I take a call. I resolve, or fail to resolve, a certain problem. I take another call.
"Hi there," I decisively announce, "my name is Riley. How can I help?"
Each call is not a pure affair. It is always colored by specters of previous calls. The preceding customer may have pleased me with their spirit, may have scorned me with their impatience, may have left me bored with their incompetence.
The other day I heard the sound I hear quite often these days. *BEEP* 'You have an incoming call' *BEEP*. The second beep prompts me to prompt them. "Hello, this is Riley. How can I help?"
There is no taking these calls as individual affairs. Each is encumbered and informed by the call I've taken before. Each is burdened by the emotions that have been generated through my prior experiences. I felt this with much clarity this last week. I knew that the previous customer had upset me and that I was fuming, reeling, recovering from what had happened to me. Yet I had to face the next call. There was no time for a break. There were 15 people waiting to speak with us. My time, moreover, is observed and regulated, controlled and evaluated.
'Adherence', they call it.
Ha.
Leave me alone, I say. Let my time be nameless, I naively beg.
Yet this insight into the nature of my interactions, this intimation of memory's influence, is one that I wish to import into my life. I don't want my life to be burdened by the past. Informed, sure. Burdened, no.
For today is not yesterday. What has happened yesterday will always be a part of what is happening to me today. 'The present' is not a place that one can comfortably dwell. The past is right here, sitting in front of our stupid faces, informing and distorting who we are and what we may become.
I wish I could forget the previous call. I wish that paranoid man, rambling on and on about the government's attempts to steal his identity, didn't corrupt my ability to discuss with a sweet woman her current needs.
A bitter old man in Nebraska can prevent me from being close with a gentle middle aged woman in Kansas. True story.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Yes, I Confess, I Think Only of Myself
But what else am I to think of? Am I not the privileged object of my observation? Is my mind not the only laboratory that I will ever have access to? Indeed, my mind is forever confined to this body, to these memories, to this path.
I have been at a bit of a crossroads in my writing. I've not been entirely sure where to go. I have about 22 pages of an essay on Clausewitz and narrative. I have several sections mapped out. I attempted to dig into it a little bit and I found myself struggling. I didn't have it in me to pour over that text like I have in the past. I think I'll finish it at some point. At the very least I intend to edit what has been done so far, clean it up, and present it as a self-contained object. What has been written so far could very well stand on it's own.
Lately my mind has been occupied by the prospect of another project, one that I haven't seriously thought about in a while. It would be something that would look like 'creative non-fiction' or 'philosophical journaling'.
My life has taken an interesting turn of late. I've started a new job. It's quite corporate, I must admit. I answer phones. I talk to people about their troubles with the internet, with a website, with their money. My contact with them is brief, specific, and purposeful. Yet I find that people often reveal themselves to me in serious ways. They betray things about their lives. They tell me their stories.
They tell me of their health troubles, their family dilemmas, the breakdowns of their marriages, the gradual separation of their families, the secrets their children don't know.
As I've grappled with my own story, the narrative arc of my own life, I've found that everyone has their own narrative arc, their own story that they are living and that they divulge by necessity.
I intend to reflect on the narrative reconfiguring that has been occupying my own time, and how part of my story has been these intimate encounters with these other people. I intend to tell you of myself as I tell you of them.
I have been at a bit of a crossroads in my writing. I've not been entirely sure where to go. I have about 22 pages of an essay on Clausewitz and narrative. I have several sections mapped out. I attempted to dig into it a little bit and I found myself struggling. I didn't have it in me to pour over that text like I have in the past. I think I'll finish it at some point. At the very least I intend to edit what has been done so far, clean it up, and present it as a self-contained object. What has been written so far could very well stand on it's own.
Lately my mind has been occupied by the prospect of another project, one that I haven't seriously thought about in a while. It would be something that would look like 'creative non-fiction' or 'philosophical journaling'.
My life has taken an interesting turn of late. I've started a new job. It's quite corporate, I must admit. I answer phones. I talk to people about their troubles with the internet, with a website, with their money. My contact with them is brief, specific, and purposeful. Yet I find that people often reveal themselves to me in serious ways. They betray things about their lives. They tell me their stories.
They tell me of their health troubles, their family dilemmas, the breakdowns of their marriages, the gradual separation of their families, the secrets their children don't know.
As I've grappled with my own story, the narrative arc of my own life, I've found that everyone has their own narrative arc, their own story that they are living and that they divulge by necessity.
I intend to reflect on the narrative reconfiguring that has been occupying my own time, and how part of my story has been these intimate encounters with these other people. I intend to tell you of myself as I tell you of them.
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
My Memories
To be conscious is to have memories. To be free is to reflect on the limitations of freedom.
In this writing I am attempting to become more free by reflecting on my memories and the way they've governed my life.
Memory, it turns out, has become an important vein in my thinking that has led me more places than I would have guessed. This is due in large to Henri Bergson's odd little book Matter and Memory. Bergson is an impressive yet unfashionable thinker. I could not have anticipated the places he has allowed me to go.
Using his ideas as a starting point, I would like to reflect both on memory in general and on my memories in particular. In doing so I will be reflecting on my past behavior and trying to understand how it was connected to my sense of the past, my memories.
We begin with one of the central claims of Matter and Memory: Memory is not not singular but dual. If we think carefully, that is to say, we discover that we do not possess a ubiqutous mental faculty called 'memory' that allows us to recall the past with ease. We find, rather, that memory has two distinct faces, one that is intimately tied to the temporal, mental, and particular, and another that is spatial, bodily, and general. To demonstrate this dual character of memory Bergson asks us to reflect on what it means to learn something 'by heart'. When we learn, for example, to recite a poem by heart, we gain a mechanical ability to deliver that poem on a moments notice. We can simply stand up and rattle the whole thing off. This form of memory that allows us to recite a poem by heart, is atemporal, meaning that it is no longer tied to the specific periods in time in which we recited the poem out loud to memorize it. This memory, instead, is generalized: it exists in us as something separate from all of the individual moments in time in which we were actually reading the poem. Memory, for Bergson, thus does two things: It "ends in the record of the past in the form of motor habits" and also "retains the image of the situations through which is has successively travelled, and lays them side by side in the order in which they took place" (Bergson, Matter and Memory, Digireads, 2010). In other words, our memory has both the character of being particular by retaining images of the actual moment in time in which we perform an activity, and of being general by converting all of those particular instances into a generalized motor habit. The former, as I said, is temporal or mental in it's functioning, while the other is spatial or bodily.
I would like to lend an example from my own experience: barista work. Anyone who spent much time reflecting on the life of a barista, as I have, could tell you that barista work is largely a matter of habit and muscle memory. It is a profession built of incredibly simple and repetitive motions that must be precisely replicated. In order to become consistent, baristas practice practice practice. We repeat our motions over and over again. Constantly tamping, pulling, steaming, pouring. The goal of this training and practice is to forget the individual case in favor of a generalized set of motor habits. Thus I could step up to an espresso machine right now and would have a whole arsenal of motor habits that would aid me in my work. Yet, if I reflect, I can stop and think of dozens of particular instances in which I made not merely a drink but that particular drink. This general muscle memory, in other words, rests on a foundation of particular instances.
These are the two faces of memory. Look into your own mind and you will find that you have them both there. You have a slew of particular, temporally bound memories, and you have a more general , atemporal set of ideas or dispositions that have been distilled from those particular experiences.
That memory should function in such a dual manner, according to Bergson, is explained by the practical orientation of life. To live is to be oriented towards doing. Thus all functions of life, from the body to the mind, are pointed towards action. This is no less true of memory. That we naturally distill general lessons from our particular experiences is not surprising. Memory, after all, is a faculty of the mind that is also oriented towards action.
Memory, in the two senses we are discussing, aids us in our quest to act by augmenting our perception of the world. What is it that keeps the world from presenting itself to us an incomprehensible jumble of images? Why am I able to discern this table, this kitchen, this beer bottle, and this computer in front of me? Because I have memories of experiencing them in the past: I've dealt with many tables and many beers and therefore don't need to look at them or think about them with the same kind of intensity that I did when I saw them for the first time. Imagine what a child's experience must be like. It must be just an endless series of images, incomprehensible and confusing. Only when the child has accumulated much experience of looking and acting will images start to become coherent and sensical. In other words, not until a child has accumulated an adequate store of memories can it begin to act consciously in the world. Thus Bergson argues that "there is no perception which is not full of memories" (Ibid., 17). Everywhere we look and everything we do, we are seeing the world through memory colored shades.
The implication of this and the crucial conclusion is this: Memory tends to supplant perception. It is often more economical to allow the residue of experience to stand in for the labor of detailed attention in the present. "In most cases," Bergson writes, "these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as 'signs' that recall to us former images" (Ibid.). Here we would do well to reflect on the Buddhist lauding of the child for actually 'seeing a ball roll across the floor', whereas an adult often lets their concept of the ball and the floor stand in for actual observation. We could equally say that we let our memory of a ball rolling across the floor stand in for the actual seeing.
Is this not true of us in our own lives? How many of us actually look carefully and closely at every door, every bus, every barista that we encounter? Do we not simply let our 'understanding' and our memories do that work for us? It is in no way vital to my activity right now that I look closely at this table in front of me. I know what a table is. I've seen them hundreds of times. I remember them. Yet, if I look closely at this table I discover all the blemishes on it, all the cracks and scratches that are not present if I let my memories of tables stand in for my actual observing of it.
Good. We've established several points.
(1) Memory is dual. One aspect of it is particular and temporal, another is general and atemporal.
(2) Memory is intimately linked with the need for action.
(3) Perception restricts itself based on it's orientation towards action, and thus tends to substitute the memory of things for the actual observation of said things.
The next thing that we must note is that human perception is not primarily visual, but narrative. Human action, that is to say, is not conducted or understood simply by how things look, hear, sound, or whatever. Human action is conducted and understood by means of thinking. Thought and intention, those self-evident activities of the human mind, are always the arbiters or human action. To 'perceive intentional action' then is to perceive thought. Thought, moreover, is not perceived by means of the senses, but by means of narrative or story. I've spent much time writing about this elsewhere and don't care to go into it now. But if you doubt that human action is only intelligible, 'perceived', in the form of a narrative please go see R.G. Collingwood's The Idea of History, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Jonathan Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal. Or just pause and reflect on your own life. How do your own actions assume meaning? How do you justify your own actions to yourself? You do it by telling a story that has a past, present, and a future. We are made of stories.
If perception is structured by memory, then, we cannot avoid the conclusion that our narrative perception of ourselves and those around us are shaped by memory. I bet that if we reflect on our lives we will see that we find a duality in the narratives we use to perceive the world just like we will find in our memories. We will find that we tell certain stories about ourselves that are particular and temporal, (such as that one time on September 7th 2011 where I gave two weeks notice at my job) and others that are general and atemporal (like the idea that I am a solitary person or a loner). The former example is something that actually happened to me, something that I did without a doubt. The latter, however, is a conjecture or generalization that has been distilled from particular events in my life.
That general habits or general narratives should arise out of particular events is totally understandable. Of course the temporally specific form of memory tends to give way to the atemporal general kind of memory. It is simply more practical. Nature, of course, favors general, bodily, spatialized memory. Living beings thrive far more from being able to distill generalizations from their specific experiences than from being able to dwell and reflect on particular events. The former trumps the latter.
Bergson knew damn well, however, that humans are not purely practical beings. We acquired a sense for reflection, for thinking, for theoretical and contemplative living. If we wish to live a thoughtful life, we must take a step back from the realm of action and thus from generalized forms of memory. Instead, we ought to sit with our particular memories, understanding them for what they were in their particular time, refusing to generalize them into lessons or doctrines for action.
Having arrived at this point, understanding that human perception is fundamentally narrative, and that it is influenced by memory in the way described above, I feel I am in a good position to reflect on my two forms of memory.
I begin with a simple admission: I have to learned to hate myself.
Somehow during the course of my life I experienced enough pain, and I saw myself as the cause of this pain, that I began to think that there was something wrong with me. That I was 'broken' or unlovable or 'damaged' in one way or another.
I was always a sensitive, nay, a fragile child. Overrun and bullied by my own feelings. I remember walking into my first preschool with my mother, seeing children playing all kinds of games, screaming running shouting. I remember the fear I felt at the idea of joining them. I remember the boy in school everyone called 'Timmy the cry baby' and how deeply thankful I was that he was identified as such and not me. It could have been me, and I was grateful to have that attention directed towards him and not me. I remember the deep anxiety I felt in 4th grade, when I would wake up crying, not wanting to go to school, not wanting to get on my bike to meet the neighbors for our daily ride.
Fear, it turns out, was the governing emotion of my childhood. I don't even know why! My parents loved me and did everything they could to take care of me! Perhaps they were too soft with me? Too easy on me? I don't know. I don't know how this happened to me.
I remember knocking a bunch of my teeth out in first grade. Receiving special attention for this damage I'd done to myself. The conversations about fixing it. 'Fixing it'. Something to be fixed, I understand. But also something to accept and understand.
I remember being in middle school and how fearful I was that my girlfriend would break up with me. What other people would think of me.
I can recall countless particular instances of feeling inadequate and fearful. It's as if though I was already resigned to being fearful, broken, wounded.
I felt so much fear, and still feel fear, at the idea of having to face this life. I've got to live the whole god damn thing? And we suspect that it doesn't mean anything in the big picture?
I can recall so many individual particular instances in which I felt afraid, felt inadequate, felt out of place or strange.
Being the living thing I am, I took those particular memories and I generalized them. I converted them from individual instances of things that happened to me and I turned them into a story about what I am. I am not just a being that experienced these things, I am a being that was made for these kinds of experiences. I am not a being of possibilities who happens to have struggled in different elements of my life, I am a being made to be afraid and alone.
At some point in my life I arrived at this conclusion: I am not a being that has experienced pain and loneliness at certain moments in my life, I am a being made for lonesome suffering.
Ha. When I began to realize that I was living this story I could hardly believe it. It couldn't be.
Yet it is true.
The more I reflected on my past the more I realized how much my experiences had passed through the prism of that narrative. Events that should have been minor pains or difficulties turned into devastating events: a girl breaks up with me, I don't get a job, I am not welcome in a certain setting. Yet these things would devastate me. And they devastated me not simply because they were painful experiences but because they were evidence and corroboration for the story I was secretly living in which I was an unlovable and broken being.
My generalized memories, the narrative arc I'd distilled from them, in which I was broken, had become dominant, and all of my particular experiences were now being interpreted in their light.
There was no room for particular experiences to be particular experiences. Particular experiences could only function as further evidence for the story of a damaged and unlovable being.
Funny shit, right?
In doing this writing, by claiming that I have been a slave to the story I've been unconsciously living, I am trying to carve out a new space for the future. I look back and I see nothing but restrictions on my freedom and my ability to experience new things. I have been so deeply dominated by my particular memories and the general narrative I've culled from them that I've had such a reduced capacity for new experiences.
I'm calling you out, generalized narrative.
I'm here to reclaim my particularized experiences.
Here it goes.
In this writing I am attempting to become more free by reflecting on my memories and the way they've governed my life.
Memory, it turns out, has become an important vein in my thinking that has led me more places than I would have guessed. This is due in large to Henri Bergson's odd little book Matter and Memory. Bergson is an impressive yet unfashionable thinker. I could not have anticipated the places he has allowed me to go.
Using his ideas as a starting point, I would like to reflect both on memory in general and on my memories in particular. In doing so I will be reflecting on my past behavior and trying to understand how it was connected to my sense of the past, my memories.
We begin with one of the central claims of Matter and Memory: Memory is not not singular but dual. If we think carefully, that is to say, we discover that we do not possess a ubiqutous mental faculty called 'memory' that allows us to recall the past with ease. We find, rather, that memory has two distinct faces, one that is intimately tied to the temporal, mental, and particular, and another that is spatial, bodily, and general. To demonstrate this dual character of memory Bergson asks us to reflect on what it means to learn something 'by heart'. When we learn, for example, to recite a poem by heart, we gain a mechanical ability to deliver that poem on a moments notice. We can simply stand up and rattle the whole thing off. This form of memory that allows us to recite a poem by heart, is atemporal, meaning that it is no longer tied to the specific periods in time in which we recited the poem out loud to memorize it. This memory, instead, is generalized: it exists in us as something separate from all of the individual moments in time in which we were actually reading the poem. Memory, for Bergson, thus does two things: It "ends in the record of the past in the form of motor habits" and also "retains the image of the situations through which is has successively travelled, and lays them side by side in the order in which they took place" (Bergson, Matter and Memory, Digireads, 2010). In other words, our memory has both the character of being particular by retaining images of the actual moment in time in which we perform an activity, and of being general by converting all of those particular instances into a generalized motor habit. The former, as I said, is temporal or mental in it's functioning, while the other is spatial or bodily.
I would like to lend an example from my own experience: barista work. Anyone who spent much time reflecting on the life of a barista, as I have, could tell you that barista work is largely a matter of habit and muscle memory. It is a profession built of incredibly simple and repetitive motions that must be precisely replicated. In order to become consistent, baristas practice practice practice. We repeat our motions over and over again. Constantly tamping, pulling, steaming, pouring. The goal of this training and practice is to forget the individual case in favor of a generalized set of motor habits. Thus I could step up to an espresso machine right now and would have a whole arsenal of motor habits that would aid me in my work. Yet, if I reflect, I can stop and think of dozens of particular instances in which I made not merely a drink but that particular drink. This general muscle memory, in other words, rests on a foundation of particular instances.
These are the two faces of memory. Look into your own mind and you will find that you have them both there. You have a slew of particular, temporally bound memories, and you have a more general , atemporal set of ideas or dispositions that have been distilled from those particular experiences.
That memory should function in such a dual manner, according to Bergson, is explained by the practical orientation of life. To live is to be oriented towards doing. Thus all functions of life, from the body to the mind, are pointed towards action. This is no less true of memory. That we naturally distill general lessons from our particular experiences is not surprising. Memory, after all, is a faculty of the mind that is also oriented towards action.
Memory, in the two senses we are discussing, aids us in our quest to act by augmenting our perception of the world. What is it that keeps the world from presenting itself to us an incomprehensible jumble of images? Why am I able to discern this table, this kitchen, this beer bottle, and this computer in front of me? Because I have memories of experiencing them in the past: I've dealt with many tables and many beers and therefore don't need to look at them or think about them with the same kind of intensity that I did when I saw them for the first time. Imagine what a child's experience must be like. It must be just an endless series of images, incomprehensible and confusing. Only when the child has accumulated much experience of looking and acting will images start to become coherent and sensical. In other words, not until a child has accumulated an adequate store of memories can it begin to act consciously in the world. Thus Bergson argues that "there is no perception which is not full of memories" (Ibid., 17). Everywhere we look and everything we do, we are seeing the world through memory colored shades.
The implication of this and the crucial conclusion is this: Memory tends to supplant perception. It is often more economical to allow the residue of experience to stand in for the labor of detailed attention in the present. "In most cases," Bergson writes, "these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as 'signs' that recall to us former images" (Ibid.). Here we would do well to reflect on the Buddhist lauding of the child for actually 'seeing a ball roll across the floor', whereas an adult often lets their concept of the ball and the floor stand in for actual observation. We could equally say that we let our memory of a ball rolling across the floor stand in for the actual seeing.
Is this not true of us in our own lives? How many of us actually look carefully and closely at every door, every bus, every barista that we encounter? Do we not simply let our 'understanding' and our memories do that work for us? It is in no way vital to my activity right now that I look closely at this table in front of me. I know what a table is. I've seen them hundreds of times. I remember them. Yet, if I look closely at this table I discover all the blemishes on it, all the cracks and scratches that are not present if I let my memories of tables stand in for my actual observing of it.
Good. We've established several points.
(1) Memory is dual. One aspect of it is particular and temporal, another is general and atemporal.
(2) Memory is intimately linked with the need for action.
(3) Perception restricts itself based on it's orientation towards action, and thus tends to substitute the memory of things for the actual observation of said things.
The next thing that we must note is that human perception is not primarily visual, but narrative. Human action, that is to say, is not conducted or understood simply by how things look, hear, sound, or whatever. Human action is conducted and understood by means of thinking. Thought and intention, those self-evident activities of the human mind, are always the arbiters or human action. To 'perceive intentional action' then is to perceive thought. Thought, moreover, is not perceived by means of the senses, but by means of narrative or story. I've spent much time writing about this elsewhere and don't care to go into it now. But if you doubt that human action is only intelligible, 'perceived', in the form of a narrative please go see R.G. Collingwood's The Idea of History, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, Jonathan Gottschall's The Storytelling Animal. Or just pause and reflect on your own life. How do your own actions assume meaning? How do you justify your own actions to yourself? You do it by telling a story that has a past, present, and a future. We are made of stories.
If perception is structured by memory, then, we cannot avoid the conclusion that our narrative perception of ourselves and those around us are shaped by memory. I bet that if we reflect on our lives we will see that we find a duality in the narratives we use to perceive the world just like we will find in our memories. We will find that we tell certain stories about ourselves that are particular and temporal, (such as that one time on September 7th 2011 where I gave two weeks notice at my job) and others that are general and atemporal (like the idea that I am a solitary person or a loner). The former example is something that actually happened to me, something that I did without a doubt. The latter, however, is a conjecture or generalization that has been distilled from particular events in my life.
That general habits or general narratives should arise out of particular events is totally understandable. Of course the temporally specific form of memory tends to give way to the atemporal general kind of memory. It is simply more practical. Nature, of course, favors general, bodily, spatialized memory. Living beings thrive far more from being able to distill generalizations from their specific experiences than from being able to dwell and reflect on particular events. The former trumps the latter.
Bergson knew damn well, however, that humans are not purely practical beings. We acquired a sense for reflection, for thinking, for theoretical and contemplative living. If we wish to live a thoughtful life, we must take a step back from the realm of action and thus from generalized forms of memory. Instead, we ought to sit with our particular memories, understanding them for what they were in their particular time, refusing to generalize them into lessons or doctrines for action.
Having arrived at this point, understanding that human perception is fundamentally narrative, and that it is influenced by memory in the way described above, I feel I am in a good position to reflect on my two forms of memory.
I begin with a simple admission: I have to learned to hate myself.
Somehow during the course of my life I experienced enough pain, and I saw myself as the cause of this pain, that I began to think that there was something wrong with me. That I was 'broken' or unlovable or 'damaged' in one way or another.
I was always a sensitive, nay, a fragile child. Overrun and bullied by my own feelings. I remember walking into my first preschool with my mother, seeing children playing all kinds of games, screaming running shouting. I remember the fear I felt at the idea of joining them. I remember the boy in school everyone called 'Timmy the cry baby' and how deeply thankful I was that he was identified as such and not me. It could have been me, and I was grateful to have that attention directed towards him and not me. I remember the deep anxiety I felt in 4th grade, when I would wake up crying, not wanting to go to school, not wanting to get on my bike to meet the neighbors for our daily ride.
Fear, it turns out, was the governing emotion of my childhood. I don't even know why! My parents loved me and did everything they could to take care of me! Perhaps they were too soft with me? Too easy on me? I don't know. I don't know how this happened to me.
I remember knocking a bunch of my teeth out in first grade. Receiving special attention for this damage I'd done to myself. The conversations about fixing it. 'Fixing it'. Something to be fixed, I understand. But also something to accept and understand.
I remember being in middle school and how fearful I was that my girlfriend would break up with me. What other people would think of me.
I can recall countless particular instances of feeling inadequate and fearful. It's as if though I was already resigned to being fearful, broken, wounded.
I felt so much fear, and still feel fear, at the idea of having to face this life. I've got to live the whole god damn thing? And we suspect that it doesn't mean anything in the big picture?
I can recall so many individual particular instances in which I felt afraid, felt inadequate, felt out of place or strange.
Being the living thing I am, I took those particular memories and I generalized them. I converted them from individual instances of things that happened to me and I turned them into a story about what I am. I am not just a being that experienced these things, I am a being that was made for these kinds of experiences. I am not a being of possibilities who happens to have struggled in different elements of my life, I am a being made to be afraid and alone.
At some point in my life I arrived at this conclusion: I am not a being that has experienced pain and loneliness at certain moments in my life, I am a being made for lonesome suffering.
Ha. When I began to realize that I was living this story I could hardly believe it. It couldn't be.
Yet it is true.
The more I reflected on my past the more I realized how much my experiences had passed through the prism of that narrative. Events that should have been minor pains or difficulties turned into devastating events: a girl breaks up with me, I don't get a job, I am not welcome in a certain setting. Yet these things would devastate me. And they devastated me not simply because they were painful experiences but because they were evidence and corroboration for the story I was secretly living in which I was an unlovable and broken being.
My generalized memories, the narrative arc I'd distilled from them, in which I was broken, had become dominant, and all of my particular experiences were now being interpreted in their light.
There was no room for particular experiences to be particular experiences. Particular experiences could only function as further evidence for the story of a damaged and unlovable being.
Funny shit, right?
In doing this writing, by claiming that I have been a slave to the story I've been unconsciously living, I am trying to carve out a new space for the future. I look back and I see nothing but restrictions on my freedom and my ability to experience new things. I have been so deeply dominated by my particular memories and the general narrative I've culled from them that I've had such a reduced capacity for new experiences.
I'm calling you out, generalized narrative.
I'm here to reclaim my particularized experiences.
Here it goes.
Saturday, December 6, 2014
Being Over and Against or In The World
This phrase, 'over and against', is one that has become familiar to me primarily through my reading and reflection on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Rilke, Strauss, and other similar thinkers. The notion of being 'over and against' the world is often contrasted with the idea of being 'in the world'. Animals, Heidegger and Rilke would have us believe, are 'in the world' in a way that we are not. Something different happened to our form of consciousness. It acquired some kind of intensity or severity and it puts us in a position not of being in full accord or harmony with the world, but being outside of it, against it, poised towards manipulating it.
This applies to ourselves just as much as it does to the outside world. It is not only the natural world that has become an object of rational control, but our own bodies and minds. We submit ourselves to the same standards of control that we apply to the outside world. We, too, are raw material to be rationally manipulated.
In Heidegger's thinking this stance of being 'over and against' the world is tantamount to nihilism. Nihilism, at it's core, is an attitude or orientation towards the world that asserts (or assumes) that there is no meaning in the world other than the meaning we impose upon it.
This notion of being 'over and against' the world is undeniably spatial: it always involves a spatial metaphor in which we find ourselves on the 'outside' of ourselves and our experiences. We are not engaged directly in the 'flow' of experience, but have placed ourselves outside of it, assuming a perspective that is somehow detached from the immediacy of what we are going through.
My life has, as of late, been tumultuous and uncertain. My living and working situations have both undergone significant changes. It has caused me some pain and, to be frank, so much has been changing inside and outside of me that I've lost track of what is happening to me. I have no idea what I'm becoming, and I'm tempted to embrace Nietzsche's claim in Ecce Homo that one becomes what one is through habitual misinterpretation of what one is, through constant mistakes and failures. I am becoming what I am, no doubt. But it is hard for me to let go and simply go with my becoming.
Instead, I have resisted what is happening to me.
This resistance, moreover, has a spatial quality to it. I have not simply allowed myself to be immersed by my experience. I have placed myself 'over and against' my self. I've been looking down on myself, refusing to accept that this is my life, that this is what is happening to me. I feel this movement outside of myself. This push to be elsewhere.
It comes along with a kind of arrogance. An indigence or sense of superiority towards my situation.
In reality I know that I'm just not capable of facing the pain head on. I cast sideways glances at it by adopting this arrogant pose. I set myself outside of it and thus ease the pain I experience by being in it.
I am not in control. This causes me pain. The arrogance of separation is what helps me cope with it.
How unfortunate.
I'd like to be strong enough to face it head on, without the pretense of superiority.
A task, no doubt.
This applies to ourselves just as much as it does to the outside world. It is not only the natural world that has become an object of rational control, but our own bodies and minds. We submit ourselves to the same standards of control that we apply to the outside world. We, too, are raw material to be rationally manipulated.
In Heidegger's thinking this stance of being 'over and against' the world is tantamount to nihilism. Nihilism, at it's core, is an attitude or orientation towards the world that asserts (or assumes) that there is no meaning in the world other than the meaning we impose upon it.
This notion of being 'over and against' the world is undeniably spatial: it always involves a spatial metaphor in which we find ourselves on the 'outside' of ourselves and our experiences. We are not engaged directly in the 'flow' of experience, but have placed ourselves outside of it, assuming a perspective that is somehow detached from the immediacy of what we are going through.
My life has, as of late, been tumultuous and uncertain. My living and working situations have both undergone significant changes. It has caused me some pain and, to be frank, so much has been changing inside and outside of me that I've lost track of what is happening to me. I have no idea what I'm becoming, and I'm tempted to embrace Nietzsche's claim in Ecce Homo that one becomes what one is through habitual misinterpretation of what one is, through constant mistakes and failures. I am becoming what I am, no doubt. But it is hard for me to let go and simply go with my becoming.
Instead, I have resisted what is happening to me.
This resistance, moreover, has a spatial quality to it. I have not simply allowed myself to be immersed by my experience. I have placed myself 'over and against' my self. I've been looking down on myself, refusing to accept that this is my life, that this is what is happening to me. I feel this movement outside of myself. This push to be elsewhere.
It comes along with a kind of arrogance. An indigence or sense of superiority towards my situation.
In reality I know that I'm just not capable of facing the pain head on. I cast sideways glances at it by adopting this arrogant pose. I set myself outside of it and thus ease the pain I experience by being in it.
I am not in control. This causes me pain. The arrogance of separation is what helps me cope with it.
How unfortunate.
I'd like to be strong enough to face it head on, without the pretense of superiority.
A task, no doubt.
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Tight Clothes, Or, What I'm Doing to My Body
Ughhh I'm trying to get dressed to go eat thanksgiving dinner at someone's house and all my clothes are so tight. I won three pairs of Dockers Alpha pants (which I like a good deal). Two of them are now missing buttons because they are so tight and the third pair is so tight I don't think I can wear them. I've got some jeans on and an old favorite shirt and a cardigan and they are all sooooo tight.
I've never experienced such tightness before.
They are tight because over the last six months I've made several changes to my life. I've joined a gym and I regularly lift as much weight as I possibly can. I've increased my caloric intake to a level that I never knew before. I've put on 20 pounds. Plenty of muscle, some fat.
I was a child the last time I encountered this issue of outgrowing my clothes. I didn't even care then.
This feels like a new experience, given that now I buy my own clothes and that this growth is of my own doing.
I mostly have half-baked and undeveloped ideas about what I'm doing to my body or why I'm doing it. I've been reflecting on it some, but I haven't yet really grasped my behavior. Why exactly am I doing this? What exactly is it that I've been doing? Why did I start and why do I continue?
It touches on a variety of issues that I like to think about: the question of the relation between the mind and the body, the question of strength (both mental and physical), the question of strength and vulnerability.
All of this has occurred to me as I've been working to change my body. It's occurred to me to write about. But I've not yet felt the urge or the need. I had some free time just know after putting on my clothes and felt like jotting this down.
I'll give a closer look at these issues at some point. In the meantime, I'll continue to wonder why I'm lifting big weights as I lift big weights.
I've never experienced such tightness before.
They are tight because over the last six months I've made several changes to my life. I've joined a gym and I regularly lift as much weight as I possibly can. I've increased my caloric intake to a level that I never knew before. I've put on 20 pounds. Plenty of muscle, some fat.
I was a child the last time I encountered this issue of outgrowing my clothes. I didn't even care then.
This feels like a new experience, given that now I buy my own clothes and that this growth is of my own doing.
I mostly have half-baked and undeveloped ideas about what I'm doing to my body or why I'm doing it. I've been reflecting on it some, but I haven't yet really grasped my behavior. Why exactly am I doing this? What exactly is it that I've been doing? Why did I start and why do I continue?
It touches on a variety of issues that I like to think about: the question of the relation between the mind and the body, the question of strength (both mental and physical), the question of strength and vulnerability.
All of this has occurred to me as I've been working to change my body. It's occurred to me to write about. But I've not yet felt the urge or the need. I had some free time just know after putting on my clothes and felt like jotting this down.
I'll give a closer look at these issues at some point. In the meantime, I'll continue to wonder why I'm lifting big weights as I lift big weights.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Blogging
I don't blog as much as I used to and I'm troubled by it.
I've often wondered, 'What if I reach a certain age, say 30 or 40 years old, and I look back at this blog and marvel at all this writing I've done'. In other words, I fear what I'll become in the future, and that my relationship with reading and writing will be a mere fluke in the story of my life.
Why is that such a problem? Why do I have this idea that reading and writing is an integral part of a good life?
Lately I've found that my desire to write is being subsumed by my desire to reflect.
My desire to write was previously wrapped up with a need to be accepted, a need to be praised, a need to fit in. Homelessness has been a problem for me. I've not felt like I've belonged anywhere in quite a long time. Though I wasn't conscious of this when I applied to graduate school, I really wanted that to be a home for me. A place where I would be greeted and protected in a certain way. I don't know if it could have served that function for me, but I assumed it would. I'm not sure why.
Now that that world is less of a priority (or possibility) for me I no longer think of my writing in the same way.
My real business is reflection. My real business is taking care of myself and keep tracking of myself. My business is paying attention.
Is blogging a way for me to pay attention? Does it aid me in my goal of being reflective?
I think so.
I am currently working on an essay that I'm really enjoying. It's been a lot of fun. Same authors (Clausewitz, Collingwood, MacIntyre, etc.), but lots of new thoughts, new ideas. It feels great. It pushes me in my day to day life, it keeps me sharp, it provides me with 'aha' moments in which I feel like I've made a break through.
I feel pained sometimes because I think that my serious thinking will just be a fad or temporary obsession in my life. I have had (I confess) many obsessive hobbies in my past: model building, hackey sack, flat land biking, video games. I've seriously pursued a variety of hobbies throughout my relatively short life.
Will serious thinking and reflecting be yet another one of these obsessive hobbies? I suspect not. Yet I fear the answer is a yes. I fear this is just an episode in my life where I try to think seriously and where it doesn't all amount to much.
Ha.
The fear! I quote two songs for you: "Motherfuck, the fear is back. The fear is back, the fear is back. No place to hide my shamefulness, no place to hide my discontent." A lovely song by John Maus. Another song: "This fear, that lives inside of me, subsides far too infrequently."
In the last two years I've managed to identify the way that fear has dominated my life. It's been a governing emotion. How strange to acknowledge and to understand that I've been ruled by fear. Some say CREAM, cash rules everything around me. I, on the other hand, say FREAM, fear rules everything around me. I've been working hard to minimize the role of fear in my life.
I, much like Kevin McAllister, am not afraid anymore. I am ready to confront my life, whatever that means, whatever it will take.
And I know, I hope, that reflection will be a central part of it. All I can ask for is to be able to step outside myself on occassion, to maintain some perspective on myself, and to laugh and cry often.
I've often wondered, 'What if I reach a certain age, say 30 or 40 years old, and I look back at this blog and marvel at all this writing I've done'. In other words, I fear what I'll become in the future, and that my relationship with reading and writing will be a mere fluke in the story of my life.
Why is that such a problem? Why do I have this idea that reading and writing is an integral part of a good life?
Lately I've found that my desire to write is being subsumed by my desire to reflect.
My desire to write was previously wrapped up with a need to be accepted, a need to be praised, a need to fit in. Homelessness has been a problem for me. I've not felt like I've belonged anywhere in quite a long time. Though I wasn't conscious of this when I applied to graduate school, I really wanted that to be a home for me. A place where I would be greeted and protected in a certain way. I don't know if it could have served that function for me, but I assumed it would. I'm not sure why.
Now that that world is less of a priority (or possibility) for me I no longer think of my writing in the same way.
My real business is reflection. My real business is taking care of myself and keep tracking of myself. My business is paying attention.
Is blogging a way for me to pay attention? Does it aid me in my goal of being reflective?
I think so.
I am currently working on an essay that I'm really enjoying. It's been a lot of fun. Same authors (Clausewitz, Collingwood, MacIntyre, etc.), but lots of new thoughts, new ideas. It feels great. It pushes me in my day to day life, it keeps me sharp, it provides me with 'aha' moments in which I feel like I've made a break through.
I feel pained sometimes because I think that my serious thinking will just be a fad or temporary obsession in my life. I have had (I confess) many obsessive hobbies in my past: model building, hackey sack, flat land biking, video games. I've seriously pursued a variety of hobbies throughout my relatively short life.
Will serious thinking and reflecting be yet another one of these obsessive hobbies? I suspect not. Yet I fear the answer is a yes. I fear this is just an episode in my life where I try to think seriously and where it doesn't all amount to much.
Ha.
The fear! I quote two songs for you: "Motherfuck, the fear is back. The fear is back, the fear is back. No place to hide my shamefulness, no place to hide my discontent." A lovely song by John Maus. Another song: "This fear, that lives inside of me, subsides far too infrequently."
In the last two years I've managed to identify the way that fear has dominated my life. It's been a governing emotion. How strange to acknowledge and to understand that I've been ruled by fear. Some say CREAM, cash rules everything around me. I, on the other hand, say FREAM, fear rules everything around me. I've been working hard to minimize the role of fear in my life.
I, much like Kevin McAllister, am not afraid anymore. I am ready to confront my life, whatever that means, whatever it will take.
And I know, I hope, that reflection will be a central part of it. All I can ask for is to be able to step outside myself on occassion, to maintain some perspective on myself, and to laugh and cry often.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Friendship
Aha! It is nearly the end of September and I haven't written a blog post. What a shame it would be if I left a month unmarked, unremarked upon. I find so much in my life so remarkable. I just avoid this particular medium.
I tend to value my voice, my speech. I'm currently trudging my way through Aristotle's De Anima, 'On the Soul'. I often find books challenging. Sometimes I find them downright inscrutable. This is one of those cases. I intend to finish it, but I don't have many hopes for understanding it.
One thing I have grasped, however, is that Aristotle places particular emphasis on speech, because speech is the aspect of human behavior in which the soul is most clearly exhibited. I have reflected on this during my morning commute, sitting on a bus, quietly whirring, not a voice disturbing the mechanical peace.
Speech also seems to be a central element of friendship. After I read 'On the Soul' I'll probably read some fiction, spend some time relaxing. But I also intend to read the Nicomachean Ethics. As I've learned from a friend of mine, friendship plays a central role in Aristotle's account of the good life. My friend has told me that Aristotle goes so far as to argue that a person who possessed all other forms of goodness would not choose to go on living if they did not have friendship. Friendship has to be one of the highest forms of goodness.
One aspect of friendship that I have been reflecting on is it's exclusive character. We favor our friends more than we favor others, and that is simply how it is. We speak to them about matters closer to us, we let them in our truths that we don't let others in on. We care for them in a way that we don't care for others.
Honestly, I've lost my train of thought. That's okay. I'll just say that friendship seems to be an awkward question in some ways because it points to the question of inequality, the question of love.
I tend to value my voice, my speech. I'm currently trudging my way through Aristotle's De Anima, 'On the Soul'. I often find books challenging. Sometimes I find them downright inscrutable. This is one of those cases. I intend to finish it, but I don't have many hopes for understanding it.
One thing I have grasped, however, is that Aristotle places particular emphasis on speech, because speech is the aspect of human behavior in which the soul is most clearly exhibited. I have reflected on this during my morning commute, sitting on a bus, quietly whirring, not a voice disturbing the mechanical peace.
Speech also seems to be a central element of friendship. After I read 'On the Soul' I'll probably read some fiction, spend some time relaxing. But I also intend to read the Nicomachean Ethics. As I've learned from a friend of mine, friendship plays a central role in Aristotle's account of the good life. My friend has told me that Aristotle goes so far as to argue that a person who possessed all other forms of goodness would not choose to go on living if they did not have friendship. Friendship has to be one of the highest forms of goodness.
One aspect of friendship that I have been reflecting on is it's exclusive character. We favor our friends more than we favor others, and that is simply how it is. We speak to them about matters closer to us, we let them in our truths that we don't let others in on. We care for them in a way that we don't care for others.
Honestly, I've lost my train of thought. That's okay. I'll just say that friendship seems to be an awkward question in some ways because it points to the question of inequality, the question of love.
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