Ad Nauseam: The White Flare of Morning
I woke up with an ill sense of nausea, and wondered if I did at least sometimes exist. other than the image of solidity I receive from the mirror, other than this sensation of running my fingers down my loins, other than this stream of thought running through my head as I wondered hard if I truly did exist: do I exist simply because I am conscious of myself as both an object and a subject?
I took a picture of myself. I turned to the back of the camera, waiting for proof to pixelize. there it was: an image of a man who looked lost waking up on a sunday morning, the image ‘smelling’ vaguely like a hospital’s disinfectant. were the pixels of information enough to prove that ‘I’ exist? or am ‘I’ merely the sum of information presented on the back-screen of this camera? is it enough to prove that I was as bold a stroke as ‘I’? I imagined myself painting a bold vertical stroke on a sheet of canvas - a phallus lost in the whiteout flare of nausea on a sunday morning.
I couldn’t, for whatever reasons, peel my eyes off the image I see displayed on the lcd screen. if it were silk screen instead, I swore I could replicate myself - Warholian style. then i could have sworn that there was a mould made especially for me. as I like, I could easily adjust, on the camera itself, this image of ‘I’. if I wanted, the world could be just as colorful as a black and white universe and ‘I’ would simply be a shadowy figure lost in the sea of undulating bit-waves of black and white. just to be sure, I snapped more pictures of myself. trying desparately to etch onto anything a part of me. am I a historical being? am I an aggregation of that which have preceded me? am I but one bricolage in the great sea of intertexts, refracted across the different waves of consciousness?
am ‘I’ an image or a simulacrum in my own right?
