The Matrix...again

Reading Sarah’s blog in class yesterday really helped me to put the whole matrix question into perspective. I realized I was analyzing it in too broadly of terms, and in attempts to relate the theme of life as fiction, the mechanics of stories, as well as the idea of some obscure system called the matrix, I was effectually excluding them from one another.

As we should well know from this class, everything is/deals with/surrounds everything else. I found it difficult to compare and contrast each of these ideas, simply because they are not meant to be compared and contrasted. They are the same thing. While one explanation for the matrix may be an alternate world simulated by artificial intelligence, this explanation is not the one that pertains to this class. It doesn’t have to be menacing or dangerous, filled with men in black sunglasses or decaying cityscapes. It is not an alien world. It is a very familiar, personal world. It is the world that Sarah described.

The matrix is our own creation. It is everything we are, everything we have read, experienced, seen, dreamed, imagined. It is our waking and our sleeping. Our fears and desires. It is every thread in the fabric of our being. We all have our own matrix, but are also woven into that of each other. And in that way, perhaps the matrices (while still individualized) are less exclusive and more communal and connected, than our initial perception would lead us to believe.