Every reader find themselves. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, readers would perhaps never have seen in themselves.
PROLEGOMENON:
Your answers — anyone's answers — may become for another reader just such an ātmanopticon: in our world where nothing ever happens the same way twice, truth resides in the reconstruction of events without precedent.
A practice/sādhana: the questions invite an unguarded, thoughtful state; and what the answer at times just astonishes in describing some interior (அகம்) — a subject, the grammatical I, a formulation of truth.
Return after enough time and (a species) amnesia to respond again. The earlier answers belong to someone else; the one answering now is provisional too. Another self emerges in the collision of the past in the present from memories we create and their associations. This is not a tragedy. It’s more like the weather.
The questionnaire keeps their record — so many persons in succession, bearing one name: I.
Insofar as recognition adds nothing new or points out something that hasn’t always been known it can be captured well by double-dipping ‘I’, ‘I-I’ sees the ones already given — who you were when you answered then. Who answers now, who will — as one light regarding itself.
Find who sleeps.
That is what this instrument is for.
a gate:
we meet @ this gate:
What follow are not intended to be polite questions. Consider this an ice-breaker, and these are holes in the ice. Answer honestly, spontaneously and something cold touches the feet.