Popular Culture Review 30.2
work of art about the biggest questions that we could ever possibly ask : why must we be mortal ? who are we really ? are we constituted by our memories ? what does it mean both to live and to die ? and how must we exist in this world , and treat each other , knowing that “ we ’ re involved in something irreversible ,” that we are given life only to be asked inevitably to sacrifice it , and that existence might legitimately be seen as a long slide into inevitable darkness ? Follow this path , seek only to keep remembering , keep shining light on everything , and we ’ ll all end up mad . Even in the midst of such beauty�and this album is a staggeringly beautiful work of art�these are the stakes : to lose our minds like a hesitant prince . And of all of the things we are about to lose , that would be the most painful .
Sleep is as little understood as death . Philosophically , both are puzzles , breaks in the continuous flow of consciousness that seems to hold the self together as one united thing . We might say that memory , sleep , and death are the three axes around which Offerings unfolds .
Aristotle , in Generation of Animals 5.1 ( 778b28 – 33 ) writes : “[ T ] he transition from not-being to being is effected through the intermediate state , and sleep would appear to be by its nature a state of this sort , being as it were a borderland between living and not-living ; a person who is asleep would appear to be neither completely non-existent nor completely existent ....” René Descartes maintained that in dreamless sleep the soul “ withdraws ” from the body , perhaps to contemplate pure logic , math , geometry , and metaphysics , thus leaving no trace of memory . And John Locke , the great British empiricist who imagined the mind starting off as a blank slate ( as does Morton ’ s Ghost in the song “ Empiricist ”), rejected
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