I have this interesting technical problem that I've been trying to attend to for a long time. It's both the thesis for my art practice and the general outline for my entire existence. I've more recently come to acknowledge it as something essential in the understanding of consciousness and human knowledge and wisdom as something whose correlation, like a membrane that's interfacing a depository of intelligence and intuition - or knowledge and wisdom, which is the material instantiation of the this human data. The problem is this: I cannot think clearly when I think about thinking, I can only think tangentially while being involved in these other activities. For example: when I sit down to write, I can't write, but while I'm out walking I begin thinking about writing, writing in my head without physical writing, I just have a stream of consciousness that I wish could be recorded, dictated, or transcribed into text form. When I return to the computer, the typewriter, or the notebook, and I sit down to attend to the stroke of genius which occurred to me while out in the world and it never returns. Because of course, at that point I'm thinking about writing, the act of writing, not the intricacies and elegances of what was percolating in my direct experience while out for a walk in the world. Part of it this problem lies with a gradient of consciousness; when I sit in the chair, facing this writing technology, I think differently than when I am outside with the sun on me, listening to music or inspirational ideas or anything else besides my own internal processes. When I'm listening to music I have ideas about new exciting music that I can imagine but never have heard, yet when I pick up the guitar and go to play my muscle memory takes over and the same old tunes come pouring out of the instrument, leaving me helpless in effacing any kind of change in this mnemonic system. When I'm listening to a lecture, I remember all the awe inspiring tangents of thought that I wish I had mapped, a network of all of my previous thoughts and memories and experiences that circulate around the content of the speakers words so as to chart myself upon the territories they are bringing into view, and then a second map of all of the supplemental information from all of the books and researches out in the world that I have immediate access to but which cannot be recalled without destroying the intimacy of liberated thought held within that quivering moment, and I wish I could superimpose all of my personal thoughts into this global database commons - to sync myself seamlessly and entirely - with all sources sited, and with the snap of my fingers or a quick succession of key strokes send it off to the publisher to edition off the new book. In a way this is what I'm getting closer to accomplishing with the Book of Energy which has become the Opera Of/For Known & Unknowable Un-I-Verses. So when I'm having conversations I say the most intelligent things that I'm capable of saying, even surprising myself with the things that come out of my mouth upon occasion, and this is the third aspect - that we each (and I especially) have different relationships with different people and the way that I am with you is the only time I am ever this person, right now, with you. Ok, well one could say we maintain different relationships with different people, that each relationship is unique, but it seems in fact that we entrain different selves for the various people we engage with, that we configure our various selves in relation to various people, that we are carrying around all of these identities all of the time inside of us. This goes back to the complication of self in general of course... So I can only have certain ideas, certain moments of genius (subjectively brilliant, not according to anyone else) when I am speaking to certain people and you are never going to see some of these aspects of my personality because... well, nothing personal but also everything personal! You evoke a certain quality within me based on what I evoke in you, and this is our dynamic, and the point is that I'm always wondering if this is something we are modulating or directing or if this is happening to us, if we impose it upon each other, if it comes from within or without... So this is very fucking interesting, and my conclusion is that I cannot sit down and write "characters" because I don't know how to think inside of anyone else's head except my own, but I do have a potentially infinite number of me's, infinite variations of my self, which can only emerge - they are emergent properties which I am observing through distance even while I recognize that these others I am describing are me, all of them, always myself, to the extent that intelligence is not a "thing" but an emergent property coagulating in response to the environment it is immersed in. Our senses are not mechanisms, but emerge of and through the body, an organic substrate seamless entangled with its surrounding context. So I would have to say that something like "love" is much closer to an emergent property of like nature than what one would flippantly refer to as an absolute truth of human kind. So I have to have all of these conversations! And with lots of different people, not just one all the time, not just you... as much as I would like to I cannot just talk to you for the rest of my life, and listen to you every day, sharing our thoughts and emotions, however complex or interesting or novel they may be, because I would be confining myself to this singular version of myself! I have to learn to record actual conversations, in real time, if I'm going to become able to transcribe the velocity of the identity construction as it plays out in the dynamic moment of that relation, in the space in-between us, at a rate almost too fast to stay aware of for more than a fleeting instant. I need to write it down... and then there's this whole ethical aspect to this dilemma: if the people I'm speaking to and sharing experiences with know that their words and actions are being recorded will it influence their behavior? And let's say it doesn't, that we are both are able to forget the recording device or at least not allow it to influence us - perhaps impossible - then what are the ethical parameters for using the recorded document? Back to the problem of essences then: can the essential meaning, or intention, or association with a concept, or a feeling, or an artistic vision be stolen from the individual within which it originates? Can anyone claim ownership for who they are, what they think, what they say? Can anyone purport to know themselves so thoroughly, so securely, so concretely as to clearly delineate the parameters separating themselves from those whom they address, either human or not, friend or foe, subject or object, territory or cartography? Does a photograph steal the soul of the subject?

I think it's interesting that one could have a conversation and use certain words in the moment, words which can then be taken or "stolen" to be used for a purpose or end which they did not intend, or would not agree with. If we had a conversation and afterwards you went and used the inspiration to compose music or an image, you didn't use my words but reinterpreted the meaning that we shared into something else, would you still be stealing from me? I wouldn't have thought about it like that...

Your description is similar to how we consider intellectual property under common law. So if one were to appropriate the words verbatim it would be illegal - as academic plagiarism, or intellectual property rights over a design concept perhaps - but if it is interpreted beyond direct quotation, manipulated or incorporated with enough nuance to be seen as being made original again, or an act of collage, to contextualize the idea into a creative work this is seen as an acceptable use.

So the problem that you're having... you will take these words and reassemble them in any context you find necessary, so you're not taking from me you're taking from a conversation you are having with yourself, in relation to me, with me serving as a witness.

You are a dynamic human being. You are not me (are you?), not my imagination.

But it's 50/50, we are speaking to each other....

Who does this conversation belong to?

Are you stealing from me or are you stealing from yourself?

It's a question that I do not have a conclusive answer to, and I suppose it will remain a question to the extent that these ethics and morals remain a negotiation that cannot be decided upon so easily, or imposed to righteously, without becoming something horrific or fascist.

Some of the people you will have these conversations with will think it's natural and not a problem, but maybe others you need to be more weary of. Maybe there's no black and white answer to this, there's a lot of gray zones, because it depends on the sensitivity of the content of what is being discussed and who is dominating the conversation and what is emerging from the conversation and how you end up using that, for what end, and how it reflects back upon that person in relation to their own conception of self that emerges from the exchange... because like you said, we are all experiencing this formation of selves in relation to each other all of the time, right? Because all of the selves are different all of the conversations are different, not just in their subjects but in their subjectivities, so that the moral problem will always be unique to the specifics of the context.

Yes but again, how the material will be used shouldn't matter... you're right, although I don't know if I agree, but is that the point or is there another? The point that you have nailed is the eternal arising of a moral/ethical dilemma, and I'm not interested in debating the details of the dilemma so much as in recognizing that there is not escaping it, except with you perhaps because of our unique conversational contract based on love and honesty, but not in the public or publicized social arenas where moral and ethical fibers become justifications for violence, revolutions, and political imperatives.

No, that makes sense.

So moving on, I'm now in a room speaking to myself, and after all of this shit about how to think and what am I thinking about and now I'm reading a book and now I can't focus because I'm thinking about thinking while I'm trying to absorb the thoughts off of the page... well, I receive some of my best ideas while reading books but not from the books themselves, they are not from the authors voice but from my own-in-relation to the content spread out before me, yet another unique self - one of my selves - which forms in relation to complex relations. Here I am talking to myself, and it's the first time in recent memory when I just let myself lay down on a sofa to record myself talking - usually I go for a walk, and it's outside, and there's movement involved, which means there is a general tempo or velocity between two points, and I usually come at the experience with a question (like an oracle) which works itself out through the movements, not to the point of solution but unravels the emotional tapestry with a fine tooth comb of reason, to outline a trajectory of how to act. It is very common that the alleviation to my mental constipation is found through pure movement, to get outside and move around! Not to exercise physically per say, but to coordinate thinking with the body. When I speak to myself, especially when it's concerning something personal, something that I wouldn't normally speak to someone else about - truly exteriorizing something that perhaps would have forever been kept interior - like laying on a psychoanalysts sofa, in their office, with the monocled analyst behind you taking notes, with me as the classic Freudian neurotic staring up into space letting the words flow out. Better to be a schizophrenic out for a walk than a neurotic on the sofa. And that's what it feels like! I feel like a neurotic on my own sofa analyzing myself, which is very hard, not because of the process of analysis so much as the forum it transpires within. I have an aversion to it, I think that I don't want to do it, that I don't trust it perhaps, that I don't want to transmit my inner contents out into the void regardless of what it is...

I'm just curious now... so when you have conversations with different people different selves emerge, so who is the self that emerges when you are speaking out loud to yourself?

A self that is based in narrative...

Are you... do you think that you or someone would become more aware of themself, of your self, of your true self I suppose, if they talked to themself out loud rather than just thinking because the language makes it real time, lays it bare, makes it present where it has to be dealt with, can't be concealed, made conscious by moving it out of the body and creating it to exist within the space that you're in, making the word present...

It's not moving out of the body, it's not moving. Whatever that sense is that we're calling self, it's not moving but is always in the same place wherever that place is and having different conversations with different people in different times in different environments, the self is always there, just there, wherever that there is said to be. The voice projects beyond the body, but not the self. I don't think it's about the body.

Ok, not the body... I'm just thinking that the persona that we are in relation to others, the projection of how others see us or how we see ourselves while we are having a conversation is having an effect upon the conversation - as you said - so how is it effecting or affecting the conversation when you're not talking to anyone else, just yourself? You're only talking to yourself, so maybe it's not related to the body but you're not mirroring to another person so you have to pull everything out of your own mind, to verbalize it, and how is that affecting the thoughts? You don't have a sounding board, there's no one there to bounce back, so where is your persona in this situation?

Well remember the problem, the problem of consciousness and the content of the opera. I'm trying to think clearly, so speaking to myself is an attempt to speak clearly, to articulate legibly, but not oriented to another, not a conversation maybe and certainly not a dialogue, but an externalization of the inner monologue. When I just sit here and think to myself "ok I'm going to think now, I'm going to think about the opera, I'm going to think about doing something, I'm going to think about making something," it gets all scrambled. I don't need a conversational partner to externalize these thoughts and make them easier to handle, and this is admittedly a much different process than if I were to create an other out of myself, to divide my unified conception of self into multiple selves that I could alienate myself from in order to conduct a schizophrenic dialogue. I would prefer to avoid distinctions like "in" and "out" because it's all in, it's all in there, the idea and the consciousness and the language, it's all infused within all the bodies and all the atmospheres, it resonates across thresholds and skins and framing mechanisms... I don't know where it's located, I can say that - and that's besides the point I think - because whatever is happening when I'm alone, silent, in a room, trying to have a clear thought with myself, to externalize it onto the page, it doesn't work so well. When I start speaking... maybe you think it has to do with the body, or just with the mouth, or specifically with the tongue and the teeth and the throat, or an emanation of a deeply seated soul resting down on the gut or throbbing out of the central nervous system twitching and aching with a sensual desire to amplify an internalized natural body-language, with moisture in watery vocaled chords of music or the dew accumulating in the air of the room, a voice echoing off against the other reflective walls, or maybe of an obsession with the image of the body, an evocation of Narcissus staring into the infinite mirror pool of self only to fall in to the silvery mercurial abyss to drown within a self-same idealism confined to the frame of the rippling pool.... whatever the fuck it happens to be, I know that it's different, and I'm not saying that it's better or more clear. I'm telling you it's not more clear, I know that it's not, not as clear as it seems when I speak to you which is part of why I love speaking with you, because of this feeling of clarity, even if it is only a feeling. And that in itself becomes intriguing, when we begin to recognize and isolate the people that we like - our friends and lovers selectively chosen because of the selves the evoke within or without of us - are those that we recognize an idealized self forming in relation to, which puts a kind of disorienting parallax spin upon sociology.

Yeah, so you love... ok, you're not saying that you're not in love with me but you admit that you are in love with the self that you are when you're with me.

It's definitely a part of it.

Completely. That seems factual, a truth. It's how we orient ourselves to everything and everyone around us. It's how I read you through my self.

I don't really know. I don't think that I can just lay down on the sofa, hit record, and have conversations with myself for hours a day and pretend to make any kind of progress. I think these process needs to happen sometimes, if only as a necessary failure (as all of my activities seem destined to be), and that has merits in its own right in order to slowly unfold this understanding of it being but one aspect of a much larger self-image that I need to remember, an image compiled of all of these voices singing in harmony, a chorus of my self attuned in relation to this problem of isolating a single voice from the ensemble. There's a page in the opera which outlines these 9 or 10 voices, the caste of characters, delineating a hierarchy... so when you were implying a minute ago about the possibility of a more authentic self, that when one is speaking to their self is a unified self addressing a doubling or mirror image of its self, or is it one self divided into two or multiple, reflected or refracted, is it one positive and one false, a series of others... all of these possibilities of character types can be contained within a single subjectivity, not people but entities, parts, voices, subjects, or selves that one or "the one" can address, to speak to or orient in relation to... so if you can follow me there, now when we refer to the self it's not so much as a truth, a source or origin or genesis from which all aspects of identity emanates. If we can identify 5 different ways that you can address yourself: there's writing in your journal, there's texting on a phone which is such a different form of writing that we could say it's a unique form of address, there's your way of speaking in person, the way of conducting your voice through an international video chat meeting without the presence of the body... all of these different ways of exteriorizing yourself, interiorizing other selves, and storing modulated nuances of self transpiring or oscillating in between, forming a kind of relational matrix: an operatic scale of engagement. It's disorienting.

Is it? Any more than... you're just pinpointing stuff which is part of normal human existence, highly relatable if not completely obvious. It just sounds disorienting because you're pointing at it. Does it make it more confusing or chaotic because you're pointing at it than what it is?

TW: Well what is it? I think it's a realm of ideas that everyone will be able to interface with, even if or because of the fact that it is so essential to the human experience of subjectification and communication, of conceptualizing relationships, modeling them into diagrams, stirring up moral and ethical dilemmas - but I'm not interesting in answering them, only in proposing them, in understanding the territory from which they arise, understanding the fundament which supports them, which supports us for the duration of our contemplation of existence. I want to understand the conceptual dilemmas at work here, and if they have been attended to then alleviate my confusion, and if they are untenable then to draw a frame around their void and give it a name - even if it's akin to zero - in order to nullify its negative reverberations into an aesthetic (or anesthetic) container of art. There's so many problems, and it's those that I'm after.

You're using your "self" as the... it's like it would be rude of you to provide answers to these problems you are uncovering if you want your project to speak to a wider audience, or if you want to encourage them to recognize themselves in the work, to be drawn into it, to relate. If you answered the questions you would be answering your own questions, that you posed, and perhaps barring others from comprehending the significance, making it seems like it's just an intricate system for you to relate to your self or your own "selves."

The answers are dangerous, falling into the realm of ideology, define modernity and all of its death drive repetitious horror shows. Look at how fucked up that was.

Having an answer is so defined by the time, space, and context that the answer appeared in - through the conversation or the book or the experience as you were discussing - and so for myself, I was trained through my education to treat an answer like a mathematical solution, to believe that the answer is factual, but now I'm thinking that the answer is becoming secondary to the question, or perhaps only maintains its sense by serving as a platform for the asking of more questions.

Answers must be provisional, flexing and folding depending on that context. That truth is temporary, subjective, and malleable seems to be the only truth, yeah? Answers are always rooted in situational contexts organized between two or more individuals. The only real truths are social truths, which is not to say objective. If I can make a statement that you wouldn't refute, we can utilize it as a truth for the extent of our conversation, or at least until you choose to focus upon it and refute it again.

Truths are containers, useful for the time of the exchange so that the conversation can continue without overflowing. It's difficult if truth is applied towards a manifestation of reality that isn't flexible, can't be unraveled, an illusion of being fixed, as if it is the only possible truth, which feels like a lie.

Lies are based in deception.

Presenting something as a truth seems like deception, like a lie.

If it's presented as truth maybe, but lying implies this moral agenda, of right and wrong, so who is at fault in the instance of this spoken lie, of the deception of truth, the speaker of the truth that believes it to be true or the listener who accepts it to be true without questioning its fundament in return? The responsibility must be shared it seems. It may be deceptive to present an absolute truth, but you can't blame the naive for they know not what they do. This precisely seems to be the importance of this operatic questioning of the fundament of knowledge, of self, and the meta-discourse of choral voice thinking about thinking: to make obvious that any proponent of truth is deceiving themselves so that our self - even our collective or social self - can no longer be deceived. We can blindly trust in transcendental truths, but we also can't blame those spreading transcendentalism for they know not what they do and we would all be hard pressed to pass blame within the culture of ideological propagation. I'm not interested in truth personally, but in philosophy, of the love of the search for the wisdom underlying the asking of question unfurling into better questions. This is not the fostering of intelligence, not of articulating or clarifying any particular truth, but in cultivating thought through a process of love for wisdom. I'm totally uninterested in science because science is totally invested in truth.