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.

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.

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.

Aha

Yes yes writing is a strange and confusing thing to do.

I've begun my latest essay in earnest. I say 'latest essay' as if though I still pounded out essays like I did in the months and years immediately after finishing undergrad. I used to produce that ish, man. Sometimes I look at my output and I wonder how I did it.

It's not like it was even all bad writing!

I just reread my essay on nihilism, magic, and amusement and I wasn't even mad about it! I was totally engaging with a bunch of different thinkers, working through their ideas, trying to think along with them and draw some implications and clarity from it all.

Yet now I find myself being so much more careful, so measured in my writing. Doing proper footnotes, trying to sound proper and speak to an audience.

One thing that was affecting my writing in those first few years out of college was that I wasn't confronting the other things going on in my life. Namely, I wasn't confronting the complexity and, more so, the difficulty of my experiences with women. I was ignoring the fact that I was lonely. I think during much of my college career I lost touch with some of my emotions, especially those that have to do with intimacy and sex, knowing and being known.

At the end of 2012 I began to face those feelings more seriously. Mainly because my heart got broken. Mainly because it was exceedingly fragile. Anyone I cared for could have broken it. I just happened to place it in hands that weren't ready or willing to hold it. So naturally it fell, naturally it shattered.

SOMETHING SOMETHING GOTTA HEART OF GLASSSSSS.

I've very much worked on my resiliency, my robustness. My antifragility?

Yet the output of my writing has been affected by another factor: my rejection from graduate school and the pain it has caused me.

When I set out to write an essay for my graduate school applications I approached it quite seriously. I worked very hard on it, I tried to make it focused, diverse, rigorous. All this crap. I'm not sure how good that essay is. I know that it tried to do wayyyyy too much way to quickly. It embarrasses me that I submitted such a thing to the universities I wanted to go to.

Now I can't seem to engage in my attempts at scholarly work without some pain. I feel so inadequate. I feel like I've failed.

To render this in terms of perspective taking, it's as if I am observing all of my writing through the eyes of a generic academic who has refused me entry into the institutions.

Oh it hurts.

Haha. I don't know what to think. What to do.

I'm delighted that I've begun this essay that I'm working on. The title, you ask? Well, surely I'll share. Tentatively (but not really): "Matter and Mind in Strategic Education: Perspective Taking and Political Wisdom in the Philosophy of Carl von Clausewitz and R.G. Collingwood"

I love the phrase 'Matter and Mind in Strategic Education'. I like alliteration.

I think that matter and mind, too, are pretty fundamental categories that belong to science and the humanities, respectively.

Eh, that's all I've got, really.

I was just so amazed that as I was going through On War, looking for the proper evidence to show that Clausewitz's concerns were eminently practical, that I was so daunted, so pained for a moment. It is a daunting book, there is no doubt about that. But my pain isn't simply that the book is difficult. It is that I find my life difficult, I find my ambitions thwarted, my ego bruised, my current working situation counter to my feelings of who I am.

Hmm. What pleasure I take in writing what I wrote tonight. What pleasure I take in writing this now!

Ohhhh to try and find an avenue to think.

Ohhhhhhhh.

Oh.

Self-Hate and Memory Armor

I hate to admit, I've not done a good job of loving myself.

I have, in fact, hated myself quite deeply. This fact has been hidden from me for much of my life. I didn't even know I hated myself. If someone had asked me, 'how do you feel about yourself?', I probably would have told them that I thought I was alright, that I liked myself, et cetera. Part of me does like myself.

Yet I behave in so many ways, and I experience so many emotions, that would only be possible if I had a profoundly negative view of myself. Breakups and rejection, for example, have always been devastating for me. Even when I am the one doing the breaking or rejecting, I'm still devastated.

Why? Why is this?

Because, as it turns out, I have been living a story in which I am unlovable, in which I am broken and in which someone won't be able to love me in spite of my ticks and inconsistencies.

For if I were living a story in which I was lovable, in which I had a good chance of ending up in a satisfying love affair, then one botched six month relationship or a polite rejection from a friend of a friend wouldn't touch my heart so deeply. Yet those experiences not only touched my heart, they went to its core, they echoed with a personal truth that rang so loudly it lapsed into silence.

These silent narratives, these thoughts that I silently think, have led me to govern myself hatefully.

I've often reflected on the way I treat my friends and family, the compassion I love to show not only to them but to strangers or whoever. Yet I deny this compassion to myself.

On occasion I imagine myself holding myself in my mind's eye. I see the child that I've always been, I see myself being small, being held by myself. I deserve the compassion that I give. Why don't I receive it? Why don't I take it for myself?

When I was seeing my therapist I used to talk to him about the deep sensitivity and fragility that has always followed me. My inner life has always been intense. I've always churned deeply.

Tears have always come to me.

Ohhhhh how embarrassing it was for me. Other kids didn't seem to be overwhelmed by tears the way I was. I recall one kid from preschool, Timmy the crybaby, they called him, who cried quite a lot. Thank god I never acquired such a nick name. Yet I remember feeling relieved that it was him who had received the spotlight for his sensitivity. I was fast. I was other things. Those things could be accentuated and my fragility downplayed.

My fragility was also a point of tension in my family. My sister is not like me. She doesn't succumb to her feelings in the same way I do. They break me. She endures them with greater ease.

I often see myself as tearing at myself from within. I don't think she does.

My fragility hurt me in my love life. I was incapable of expressing myself to my most long-term companion. I was deeply hurt by conflicting desires. I behaved in conflicting ways, and I know I hurt her.

Yet it remains an issue for me that it doesn't remain for them.

For now what I am dealing with is not merely the fragility that is still a part of me, but the scars that have been left by my emotional pains.

To be more precise, lets not call them scars, lets call it armor. Memory armor.

I have been reflecting on memory both generally and in particular (thanks, Bergson).

Memory, in general, is something that accumulates and eventually provides us with habits, biases, and heuristics that we use to navigate the world. I have walked down Broadway in Capitol Hill hundreds of times, and I no longer need to look very carefully about where I am going. I have pulled thousands of shots of espresso and made thousands of lattes, and can now do those things habitually, probably with my eyes closed.

The essential point about memory is this: they unconsciously coalesce into general conclusions and habits that govern our behavior and constrict our perception. Memory eases the burden of seeing by substituting past instances of experience for observation in the present.

Do you look carefully at every tree you pass? Do you look closely at every barista you deal with? Of course not, you fucker, you know damn well what a tree is and what a barista is. You don't need to look at these things because, practically, memory can sufficiently supplant perception.

But what if some of our memories have led us to the wrong conclusions about the thing we are dealing with? What if our past experiences have been incorrectly generalized and we are now incapable of observing the thing in front of us? What if memory has us convinced that we are A when we are actually B?

My memories, I am implying, have provided me with the general conclusion that I am a fragile person, destined to be hurt and run over by the world, never to love or be loved.

How dare I extrapolate such self-hate from my memories! How can one be so hostile and unforgiving of oneself?! What kind of person thinks of oneself in such perverse and distorted ways?

Many of us, I suspect.

But this makes sense in a way. It is armor, protection against the pains of the future.

Love hurt me. Love hurt me deeply. I loved someone so much that I was incapable of disconnecting from them. I couldn't be without them, yet part of me knew I had to be. I tried to pull away, and was always pulled back.

I was not a consistent person then, I am not a consistent person now.

So I took that pain, that experience of love, and I said to myself: 'This reveals your deepest contradictions. This shows you how powerless you are against your own emotions. There is something deeply, deeply wrong here.'

What a lesson to unconsciously learn! Ha!

I took those experiences, I took those memories, and I layered myself in them. I let them harden under years of solitude and smoke. I fought my loneliness as my mentors prescribed. I took my memories and I used them as a blue print for a suit of armor. I guarded myself against those pains.

I recently had an experience where I took that armor off. There are no actual wounds there. I am not a jagged and broken thing.

I am a sensitive human, with an inner life of great intensity, and I will continue to be hurt by the world. I will continue to wear these emotions on my young face and I will continue to hear my voice break and my lips quiver under their weight. I will continue to relish my sobs and my frowns.

But I don't want to be afraid, and I don't want to wear these painful memories like a suit of armor.

I won't allow my anger to step up and supplant my sensitivity.

I have to learn to bear this intensity.

The alternative is hiding. The alternative is a wall of anger. The alternative is putting on a suit of armor built of memory. The alternative is self-hate.

For this intensity will not go away. It will merely swell behind the walls I create until it finds a chink in my armor.

What I Think About

I'm not sure what I think about anymore.

Its interesting to have let go of graduate school ambitions and to still feel inclined towards reflection and philosophy. I found it comforting when Bloom told me in Love & Friendship that philosophizing was a solitary quest. It obviously has to be.

It's just odd to me that there is such an institutional structure that structures philosophy. It has become a career path, a way to make a living.

John Maus said in an interview that he doesn't think we should make our living by being musicians, that the threat/reward of money threatened something about artistic integrity. I wonder the same things about the universities. Is 'publish or perish' really a good model for producing sound scholarship? So I have my doubts about the universities, their goodness, their ability to provide philosophy with an adequate home.

The problem with no being involved with the universities, however, is that I can't do my reading and writing with a ton of rigor. I have to work full time! I have a job where I'm just scraping by, having friends, trying to date, trying to live.

Why do I have to be poor and strapped for time if I want to be scholarly? Eh, my professor pointed out a long time ago that there is a reason that monks used to be scholars. It takes time! It takes a lot of time! Building a certain cast of mind, becoming a certain way.

That, perhaps, is the scariest thing, and the thing I think about and fear the most. I fear that I won't be able to continue thinking in these ways. I've worked hard to learn about philosophy, to learn about myself. I've become something different because of the work I've done. I can tell. So the kind of person that I've made myself into is directly related to the way I've learn to think through my reading and writing. Now I have to keep thinking if I want to stay who I am.

There is no telling what kinds of things I will think in the future, what kind of person I'll be. But I want to continue to be thoughtful and reflective. I see no reason why I shouldn't continue to reflect in the future.

It's just hard not having any way for it to be a source of identity. I think, I read, I write. Yet I have no institutional support in this task.

Who knows what I think about.

I know what I've been reading.

Joyce.

Collingwood.

Plato.

So on so on so on.

I will think more.

The Self, The Network of Gazes, and Living Through the Screen

What I am is inseparable from what you are. I do not have some kind of autonomous self that subsists independently from the people around me. The people I come into contact are an integral part of what I become.

For when I engage with you I am not simply deducing your mental process from your words. I am doing something more like recreating your mind within my own. I simulate your mental processes as I observe them in order to be connected to you and therefore part of my understanding you is becoming you within myself. What I know of you is really something that I know of me.

Similarly, when I am around you I not only see from my point of view, I imagine how you view me. When I walk down the street, for example, I often have an internal image of what I look like from behind, how a stranger would view me walking down the street. I always see myself from both within and without.

Sometimes the view from without is a definite perspective, like that of a close friend or lover. Sometimes the view from without is vague, amorphous, not belonging to any one person in particular, but rather a general sort of mind that I assume belongs to our time and place.

All this should be fairly obvious. Of course the self is not some static entity. It changes based on who I am around. And, more specifically, it changes based on what perspectives I am able to imagine myself from. Thus my therapist posed the very intelligent question, 'Which me do I get to be around this person?' The point being precisely that relating to different people make us into different things because it forces us to occupy their perspective and therefore to subtlety change ourselves. The point being: The self emerges out of the constellation of perspectives that we take on a regular basis.

This idea of the self as hinging on the possible perspectives we can imagine ourselves through is at the heart of Foucault's work on panopticism. In Discipline & Punish Foucault wrote about a 18th-19th century prison design known as the panopticon. The idea is that there is a guard tower standing in the middle of a ring of prison cells, each one visible from the tower. The top of the tower is totally blacked out, whereas the cells are fully lit at all times. The prisoners therefore cannot know if they are being watched at any particular moment, but they know that there is a possibility for them to be viewed at any moment and thus they must behave as if though they were being observed.

The idea of a panopticon is therefore essentially a means of control that functions by forcing an individual to view themselves from a point of view other than their own, in particular, an outside perspective that  has the capacity to judge or punish. In the case of the literal panopticon, a prisoner is being forced to imagine they are being watched by a guard who could inflict punishment on them if t hey catch them breaking a rule. There is, however, a more general point to be made: any new perspective I learn to take allows me to criticize and praise my actions in new ways. This is why Allan Bloom said that great authors must be worn like a pair of glasses through which we see the world. I've also read that therapy, from the patient's point of view, is about learning to build a more balanced perspective in part by using your relationship with your therapist as a touchstone for healthy consciousness. I can say from personal experience that it is a useful to ask, What would my favorite professor say about this? Or what would my therapist say to me right now?

The ability to internalize another person's perspective, and learning to criticize oneself through that perspective, therefore has significant repercussions for our actions. Foucault used the image of the panopticon precisely to draw attention to how our behavior can be altered merely by 'the gaze' of another. He therefore meant the panopticon primarily as a metaphor for the way our current social order depends on a regulatory 'network of gazes'. Our dominant institutions, penal, legal, psychiatric, medical, etc., all institutions that exert power on society by producing knowledge about what is and is not acceptable behavior, therefore putting a corral on the potentials for action. The knowledge they wield, moreover, expresses itself in a gaze: a point of view that each of us internalizes and learns to criticize ourselves through. Foucault might say that there is a doctor, a psychiatrist, a judge, and a priest inside us all. Or, more precisely, we have all learned to silently judge ourselves through those perspectives.

So much of our experience is filtered through these dominant perspectives. So much of what we are is about the other perspectives we imagine ourselves from, which stories we tell about ourselves from which points of view. I am thus claiming that the self is something that emerges out of a 'network of gazes', or, to put it differently, it is the sum of all the points of view, all the silently simulated perspectives, that we carry with us in our daily lives. Solitude, friendships, relationships, all breed very different kinds of selfs.

If it is true that the self is something that emerges out of the variety of perspectives that we carry within us, what does this say about our relationship with media in general and facebook in particular?

With media in general we have to recognize that many of the things we may think about ourselves, our bodies or our minds, is often being generated by a machine that doesn't want to make us into better people. It wants to make us into consumers. It wants us to buy into unrealistic standards for our bodies and our relationships. We can catch ourselves criticizing ourselves through this lens we've internalized from marketing and media generally. We can label it as such. In doing so we can place a little bit of distance between us and those narratives. In our initial dealings with media it is easy to be unaware of its subtle influence on behavior, but the goal is to recognize that it serves a regulatory function that you are capable of resisting for yourself, free to explore alternative narratives of what you'd like to be.

Foucault would wager that such an activity is 'political'. It is true that the dominant institutions of our society have become somewhat politicized. I can't eat at Chic-fil-a anymore, god dammit. I wish I could just eat one of those chicken sandwiches because it's a fabulous sandwich. Chic-fil-a's approach to social and political issues, however, overrides that. The medical industry, psychiatric clinics, and penal institutions, too, are major structures of our political system. But does merely thinking about them differently constitute a political action? I suppose that being open to counter-narratives and alternative subjectivities could drive one to have a certain political leaning or attitude towards action. I've never quite grasped Foucault's thinking on politics. I know I'm not the only one. Forgive this digression.

In addition to being critical of the dominant narratives around us, we can actively seek out positive forms of media that will provide us with new points of view which to view ourselves. Reading and getting to know an excellent philosopher, for example, can provide you with a new set of eyes to see the world through. I can say that my world view has become noticeably richer and more exciting because of the contact I've had with friends, therapists, and philosophers. Each of them offers me a new perspective that I can see myself and the world through. At the end of it I feel like I'm able to build up a more realistic perspective on myself and the world because I try to find a place within myself where I can balance all the perspectives I've internalized. Recognizing that a more realistic sense of can self emerge out of interaction with diverse perspectives is very helpful in the task of reflection and self-cultivation.

I finally just want to comment briefly on what all this means in relation to facebook. Facebook is a very strange thing if you think about it in the terms I've presented here. It allows us to imagine our profiles from the perspective of hundreds of people that we've met throughout our lives, many of whom are acquaintances at best. I think in turn people tend to put their 'best foot forward' online: we choose our best pictures, we spend time thinking of witty things to share, we want to be acknowledged. There is an interesting quotation from some bro named Steve Furtick. It goes, "The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel." What is facebook if not a permanent highlight reel?

My concern here is that we are abstracting ourselves, that we are forcing ourselves to become generalized people, one's more amenable to the packaged presentation that something like facebook or okcupid enables. This imperative, moreover, is something that may emerge out of the network of gazes that facebook provides us. When all we see is people having tons of fun and posting great meals and changing their statuses to engaged or married or whatever it can be easy to assume that they experience no speed bumps, no fits of self doubt or sadness that come out of nowhere. But of course they do. We all do. What I'm wondering, though, is if it's possible that long term exposure to facebook (as a network of gazes that we imagine ourselves through) can have a lasting affect on our behavior? If we take a picture of every meal, if everything is documented, and we know that it is being documented, is it not true that a part of our mind is perhaps imagining what that picture will look like to the hundreds of people we know online? Is not part of our mind therefore detached from the situation itself, and the experience in some ways passes through imagined screens as we experience it?

Other people have written about facebook as a panopticon. It makes perfect sense. I have not, however, seen anyone render the panopticon in the language of perspective taking and simulation theory more specifically. When we do render facebook panopticism in the language of simulation theory, we get something like what I'm trying to talk about. I'm struggling. But the idea is that facebook can exert a regulatory affect on our behavior by providing a huge number of perspectives that we criticize and praise our actions through. Facebook as a network of gazes, moreover, exerts a generalizing power, forcing our self expression to be condensed and trimmed. It encourages us to display only our highlight reels, and I fear we may forget how to move comfortably behind the scenes.