.
A final note for Neil's appreciation. Then another scrap of fiction:
We brought in the female Jesuits from a parallel line. They wore plain black dresses that fell straight from their dog collars to their heels, and wore their hair cropped close. All of them, it seemed, were slim as
They were humorless, educated, and sure in their cause.
They were the most frightening ladies ever.
The fragment-opening is marked 10:46. So I wrote it in less than a minute.
Then another story opening, which I rather like:
It was a night of Stars and Snowflakes.
The small notation to the bottom left suggests that instead of cassocks the female Jesuits would probably wear pantsuits. They being no-nonsense types.
Finally, somebody’s suggestion that what we’d all like is destroy ourselves and replace ourselves with a new person exactly like ourselves in every way struck me as profound. It still does.
*
Back in the dark ages, the psychadelic mindfuck Aeon Flux had an episode all about the temptation of replacing oneself with a duplicate.
ReplyDeleteThough now instead of scrounging through out of print VHS tapes, apparently they're just all on the internet. What a world!
Perhaps I'm missing something but that seems like the very thing we would all least like.
ReplyDeleteTo be more precise: I can't think of another change that would make no observable difference in the world, yet would be more abhorrent to the great majority of people.
Now, if the offer were to destroy myself and replace myself with someone exactly like my own conception of myself, then we might have something to talk about.
ReplyDeletePhilosophical cartoons: didn't the National Film Board of Canada get there first? I seem to remember one about a mad scientist with his matter transporter/duplicator that--deliberately or otherwise--ran through the Derek Parfit Reasons & Persons scenarios. Genius!
ReplyDelete(An opinion not at all influenced by my last seeing the cartoon with a fellow philosophy grad student & skiffy head in the now distant neo-psychedelic days of the early nineties.)
If we needed a secular alternative to religion, I think meditation on "problem cases" for personal identity would do.