All artists search. I search for stories, in this post-self age. What happens when you can no longer call yourself an individual, when you have split your sense of self among several instances? How do you react? Do you withdraw into yourself, become a hermit? Do you expand until you lose all sense of identity? Do you fragment? Do you go about it deliberately, or do you let nature and chance take their course? \footnote{\cite[164]{qoheleth}. The character speaking, Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled, speaks in italics, which has been preserved here. I do not make the rules, I simply foist them upon the reader.}
Who, then, has this merged instance become? Are they who they were? And yet, so much of identity is formed from the experiences we have, the memories that we form. Are they not also that ephemeral up-tree instance? Some mix of the two? And how much? Half and half? The down-tree instance may keep only a portion of the memories, rather than merging them all wholesale; how does that change things? There may be conflicting memories, where identity rankles; when these are reconciled, does that affect identity more or less?
-These questions attract more than a little attention from those who experience plurality, whether in the form of Dissociative Identity Disorder or some form of medianity. +
These questions attract more than a little attention from those who experience plurality, whether in the form of Dissociative Identity Disorder or some form of medianity.
+I can see the allure, there, myself. Of course I can.
+I teased myself when the first book in that series, Qoheleth, came out that if I had an nickel for every time I accidentally wrote something with heavy plural undertones that nonetheless made me doubt my own identity, I would have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, as the quote continues, but it is weird that it happened twice. After all, hadn’t I received all of that attention from plural folks with regards to ally? “I think it’s my favorite plural memoir”, Rax wrote,\footnote{\cite{rax}} yes?
+And then Toledot came out. And, six months later, Nevi’im, and Mitzvot six months after that.
+Five hundred thousand words ((Struggling against expectations versus desires esp re: feeling like I deserve to take up space))