How much of the unconscious must I bear? There like a virtual je ne sais quoi it feeds off the limit of my conscious self, creating the dread of non-being. You are much more than you are, you can be much more than you recoil from being. Perhaps. But why should I imagine someone who is not? How can I be more than who I am if that more is not? To what, whom, am I being compared? “You are more than …”. Clearly, I am not then! But neither is this more who supposedly is me. Why am I fed this nonsense as though from a frontier not myself and yet myself? You are more.


Perhaps what is meant is: I can be more? But how is this any less cruel? Now I am being directed to be someone of infinite possibilities even more remote than the discounted more of my present being. What possibility will I be to be this presumably right more? There, I see some admirable not-I who is cleverer, more industrious, more trendsetting, more loving, more faithful, more, more, more. Perfect! A not-I that I can be but, in being this not-I who I am, am not. An unbridgeable chasm, a diminutive “infinite qualitative distinction” seemingly as infinite as the perplexed Dane imagined. Let us distill from this not-I the admirable qualities pulling the I into this gravitational field. Is it any less vexing? Can we admit of degrees, degrees of admirability inciting this self to self, not yet the self it once imagined itself to be (“you are more”) now on a path of becoming (“you can be more”)? Delicate.


What will be the proper mix? 20% more industrious? Perhaps 50% more loving, combining that earlier 20% with 30% more exercise? Less of this with a little more of that? The recipes of calculation rarely furnish a delicious dish when cooking up self-transcendence. Perhaps this is the underside of wedding the term “rabbit” to “hole”, a cute furry animal nonetheless enticing you into a discombobulating vortex? Beware. Johannes Climacus knew the menace of imagining authenticity to be regulated by approximation. The mixture achieved solely through a measuring cup insults the palate of any true connoisseur. But I cannot bring myself to simply dismiss the utility of the cup, as probably Kierkegaard could not by settling on the vehicle of Climacus. There is a place for measure, for calculation. Oh, but to place this place! In this place, here, now, I must confine myself. I eat and drink daily from that other cup but am wired to want more. But what sense is to be given to this “more”? 20% of this, 30% of that? We encountered such numbers already. This more is more than more. This more cannot be dictated by that other more we tragically identify as the only more, the only game, in town. Gödel. My august symbol that indicates that the rules of more suggest more that cannot be contained by the rules themselves.

Placements have been made and I am grateful for them, all of them! But the place of “my” place is, finally, left to me, to you. I seek it through leaps and bounds (terms chosen accordingly). I look here, I look there, wherever the spirit leads. Perhaps the task is to recall, again and again, that this more I started with is to be imagined more (!) like a tourniquet than a dangling carrot to be pointlessly chased. Tourniquet suggests something else for me, not that empty, romantic sense of discomfort cancelled by purpose. Such calculation is a little much for me. Tourniquet in the logic of this place cannot function like a Band-Aid. The rules are to be somehow reimagined, lived—whether demanding a “higher context” I leave to gestures of placement alluded to earlier—according to which in the discomfort healing is, in some measure, present. If sadism is suggested, I apologize. This is obviously (I would think) not my point. I am far from celebrating discomfort, pain, etc. Live a logic in the negotiation of a logic always ready to cancel, dominate, the experience and what it means to undergo it. What better way can I end? End?