This is the official blog of Northern Arizona slam poet Christopher Fox Graham. Begun in 2002, and transferred to blogspot in 2006, FoxTheBlog has recorded more than 670,000 hits since 2009. This blog cover's Graham's poetry, the Arizona poetry slam community and offers tips for slam poets from sources around the Internet. Read CFG's full biography here. Looking for just that one poem? You know the one ... click here to find it.
Showing posts with label egism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label egism. Show all posts

Monday, May 12, 2008

Solism

The legitimacy of solism as a philosophy.

I read once about the theory of solism, or egism. The passage was brief and I found the analysis of the theory delightfully ironic. To paraphrase, it read, "however, there are schools of thought or major writings on the topic."
If you are the only sentient, real creature in the universe, who do you need to tell the theory to? So no one else "matters," in the philosophical sense, and when you die, the universe ceases to be.

Everyone is the center of their own universe. You are the center of your universe. It began at your birth and will end at your death, simply because there is no other way to disprove this. Any objections to this are speculative, and, since they can never be proven, unless you inhabit the mind of someone else, are irrelevant. Whether you are "god" or there is another, be it an equal or a superior being, is also irrelevant.
As such, ignore any pretense that anyone or anything else but you has, does or will exist.
The rules for behavior are simple: you have elected to inhibit a human body with a limited lifespan obeying other rules of physics, the passage of time, and whatever society you have chosen to inhabit. You have created others with whom interact who also obey the same set of finite rules. You have created a fictional history of the universe before your existence that all of these characters and yourself choose to believe, because there is nothing else to believe. Since you, in this body, can not travel through time, can not disprove this fiction, it is true in the sense that it is uniformly believed.
However, everyone else, whether they exist as sentient beings, characters in a story or mere figments of imagination is also irrelevant. Everyone believes they are the center of the universe. Understanding this cognitive rationality is paramount to interaction with them, whatever they may be.
The reason society functions at all given this fact is that members of it choose to play the game that others exist, whether or not they do. They also obey the rules of corporeal existence in a limited space-time continuum.
We chose to play this game because we cannot break the rules we ourselves have created and the only other option is self-annihilation.

Whether the reality of what we have been told the nature of the universe is is true, or whether this theory is true, the point is that we must obey the rules we have established until we end. When we end, either the universe ceases to be along with us and the hiccup in time and space ends as well, or we find out that the game is over and go back or forward to whatever state of existence truly is. If we are god playing a game, we go back to being god. If we are mortal and there is a god, I'm sure we speak at length over the experience. Granted, if there is no god, but a corporeal universe, then we still cease to be, but the universe continues on as it has for eons.

Metaphorically, imagine that you are seated at a table on a platform floating in space. Before you, sits a massive chess board or Monopoly game, deck of cards, whatever, and you play an invisible, incorporeal opponent. If you win, you play again. If you lose or refuse to make any moves for too long, the platform and table disappear and you fall. You have no choice but to play, make a running leap off the edge or refuse to play. Even if you win, you will eventually lose. With nothing else to do until then, why not play? Find joy in the game.

Conversely, imagine that you are an author thousands of years from now. You have written a fictional novel of a character with your personal history. However, rather than read it, you live it. The book does not end, and you do not leave the novel and return to your author life until you die in the book. The author creature you are may make nothing like a human, may be a jelly, a being of electrical energy, or may have the ability to travel through time, or may be god with an itchy pencil. Either way, the author has chosen to write about a human life. You are that story.

Sunday, December 22, 2002

What is Christopher Fox Graham about?

Christopher Fox Graham is about to reassure us
Christopher Fox Graham is pushing the case
Christopher Fox Graham is going on
Christopher Fox Graham is more plentiful
Christopher Fox Graham is in the ratings hunt
Christopher Fox Graham is trying to leave the door open for those who have yet to come through it
Christopher Fox Graham is saying 'is'
Christopher Fox Graham is in the henhouse
Christopher Fox Graham is Ralph Stricker
Christopher Fox Graham is shutting down
Christopher Fox Graham is running
Christopher Fox Graham is back at camp in a new way
Christopher Fox Graham is pledged to continue
Christopher Fox Graham is good
Christopher Fox Graham is brown and red
Christopher Fox Graham is now available as a toolkit
Christopher Fox Graham is trapped by the tentacles of power
Christopher Fox Graham is a sly teacher to keep kid's attention
Christopher Fox Graham is hungry
Christopher Fox Graham is over eight thousand days old
Christopher Fox Graham is named employee of the month for march
Christopher Fox Graham is not a useless piece of trash
Christopher Fox Graham is based on TV
Christopher Fox Graham is put into practice by the government of Suriname
Christopher Fox Graham is one of Staten Island area's most respected fishing advocates
Christopher Fox Graham is in the open
Christopher Fox Graham is back
Christopher Fox Graham is a sly fox
Christopher Fox Graham is seen in this file photo
Christopher Fox Graham is Charlena Marie Wilson
Christopher Fox Graham is committed to land protection
Christopher Fox Graham is not on the run
Christopher Fox Graham is elvis
Christopher Fox Graham is the newest Lifetime Channel member
Christopher Fox Graham is trying to cancel Futurama
Christopher Fox Graham is better than MTV
Christopher Fox Graham is a remarkable glider
Christopher Fox Graham is a stream
Christopher Fox Graham is a director
Christopher Fox Graham is Canadian
Christopher Fox Graham is about to reassure us that Bush can scold wall street with a straight face
Christopher Fox Graham is right
Christopher Fox Graham is doing it
Christopher Fox Graham is full of crap, and lots of it
Christopher Fox Graham is IS
Christopher Fox Graham is frying many fish
Christopher Fox Graham is our logo
Christopher Fox Graham is pushing the case with his popularity high
Christopher Fox Graham is staying home
Christopher Fox Graham is indecent
Christopher Fox Graham is maxine
Christopher Fox Graham is symbiosis
Christopher Fox Graham is in the ratings hunt
Christopher Fox Graham is off base
Christopher Fox Graham is trying to leave the door open for those who have threatened our delegates
Christopher Fox Graham is shutting down websites
Christopher Fox Graham is pledged to continue Mexico's subordination to us
Christopher Fox Graham is a good randy playboy trick
Christopher Fox Graham is a new stretch of 11th street opened by the city of Springfield
Christopher Fox Graham is common in most of northern North America
Christopher Fox Graham is better than CNN
Christopher Fox Graham is this
Christopher Fox Graham is that
Christopher Fox Graham is a saying about kings
Christopher Fox Graham is found in the treeless tundra extending through the arctic regions of Eurasia
Christopher Fox Graham is put into practice by the publisher
Christopher Fox Graham is lowest profile standard unit available for real time clock applications
Christopher Fox Graham is taking from my *$#%@!
Christopher Fox Graham is a Southern writer who understands heat
Christopher Fox Graham is hunted by hounds following the line of scent
Christopher Fox Graham is great
Christopher Fox Graham is smaller and skinnier than the red Christopher Fox Graham
Christopher Fox Graham is one of two fox species found in the southern mountains
Christopher Fox Graham is one of the most common mammals in Ireland
Christopher Fox Graham is suffering from rabies as well as other fox species
Christopher Fox Graham is the state
Christopher Fox Graham is solitary
Christopher Fox Graham is a professor of industrial engineering with cross appointments in the department of computer science and faculty of management science at the University of Michigan
Christopher Fox Graham is guarding the chicken
Christopher Fox Graham is a pest and his population needs to be controlled
Christopher Fox Graham is singing again
Christopher Fox Graham said "I joined because Iowa was one of the first states to start recycling mandatory returnables"
Christopher Fox Graham is at the top of it's food chain and has never naturally been hunted
Christopher Fox Graham is getting a bum rap
Christopher Fox Graham is tops for redbird gymnastics on senior night
Christopher Fox Graham is Christ
Christopher Fox Graham is called a reynard
Christopher Fox Graham is an exciting glider
Christopher Fox Graham is coming
Christopher Fox Graham is a lot better that MTV
Christopher Fox Graham is one of the most widely distributed carnivores in the lower 48 states
Christopher Fox Graham is casting single men and women for a new reality show
Christopher Fox Graham is making a mistake
Christopher Fox Graham is like to fly
Christopher Fox Graham is 'lucky' in love
Christopher Fox Graham is a C++ based toolkit for developing graphical user interfaces easily and effectively
Christopher Fox Graham is spotted
Christopher Fox Graham is a spiritual theologian who has been an ordained priest since 1967
Christopher Fox Graham is a dual national
Christopher Fox Graham is a large fruit bat weighing 400 ounces
Christopher Fox Graham is found in the far north
Christopher Fox Graham is on the town
Christopher Fox Graham is evil
Christopher Fox Graham is located on the southwest corner of Oak Park Avenue and Lake Street in the Scoville Square office building
Christopher Fox Graham is all that AND a bag of chips