Hyperbolic Heteronyms

For Fernando Pessoa

I am many. I was born a litter, multiplying so quickly that my mother ran out of names. (I’ve resorted to addressing myselves by shifty pronouns – You! I say to one of my nameless selves – what kind of mischief are you up to now?) Since my first breath, I haven’t stopped proliferating, my lungs a factory of souls. The mere touch of another impregnates me; strange hybrids are constantly springing out of my orifices. I used to exhaust my energy naming myselves, but I’ve given up. Now I call each new arrival Anonymous n, like the forgotten authors of medieval treatises. Bestiary after bestiary is being overrun by my chimerical incarnations and mutations. There are so many of me I’ve gotten lost in the multitude – there’s no one to say I anymore.


Damon Disparu

Man is an animal that almost exists.

Life, a breathtaking disappearing act.


Salvador Searcher

He owed all his accidental discoveries to his obsessive pursuit of what wasn’t there.


Jäger Freud

He believed he was pursuing happiness, but in actuality he was employing all his human cunning to evade it.


Socrate d’Espinosa

I am not conscience-stricken but consciousness-stricken.

The more I know myself, the less I know myself.


Addie Murphey

Unable to control my selves’ promiscuous propagation, I give in – Go forth and multiply I tell them, and they do.


Vaughn Verso

What is singular about the body is its irreducible plurality. Like the universe, it is always turning into something else.


Debbie Doherty

The only time I forget my paralyzing fear of dirt is when I’m dirtying myself.


Frank Feigner

Fancying himself a poet, he pretended to be in a perpetual state of astonishment. (Sometimes he really did astonish himself.)


Jon Undonne

An artist of incompletion, I send out my unfinished self to seek what’s unfinished in you.


Madeleine Middleton

My favorite beginnings and endings are those that throw me into the middle of things,


Carl Cutter

I’ve always felt my ideas deeply, like sharp objects cutting me up inside.


Cyrus and Cynthia Cezanne

Suffering too is made of cones, spheres, and cylinders - they can be reassembled into a shapely joy.


Martin X

In a crisis it’s hard to tell if things are falling together or falling apart, but it doesn’t matter, because the ecstasy is in the falling.


Medusa Gorgonzola

Too much self-knowledge is petrifying.


Tricky Triphop

The only way I’ve ever learned anything about myself is by pretending to be someone else.


Simon Inocencio

What is knowledge without innocence?

Living is a secret and fluid state of being ignorant of things and of oneself – and the only style of life appropriate and comforting to a wise person.




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