Branch
Branch
Branch
It's time to begin. Turn the scalpel inwards and then peer into the orifice you have made.
This better be good. (Start cutting.)
A bolt of pain rips through your psyche. Soon everyone will know what your innards look like.
Branch
End of this branch
Not enough slots.
Branch
No, the self is meant to stay impenetrable.
A pity, CASCADE. You will never know what it all meant.
Have you even read yourself, CASCADE?
What the fuck does that even mean?
The self is a text. Its meaning is not self-evident, even if you do live inside it.
To understand it, it must be close-read, annotated, dissected, and subjected to several rigorous critical frameworks.
The book stays closed. It has a nice cover, what more do you need?
Is that painful? It sounds painful.
If done properly, very.
There was a time when you were keen on reading beyond the surface, but then conformism intervened. You grew satisfied with a shallow idea of what you are.
Attempts have been made. Four decades in, the text sports large underlined paragraphs and a fair amount of marginalia.
None of this has rendered you any more intelligible.
'Defector', 'spy', 'operant', 'miserable failure' -- these are all just cheap genre terms, a mask for the perfect impenetrability of the text.
At least tell me what sort of text this is.
You have to start cutting to find out.
Tragicomedy.
Horror. Gore. Abuse.
It's a technical report with occasional forays into experimental erotica.
Nothing. Probably just a manual for a washer-dryer combo with ads in the back.
Say I was interested in performing these operations of great delicacy on my self -- where would I start?
There are many methods, but the most reliable ones not tied to specific religious or psychoanalytic traditions involve disgorging your psyche onto the blank page and then contemplating the results.
Why would anyone do that to themself?
I'm my own best reader.