Playing Yourselves By Way of Celestial Mind Jazz

If the soul is the form of the body... Let's just say it can't be that cutandry if vital aspects of ourselves are not only located outside ourselves, but we ourselves are never an isolated, atomistic, and closed system (neither horizontally nor vertically).

I 'm not meself at all.

That phrase from Finnegans Wake just popped into my head. I googled it to find the exact wording and location in the book, and this Putz comes up (https://www.jstor.org/stable/25487153):

Joyce works various identities into each of his characters and lets them interchange, blend, and develop in a confusing choreography of permutations. A look at Adaline Glasheen's classic "Who is who when everybody is somebody else?"..., will show that a stable identity is hardly one of the indispensable features of Wakean characters.  

Yawn, one of the many guises of Shaun, puts it quite clearly in the inquest chapter, which is permeated with questions of changing forms, when he says, "I swear my gots how that I 'm not meself at all." 

[Extra credit: the sentence from FW continues after the ellipses as follows: "no jolly fear, when I realise bimiselves how becomingly I to be going to become." 

The author cites another passage that makes the same point about the dance of multiple subselves that merge into the ego, but which appear to decommission any stable mission or course we can claim for this random amalgamation:

Now let the centuple celves of my egourge... of all whose I in my hereinafter of course by recourse demission me -- by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in that identity of undiscernibles...]  

Coincidancelly, the next chapter in The Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self touches on this question of mission. As mentioned yesterday, the book is too dense for me to jump down every rabbit hole it opens up. 

Let's just say -- as we've said before -- that human beings are members of an oxymoronic species of unique individuals. Get it? I'm sure you do, but what is unique and unthreepeatable would seemingly constitute a species of one. 

Bailie quotes Balthasar to the effect that "Only when we identify ourselves with our mission do we become persons in the deepest, theological sense of the word."

Agreed. I think. A little hint, perhaps?

Christianity exists to help fallen creatures like ourselves discover the mission in the performance of which we fulfill the promise of personhood that is our birthright by becoming persons in the deepest theological sense of the word (Bailie).

Not sure if that was a hint or a rewording. Then again, I paused here, gazed off into the distance, and wondered how this might apply to me....

[...] 

For clearly, I am on a mission, FWIW. The proof is here in this post and in the previous 4,000 (or however many) posts of the past 18 years. Why am I doing this? What is the source of this compulsion, and what is the point, the prayoff?

Hmm. You're putting me on the spot. Fame? Right. Money? Eh, my needs are few, and the last thing I need is a few more. Status? What status? Women? Got one, and she's too much for one man but not enough for two. Shits & giggles? Yes, in a way. It's a peculiar form of entertainment, but I do find it amusing. 

No, it's a mission, and it is my mission. If I choose to accept it.

Okay, but what is the mission? 

I'll have to think about that. Perhaps if we keep reading, Bailie will give us another hint. 

The word mission can conjure up rather lofty images and not without reason. 

Quite true. Just tell someone you're on a mission from God, and gauge the laughty reaction. 

Christians qua Christians do not have careers; they have missions.

Say what you want about the blog, it is certainly the opposite of the word career. It's not a vocation but literally an abiding a-vocation, which is to say not-working, and for nothing. Playing then? Yes, in the sense of Letter I of Meditations on the Tarot. You can look it up: https://onecosmos.blogspot.com/search?q=The+Magician

Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play; make every yoke that you have accepted easy and every burden that you carry light!

Meanwhile, back to Bailie:

the central question for a Christian is: "By Whom am I called, and to whom am I sent?" The concept of the person cannot be located in the self or in the psychic inventory.

Quite true -- I looked down there and the shelves were pretty much bare by November 2005. That's when I gave up and just started making it up, but seemingly with vertical help. Or something. Whatever else this so-called mission is, it is

accompanied by corresponding responsibilities, among them the necessity of availing oneself of the grace without which those responsibilities cannot be met.

Balthasar:

its personal range may extend to the whole universe, depending on how far it is prepared to cooperate... 

The whole cosmos? You don't say. This sounds like a mission impossible. I suppose it is, in the sense that Without Me you can do nothing. You could say it's a light burden and an easy yoke, but someone has to do it, or at least I do, anyway. Apparently. 

All the world's a stage, but the play that takes place on that stage is both choreographed and improvisational (Bailie). 

Celestial mind jazz? Or am I just becoming meself after all?