"the hardest thing in this world is to live in it"
The minute I start feeling sorry for myself, a friend steps up out of the blue with a charming, quirky, and completely unexpected gift – and I get awesome, amazing news about my sister – who was accepted to her first choice of medical school!
Yeah, I’m moody and melancholy, and I feel very alienated from a lot right now, and that’s not likely to get better any time soon. But there’s still good out there.
I’ve stopped asking when things will get good – I realize, after all, that there are good things going on, it’s just that I get overwhelmed at times and can’t see the forest for the trees. Or something wise like that.
It’s really more accurate to say that I’m trying to stop vocalizing the thought – I still have it, and often. Today is a great example of that. I woke up several hours later than I had wanted, groggy beyond belief. (Apparently, since not only did I reset my alarm, apparently, but eventually decided to unplug it from the wall.) I had over 100 email actually needing some moderate attention, because I basically ignored my computer last night. In that, there was email from my sister passing on a message from my mother that was heartbreakingly sad, several notes from former colleagues about the suicide of someone I knew professionally at UW, and a whopping single email from anyone I work with, my exec editor, in response to a question I mailed last night.
So I’m surrounded by death and feeling, at the moment, if I just packed up and left, it wouldn’t be noticed by anyone. (Or more realistically and accurately, if I turned off chat clients and shut down email, basically going on radio silence, it wouldn’t be noticed by most.) What a charming mood this puts me in.
I’ve set aside the papers I was grading, and am watching the coffee shop again. Watching people read their papers, seeing their screens flash by various news sites. I can’t help but think of another of Latour’s comments about modern man. He says that if reading the daily paper is modern man’s form of prayer, then it is a very strange prayer indeed, with culture and news and nature being churned and tossed up over again on a daily basis. It’s an amusing analogy, but perhaps more apt than he even realized; prayer, ultimately, is a gesture of hope, of faith in something greater than yourself. What better thing to pray in and to, than that which you directly influence? And in the field of interdisciplinary studies, what you directly influence is up to you, limited only by your own ideas.
– me, CHID 390 final paper, written much later than most, and thus with much more perspective
I have been reading William S. Burroughs’ The Adding Machine, and finding, to my delight, small bursts of creativity flowing from his words. I picked up a journal this evening to pair with the book, to record and expand my thoughts on what I’m reading (instead of scribbling on the back of whatever receipt is handy).
In one of his essays, Burroughs talks about words being viruses, and how Korzybski’s book argues that words without referents are words that should be dropped from the language. It stuck with me, since I’ve been thinking a lot about semiotics lately, and how much of Locke’s Essay deals in a sign theory that seems closely mappable to Lacan’s. I sort of wondered how my empiricism prof would take me tossing Korzybski into the discussion next week (before dismissing it outright since that would drag the conversation even more off track than we normally get), idly debated looking to see if the store had the book Burroughs referred to, and moved along.
I had decided I wanted to inscribe Stephen Greenblatt’s comment about wonder in the beginning of my new journal, and rather than just walk into the other room and pull Marvelous Possessions off the bookshelf, I decided to see if I had the quote in my blog. A quick search on Greenblatt pulled up not the quote on wonder, but a discussion of Douglas Engelbart and Korzybski. How very strange and serendipitous the world can be.
…actually, I did pretty well. And this is probably the third or fourth time I’ve been in a bookstore the last few weeks and the first time I bought something, so that’s got to be worth something. Especially since I was technically at two bookstores. From the little local store, I picked up another journal to write in, as well as The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power by Kenneth L. Schmitz, who I’ve never heard of but is apparently a professor emeritus of philosophy and a fellow at Trinity College, University of Toronto, as well as a bunch of other academic affiliations. I picked this up largely because of the topic – I’m curious what a philosopher has to say about recapturing wonder and it’s importance in the world, as opposed to Greenblatt. (All hail Greenblatt and other CHID-related chanting.)
And speaking of CHID, Phillip would be so proud. The last time I was at Borders, mucking around for books on empiricism (which I didn’t find), I stumbled across a couple of Henri Bergson books. I grabbed them, held them longingly, and then put them back and have thought about them ever since. I actually specifically went back to Borders tonight to buy them, and picked up The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, which is actually his last book and more of an autobiography and explanation of choice, as well as Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, which on my copy has a much nicer cover! I justify this as being related to what I think I’m writing my dissertation on – Bergson looks at what laughter is and why people laugh, saying that laughter keeps us human. It should be very interesting paired with the reading I’ve been doing on the function of satire.
Mm, books.