A Note To Those Who Would Diminish The Hermeneutic Possibilities of First Person Anything.

There is no first person, only first person.
-Hay Investment and Hay Speculation, 1931.

Some people say it is ridiculous to pen
first person narratives. What is a first
person narrative? Did not Bodhidharma
come out of Persia to install his legs
and arms on poles in the Mountains?
I am Stuart Hall writing something
called Notes on Deconstructing
"The Popular" (1981).

I got my first yukata in a mountain
hot-spring hotel, or onsen / ryokan,
in the Hakone' region of Japan, maybe
15 years ago. I looked for the name, or
link on google, but it escapes me. It
wasn't that far from Lake Ashi, a
lonely place near a haunted shrine.
William Howard Taft had stayed there.
It gave good service until recently
when its thin cheap cotton fabric
gave way, so I put it up in the closet.

Today, or rather these last few months,
I've enjoyed a new yukata, bought
by my wife from Japan on my
birthday, the 29th of August, and
the same dark blue indigo color which is
my favorite in clothing, and covered
in laughing Oni masks. It has
two different kinds of belting.

My conundrum is that, in
the morning when I clean my
French press, and fill my boiling
kettle, my sleeve tips often get wet,
as this, more traditional, and finer
silk patterned yukata, has longer
sleeves. There is a cord, traditionally,
that Samurai used to tie up their sleeves
when entering into battle. I feel sure
it has no formal name, but if it does,
I choose to believe it nameless.
A nameless instrument of contingency,
whose function is self-evident.

On this world, there is only first person.
There is only one person, but let its name
be Nameless G. Contingency, for I
feel that its gender is far too complex
to notate properly, for it is the mother-
father of all gender properties and gen-
derlessness, its tenderness being expressed
as complexity itself, and so that every
word's definition is in doubt, and every
thought a move to get out by which
a line is exuded through. All epiphen-
omenality is empty, for fullness lives
within it. Imagine a great gong
removing a force-field from a frozen
tsunami. Any image can be any thought,
any word can be a door to any dream,
any wordless, thoughtless form can elicit
infinite essays of tiny splattering raindrops
becoming ink, or panda-pandora, or candle
owl droppings aborted, the Horla.
Abolition has already been installed here.

My name is Ben Kafka, minister of
spitwads becoming Seafood.

Notice the blurred meander pattern strip passing behind his head. Freud says in his journals, neither the psychic, nor the somatic, evince complete uninterrupted sovereignty. And doesn't Taft seem bewildered. It looks as if he's thinking this phrase: "What the fuck is this, really?"