Sunday, November 16, 2008

There is never just one conscious experience; the minimum is two. An experience of dying is implied in the experience of living. The conscious body of experience is the explication of the implicit; the event named birth is non-simultaneous with the event named death. If the happenings of birth and death are abstractly simultaneous, there is no body of conscious experience; birth and death define the conceptual body of conscious experience.

The conscious body knows that it is going to die, but it does not know when. As Yeats explains in A Vision, there is no conscious experience of the points which constitute the limit called birth/death; consciousness is what lies between the points. It is the duration of consciousness that is problematic and open to question. What determines the limit of my endurance? Am I the master of my fate, or its slave?

My identity is a matter of time. It is constructed from time past, and deconstructed in time's slippage. Each sunrise I awaken, and rise up from the bed of dream and reconstruct myself. Absent a clock, I can't get out of bed. If I were to awaken to a world without clocks I would think I was still dreaming. In the absence of the ticking of the clock there is no way to measure the distance between inside and outside, no way to distinguish myself from the other.