TRANSCRIPT

That's a trick question and you can't get me. I will try to circumscribe the entirety of "me" separate from everything else everything else anyway, but just know I won't like it. When it comes to defining the "self", some philosophers have talked about the continuous link (unbroken red thread) of an entity being conscious of itself as the tangible real-life event to be the "self". I am personally kind of a fan of the idea. Even in the case of memory loss - which I am unfortunately no stranger to - I feel this unbroken integrity consistent in the way I have always felt it. You know, like in the morning when you are mechanically making coffee, or at any other moment in which you are not fully conscious of your whole simultaneous existence; where instead of holding every memory you can hold in both of your hands, you are just existing, and no matter whether you were completely amnesiac or remembered your entire life perfectly, your inner monologue would make the same sarcastic joke in your head because that's just you, just your personality? The bounds of the inside of my mind are like a house I've lived in my whole life. I've maybe furnished it based on my lived experience, but no matter what happens (what memories I gain) or what I forget (what memories I lose) the house will be the same, the floorplan of my brain one I've navigated since I could crawl. I believe that house to be my "self", through empirical knowledge of living in it, and I extend that theory to a wider application. The self is a house that each carries and lives in before living in the world.

ADDITIONAL NOTES

This is the first part of my FA22 Literature class final assignment. I wanted to open the reflexion on the widest question - and coincidentally (or probably not, now that I think about it haha) the first one in the prompts list. The thesis question : What is the self? For this I also wanted to use watercolor. Watercolor is, to me, a very spontaneous medium. It's what I use when I need to get ideas down quick on the page, get a bit of color so that I can have a visual for what I want to do. In the spirit of spontaneity, the first self portrait was also a live portrait rather than copied from a picture ; I just opened my phone camera in front facing view and started going at it with a paintbrush based on what I saw. In my opinion, pretty fitting for an opener : we're getting warmed up, we're getting started, I say the word 'self', what's the first thing that pops into your mind? This was the approach here.