Just what is shared

Just what is shared?  Just because I share a perspective with so many things, does not mean I rest content with understanding these things, or anything else.  Sharing can give rise to the utmost confusion, and is not a bed on which to rest and call the rest of our investigations quits.  I share a perspective with all living and all dead or inanimate things, with the dog roaming back and forth from the sun to the shade in the yard as much as the grasses he finds for a bed, as much as the bicycles he passes when he finally finds his cool or warm nest, as much as the PVC pipes for whatever human project stacked against one another with wood and other debris in a pile indistinguishable from clutter, but it does not mean I am these things any more than falling in love with any one of these things entails that I become the object of my love, no matter how intense the love this thing and I share.  There is still an ineradicable multiplicity, an indelible plurality, at the heart of things, a multiplicity or plurality that keeps division, separation, distance and the knife’s edge at each thing’s skin.  Unless, that is, I am at bottom multiplicity: then it seems indeed that I am all things, whether I wish this identity or not; that all things, insofar as they are multiple–and what individual thing is not, at bottom, multiple?–share in the essential multiplicity of all things.  But, thank you Nancy, for letting us not forget that, just as there is a need for the multiple when waxing on about the singular, so there is a need for the singular when arriving at the multiple.  Both concepts, as both realities, call for one another’s assistance in keeping the tapestry of existence a true tapestry, one with true woof and warp and distinct threads as much as oneness, rather than a tapestry fluttering desperately in our dreams, a tapestry of solid, seamless cloth or a tapestry where each seam bids us lose ourselves in it and forget that there is a cloth, that the seams go up to make one pair of shoes or one sweatshirt.

            We share, then, our being singular as much as we share our being multiple.  The singular does not merely pose as the obstacle to sharing, but is shared, just as our being multiple is shared.  We share, if we share anything, our plurally-singular being with one another.  And sometimes–all the time–we just don’t know where to begin with one another, where to get this confused sense that we share something–THE thing, the whole of it–off the ground.