Tuesday, September 7, 2021

Not Me!


Billy Whitelaw's mouth in Not I  (TheoryReader)

Beckett’s Not I is a talking mouth. Billy Whitelaw famously rendered the words flowing out of the disembodied orifice. With the world crumbling at an exponential rate, the salutary effects of such deconstruction may soon be realized. Why is the body necessary when consciousness can be stored and even produced by itinerant artificial intelligences? Who needs a body when you have words gushing forth, as if they’d taken on a life of their own, like an expeditionary force, free to explore in an unencumbered state? The present multi-morbidities are going to force the accommodation to ever changing platforms. Suddenly and without warning the present generation has become the beneficiary of the wanton indifference to danger signals, particularly on the environmental and biological fronts. If human kind begins to find their bodies uninhabitable, there's got to be a change of venue. Why is the torso, head, heart or lungs necessary for speech? Personality is usually considered to be the product of bodily processes, but what if the body can be retired, leaving its constituent parts to fend for themselves?

Read "E.D., The Erectile Dysfunctional" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

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