All his life a man fought with numbers. He was not sure whether it was all one big thing, as some of the mystics who sat atop poles while looking quite scrubby insisted, or an infinite number of somethings. 

One could easily imagine these somethings pullulating into more somethings through anabolism, catabolism and other shifty means of swarming like rampant abstraction and the “naming disease.” Just devious. And was each frame of cognition in his brain another actual thing? More deviousness from the expansionary universe. 

He wasn’t sure whether he was one being or a series of parts allowing him to experience a hallucination of oneness. Take my two hands, he thought. Clearly they imagine a mirror going down the center of my body making them reflections of each other. But as he counted his two hands, he noticed the ten fingers wriggling and thought, “They are starfish.” 

No wonder they had always been so voracious at gripping things. Look at how they naturally take to the lids of cans and just surround them. It’s exactly the way a starfish attacks a poor clam. He imagined his starfish had evolved to lose their vestigial teeth. Maybe that was why his palms sweated so much, to aid in the digestion of things which they held? This was philosophy of the first water coming to him!

Knowing now his hands to be starfish, he suspected they wanted to leave him, to return to the primordial sea. He could take an axe and cut one off, but then how would he sever the second one? Only one hand could be freed. Which one to choose? Which one did he love more? He would have to ask someone else to oblige him if this emancipation of his hands from the tyranny of his body was to be fair and total freedom.

But then he thought better of it. Better a test. If he were to chop off just one finger, it would eventually regenerate. It would surely flee to the breast of mother ocean. It would smell the salt air of the surf through open windows of the man’s house. It would wriggle homeward. Being a starfish and all. It would be proof of concept. So he would do that. He lifted the axe high and brought it down like the French Revolution on his left pinkie. Liberté, égalité, fraternité! The pinkie bled on the table like the future of freedom always does. But it remained surprisingly inert. 

When the finger did not make furiously for the sea, which creamed against rocks just beyond the man’s backyard, when the severed thing just lay there on his wooden table in a wee foetal curl, he wept. The pain was a howling wolf inside him wanting to ululate, but the man didn’t let it, it was everywhere but in that severed finger. Look at it. Such peace in that severance for the pinkie. The curl of finger appeared to be peacefully sleeping its way towards some theoretical future existence. It had been restored to some anterior existence, some condition of patiently waiting to be born, to be painfully alive. This all hurt the man, physically and philosophically. The innumerate being wept some more, and when his tears reached his mouth he tasted the sea. What a traitor the sea was, not to take back its own children!

He spent a number of days waiting for the finger to regenerate. Many days he would think he felt it finally budding like spring crocus, but it was always just that “phantom finger” sensation. Nothing came. 

He wasn’t sure whether to feel vindicated or betrayed by the finger, which he now kept in a small reliquary box with salt to help it become a little mummy. He planned on donating it to some institute of philosophical studies. There had been no philosophical proof. No Q.E.D. It was all quantum uncertainty. Because, viewed from one angle, the refusal of the severed finger to make for the sea disproved the singularity and starfishness of his hands; or, at least, it had disproved it for one finger of one hand. Further experiments could be attempted. But, on the other hand (pun excused) had the finger not implanted the suggestion within the man to free it? Had not its willful perverseness of being separate led him to lift the axe and bring it down? Its ability to survive independently of its hand and regrow its organic mothering form was irrelevant. His ability to regrow it was irrelevant. It was the gesture of will that mattered. So it is with humans in society. A human severed or ostracized from its society can regrow a different society, starfish-like. These might be real flesh beings or spectral “phantom limb” people, if one prefers reading books. So literature is related to the regenerative powers of the lowly starfish. So the books in the British Library are all just late evolutionary variants of the Asteroidea. Thenceforth, the man took some small consolation in knowing his pinkie’s contribution to the holistic picture of humankind in that grand pageant we call natural history.