I believe that our ideas live on beyond our corporeal existence. Our ideas, in effect, are the ideas of those before us, and in this same way, their ideas—our ideas—continue beyond ourselves through their passage to other people, or their dissemination throughout the world by way of various mediums. In The Raw Shark Texts we encounter “Eric Sanderson one” and “Eric Sanderson two” whose ideas live on post-metaphorical death, and eventual literal death. However, Eric’s ideas, memories, feelings, and “self” exist by and by through himself—initially through printed or written text sent to himself by his first self (Eric Sanderson one) and finally as a conceptual self. The survival of his mind—however conceptual and tricky to grasp—is interesting to me because it is contained. While I wouldn’t say that our ideas are diluted as they pass through time to others, they are shared—tiny (non-aggressive), conceptual fish, if you will, that swim back into the stream of a collective human reality, if not consciousness. Eric’s course of, we’ll call it “self-preservation”, raises a question: is reality shared of personal? can people separate their own realities from the collective reality of humanity? All have wondered at one point or another in some form another if the secret truths or memories inside our heads mean anything at all if they’re only known to us– does a tree make a sound if no one is around to hear it, do we matter to the world if we’re heard only by a few? Eric seems to answer the question with his belief that only he and Clio Aames matter—with the conviction that she is all that matters to him, to his existence.
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The Raw Shark Texts: Crazy Conceptual, but a Classic Maybe-Existential Work of Art/Awesome
04 Wednesday Dec 2013
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