In just a short week, I’m off to Meet Factory to play around with some ideas about the expression of self and internal perspective. I’ve been thinking a lot in the lead up about some writing by Peter Sloterdijk, where he talks about the process of communicating the idea of the self to the external world as well as the conscious self. He describes this process almost like a spelunker going into a cave and shouting back out towards the mouth of the cave his observations of the cave’s interior. At a certain point, however, the voice of the spelunker is lost as he becomes perfectly engulfed by the cave.
I mulled this over a bit and decided that the self is a lot like a blackhole. We can observe with certain tools we have created for ourselves to gaze internally, but the closer we get to actually sitting at our center, the less information we can relay back to our conscious mind. To carry the analogy further: as we slip across the event horizon of self, we are no longer able to use constructs of a conscious self to report on what we’ve seen; information does not travel in the outward direction at this point. It also illustrates the idea that the self is something that sits outside of constructs like language. Something like language is a general tool for creating internal perspectives.
What I find interesting about this analogy is that it puts self in a relationship with death. Death is the other blackhole of our experience. A delineator of time after which we are not able to pass information back to some external world. (I guess there can be a long parenthetical here about ghosts, psychic visions, dreaming, etc., which I don’t think contradict the idea of a Death As A Blackhole, but each of these, if true, would be constructs, like language, which are used to give a perspective on the Event Horizon of Death, but which don’t report on the full experience of What Death Is).
So then life is the process of feeling the gravitational pull of self, before the inevitable gravitational pull of death taking over. And maybe the satisfying life is the life which falls weightless and free to death because of a perfect understanding of self.
