Been a while
, and had my reasons, but it does seem a day too long. I’ve been stressed, and trying, as I’m sure many of you are, to keep my head and to keep my heart. Unfortunately this process is difficult to contain.
On one day I might try to convince you that I’m taking appropriate measure of the situation, that I’m not overreacting, that I’m considering forms of adaptation that are granular, strategic, and which don’t depend on magically coordinating the uncoordinated. On another day I might try to communicate my sense of the worst case, how it feels to be losing some of what we are likely to lose, our desperation and defiance, the fight that remains in us. In either case, these are just so many bowls of the bears’ porridge. Hot or cold, we will need both sometimes. The situation dictates which.
Well, I’m not the doctor of society, standing back. When I say that this process is poorly contained, I mean not only that some people do this, but I do it too. Sometimes we’ll find talking unbearable, because we aren’t really addressing each other, but trying somehow to balance our affects or get permission for them. “You don’t understand, I’ve earned my panic.” “You don’t understand, none of that is happening and we need to remain cognizant of our room of maneuver.” Both are right, but it isn’t a conversation.
I spoke a while with TP and EZ about a model of misanthropic re-injury. It’s possible to run on a broken ankle just often enough that it never heals. Who knows what subtle processes of healing we may be interrupting by kicking ourselves uselessly into despair twice a week or twice a day. Perhaps that’s a real hazard of social media. How many times per week is it safe for me to think, “so this is what we’ve got?” or “I am so much more alone with this feeling than I ever knew.” The point isn’t the evaluation, but the re-injury, the spurs to separation and despair. There might be no avoiding that feeling, but your life might be very different if you only felt it once a month.
I’ve found it helpful to hold in mind that there’s rarely anything which I ought to be the first to know or the first to opine on, and that processing through public “takes” invites over-familiar and entitled responses which are likely to send me tail spinning.
On the other hand, just as a sedentary life won’t save your joints, withdrawal won’t save your brain. I was thinking about this in the context of the “extended mind.” Take an example: suppose I am a person in mental decline who relies on certain routines in my home. Notes on the fridge, furniture to which I am precisely adapted, the pill calendar which is always in the same place. If you take me out of that home, I now have to rely on my possibly quite degraded cognitive and physical capacities in the abstract. Effectively, the constancy of my environment and my adaptation to it were a bit of my mind, which happened to be outside of my skull. Prosthesis. And it’s taken away. If we compare a more science-fictional setting, you could somehow beam something into my brain which annihilated certain capacities. That would be regarded straightforwardly as sinister and violent. Yet both have the same effect.
I don’t bring this up in order to magnify a sense of grievance or paranoia, but to name a certain continuity between loss of world and loss of self. There isn’t such a clear line between them. I wonder what parts of the self we might all be losing now as we lose pieces of a world. Who will we be then? What am I after all trying to make a space for?
Losing the ability to think in public, we might find ourselves empty, abstract, unmotivated. When I come to this place I am completely undistracted. But “I” am not there.
I seem rather to hear my own thoughts for the first time, in my own voice. There are social and formal arrangements which draw this voice out. Against the idealization of solitude, I have always felt that I needed some concept of address in order to send buckets down the well of thought. This social and partly improvised element, broadly, “language,” is what I don’t want to lose. It’s in this sense that I haven’t found a life in retreat to be more honest.
Bluntly, losing the ability to think in public means for many of us losing the ability to think. At least in certain ways. In this way I think we really lose something as we lose each space or platform, or resign from each in disgust, or despair, or go dark, or gone. I don’t believe in that stoic-or-so compensating inner solidity, or in its mirror, dissolute joy.
It’s good to need people and not to forget it. Perhaps we have no separate selves to take away. And on the other hand it’s good to avoid the kind of psychic re-injury that is likely to come from say, processing hard feelings or hard facts on social media, or engaging in dysfunctional forms of group life. I’m not sure how we’ll do it.
But let’s stay in touch.
Jackie
P.S. There’s a new edition of Darryl out in the UK and Brussels with Divided Press this week. I made hundreds of changes at the sentence level, and think it’s a much better book for it. If you have the choice, prefer the new edition. https://divided.online/#darryl
P.P.S. Are any of you listening to Rainer Brüninghaus?