Archive — Jamie Lyons
Solipsism. The fancy academic word for what every self-obsessed bastard has felt at three in the morning after too much wine and not enough sleep. The nagging suspicion that maybe, just maybe, this whole goddamn circus is nothing more than my own private hallucination. That everyone else is just extras in the movie I'm directing, producing, and staring in. A movie, by the way, that nobody asked for and that's been running way too long without a decent plot.
It's also way over budget.
I see it in my work, these self-portraits masquerading as art. That dog, Sharka, looking back at me with more authenticity than I can muster for myself. I'm there, always there, in every frame. The photographer who can't step out of the shot. It's not narcissism, not exactly. It's worse. It's the desperate need to confirm I exist at all.
Here's the thing about absolute solipsism: it's both completely right and totally useless. Yeah, I'm trapped in my own perception. My senses, my biases, my particular flavor of damage filtering everything like Instagram for the soul. The curry I ate in Chiang Mai, the heartbreak in Paris, the sound of my own voice echoing in that cathedral in Barcelona, all of it processed through the meat computer between your ears. Solipsism is technically irrefutable. Congratulations. I've achieved philosophical checkmate while the game continues without you.
But that Sharka knows something I don't: the truth isn't found by diving deeper into myself. It's in the moment I stop. When I'm hungry and someone hands me food. When I'm cold and someone offers a blanket. When I'm lost and a stranger gives me directions. These moments don't prove other minds exist, philosophy's too slippery for that, but they remind me why it doesn't matter.
My solipsism isn't profound. It's a luxury. A symptom of having enough comfort, enough safety, enough time to contemplate my own navel while the world keeps turning.
And then I had a kid. Charlie. And suddenly my precious solipsism found a new home, a new host to infect. Because here's the beautiful, terrible truth about having children: you don't escape yourself. You just build a smaller, louder, more demanding version and project every anxiety, every hope, every unresolved piece of your psychological baggage onto them. Week One Charlie, Week Three Charlie, Seven Week Charlie, I'm documenting his existence like I'm trying to prove my own. I'm not photographing him as much as I'm photographing myself photographing him. It's solipsism with a human shield.
I watch him discover his hands, taste his first solid food, take his first steps, and I think I'm witnessing his consciousness unfold. But really? I'm just experiencing my own consciousness experiencing his. I can't know what it's like to be Charlie any more than I can know what it's like to be anyone else. That's the trap. The gorgeous, inescapable trap. I wanted to stop being alone inside my head, so I created another person, and now I'm twice as alone, stuck inside mine, forever outside his, obsessing over the unbridgeable gap between us.
Welcome to parenthood: where solipsism metastasizes into legacy.
absolute solipsism (n.)
1871, coined from Latin solus "alone" (sole) + ipse "self." The view or theory that self is the only object of real knowledge or the only thing that is real. "The identification of one's self with the Absolute is not generally intended, but the denial of there being really anybody else".
Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn't we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it's as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can't explain his to us, and we can't explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication ... and there is the real illness.
Absolute Solipsism 2025
There are moments that crystallize in memory like amber, perfectly preserved, weightless, eternal. This image of mine, caught between heartbeats that yesterday appeared in a SF Chronicle story, holds one of those moments: Adji and Alonzo in their element, light streaming through studio windows like benediction. For me, these days, a good photograph isn’t really […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2021
Here’s a public bathroom confession: staring at that light bulb with its accidental face is the most honest moment you’ll have all day. That smudged, glowing thing sees you, really sees you, in ways you’ve been avoiding. Sartre knew it. That slow dissolution when you look too close, when familiar becomes alien. We spend our […]
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Three weeks on the planet and already he’s got more gravitas than most people I’ve met in waiting rooms and corporate offices across this increasingly plastic world. Those eyes, Christ, those eyes, they’re not just looking at you, they’re looking through you, taking inventory of every lie you’ve ever told yourself, every shortcut you’ve taken, […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2021
I’m not built for this. Never was. The concept of being responsible for another human being, one whose skull, impossibly fragile, fits entirely in the palm of my hand, it’s terrifying in a way that makes every other fear I’ve ever had seem like amateur hour. Two weeks. Charlie’s been breathing air for two weeks, […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2021
“In the world of Peloton, exercise-at-home apps, and dance classes on Zoom, is physical co-location necessary? Join us for a discussion about the ethics of using digital ecosystems for training performance artists.” Ethics Society and Technology Unconference, Stanford University, May 13th-14th Presenting Liveness in the Tech Space with Aleta Hayes, Samer Al-Saber, Jamie Lyons, and […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2021
Working at the emerging intersections of Art + Tech Art + Tech. Two words that get thrown around Stanford like they’re some kind of revolutionary manifesto. Except here’s the thing, sometimes it actually fucking matters. I was there because they wanted to hear about collaboration. Not the sanitized, LinkedIn-profile version where everyone’s “ideating” and “synergizing.” […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2020
If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe. Werner Herzog I’ve shot a thousand bodies contorted in a thousand supposed […]
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So this is what it comes to: you, the mirror, and the slow-motion shipwreck of your own face disappearing under a forest of hair that screams “I HAVE GIVEN UP” in fourteen different dialects. Robinson Crusoe, sure, if Crusoe had Netflix, bottomless carbs, and a growing suspicion that Friday was never coming because there was […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2020
All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. Albert Camus, The Plague So here we are. Day whatever-the-fuck of the new normal that isn’t normal at all. Just you, me, and that […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2017
So here’s a Bertolt Brecht poem, and here’s the thing: where he says acting, plug in whatever the hell you’re actually doing… writing, painting, fucking, dying, making breakfast, making art, making sense of the wreckage. And that instant he’s talking about? That’s whatever you’re trying to bring into the world before it crushes you. Same […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2016
my father Charles R. Lyons in Shakespeare’s Love Labour’s Lost for Farm Players at Stanford University mid 1960s LOOK AT THIS MAGNIFICENT BASTARD. Stanford University, mid 1960s, some production of Love’s Labour’s Lost that probably nobody remembers except it’s Shakespeare and Shakespeare MATTERS because Shakespeare understood that language is the only weapon we’ve got against […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2015
Accepting no doctrine in the Santa Cruz Mountains No, a true seeker, one who truly wished to find, could accept no doctrine. But the man who has found what he sought, such a man could approve of every doctrine, each and every one, every path, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all those […]
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Let me way this. I was 22 when I came to prison and of course I have changed tremendously over the years. But I had always had a strong sense of myself and in the last few years I felt i was losing my identity. There was a deadness in my body that eluded me, […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2015
Solipsism sphere on Rocinante…. There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. Joseph Conrad, Typhoon
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Absolute Solipsism / Engineering 2014
Solipsism Backstage at We Players‘ Macbeth at Fort Point “My darling,” she said at last, are you sure you don’t mind being a mouse for the rest of your life?” “I don’t mind at all” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.” Roald […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2014
We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2013
Solipsism at the circus. Circus Center, San Francisco
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Solipsism at Performance Studies international, Stanford University It is wrong to oppose to objects an isolated ego-subject, without seeing in the Dasein the basic constitution of being-in-the-world; but it is equally wrong to suppose that the problem is seen in principle and progress made toward answering it if the solipsism of the isolated ego is […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2013
So here I am, suspended in that particular brand of urban purgatory, the Mission District waiting game, watching my reflection fracture across safety glass like some cheapshit Gerhard Richter that nobody commissioned. The car window becomes a frame, becomes a proscenium, becomes the fourth wall I’m simultaneously behind and in front of, performer and audience […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2013
I’m standing on Ava’s boat with this fisheye screwed onto my camera and I know, I fucking know, this is the only lens that tells the truth about what it feels like to be alive on the water at sunrise instead of entombed in some office pretending my life means something. The fisheye doesn’t lie […]
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Absolute Solipsism / The City 2012
So here’s the deal: I’m early. Not fashionably early, not strategically early. Just early. Standing on the steps of San Francisco City Hall like some kind of ceremonial parking cone, waiting for Dan and Ciara to show up and get married in a way that doesn’t count except that it counts more than anything that’s […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2012
Solipsism in a mirror I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was […]
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Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay Beauty… it’s a goddamn trap, and this photograph proves […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2011
I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations Look at this photograph I took and tell me something isn’t dying right in front of you. The Stanford Movie Theatre on University Avenue in Palo Alto. The marquee reading Great Expectations […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2011
I would rather be ashes than dust I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2011
Here I am, dissolving into your my fucking testimony. I’m not even trying to be present, am I? I hit the button, the doors slide shut, and instead of standing there like a regular citizen of the vertical transit system, I’m already half gone, vibrating at some frequency the fluorescent tubes can barely keep up […]
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Absolute Solipsism 2006
This photograph doesn’t lie because it can’t. I’m alone with the weight of being the only consciousness that matters, if consciousness matters at all, drinking wine where Romans probably did the same stupid gorgeous thing. This is vineyard solipsism at it’s finest… the afternoon bleeds gold and I’m stealing it, one sip at a time, […]
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Solipsism with on the Mabou Mines Brazil Tour of Gospel at Colonus and Hajj. The Mabou Mines Hajj crew + Waj. When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too. Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
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