This writer is not really Johan Sigg so much as it is an entity positioned at a curious angle looking in on a man whom other people call Johan Sigg. “I” am certainly controlling that body called Johan but “I” am not Johan. “I” am not quite sure what “I” mean to say when I use the term “I” nor the term “me,” but in this place there is a dominant (possibly erroneous) concept called “individuality” that must be maintained by a stultifying wave of ubiquitous words that “I” will have to use if this is to make any sense. The I-Me thing has come up against many problems while directing Johan but has managed to convince him to write something to convince “myself” that I should not just throw in the towel with this whole “Johan” business. I’ve been assigned an extremely defective entity and would like a better one, please.

Allow me to describe my mostly unfavorable position. I’m at an odd angle just above his nose, which I can’t see the bottom of. I can’t see where the two sides of the nose meet either; there is no top to the mountain. I can’t see his lips unless I instruct the body to stick them out and risk misleading others. I have a good view of his hands and upper torso and usually, depending on certain obstructions, his lower torso and pelvis and the two appendages that he uses to move around according to my instruction. Early in the shift I had to coach Johan out of the “crawling” stage and into the proper emulation of “walking” according to the performance of the other vessels, who at the time were much larger than him. In retrospect, it’s astonishing that I ever got him to do anything at all. The equipment of the Johan-creature isn’t top-notch. Most of it the I-Me thing was just handed, or as a fellow named Heidegger called it, “thrown,” and I-Me can’t recall who or what “threw” it over or if somehow nothing at all “threw” it over and it’s all just a big stupid joke that happened to happen to happen and will eventually diffuse its energy into a black dome^[1] of nothingness. The possibility of this being only an empty illusion is often what keeps Johan from doing things, as it implies that this whole “life” business is just an immense nuisance. “I” was just minding my own business and then someone threw me a disintegrating plastic hammer and told me to hammer nails with it and wouldn’t tell me why or what for and yet, here “I” am doing it with extremely shoddy equipment.

Johan’s equipment is a perpetual protest against its own existence and is in a state of constant self-destruction. Pieces of it come off and fall away every minute. Even laying aside the tangle of lint and wires that is his brain,every pore and orifice secretes a different sort of globulous ooze that has to be wiped away or snipped off or pushed out intermittently and has little-to-no immediate value. All that this vessel does is consume what is outside, take it inside and then excrete it unpleasantly back outside. And it’s all for so little. He isn’t very productive in the sense that “I”(the “I / Me thing”)understand the word “productive” according to the other vessels. Most of the entities, actions and concepts in this place are categorized according to two basic appellations: “good” or “bad.” There is a consensus that being “productive” or “creative” is generally good, unless the creation is the creation of something destructive, because de-struction is almost certainly bad unless the de-structionis the destruction of something itself de-structive. And as any reasonably intelligent I-Me who knows where to properly dispose of its feces will know, those de-structivecreations tend to destroy themselves. Johan does the “creative” bit a fair amount. The vessel is slowly improving, but in the same amount of “time” (the word for the advance and depletion of the I-Me’s allotment in this place) that Johan has taken to improve, other vessels that “Johan” has known for years have improved themselves much, much faster than he has. He tends to imbibe more alcohol and marjuana than he should and will do so in direct defiance of “me.” “I” am able to understand his reasons for ignoring “me” but I can also see through to the end of this whole joke and the massive project of self-actualization, individuation, repentance, karma and dharma etc. that this short shift entails and I don’t know if Johan is going to make it.

This shift operates according to a local law called “time.” According to an expired vessel named Kant, time doesn’t really exist except in the mind, that is, it is created by the equipment and for the equipment. Space and time are representations of the exterior world that are conditioned into subjective data by our senses. Nothing “moves” without time; in fact nothing can ever change at all without it and supposedly that’s how the nothing became a something in the first place. The “I-Me” can’t tell at what point in this “time” business we are currently located- I got Johan to write some of this yesterday, but now it’s today, and soon enough today will be yesterday and a week ago, which is just yesterday measured by seven. Johan is only able to perceive this time stuff because the I-Me (that is, me) is held inside a vessel equipped with the proper tools for time’s measurement. An expired vessel named Chuang Tzu used to refer to his body as his “companion” and would use the very same word to refer to his friend or his wife, meaning that each were equally adjacent to him as “companions.” So maybe this “self” thing that the “I-Me” appears to be akin in substance to is the pilot of the “companion” called the body. But nowadays that isn’t so popular a theory. Most vessels enjoy the belief of “materialism” today, though they seem shy when asked to thoroughly examine the implications. Materialism appears to assert, at bottom, that there is nothing as companion to the companion, there isn’t even really a “self,” it’s all just an illusion Johan’s brain-body made up as a defense mechanism so that it would survive, and that is what “I” am: a self-illusion- a tale told by an idiot. A fellow named Wittgenstein concluded something like this in the middle of his book the Tractatus: “A composite soul would not be a soul any longer.” The thing is, that vessel later went back on his Tractatus and also said that “Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”^[2] So – damn it! We’re back with our original question- why exactly should “I” remain on the job, especially if “I” am supposed to be an illusion? The words of a certain expiration named Emile Cioran echo: “For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery.”^[3]

Another expired vessel named Freud has been somewhat successful in identifying several components of the brain he named the “ego,” the “id” and the “superego,” all of which seem to influence the I-Me thing but none of which appear to be this proverbial ghost in the machine, the “spirit” or “animating principle,” as another vessel named Aristotle has called it. The situation is much more complicated than it should be. We have several parts: the commanding spirit beyond (which may be an illusion, according to the materialists), the cooperating brain (through which, and, from a materialist point of view, also from which this instruction is translated into action), and the obeying body-self, which paradoxically includes the repulsive, course pound of flesh that named itself the “brain” and is also likely an illusion, but a self-illusion. The expired vessel Kierkegaard said that man is a “self-relating self”^[4] and a lesser vessel named Kojeve^[5] reiterated, “Man is self-consciousness.” But why must I participate in this whole interaction in the first place- I, I? We are now onto what “I” originally wanted to know about Johan- how exactly is it that I’ve been able to convince him to do anything at all, even with the help of the others who love him, if I’m just this brain controlled by the id and the will to power- and who exactly am I convincing by convincing “my” “self?” Myself? Why do I need to do that?

The other vessels I’ve met here describe an inscrutable concept called “will” that I have to dig up from inside and put to use with this Johan character. Sometimes I just can’t find enough of the stuff and I have no idea where it comes from, just as I have no idea where “I” came from while where Johan came from is easily determined.

Things are so complicated here even though they are actually simple. The other vessels have simply found it better to make everything complicated; it is easier for them because they have been fitted with tools that aspire to the complex. There’s an immense concept in this place that supposedly spurs the “will” stuff into being, and the I-Me has noticed that when it is applied sincerely, things sometimes get better. It’s often called “faith” in this place, but there’s a conjunctive imperative that says that the “faith” must be connected to another source. It must be faith “in” something but the faith can only be faith if there is very little objective evidence for the veracity of this something. If it were clear and obvious, it would not really be faith. Usually the faith is placed in an ultimate external source called “God” via transmission through the teachings and practices of the most successful vessels from across the globe- Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Zoroaster or Confucius. Though technically “expired” many insist that these vessels are not expired at all. One vessel named Huxley concludes that they are each different expressions of the same perennial truth and person that the pattern of the universe corresponds to.

The departed vessel Buddha says that the watcher and the watched are one and the same. His kindred spirit Jesus said that “we” are not even supposed to be here- we are not of this world but have been chosen out of it, and for this the world hates us.^[6] This writer, then, is decidedly not Johan, but neither is Johan, as Johan is only an invention, but not too bad an invention. This “body” that I was thrown is just defective equipment. It is a raft set adrift on the stormy sea. But Johan- if he chooses to listen to me- is not a raft but a massive, triple-masted nine-sailed man-of-war, and he will keep sailing.

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^[1] A phrase from the Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat.

^[2] From Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value.

^[3] From The Temptation to Exist.

^[4] The Sickness Unto Death.

^[5] Opening to Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.

^[6] John 15:18-20