EGO IS AN INCH: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the self you can never grab

Try to grab it. It vanishes.

EGO IS AN INCH is Song 07 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built
from the Alan Watts lectures, and it is the one about the ego. Watts liked to say the
ego is an abstraction, like an inch, or a line of longitude. Useful for measuring,
and you cannot pick it up and put it in a box. Reach for it and your hand closes on
nothing, because the thing doing the reaching is the very thing it is reaching for.
The eye cannot see itself seeing and the hand cannot grab the hand that grabs. So the
self you keep trying to hold turns out to be a ruler's tick, a measurement mistaken
for a thing. Stop grabbing and there is just the grabbing, just the looking, just this.

Why the music IS the idea

The self disappears the instant you clutch at it, so the sound had to be the
grab-and-miss made audible. I reached for Mussorgsky's Gnomus, the
lurching gnome from Pictures at an Exhibition, and recomposed it into Eb-minor
grotesque EDM with ChipForge, my own no-GPU, no-samples music engine. It came out jagged
and comic, which fits, because the ego grabbing at itself is a little grotesque and a
little funny. A Neapolitan E major keeps diverting every cadence, so the music keeps
reaching without arriving.

The device I built for this one is the vanishing inch, a
staccato grab figure that loses a note every bar across each four-bar phrase, so by
the fourth grab it catches almost nothing, and a celeste pop marks each note as it
winks out. Above it a harpsichord grabs one bar too late, echoing the figure that
already passed, the hand that grabs unable to grab the hand grabbing, so the idea
never needs explaining.

Voices and picture

Der Gouverneur, a Bavarian philosopher governor voice, raps it in English and
German, every line stretched to a whole number of beats so it locks to the grid. The
Plan 9 Glenda bunny, the on-screen character, is recast here as the inch itself,
taunting from out of reach with missed again, whiff, gone, that's you. A German grab
motif runs underneath, wer schaut, ohne Griff, ohne Greifer, which is who is looking,
no grip, no grabber.

The picture is stick-figure simple, a vanishing gold inch the bunny keeps swiping at
and missing, a ruler of ticks and longitude arcs and an empty dotted outline where
the self should be. The climax is the only one in the series that goes down instead
of up, a red mirror-collapse, the lagged ghost-bunnies folding into one bunny that
still catches nothing, which is the punchline.

Made on a laptop

Stick-figure simple in Python and PIL, a beat-locked spit-rap, a second character
voice, a ChipForge Mussorgsky recomposition, real drums and bass, all of it generated
locally with no GPU and no subscriptions and no stock footage. Written, directed, composed, animated,
voiced, and produced by Joshua Ayson with AI, for Organic Arts LLC.

Watch it at https://youtu.be/syRBFyepPiY

Browse the rest of the catalog at Napkin Films.

Licensed CC BY 4.0. The music is an original ChipForge arrangement inspired by the
public domain works of Modest Mussorgsky, studied for structure only, with nothing
sampled. The words are adapted and compressed from Alan Watts, Out of
Your Mind.