Chan Alvarez’s Six Degrees of Separation: Act III is plucked from the pantheon of his work that ruminates on the subject parted from themselves. In his series of meditations on existential thought, Chan paints humanoid figures and leaves them full of holes, each black punctum a deliberate front, tendering them unrepresentable. Act III is different, as the assonance of innards in his three figures puts what matters most at stake. Jean-Luc Nancy, in his book Corpus, reminds us that any talk of the subject (the ego, the self) is always talk of the body, “[T]he ontology of the body is ontology itself: being’s in no way prior or subjacent to the phenomenon here.” It no longer suffices us to say that we are who we are because we think, but rather: we are who we are because the body is the bottom line. “Mouth and mind are the same,” Nancy wrote, “it’s always the body.” The figure in the center with their head bowed is a thesis of a greater hurt, that we never truly cut on our losses when it comes to any matter of the flesh. As when Roland Barthes, for example,  was left studying photographs of his mother after she passed away. “Photography thereby compelled me to a painful labor; straining towards the essence of her identity, (...) struggling among partially true, and therefore partially false.” (Loss is a strong tranquilizer to even the most stoic thinkers fettered to existentialism. “We are, despite our best intentions, stuck with essences, and essentialisms.” Peggy Phelan said in Unmarked. “And perhaps never more fully than when the body of the beloved has vanished.”) The wave of figures rushing in to console the one in the center means we have our work cut out for us, as co-inhibitors of the same plane with other bodies. It is maybe why Chan’s syntax of black holes is so recurring, to remind us that we have to keep filling each other up. I offer, then, as though it were a koan this haiku: