirror? I am in the mirror. You are in the mirror. You and I in the mirror, do I ever say we, do you? Who am I in the mirror? Who are you in the mirror? What am I? What are you? Who and what–what do I know about you? This you is not the you who is you now the one reading. What could you know about me? This might be you the reader but just as well could be me the you in the mirror I speak to from time to time; I have to do what I am supposed to do is one way to say what I do in the mirror; you have to do . . . ‘You’ is appropriate, I have said. Do you also say the same? ‘I’ is appropriate, you say? I ask for you.
I have to do what I am supposed to do. This is true. You have to do what you are supposed to do, I say to me you. This is also true. This you I speak of here for me and another you as in you, the reader–do I use ‘you’ in my journal? Sometimes I do. Sometimes I am I and sometimes I am you, what are we going to do should be appropriate; I am we is surely true. The you in my essays is not the same you as the one standing in my mirror–in is not on I remember having said in a poem. The illusion of depth is as good as having depth? As good as reaching depth? What are the depths? Depth is down, is below. Hades is a depth; Hell is a depth. Being down, being low, being under things, under the weather, under control; how is anything under good? Under the covers, but then undercover. I remember Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. What more could I say, should I say–I do not like living with must. I have gotten halfway through Sartre’s rewrite of this, Nausea—at least I imagine Sartre’s novel a rewrite of Dostoevsky’s novella.
All this and other persons too. I am the first person, for sure; I am also the second person, I know, as the times I am you, again, as I have said herein, not this you I am speaking to here on the page, another on that clouds the truth of in–all texts have depth–this depth is good. I am also the third person. I am he? Who am I talking to when I refer to myself as ‘he?’ I must be talking to you, this I-am-you from the I-am-I. The truth of the situation and the Truth; what is the Truth of the persons I am. Every person a mask; persona means mask; persona gives rise to person, to personality?
If there were only a way to discern Truth as easily as we have convinced ourselves that there is no Truth, or that Truth is a lie—or not nearly as heinously, that Truth is a fiction, but then of course it is a fiction, which is why learning to read is as important as it used to be and even was; and the fact that we have been systematically under-taught in this way has had devastating results for us in our balancing the weight of Power and the weight of the People, which we have been bartering in trade with a Public; the Public’s weight will always be added to that of the State; the State always levied against the People. We are in general too stupid, too under-educated, especially too semi-literate to manage democracy or our freedoms. Truth is a fiction is one thing to say; it is another thing to lament, and even a stupider one to use as a dogma set up in iconoclastic fervor, only resulting in Power becoming more powerful, money more monied, and we the people a forgotten ideal. Ease and convenience; instant breakfast, instant literacy? Alphabetism is all we have; nothing close to literacy. I all of you like being fucked in the political-ass—nothing resembling homosexual love or joy, but only what happens to punks in the Prison House of State.
Personality is maskality, I remember having recollected that I had said.
The Falling Leaf Review 