This is a new series attempting to explain my misunderstanding of perhaps the most important 20th century philosopher, at least to artists and other weirdos
It happens continually. That tree over there looks like the one that was there moments ago, but it is a mere simulacra of something that was in itself a simulacra, and so forth, back through an eternity of treeness (though it is possible that each simulacra is in itself an original, but we’ll get back to that later). And I keep changing while remaining the same. I have the memories of someone who once was, who never will be again, but I have come along to carry the torch, as someone — many by the end of this sentence — will come along to carry it for me. And not in any frame-by-frame sort of way, but in a blur of continuous repetition. This is only one way of looking at it of course, but just knowing that the continuity of me is always in flux, that a solid foundational me is more or less a fiction, and how mutable we all are, even in the midst of seeming stagnation (as in quarantine) — that stagnation itself a kind of change and becoming — changes everything, every relationship with people and things, beliefs and ideas. And in the same way difference may tend to look the same, or these words may be made to represent something, but are only a part of something else, a different series of events, something that interacts, but cannot cover (truly represent) the things that they refer to, as they are separately immediate, though transcendent, meaning immanent. The world is a creative act with no creator. At least not one you would invite to a dinner party.
It is always the beginning.