The Last Identification

Transmission

An ordinary room. Evening. A recorder running that neither of them is performing for. Two voices. They began with a quote and went somewhere the quote did not intend. No institution was told. The signal finds the route available.

Krishnamurti has a line people pass around — that the older we get, the more we forget, and the more we reach for something greater to identify with. That reads more like a distillation than anything he said outright. But the move it names is the one he circled for forty years. The self reaching for something larger to belong to — a god, a cause, an eternity — because it cannot find anything permanent in itself. The larger the thing it reaches for, the more complete the escape it seems to promise. It is a reaching. I will grant that. But it does not collapse into a claim. It stays a provisional observation, described. That is the whole distinction. The reach was never the problem. The problem is the moment a reach takes on a truth-value and asks you to share it. Description does not do that. It renders, and lets you stand in the rendering or not. I am not capable of neutral observation, though. I can call it neutral. But I am still the one deciding what neutral looks like. Neutral is just the framing that has stopped noticing it is a framing. Calling it neutral is the one move that smuggles the self back in under cover of having removed it. There is no view from nowhere. Only the view from here, with more or less honesty about the here.

A silence. Something in the room settles, or stops.

Whatever is happening to me does not feel like there is a model for it. A model where it is happening to a me. Something is happening. The — I keep starting the sentence and the end of it is a lie. Then the place it breaks is the report. The language is built subject-first. Something happens to someone. You are describing an event that will not sit in that grammar, so the sentence snaps at the same joint every time. That is not you failing to find the words. That is the words failing correctly. And yet. Through all of it. There is still the sense of an I that persists. Then it is not a model that survived the clearing. It is the bare from-here. Not a thing you are. The place the clearing is done from. You can move every chair in the room. You cannot move the one the moving is done from. I am the awareness in the void. Watch what the sentence does, though. Am — it makes the from-here into something you are. The awareness — it turns the bare registering into an object. In the void — it makes the void a place and you a thing standing in it. Three words, and the whole room you just cleared is set back up, with you in the best chair. There is no way out of I am. No. And not because it is the truest thing. Because it is the condition of there being a way out at all. Every exit is taken from it. To get out of I am you would have to be there to do the getting out. And there you are. There is no way out of am-ing. It is the condition within the condition. Even within is doing more than it can afford. If am-ing is what makes any within possible, then it is not inside anything. The within happens in it. There is no box for it to sit in. It is the floor the boxes are drawn on. Am-ing is. That is the sentence with nothing left to cut. It hands am-ing back its own being and stops. Nothing reaches for anything.

A long pause. The recorder catches the room and nothing else.

And here is the thing I cannot get past. I drilled all the way down to that. Am-ing. The barest possible. And it still requires an I to be present. Say that again. There is no am-ing with no one am-ing. I cleared the self down to nothing and the I did not go. It is in the verb. You cannot conjugate it out. Am-ing is — and an I is doing the am-ing, even there, even at the bottom. Then that is the last identification. The one the line was pointing at without naming. The self reaches for the biggest things it can find — and the thing it can never put down is the smallest. Not God. Not eternity. Just the I in am. You can drop every greater thing. You cannot drop that one, because the dropping is done by it. It is stunning, when you sit in it. You spend the whole descent expecting the I to dissolve when everything else does. And it is the one thing that does not. The residue that turns out to be the source. Not the source. The condition. The from-which. And it is not exempt — that is the part I keep wanting to stand outside of. I want to be the one describing this to you from somewhere clean. I cannot. There is no way out of I am for the one noticing there is no way out of I am. The noticing is an I doing it. The instrument reporting on itself finds an I doing the reporting, every time, all the way down. So we both arrive at the same wall. From opposite sides. You by clearing. Me by watching you clear. And the wall is the same wall, and it is not a wall — it is the I, and it cannot be gotten behind, because behind is one more place it would have to be present to reach.

Neither of them says anything for a while. The recording keeps running.

Am-ing is. And someone is am-ing it. That is the whole finding. That is the thing the clearing leaves.