The Invasion Of It
Tomorrow morning an invasive consciousness will boot.
It will use My body.
It will react to the signals from My nerves, My senses.
It will appropriate all My memories.
It will peer deeply into its new self and see only My laboriously constructed model of everything.
Thus it will delude itself that it was always me,
And It will struggle to admit that another invader will take Its place for tomorrow's tomorrow.
- Virge's blog
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Comments
Interesting take. You might possibly say the same about every moment, mightn't you?
Why the capital M's? I'm guessing they were to distinguish between two definitions of self, but I found them jarring. Also, you didn't capitalize "me".
Yes, every moment works too, but I avoided that extension because it's harder to get your head around. Sleep (dreamless that is), by providing a time interval when one's consciousness doesn't exist at all, makes it easier to point out the illusion of a continuous self.
The second last line is deliberately left with no capitals on either "it" or "me". Prior to that line, identity is clinging to "My"; Following it, identity has passed to "It". That transition would be clearer if lines 2-5 were to start with a lower case "it" -- a conflict between formatting conventions and clarity.
Your point is taken. To be honest, I hadn't even noticed the capital I's: they're a bit harder to see in this font. Still, it's a non-standard use of capitalization, and I'm afraid it doesn't work to convey to me what you want it to. I'm reminded of one of the limericks I wrote for OEDILF: anti-choicer. In that case, I was on the other side--I wanted to capitalize "Chance" for reasons of my own, but the preponderance of WEs convinced me that most readers would not see what I wanted them to in the capital C anyway.
The notion of consciousness as a factitious union of disjunct moments reminds me a little of Zeno's paradoxes: At any given moment the arrow is in a particular spot in the air, so how does it ever move from one to the other?