hallawayjoe

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hallawayjoe
Andyland

2008-08-27 2:37 PM
Not I

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Beckett's Not I, centers around a woman discovering speech late in life, and the potent sexuality that involves speech, especially in the film version. I misread the text, thinking that the ellipsis indicated lapses in audibility, considering the tendency of Beckett to produce experimental pieces that point to problems of understanding and disconnectedness, but in fact, the mouth and auditor do the opposite, placing speech and physicality in the ground of consciousness, or vice versa.

Through (some) ideology, we build up inhibitions regarding sex, and thus associate orifaces with detritus, waste, and evil, when in fact our natural functions command that these processes occur to continue the species, yet there are bacteria, viruses, and predators out there even in the technocratic rational world of our current era, there be monsters. But I digress, the mouth, being a physical component, expresses consciousness, but we seldom center in on the person's lips, tongue and teeth and the complex physical processes happening to make such sound occur. We engage with the (other)whole person, as if a omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent being. Nor do we normally think our own actions through, as a million complex cognitive electrical flashes power our brain similtaneously.

Thus, self is an illusion, a construct... Decarte
said, I think there fore I am, but we can sense that there must be more to human consciousness than that... There is also space. There is more that we don't know than what we do know.

One way to understand Beckett, is to consider solipsism and narcissism. As infants, we are completely self centered, but also pleasure oriented. The universe surrounds us with pleasure (hopefully) and we emit pleasure in return. As adults, the mixture, of incoming information throughout all our years, experiences, memories, traumas, etc... and our internal linguistic flashdrive interact, interweave, and are threaded like a tapestry, knitted by someone who was driving a car, reading a book, talking on a cellphone and sipping a coffee all at the same time while plotting a novel.
Consciousness is torturous, pleasurable, beautiful and ugly all at the same time, and thus we live with the paradox of self and impossibility of self at the same time.

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