Where We Were

We were all in a familiar place, physically. Mentally, I was in the most foreign of places. Lifted by my many vices, embellishing the parts of myself that I feared the most.

Comfort was overshadowed by something nameless and I didn't care to name it.

But she was there to tell me its name. It was called drama, narrative flourish, a skill in one world and an embarrassment in another. In the world we were in, in that bakery and in that bar, it was an embarrassment. Take it to that other world, she said.

There was a man, she told me, that had been afraid of his talent for drama and wild emotions. She told me that I should devote myself to fiction writing because, clearly, I had the capacity to live many lives even as myself. Imagine the lives I could live as others.

Life Narratives, Complexity, and Generality

Recently I find myself falling into the trap of narrating my life in very general terms.

I say 'these days', I say 'I'm successful', I say 'this period'.

Last night someone told me I spoke like I was very old. That I would live so many lives with the way I speak. 

There will be endless periods! Wave after wave of classifiable 'days' and 'phases'.

But this kind of speaking is problematic because it is my way of not confronting complexity. I try to chunk my life into clean, generalizable, easily narratable segments. 

The problem is that I love narrative. I love thinking about narrative. I love philosophers who regard narrative as definitively human. A book on this topic, The Story Telling Animal, was published earlier this year. Alasdair MacIntyre and Roger Smith  make similar arguments, claiming that human action only becomes intelligible through narrative, and that in the process of narrating our actions we also create our future actions. 

What they say is that humans are the beings that create themselves by telling stories about themselves.

So why am I telling such simple stories about myself?

Why am I making myself into this generality by telling these general stories about myself?

Because the complexity of my life is unintelligible to me at this point. 

Even the way I think about complexity is loaded with generality. My half-assed thinking and writing about nonlinear dynamics is a good example of this.

Not that I need to be hard on myself.

It is okay that I don't grasp the complexity of my life. 

I just need to stop telling such simple stories about what is in reality a very complex dissatisfaction. 

Things are not as simple as I'd like to make them out to be, my own unhappiness included. 

Clear Coffee Thinking

I value clear thinking. I don't know why.

The things I often think clearly about, however, are not life itself. I think clearly about coffee. I think clearly about philosophy. I think clearly about abstract things.

It is much harder for me to think clearly about my own life, my own emotions. My life and my emotions are so intense. I don't know why.

Thinking clearly about these other things makes me feel good. It distracts me from the uncertainty and incomprehensibility of real life.

Tomorrow is coffee fest.

I'll be pouring in the latte art competition.

I've been spending so much time trying to think clearly about pouring.

It has been nice.

I don't know what will happen tomorrow.

I don't know what will happen after that.

I think I need to give up on clear thinking.

Sincerity

I just read a brief article about David Foster Wallace's suicide.

I took my copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again off my shelf. A friend gifted it to me. I've never read it. I'll read one of the essays tonight.

I have read This is Water. I thought it was an excellent speech.

One thing I like about Wallace is his thoughts on sincerity. He seems to have little patience with irony, with referentiality.

I remember when I first started this blog I shared one of his quotations. I'll share it again:

'The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.'

I have no patience for the kind of irony he is describing. Sincerity seems like such a great alternative.

But for some reason it is so difficult.

We have so many ideas about all the different games we should be playing.

So many ideas about power, about who's in control, about who should text who and when.

I'm thinking about men and women, about dating and sex.

Relationships, both platonic and romantic, are where I crave sincerity above all.

I want to tell someone I love them and I want to mean it in a very robust sense.

I have no patience for weak conceptions of love.

If there is one word that does not need to be diluted, as so many words are, it is the L word.

The All-Volunteer Force and Collingwood in WWI

My intellectual stagnation can be explained partially in terms of my personal life. I've suffered some heart break, and I've become frustrated with my working life.

But there are also genuine intellectual problems that have felt insurmountable.

The biggest problem has been my graduate school personal statement. I don't know how to frame myself to these schools.

On the one hand, I have a very clear idea that could be pursued through military history programs: The problem of democracy and state service in America, and the way that the all-volunteer military has effected the political process in America. More specifically, the question as to how the all-volunteer force has effected democracy. Has it strengthened it or made it weaker? I think the latter. Disentangling the citizenry and the military, I suspect, is dangerous. It means that the government can fight wars without the people's approval, because, at the end of the day, we are not the ones doing the fighting. They have a military that is fully in their control and that is paid to be in their control.

This line of research goes well with many of the current issues in American politics. If we want to know how democracy in America has been corrupted by the role of corporate money, we might want to ask ourselves why we let corporate money into our war making. This decision, I think, may have something to do with our ignorance about the relationship between the participation in war and inclusion in the political process.

On the other hand, I love R.G. Collingwood and want to devote my time thinking about him and his ideas.

So much of my thinking and writing during the last two years has been devoted to Collingwood. He is without a doubt the thinker I feel the most connected to. When I read him I feel like I am genuinely communing with another mind. His thoughts are so excellent, and I feel such a personal connection with him.

I could also conceivably write a military history dissertation on Collingwood. The question would be: What the hell happened to Collingwood in WWI that influenced his philosophy?

Collingwood is very clear in his Autobiography that the war was the event that inspired him to try and create a science of human affairs, a method by which men could learn to deal with problems in the human world as skillfully as the natural sciences had taught him to deal with nature.

This would be a question of war, of politics, of education, of philosophy.

This, then, is what my personal statement needs to explain.

I need to explain how torn I am between these two projects, these two paths.

On the one hand I have a clear historical problem that also has relevance to the present.

On the other I have the philosophical love of my life, and questions about the war that drove his work.

What to do...

It feels so good to be thinking.

Quickfire, I Tried

I saw Moonface live the other night.

It was great! Moonface's new album is so excellent. Sinai was even there playing with him.

Super good.

My only complaint is that he played my favorite song too soon. Third.

He should have waited until a more climactic moment.

One interesting thing was that he added a new lyric to the climax of the song.

"Quickfire, I tried to be a genius. But my mind is in a million fucking pieces."

Pretty awesome.

I can identify.

My intellectual stagnation is severe. My mind is starving and fading in some weird mixture of anger, depression, and loneliness.

But I have hopes that I'll be coming out of this soon.

Change is coming.

It always is.

Someday soon I'll think clearly again.

An Affirmation.

I'm stopping in only to reaffirm my disinterest in this blog.

I'm tired of it.

My thought is stagnant.

I don't understand how this happened.

I don't understand how this blog animated my thought for as long as it did.

I don't understand how my thought has become what it is right now.

I don't understand the process I'm going through.