I, Amphorum
… red, gray, and other encounters across space
and time …
Like a container—or several—spilling over at the rim, I fill up.
My only desire? To empty all these vessels that I am!
The urge to reunite … to recombine … to rejoin, overwhelms me. But which me?
What me?
Why, when, and where me?
All the famed journalistic double-U questions, turning around to bite the reporter.
Double-U. Double-yous. Identical, yet different. For one of me knows things the other doesn’t.
One has seen clay jars from shipwrecks two thousand years old. Mother- or whore-goddess figures that were molded out of river mud twenty millennia ago. Wedgelike symbols, pressed by hand, way back when hands first learned to scribble thoughts …
One has seen all those things. The other me writhes, wondering where all these images are coming from. Not memories, but fresh, immanent, experience in the raw and actual.
I know what Maharal is doing. How could I not know?
Yet the aim of all this torment remains obscure. Has he gone mad? Do all dittos face the same fate when they become ghosts, cast adrift without the anchor of a soul-home?
Or is he exploring a new way for the Standing Wave to vibrate? Multifariously.
I do feel less like an individual actor. More like an entire cast. An arena.
I am a forum.
Ack! This isn’t at all like the familiar sensation of inloading we all know—passively absorbing memories as a soul-wave replica flows back to combine with the original. Instead, two waves seem to stand in parallel, gray and red but equal in status, both interfering and reinforcing, jostling toward mutual coherence …
And droning in the background, like a bad tour guide or a hated lecturer, the voice of ditYosil tells me, over and over again, that observers make the universe. Oh, he teases and taunts with every rising throb of the salmon reflex, urging me to “go home” to a self-base that longer exist.
“Answer me a riddle, Morris,” my tormentor asks.
“How can you be in two places at once, when you’re not anywhere at all?”