I Am Trying Hard to Follow the Sound : Meditations on Accepting Typhoon ’ s Offerings
the Cartesian view of sleep , maintaining that when we sleep , the mind simply shuts off for a bit completely : our experience showing this to be true . A nonactive mind , however , is a problem for personal identity since the self seems to be constituted by memories , by the ability to think “ I am the same me that was thinking this thought a moment ago .” Is the self really a continuous whole , then ? Is the self what we think the self to be ?
Memory , sleep , and death have deep philosophical connections , and thus can stand in for each other artistically as well , with waking and sleeping becoming , metaphorically , birth and death . Offerings begins with the song “ Wake ,” turning next to “ Rorschach ,” which makes an appeal to “ the river of forgetfulness ” �a reference to Lethe , the river in Greek mythology from which the dead must drink upon arriving in Hades , thus causing them to forget their earthly lives . Ingested , Lethe ’ s waters erase memory . But , Lethe , it is also said , flows around the cave of Hypnos , the god of sleep , its babbling provoking drowsiness in anyone listening to its gentle current .
Listen .
The ancient Greek word for “ truth ” is derived from lethe . It is , in fact , the absence of lethe : aletheia ( ἀ�ήθεια ). “ Truth ” is thus literally a kind of non-forgetting , an a-Lethe , an unconcealedness . But as the Greeks knew , and as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida reminded us two-and-a-half millennia later , “ unconcealedness ” always still conceals something . In order to shine a light in one corner of a dark room , you must necessarily cast other areas into darkness . To enframe something and put it in the spotlight is necessarily to leave something else outside the frame in the shadows . The force that brings a text to meaning is always at the same time the force that threatens to dismantle it into nonsense . In order
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