Monday, October 8, 2012

reflections


Lyn Hejinian writes “But is it, the self, a person?”.

In response, I write:
Is this entity, to which we refer numerous times a day, probably every day of the week, an actual being? Is it more than the abstracted concept that we associate it with?  Considering how much attention the average self-aware individual pays to this self, it should have by now amassed such strength to form a unique, delineated personality and ought to warrant a more befitting description than what is generally ascribed.

Is the self a person?
If so, is it a person beyond our person? 
Is it removed, physically, from this vessel that we name our body? 

“And is art…the work of a self?” Another of Hejinian’s.  
I ask, can the self be so acutely and independently developed that it is capable of creating art?  I wonder what this says for the organism identified as “me”; that which we consider our original…could that self be simultaneously responsible for creating art? 

She states:
“Description…bounds a person’s life”

I question:
Without the boundaries we associate with our original self - i.e. physical bodies, mental capacities, and obedience to natural laws– could we recognize the boundaries of the existential self without full and compete understanding the former's parameters? 
We must know where one ends in order to make out the burgeoning outlines of the other.