Möbius And Finding One's Self Oneself

Yesterday evening, Norma's blackboard invited me to reflect and decide if, after a day of cardiology tests, I was having fun yet. A simple question if you ignore the virgule --right-leaning slash mark-- which is actually a chive. In all languages, including French, one can distinguish between virgules and chives because only the latter casts a shadow. This is elementary grammar to my generation but is no longer taught and bears repeating. By such details one finds one's self.

The phrase "one’s self" is used in spiritual, philosophical and psychological description. Otherwise, "one’s self" can be replaced with the pronoun "oneself" except in possessive reference to a small mythical being --in which case, it's probably better not to mention "one's elf", even loudly on a cell phone in public. Why? Because it doesn't really compete with public cell-phone broadcasts like, "Where you at? No, where YOU at? I'm at the checkout line, buying that stuff FOR MY CONTAGIOUS INVERTED NIPPLE!"

Where this leaves one's self is debatable.

People who shout publicly on cell-phones are the biological equivalent of a geometrical enigma, the Möbius strip.

The Möbius strip is a surface with only one side. It was discovered independently by German mathematicians August Ferdinand Möbius and Johann Benedict Listing in 1858. This was a great coincidence, diverging only in subsequent disagreement between the two mathematicians over which side had been isolated. Möbius claimed the outside and Listing argued for the inside. They finally agreed it was neither but the model was named after the mathematician with the best left hook.

Cell-phone shouters seem only to have an outside, but their effectiveness in driving the rest of us inside suggests both geometrical planes coexist.

Two-sided people can use cell-phones too. Norma uses hers to converse very quietly with our children, who have grown up and scattered over the world, in the same gentle voice she used to hush them to sleep with when they were little. She does this in the evening while painting things blue.



While Norma was murmuring soporific phrases in the 1980s and '90s, lots of friends were questing off to India to find themselves. They would come back after a year or two, full of strange enthusiasms --meditation, abolition of self, gravity bathing (ok, I just made up gravity bathing)-- back to find their little ones had found other parents and their spouses reassigned. They had found themselves in search of themselves, but on the bright side they found a lot of Indians.

My personal search for myself is as it has always been. The sun sets. I set out to find it. On the way, I notice the elf is not an elf but a purple-capped gnome at the foot of Norma's slate. And what...whatever I was looking for: probably forgot and left it in the van.