One and the Same, 26 February 2018

Perhaps the number one is as fictional
As all the rest, and there is no discrete whole
Of anything or everything. What is one?
If you mean the universe, the only one,
You don’t know its boundaries. If you mean
God, if you’re a mystical monotheist, you
Have to wonder whether God is the whole
Of God’s creation or a creator separate from it.
More humbly, not to say tractably, what is one
Of anything? There can be no one of something
Without, at least in human imagination of it,
Another. The endling, last of any species
Is one because attended by the ghosts of others.
By definition, one requires a difference. One
Can’t be coterminous, isomorphic with another
And still be one. We get addled when we think
Through this. Identical twins have been murdered
Because one soul cannot have two bodies,
Although now we’re content to count two souls
To one genome, even in a partly fused body,
So long as we get two persons, two heads.
We get addled, like I said. A one of something
Is a fiction. No two items are the same, else
They would not be two items, but no one item
Can be defined without the concept of another
Of the same. I’ll grant one a greater fiction
Than all the fictions that follow from it,
The infinite number lines in all directions,
But it is only the set of itself and at one
And the same time the set that includes nothing
But the empty set. Oh, the dolls we nest,
Knowing they can’t nest unless they’re changing,
Can’t nest unless they’re nearly the same.
Every one is the only one, and there is no one.