The Splintering

Each of his men and women is at least several men and women, and his lovers learn that we can never embrace any one person at a time, but only the whole of an incoherence, the cluster of voices and beings that jostle in any separate self.

Harold Bloom on Robert Browning

The fragmented self was born of revolution,
First without then within.
Giant personages set free on the stage
Articulated the fury of the age,
Set free of divisibility.
The whole never to be delivered again.
A great cage was erected:
Motion driven in all directions
Till motive was impossible to read
Except as a refractory prism,
Interpreting and reinterpreting itself,
Dancing through the darkened self;
Projected onto shimmering screens,
Distant lights flickering in infinite diversity.