Civilization

Feel this. Bathe in this.

Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder

The Disease Perspective

PTypes personality types proposes Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder as a pervasive pattern of unstable, "overtly narcissistic behaviors [that] derive from an underlying sense of insecurity and weakness rather than from genuine feelings of self-confidence and high self-esteem" (Millon), beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by ten (or more) of the following:

·         X  seeks to create an illusion of superiority and to build up an image of high self-worth (Millon);

·         _  has disturbances in the capacity for empathy (Forman);

·         _  strives for recognition and prestige to compensate for the lack of a feeling of self-worth;

·         X  may acquire a deprecatory attitude in which the achievements of others are ridiculed and degraded (Millon);

·         X  has persistent aspirations for glory and status (Millon);

·         X  has a tendency to exaggerate and boast (Millon);

·         X  is sensitive to how others react to him or her, watches and listens carefully for critical judgment, and feels slighted by disapproval (Millon);

·         X  is prone to feel shamed and humiliated and especially hyper-anxious and vulnerable to the judgments of others (Millon);

·         X  covers up a sense of inadequacy and deficiency with pseudo-arrogance and pseudo-grandiosity (Millon);

·         _  has a tendency to periodic hypochondria (Forman);

·         X  alternates between feelings of emptiness and deadness and states of excitement and excess energy (Forman);

·         X  entertains fantasies of greatness, constantly striving for perfection, genius, or stardom (Forman);

·         X  has a history of searching for an idealized partner and has an intense need for affirmation and confirmation in relationships (Forman);

·         X  frequently entertains a wishful, exaggerated, and unrealistic concept of himself or herself which he or she can't possibly measure up to (Reich);

·         _  produces (too quickly) work not up to the level of his or her abilities because of an overwhelmingly strong need for the immediate gratification of success (Reich);

·         X  is touchy, quick to take offense at the slightest provocation, continually anticipating attack and danger, reacting with anger and fantasies of revenge when he or she feels frustrated in his or her need for constant admiration (Reich);

·         X  is self-conscious, due to a dependence on approval from others (Reich);

·         X  suffers regularly from repetitive oscillations of self-esteem (Reich);

·         X  seeks to undo feelings of inadequacy by forcing everyone's attention and admiration upon himself or herself (Reich);

·         X  may react with self-contempt and depression to the lack of fulfillment of his or her grandiose expectations (Riso).

The Behavior Perspective

"Delophilia: ["exhibitionism"] can be defined as the desire to express oneself and to fascinate others by one's self-exposure, to show and to impress, to merge with the other through communication" (Wurmser, pg. 158). With the delophilic drive "the subject basically wants to overpower the object by the magic force of his expressions, of his looking, talking, and thinking; he wants to fascinate, charm, mesmerize, magnetize, subjugate the other and merge with him" (pg. 165).


"Theatophilia ["idealization"] can be defined as the desire to watch and observe, to admire and to be fascinated, to merge and master through attentive looking"...(pg. 158). With the theatophilic drive "the magical force of the object is incorporated, identified with, submitted to, and merged with, with the help of looking, hearing, and being touched; one is filled with, gripped by the power of the awe-inspiring object and becomes enthusiastically enriched" (pg. 165).

Thanks Mark. I have no idea what to do with this information.

No More Michael Jackson

I listen to this over and over and over.

Keep on the Borderlands; III

As a child they said to me, “You have no place in this atmosphere,” and they said to me, “Did you make any friends today?” and I looked away, preferring to pretend that I had not heard and hasten home to be alone once more forever.

The apothecaries were summoned, as you might imagine. I was given tests. I was measured in this way and in that way. Solutions were proposed.

The meat suit was mine.

Dinners were a hurried affair, brisk but inclined toward added value and ventures undertaken to better know my sisters and myself. “Families who eat together stay together,” Mother would often say, thinking back to lonesome nights alone with a heavy pan and mewling brethren, father heedless and her own mother bested by another spell. In her heart she dreamed of future construction.

Big would eyeball the table’s length and call out our lapses in protocol. We had done too much of this and too little of that. She would use her napkin and then use my father’s, too engrossed to spare attention on her own place and missing forkfuls, staining blouses.

Little did her best to eat nothing. Portions were separated, divided into smaller and smaller pieces, presumably to create the impression that their total volume had decreased somehow. She would tuck the odd nugget of food beneath her napkin, a floret up under the table ledge, a crust into the dog’s mouth.

I employed similar methods but with meat specifically. Only the smallest slivers could be safely secreted into pocket or sock without raising suspicion. The suit would require so much more meat than I had originally thought and I had found no other means of procurement, so gather I did hungry or no. It was a slow process and my digestion suffered for it.

Assembly took like forever and the thing basically stank. Movement was accomplished by means of metal rods driven through each appendage and waxed line cables connecting each to the series of levers operated from the driver’s recess, a pod of sorts inside the construct’s abdomen. It was simple and inelegant, driven less by clever mechanics than by the necromancy I was at last resigned to employ. That is how such things begin, I suppose. Mike and I at the library had found a record on which Vincent Price explained how such things might be accomplished and we dutifully transcribed each line, marking intonation, together planning to attack Saddam Hussein with death magic when we were better men. From Vincent’s clues I puzzled out some elementary principles, the rudiments of offhand cantrip and simple countryside nonsense, Mike having already forsaken the whole project as unseemly. And it was. With tubes down the throat and another astride my crotch I wondered again at the wisdom of this course, if it was not better to simply play alone.

I lumbered out into the company of others and they said to me, “Ambient temperature seventy-six degrees,” and they said to me, “All systems nominal.”

Camera Phone

The leg extended past my corner position to bisect the distance between where the body had begun and the chair beside me. The passage was cramped enough to cause some discomfort. Her pitch rose and fell, delighted exhalation fixated upon the squeaking visage camouflaged in paints and arching brow. Body followed leg and settled in the vacant seat while arms slapped at the air like carp to best illumine some special moment of dialogue. Then, greetings having been properly observed, it was time to consider other matters.

“Do you want to see what I’m doing for my birthday? Are you sure?”

“Uh, I guess?” replied the newly seated.

The first waggled at the phone for a moment and then held out the screen triumphantly. “This!”

“Oh, my God! It’s so big!”

“Yeah,” she cooed. “His name is…flying into New York to meet me…I’m not going to marry him, I’ve just always liked big guys…”

You can still see the hull breach where the initial damage occurred. Cracks, especially under the eyes about which foundation could do nothing. Pretty shoddy workmanship. I hunkered over the table and busied my hands.

The lighting bristled overhead, collecting the microbial plant and animal life that thrive here in teeming clouds of umber vapor. They move about under the auspice of hidden barometric pockets and unfelt winds. I often catch the others glancing up but we never discuss this. We don’t really discuss much, actually. I prefer that to the alternative. It’s okay because I belong in Halloween Town. I am necessary.

The windows behind were rimmed in frost. Beyond that the ground fell away. Crepe paper bats rotated in the squinting light.

Foxes

Cavities of your body,

the charm of any cave.

The hollow of your chest

a den of foxes.

Leaves and sticks and clumps of hair -

the by-products of wanting.

Youth

If I could, by cunning,
touch my fingers to your lips,

Then later on
I'd touch my own

Pretend that we had kissed.

In all the world
what boy could dream

A finer dream than this?

Angst

by David Eagleman

As humans we spend our time seeking big, meaningful experiences. So the afterlife may surprise you when your body wears out. We expand back into what we really are - which is, by Earth standards, enormous. We stand ten thousand kilometers tall in each of nine dimensions and live with others like us in a celestial commune. When we reawaken in these, our true bodies, we immediately begin to notice that our gargantuan colleagues suffer a deep sense of angst.

Our job is the maintenance and upholding of the cosmos. Universal collapse is imminent, and we engineer wormholes to act as structural support. We labor relentlessly on the edge of cosmic disaster. If we don't execute our jobs flawlessly, the universe will re-collapse. Ours is complex, intricate and important work.

After three centuries of this toil, we have the option to take a vacation. We all choose the same destination: we project ourselves into the tiny, delicate, three-dimensional bodies that we call humans, and we are born onto the resort we call Earth. The idea, on such vacations, is to capture small experiences. On the Earth, we care only about our immediate surroundings. We watch comedy movies. We drink alcohol and enjoy music. We form relationships, fight, break up and start again. When we're in a human body, we don't care about universal collapse - instead, we care only about a meeting of the eyes, a glimpse of bare flesh, the caressing tones of a loved voice, joy, love, light, the orientation of a house plant, the shade of a paint stroke, the arrangement of hair.

These are good vacations that we take on Earth, replete with our little dramas and fusses. The mental relaxation is unspeakably precious to us. And when we're forced to leave by the wearing out of those delicate little bodies, it is not uncommon to see us lying prostrate in the breeze of the solar winds, tools in hand, looking out into the cosmos, wet-eyed, searching for meaninglessness.

from Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives

The Illusion of Competence

by W.I. Miller

"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities. It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense."

from Humiliation and Other Essays

Hello Again

Etching out transitions in your private lives straining the abdominal corset in order to emit an awful, strident keening along the contours of green manifold and bituminous variegated cardboard structures that dominate this frame in startling sequence, sectioned in descent to overlap and shielding tender eyelines from undigested data.

For there will come a day when you will be abandoned and upon that day do not forget the nut I squirreled away inside you there will be some headaches I will of course be occupied with separate projects it was advised that healthy boundaries perhaps include brocaded hats and mohair bangled disproportionate the whole of the broadside managed quite meticulously do not fret, so do not fret.

A heart as large can nurse a baker’s dozen kittens boiling as a pile hair and keratin agape and soon aggrieved with no regard and aping feeling stamping about shuffling rough in some other man’s nest thawed out of wedlock, dividing breath with episodic misgivings it is here that I strike at you piercing hollow spaces with an ivory rod my birthright.

A question of deserve begins with four words, in the absence of magnetic north such things will prove impossible packed parcels and crowded dendrites clustered about you want you cloudy and cold, arrogant and inviolate, yellow hair denatured in the inky curd of guile and spittle and a futile calling.

Dealing With Haters

Selections from a The Next Web Conference Address - Amsterdam, 2010

by Tim Ferriss

1. It doesn’t matter how many people don’t get it. What matters is how many people do.

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“It’s critical in social media, as in life, to have a clear objective and not to lose sight of that,” Ferriss says. He argues that if your objective is to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people or to change the world in some small way (be it through a product or service), you only need to pick your first 1,000 fans — and carefully. “As long as you’re accomplishing your objectives, that 1,000 will lead to a cascading effect,” Ferriss explains. “The 10 million that don’t get it don’t matter.”


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2. 10% of people will find a way to take anything personally. Expect it.

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“People are least productive in reactive mode,” Ferriss states, before explaining that if you are expecting resistance and attackers, you can choose your response in advance, as opposed to reacting inappropriately. This, Ferriss says, will only multiply the problem. “Online I see people committing ‘social media suicide’ all the time by one of two ways. Firstly by responding to all criticism, meaning you’re never going to find time to complete important milestones of your own, and by responding to things that don’t warrant a response.” This, says Ferriss, lends more credibility by driving traffic.


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3. “Trying to get everyone to like you is a sign of mediocrity.” (Colin Powell)

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“If you treat everyone the same and respond to everyone by apologizing or agreeing, you’re not going to be recognizing the best performers, and you’re not going to be improving the worst performers,” Ferriss says. “That guarantees you’ll get more behavior you don’t want and less you do.” That doesn’t mean never respond, Ferriss goes on to say, but be “tactical and strategic” when you do.


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4. “If you are really effective at what you do, 95% of the things said about you will be negative.” (Scott Boras)

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“This principle goes hand-in-hand with number two,” Ferriss says. “I actually keep this quote in my wallet because it is a reminder that the best people in almost any field are almost always the people who get the most criticism.” The bigger your impact, explains Ferriss (whose book is a New York Times, WSJ and BusinessWeek bestseller), and the larger the ambition and scale of your project, the more negativity you’ll encounter. Ferriss jokes he has haters “in about 35 languages.”

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5. “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” (Epictetus)

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“Another way to phrase this is through a more recent quote from Elbert Hubbard,” Ferriss says. “‘To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” Ferriss, who holds a Guinness World Record for the most consecutive tango spins, says he has learned to enjoy criticism over the years. Ferriss, using Roman philosophy to expand on his point, says: “Cato, who Seneca believed to be the perfect stoic, practiced this by wearing darker robes than was customary and by wearing no tunic. He expected to be ridiculed and he was, he did this to train himself to only be ashamed of those things that are truly worth being ashamed of. To do anything remotely interesting you need to train yourself to be effective at dealing with, responding to, even enjoying criticism… In fact, I would take the quote a step further and encourage people to actively pursue being thought foolish and stupid.”


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6. “Living well is the best revenge.” (George Herbert)

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“The best way to counter-attack a hater is to make it blatantly obvious that their attack has had no impact on you,” Ferriss advises. “That, and [show] how much fun you’re having!” Ferriss goes on to say that the best revenge is letting haters continue to live with their own resentment and anger, which most of the time has nothing to do with you in particular. “If a vessel contains acid and you pour some on an object, it’s still the vessel that sustains the most damage,” Ferriss says. “Don’t get angry, don’t get even — focus on living well and that will eat at them more than anything you can do.”

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7. Keep calm and carry on.

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The slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On” was originally produced by the British government during the Second World War as a propaganda message to comfort people in the face of Nazi invasion. Ferriss takes the message and applies it to today’s world. “Focus on impact, not approval. If you believe you can change the world, which I hope you do, do what you believe is right and expect resistance and expect attackers,” Ferriss concludes. “Keep calm and carry on!”

Disqualifying Statements

by Malcolm Gladwell

"Only once before in my life have I even kept a diary, and that was in my midteens, when I was running track, and all the entries read something like: "4 miles, then 4 x 800, with 30-second recovery. Felt strong." Somehow a diary isn't a diary when it includes the phrase "felt strong." As I've gotten older, things have gotten worse, particularly since I stumbled across the Theory of Disqualifying Statements. This was a principle that came to me several years ago, when I was seated next to a very attractive woman at a dinner party. During a lull in the conversation, I asked her where she went to college, whereupon she launched into an elaborate explanation of how her grandfather went to Harvard, her father went to Harvard, her mother went to Harvard, and her brothers went to Harvard--but she was way too much of a maverick to do something that safe and predictable.

"So where did you go?" I asked, imagining this young rebel at Oklahoma State or the University of Kinshasa or even UTEP.

"Brown," she replied, without missing a beat--and, at that moment, the Theory of Disqualifying Statements was born: For every romantic possibility, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word (Brown!) capable of extinguishing it.

There was a time when I was something of a connoisseur of Disqualifying Statements, and actually compiled a short list of the most compelling. (My favorite: A friend moved to a tiny town in uppermost New England and began to date a local. She managed to overlook their difference in class and perspective, until one night, during their inaugural amorous encounter on his couch, he removed her shirt, and, slack jawed, blurted out, "Nice Tits!" At which point, the Trans-Am and the Naugahyde furniture and the Pabst Blue Ribbon suddenly became unendurable. She walked out, never to see him again. "Tits," until then a word of harmless connotation, was the disqualifier.)

I realize this has been a lengthy digression. But do you see my point? Do you now see why I've been so withholding? Diaries, by their very seductively uninhibiting nature, are breeding grounds for disqualifying statements. Any one of these sentences could irrevocably alienate any one of you (not to mention the very real possibility that merely owning up to the Theory of Disqualifying Statements is in itself a Disqualifying Statement). Hence my trepidation, and why I don't feel I can do any more than the most cursory of explanations of my day. So here goes: Got up 8ish. Made a few calls. Late lunch. Went to the gym. Felt Strong."

Source

Toothbrush

It’s okay that you’re disappointing
me with the things that you say.
I like watching your lips move
at least as much as
I like watching TV and stuff.

So I’ve been dating again and
I think I should buy a new toothbrush
the next time I’m out,
these things wear out
it’s no big deal.

Joy

“I can’t believe some of the things you post there.”

I can’t, either. It does give me somewhere to put all of this where you may choose to scrutinize it at your leisure. And I do very much enjoy the additive nature of this project; that it grows in size and overall message complexity. I like to believe that some day I might dress it and send it out in my stead.

As for the content, I have no apologies. I sure hope no one finds out that I’m strange. BREAKING NEWS.

I’m fairly sure my readership consists almost entirely of past and future girlfriends, anyway. Hi, ladies. A valuable service is being provided for you here. Those past get to cluck their tongues and shake their heads knowingly. Those future may as well find out what they’re in for: spectacular melodrama and needless nautical references. I AM IN YOU. Well. You know what I mean. I also guarantee a deeper and more complete overall experience than the other candidates offer. They’re just a person. I am everyone.

What I do regret is the incompleteness of this tapestry. There is little joy. One doesn’t find Jesus on prom night nor does one run for pad and pencil when things are well. At least I don’t. There’s little need to make sense of experience when that experience is already what you wanted. You simply exist and enjoy. There is no reason to process it further and doing so would only serve to create damage and distance.

It presents a very real issue in terms of voice. Is this severed perspective punctuated with moments of shuffling ache really adequate? Were that the whole of my self I would be a sorry figure, indeed. However, I find it difficult to reproduce the rest of the equation, stretches of simple pleasure, in a satisfactory way. Even the quiet, daily happenings that constitute a happy day. Kurt Vonnegut said that such moments should be acknowledged, that we should do so out loud saying, "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is." I want to do more, but it's slow going. It somehow fails to translate textually though it accounts for the majority of my daily experience.

The only exception to this are periods of love which, while certainly falling under this heading, are the exception rather than the rule. Exception is easy. What remains, the rule, are the portions that I am tempted to summarize and skip over.

I am concerned that this is a serious error.

The Good Girl

Today I watched The Good Girl. It was your standard tale of quiet desperation. A life of dirty kitchens with things left out on counters. Little miseries and retail lighting and insufficient fellows.



It was very sad. Not the boy, Holden. Were I to have read a synopsis this is the character I would have expected to like best. He’s a writer, struggling with inner demons alone. He wants to be understood. I found him repulsive. I found him empty, parasitic, leaking fluid and delusion.

The husband is just bland.

No, I liked her. Despite her ridiculous tan – how was this allowed – Jennifer Aniston handled this well. The sadness had little to do with her acting, though. The premise of the film is that her life is a prison due to decisions she had made earlier. She married the wrong man. She didn’t go to college. She stayed at a dead-end job.

I have a lot of gift cards. This is a popular present combining the flexibility of cash with the assurance that you were remembered. They sit on my desk and I observe them. I like thinking about the different things I might buy. I will go to, for example, Amazon, and examine interesting choices that I might make. A shirt. Some book. Titanium rings. I then close the browser and make a sandwich.

I cannot express how pleased I am that I never got married. I have done incontrovertible things but not that, never that.

“You ever feel like that? Like you gotta escape?” her husband asks.

But she doesn’t escape.



She throws herself on the mercy of the court as women so often do in stories like this. She remakes the same decisions and the lighting and music lead you to believe that things are better somehow, that she accepts this life. No more unfocused stares.

It just sort of starts over, but now there is a baby. If she were trapped before what is she now? The characters seek transfiguration through one another and basically accomplish nothing. Oh, one of them dies.

Fineskinde Farm

It rang and rang.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is Liz there?”

“Which Liz?”

“Liz O’Brien.”

“Hold on.”

I squirmed and clenched the phone cord. I wiped perspiration onto my pantlegs.

“Hello?”

I didn’t recognize the voice at all.

“Liz?”

“Yes, who is this?”

I told her.

A pause. “Oh my God. Hi!”

“Hi.”

“How did you get this number?”

“From Jessica. I gave her a message for you at the record store. I waited five years and didn’t hear back so I thought I’d call.” My best smile.

She laughed delightedly.

We spoke. She was in college still, in the south. Worked at a library and volunteered at a battered women’s shelter. She was studying English.

“What do you even look like now?”

“Pretty much the same, I guess. I had the Jennifer Aniston thing for a while, but now I’m back to just the standard. How about you?”

I told her.

“Haha, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I always imagined you turning out that way.”

She sang in a punk band. I was post-punk but willing to compromise. I was willing to do all sorts of things.

I was on point like never before. I don’t think I’ve ever been so charming. Every joke landed, timing tight, every nuance noticed. Pretty soon it was like we were children again.

“Do you remember when I threw up on your lap?”

“What?”

“On the bus. We were at Josh’s bus stop and I just turned and threw up all over you. His mom took me inside and called my mom.”

“I forgot about that!”

“The part I most remember is how you barely flinched. You were like a nurse, completely professional, trying to make sure I was alright. Helping me up.”

“I don’t remember that part!”

I do. I should have known and never did. She loved me all along and I never knew.

“What ever happened to Josh?” I asked.

It was getting dark. An hour had passed, maybe more. She had a boyfriend but I didn’t care. He was a placeholder.

“Usually when you talk to someone from your past, it’s awkward and strained. I can honestly say that you’re the kind of person I would want as a friend. We need to talk again.”

I could not agree more.

“Oh, you know what? Do you like writing letters? I’m an avid letter writer. If you write to me, I will write back.”

“That sounds great,” I gushed. “I’ve always wanted a pen pal.”

“Be warned, though. My handwriting is almost unreadable! What’s your address?”

I told her.

The Centrifuge

The potential energy that clung to this body to reprimand and retard is forced now to the perimeter. It is released as heat and I feel it radiate from my person. I am heat. Netted muscle knits in advancement. A feeling of well-being settles upon us now as we affiliate with this, the world of common and communicable experience. I am jarred into wakefulness. I am pried from the abstract. Standing in the center of the sigil, gloriously present.

We are nearing the end of our exile.

My fear was always that there were a certain, fixed number of resources to allocate. I have come to suspect that this is not the case. Okay, really it was absurd – a revenge fantasy of the impotent. To test this hypothesis, however, it is necessary to construct a worthy vessel. A bearer befitting the borne. This is Unified Field Theory shit, kids.

Still, there is some property of physical activity that interferes with imagination. I use the word imagination for want of a better term. Imagination is not what we think it is. It is not simply a fictive picture show derived of contained chemical happenings. It is something far, far stranger.

I suspect that coma patients, opium addicts, and autistics are furthest along this axis. What they see and know is otherworldly, unique to each, and incommunicable. They cannot access this middle band, the wavelength on which communication is possible. What they can access is pretend and yet not false, or so goes the supposition. Related to this are art, dreaming, and creative enterprise generally, but also barking lunacy in its many shades. The capacity to make and alter is to fashion form from nothingness. To remake some portion of the material world. Is that not the very basis of power?

At the opposite end, of course, we have simple machines such as the lever. We mostly fall somewhere in between. I am moving left and am pleased to do so. It is easier and less dangerous. I spin and burn. Watch me shine.

I can still feel it. It’s not gone – not even dormant – but waiting, perhaps have fallen back to take position in marrow or vertebral crevice. It lurks and bides its time. Someday it will win. I know this; have always known this. The important thing is that it will not be soon.

In the present it is time for change. It is time to stand and take what is mine.

Boredom

It is the great devourer.

Every resource is exhaustible. If it inspires, it is only for now. Music is the most frequent culprit. Some series of sounds will access some hidden trigger deep within my person. The thrill is indescribable. I will chase that thrill. I will become engorged with that sound until the process becomes predictable. Each note expected, each lilt and lyric and wobble wrung dry. It gives now only a stale sort of pleasure. It is agreeable and nothing more. I therefore chase novelty, forever seeking newness and all that it offers. It is the same with fiction.

It is the same with people.

It’s an awful thing to say, I know. I must specify that this is not the case with all people. Those closest, who have penetrated to the inner circle through time or some unspecified set of unknown variables (see Magic Spells), are not subject to this brand of fatigue. For the rest, though, they simply wear out. We will be out somewhere and suddenly I know what you will say next. I know what you will say after that. It’s like realizing that, half asleep, you have begun watching a movie that you’d seen before. I turn it off and go to bed.

Strangely, this relates to alcohol.

For many years I would regularly go out and drink to excess. I would do this even knowing the horrific repercussions that faced me the next day. I would do this even during the KotB period when I think sleep deprivation brought me fairly close to madness. What I was warring against was my own behavior. I knew what I would do next and I hadn’t the choice to turn that particular movie off. There was no novelty and so there was no excitement. The trigger could not be flipped.

Pickling myself in alcohol meant that I was unsure of what would happen. I mean, of course, drinking until the governor went off-line. I would hook up with unexpected people. I would say amazing things. I would perform acts of incalculable stupidity. The point is, I would cede control – that is, the forebrain would cede control - to some baser self. Letting go was secondary, though, to the real goal, which was to achieve unpredictability.

I do not recommend this practice. It’s a miracle I didn’t die. Most people go through a phase of rampant substance abuse, typically alcohol, but are content to dismiss it as youthful caprice or questionable stress management. I think there’s something more at work here. It certainly warrants analysis.

A Play

BOY: making noises with his face
GIRL: making noises with her face

CURTAIN

Keep on the Borderlands; II, ii

You need to understand the ship.

We talk about it a lot. Most recently it has been the HMS Swanky Blumpkin but is known by so many names. It is a table and it is a place and it is a vehicle. It is a vulpine monstrosity that was assembled of the earth and then expelled like a splinter from the fleshy coast.

Boasting twenty three forty six guns a load most substantial thickly twined and lacquered black decks and, at the prow, Athena with sword and scepter her brow furrowed in anger and disappointment. It is crewed by a brotherhood of survivalism. We have boiled soles and caught rats and known lean times. We have run down lesser craft without malice in order to fill bellies and maintain the Divine Propulsion. Piracy is wicked, I know. But you must understand that this is a warship.

It is needlessly ornate in crustacean rococo. Charred relief of daemons and water sprites interspersed with asymmetrical horns and swept scrollwork aproning each deck in a thick syrup of input. The decks are rigid and well-planed, buffed to a matte gloss catching points of reflected light at the peak of midday and when fully lanterned. Below decks are the dim halls full of directionless clicking and festooned with anonymous, locked doors. There is talk of lavish appointments, though others talk of cells. The crew is kept in barracks, row upon row of hammocks and sea chests bolted to the deck and stuffed with all manner of sanguine cargos. There are conference places and other rooms of particular purpose. A map room, for instance, dense with papyrus produced exclusively in the Nile delta fashioned as charts that must be chewed to a pulp and taken deep into one’s own cellular structure in order to be made plain. Information transference of a kind known only to the weathered primitives who see with sight unbounded and fold in upon themselves with laughter at the thought of such meager expression.

The banner above is graying. A skeleton, certainly, but not a head. Not a man at all, in fact. No one had ever surmounted the mainmast beyond the nest and so the original standard flew still. Flew, that is, when nature allowed. The bulk beneath had no such propriety. She needed no wind, no oars. She simply continues.

To understand that vessel is to understand her master. Identity in this case is not a matter of essence or achievement but rather a by-product of the relationship between captain and ship. It exists as function; even as lack of function. It exists in perpetuity even hacked and burned, rent asunder by indignant authority or criminal neglect. It is really just an error, a pock or defect on the cornea perceived as a black shape insinuating itself across each field of vision impossible to arrest impossible to approach.

Witch House

Things continue to be well. Sun and strength and a burgeoning sense of satisfaction. My mother and sister continue to maintain that I am going to get this job. I scoff but it’s a witch house. Such things are in the blood.

That’s a different sort of tone for us, isn’t it? I feel like I can tell you anything, internet. Let’s never fight again.

Our topic today is talking shit. Let’s scrub up and don gloves.

What is this? It is related to set theory in the sense that the operative property is one of organization. By casting some third party as other, the speaker offers a reclassification of social bonds in which speaker and listener are linked as self. Supposition of a self requires there to be a non-self. It’s a simple binary.

Why do we do this? Talking shit is one of the easiest ways to establish or strengthen social connectedness. You suggest that you and your audience are united and they then have the option of ratifying your suggestion by taking part.

It is also one of the few ways to use negative force to achieve a positive end. Rather than identifying and addressing the particulars of commonly held belief you instead isolate and belittle the alien. It's an awful practice. The trouble is that I am very good at this.

I will now wear a rubber band. I will operantly condition myself through mild pain and public humiliation. Wish me luck.

This Is Water

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005

by David Foster Wallace

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about quote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says, "After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes. "No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp."

It's easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education -- least in my own case -- is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera. Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.

But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just depends what you what to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Keep on the Borderlands; II

“What are you thinking about?”

I returned with sudden awareness and focused on the sticky pad of dried milk surrounding the machine’s right front leg.

“What?” I ventured.

“I said, what are you thinking about. Are you even listening? God.” She strode around the corner and out of sight.

I was cleaning this area. Dabbing absently, the rag too dirty to do more than shift distribution of the fetid water and coffee grounds that swirled beyond the drain’s influence. The faucet and knobs were beginning to discolor. Under the sill were grains of sweetener trapped amidst the plastic mesh shelving liner. Eyes pulsed with a steady, cold ache. I wiped at the most conspicuous surfaces and pulled the half door closed behind me.

Canary walls and chipped wood led into the nave. The machine smells lessened, giving way to cut flowers and a farmhouse palette of stale bread.

“Well, I really need off so please don’t forget. I’ve told you like five times but you never listen to me. Barbara is totally freaking out and after last Friday she’s never going to speak to me again if I have to bail on another fitting. Did you do the sheets for tonight? Did you see Joe? He’s acting like a lunatic. Did you polish?” She lifted a tulip to the light.

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?” Her eyes narrowed and she stood waiting for a reply. I should tell her that I have brain maggots.

“I have brain maggots.”

“What?”

“I have maggots in my brain.”

Rachel sighed and rolled her eyes, replaced the glass and bent fussing beneath the terminal where she stored her personal effects. “Yeah I know, I know. Who is working tonight? Please don’t tell me it’s Klaus.” Her belt was black leather and studded with metal squares, straining against the loops. I wanted to grab it with both hands.

“I don’t know. Henry, I think. Justine or whatever.” My eyes were slipping forward out of their sockets. “I’ll be back.”

“Don’t forget. Next Friday.”

It was so peaceful before a service. I picked at the lint on my lapel and crossed back through the transept. The jacket clung uncomfortably but I couldn’t remove it. In the foyer I slipped behind the pockmarked slab and stabbed at the touchscreen.

Children discovered Lascaux. It is understandable that they would wish to keep such a thing hidden. Save.

Light tonight. Behind a flimsy door the stair led down to the crypts. Poised to draw it open I could see into the vaulted bar room as the black clad scurried about in preparation.

“Hey,” I called. He waved. She just looked at me.

I hurried down the stairs, grinding my teeth together. Just let me hide. Just let me gnash furiously, snapping disconsolate at bare heels that come too near. The bathrooms on this level were less trafficked and afforded some degree of privacy. Also, paper towels. Through another thin door the sounds of dishes stacked and slotted in haste, the whir of motors, and lilting treble of unsanctioned music.

I slid the bolt and peeled the black cloth away from my body. I stared hard into the mirror. Oh, it was so much worse. Pallor, bloat, the bags chalked in harshly, the head advancing. I could feel each glossy leg gliding just beneath the scalp, rippling the hairline and prodding the backs of my straining eyeballs; tracing the scarred amygdala. I kneaded palms into each socket and lapped at the dripping tap.

When the heat sinks were changed and the coat reattached I could finally consider strategy. We would go, certainly. It was Tuesday. I had to be fun now, funny now, jocular, jocularity was the order of the day and could I not deliver? I couldn’t think straight. The table in the corner would be best. It afforded the best acoustics for speaking when the room was full. I would sit next to her. No, better that I sit first and allow her to make a choice in where to sit so I know how to proceed. No, better yet, I would take the furthest position possible. I would sit last.

In the mirror I adjusted a necktie.

Memory

Memory is an adornment.
The only marking made upon a body by its own hands
And thus to know one from another.


The purpose of narrative is to create meaning. Experience itself has no essential qualities beyond basic sensory input. The world is perceived as an unrelated succession of lights and sounds and impact. These data are processed by the central nervous system and joined in an attempt to make predictions about the environment which will facilitate survival. The urge to organize, to make meaning through association, is a hallmark of humankind. Experimentation teaches that a certain series of sensory phenomena indicates danger while another indicates safety. Language allows these sequences to be labeled and explained. It becomes possible to convey the lesson without the experiment. This conveyance is narrative. Narrative is the primary method for imposing order on gross input. It is the method used to remember such order oneself and to share it with others. After the sensory input – the experience – has passed, what is left behind as memory is an approximation of that experience which is distinct from the experience itself. This fact is so obvious and such a commonplace that it is rarely examined. Recollection is necessary to catalogue memory, but also to create a sense of self and a sense of context among other non-selves. Narratives agreed upon by many become the foundation of culture. It is, no doubt, a useful evolutionary strategy, but one that involves a certain amount of construction.

Experience is limited by perspective. A given viewer witnesses a given event from a particular vantage point, which influences understanding. Perspective is both physical, as in an observer’s actual field of view, but also psychological. One sees what one expects to see. Such elements of subjectivity ensure that even the most meticulous attempt to relate past events is definitionally handicapped. There is an unbridgeable distance between experience and memory. Attempts to share those memories with others widens the distance further. When narrative is shared, each participant introduces a new perspective and a new set of variables. The information is subject to a new set of filters which alters final understanding. “Truth”, if such a thing exists, is not accessible. Unfortunately, such a postmodern approach is as uncommon as it is unsatisfying. The more we empower narrative as an explanatory device the more we need to believe in its fundamental trueness. Even those who are familiar with such theories suspend disbelief in order to privilege certain narratives. Even in fiction, a genre approached and understood as imaginative, readers require a level of plausibility based on seemingly arbitrary guidelines, many of which are created and perpetuated by the works themselves. Anomalous events, which occur in experience, are frowned upon in fiction. A constructed narrative, labeled as such, is judged by a different metric than the narratives we ascribe to direct experience, but is judged nonetheless. Whether or not something is true, or at least believable, matters.

It's how we recognize each other. I'm told that can happen.

Mailbox

I want to mail you something
to test the distance;
count the seconds till impact.
Not a letter – the word proved too defiant.
A greater liaison to better serve
the wary temperance of solitude. And so
I reach through the hole at the end of the driveway
and far away an arm snatches dumbly at the air.

I want to mail you a bouquet of delicacy
to sidestep the noise of speaking,
common symbol of budding branch and nature’s readiness.
Root and bulb beneath the soil
mutely inch toward some future;
living repositories of vegetable gnosis.
I’ll include an unknown specimen
and never learn its name.

I want to mail you a basket of sensation,
after all, you and I are hardly commonplace.
Rich confection and storied jams
with handmade labels lovingly arranged beneath clear plastic.
Objects that encourage touch and generate a private warmth
surrounded in wet and steam like a proper shower,
buckle your knees and contort your face with accomplishment
to see you glisten in my fondness.

I want to mail you a catalog of memory,
after all, the physical is but a moment.
Mementoes serve as signposts leading back to where you once were.
The card I took from Barbuzzo, tickets to Natalie Portman,
these are topographical maps of a hidden kingdom.
The napkins I spun absently while searching for a better example
- indeed, entire transcripted conversations -
the real reason no one can replace you.

I want to mail you an envelope of petals,
after all, objects never swell with our investment.
A treasure removed for safe keeping
from trees that bore witness to our secrets.
An acceptance of the larger cycle, but something more.
Something I would myself wish to receive,
to recognize as I wish to be recognized
as both form and void together.

These things are not enough,
these tokens crumble as I name them.
The postal service cannot box this maelstrom, and matter
fails to connect our fingertips our faces. Eye to eye,
rather brainstem to brainstem, safe from abstraction.
The solution is from earlier in evolution,
close your eyes
I am beside you.

Ninth Grade

I came across this excerpt.

I was an awkward child. My principle interests consisted of Dungeons and Dragons and the vivid fantasy world I inhabited. These were related but distinct. My fascination with Dungeons and Dragons revolved around designing and populating adventure scenarios rather than actually enacting those scenarios with others, which was always an exercise in disappointment. The fantasy world, on the other hand, stemmed from imagined re-enactments of daily life, which became imagined acts generally, then developed into a vast, personal mythology in the order of Walter Mitty. This isn’t to say that I didn’t have friends, I certainly did, but there was always an element of distance. I was focused inward to an alarming degree, a fact which school pictures from this period bear out. Here was a boy who paid literally no attention whatsoever to his appearance. My hair was maintained rather than styled, evoking a median or park hedge. My clothing was accumulated rather than chosen and begged for peer disapproval. Amongst my fellow students I was quiet, but not too quiet; studious, but not too studious. I cultivated the role of spectator. I was forgettable.

For whatever reason, Mrs. E had divided the class into two or three groups, I can’t remember, and each had read a different book. Each group took turns gathering with the teacher to discuss what they had read. My group had been assigned To Kill a Mockingbird. There was a strict lesson plan. She’s called Scout because she’s like a scout and she’s exploring new ideas. Every name had some godawful, heavy-handed symbolism behind it, and this infuriated me. I couldn’t let it go. Clearly, this was the information we needed for the quiz laid out neatly. It didn’t matter and I didn’t even like this book. Karen and Paul happily fed her the clearly telegraphed responses she sought, but I demanded to know how she could make these claims. There was something base and vulgar about it, some belittling element that pulled the humming string of meaning too tightly and held it too long. I didn’t understand the source of my indignation. I was content to believe that she was stupid and unfit; unable to see what I could see. It was easy to dismiss Mrs. E on these terms as I would proceed to dismiss hundreds of others, thousands, with youthful conceit untempered by perspective or humility. I hated her and I hated my class and I hated being a drab boy in a drab place with no control over what happened around me.

It is tempting to engage such memories armed with the vocabulary of critical theory, but that would solve nothing. Such description is a violation somehow; an act of confinement in which a live, formless thing is conquered and made to die. I struggle with how to logically conclude about this experience, which though not particularly important in my life is nonetheless representative of many such moments. I want to say that what Mrs. E was doing, passing tidy judgment on Harper Lee’s fantasy, represented a very real threat to the imaginative core that fueled me and maybe draw some larger parallel. What I do know for certain is that, many years later, I still remember this room and I remember this day and I am still wary of explanations about literature.

Feelings

I have certain feelings. Emotional response stems from thoughts or actions and I then try to decide how best to respond. How can this be so difficult? Why is it I don’t constantly hear about others agonizing over this process? People seem to know what they think and what they want without endless deliberation and fraught grandstanding. They may not know what choice to make, but they seem to understand instinctively what factors are in play and what outcome they’d prefer. Meanwhile, I’m rolling around in the night and making charts and taking notes and, when I finally assemble all the data, I have no idea what it means.

Maybe emotion is too extreme an example to begin. Those types of decisions can arrive in a charged state and a certain degree of hemming and hawing is understandable. Let’s consider opinion instead. The root issue is similar and potential examples are more readily related.

When someone asks me, “what did you think of film X?” I rarely tell them what I thought of film X. I thought everything about film X. Yes, the actual embedded question is “did you like film X?” but that’s not all that much easier to answer. I liked the following things and I disliked the following things. I alternated liking and disliking the following things. I liked certain things in one sense and disliked those same things in another sense. These decisions are subject to revision, often nearly at once. I’m not even always sure if I enjoyed the experience. Was it good? What sort of scale are we using? How can you compare such things? There is an insurmountable apples and oranges issue inherent in evaluation of this kind.

My typical solution is to select the object features I am most willing to talk about at that moment and use that as a framework. Onto this we stretch sackcloth, dab paints, and affix glass baubles. When you ask for my opinion, this is what I give you. Maybe other people do this, too. I have no idea.

Humor

I have a complicated relationship with humor. It’s a tool and a straitjacket. Humor is an alternate victory condition like shooting the moon. It allows you to bring to bear a certain skill set that is not normally useful in socialization.

The Good: It delights and amuses, makes you distinct and memorable, encourages others to talk to you and spend time in your presence. Women love it provided they aren’t stupid (see “The Bad”). It’s especially useful for disarming situations – this is my specialty.

I found out early that I could say awful things and get away with otherwise inexcusable behavior by carefully deploying a great line. Each time it gets easier. Once people get accustomed to dry humor, especially dry humor that might take them a few minutes to understand, they brace for it. When you wear the groove deeply enough they begin to laugh before you’re even finished speaking in sheer anticipation.

The Bad: Of course, because of that, it’s often difficult for others to know when you’re being serious. When one pendulums between great seriousness and great jest the end result can be frustrating for both speaker and listener. It becomes an obligation. They expect performance. You may find yourself in social situations in which you provide much entertainment and receive little in return.

You also need to read an audience. Those you know well are easy. A well timed callback to something that happened in your common past or a reference to a mutually loved film is usually adequate. Strangers are harder. What one person might find hilarious another might find offensive. Wit typically requires a certain amount of active attention and analysis, even for simple word play. Many cannot do this and find such talk snobbish. Like using weighty vocabulary or scratching your crotch it must be done in select company.

Peddling in humor has another interesting and unexpected effect on social choices. The laugh becomes the prize. There is immediate positive feedback when it’s done properly and you start to hunger for that feedback. The interesting part is that not all laughter is equally satisfying. Part of this has to do with seeking approval. If you respect the listener and his or her judgment, the potential they offer is superior. There’s also a strictly tonal element. There are people who have an amazing laugh, one that is simply a joy to elicit. There are people who I find rather boring but love to talk with because they laugh so well. The opposite is also true.

Robert Smith

Oh, Robert. What happened.

You were glory. I curled up on the red white and blue deco comforter my mom chose and stared at the liner notes and I couldn’t even understand how it was possible. “Play this music loud”, it said. The pageant of abandon I could not wait to join it crowded out the dozen other templates that nuzzled into vision and vied for internal relevance.

It was pie in the face ridiculous. No question. Somehow that was necessary. All these disparate signals and melodic tensions contrived to form a consistent message that was both vital and true. Black tressed, pale swaying alongside harsh and tragic masters the approval of which signified absolute validation and sensual fulfillment. They were out there. I was making contact from my signal tower gathering crumbs toward satiation.

And time passes. I see you in a hockey jersey. I see you now a jowly corpse retrieved from the riverside like old ladies who refuse to cut their hair and vainly tread against the inevitable. God, it kills me.

Give me better lighting and smoother cheeks and send me out to be in the night world and embrace on the dance floor. Take me back to the tiny room behind Pulsations and leave me there I won’t cut my hair go on without me. Go on without us.

Game Theory

Imagine the following:

What we have here is a stand off. Participant A and Participant B facing one another some scant distance apart, and both have the privilege of adequate cover. Both parties are armed.

What makes this interesting is that both A and B have the same goal. Not as in categorically similar but mutually exclusive, such as vying for a victory only one could claim. That would be simple competition. No, I mean identical. Each wishes to shoot and be shot in turn.

The reason for the stand off is that both participants fear that, should they act, that act might not be reciprocated. A may have misread the situation and, discharging his weapon, be abandoned by B for whom the game is now at an end. B might step out from behind the enclosure too quickly and therefore be found unworthy of escalation in the eyes of A.

So they wait.

Attempts to communicate subtly have been inconclusive. Communicating explicitly is considered action and begins the potentially damaging event cascade described above.

Option #1 – Go

Participant A or Participant B begins the sequence and continues beyond PNR.
Duration: Low
Risk: High

Option #2 – Wait

Eventually it becomes likely that each party is adequately invested in the engagement.
Duration: High
Risk: Low

Option #3 – Quit

The situation is scrapped in favor of a new set of variables.
Duration: Low
Risk: Low

Solve.

More and Faster

“I am nothing and I should be everything.”

So you wanted to be free of the tyranny of meaning? There you go.
So you wanted to no longer truck in strict negation? How’s that going?

Such aspirations are not going to make things any easier. How have we not learned this lesson yet? You are still attempting to solve the problems inherent in symbol use through symbol use. It’s as inbred and ill advised as it sounds. You know better. This is the root complaint of deconstructionism. “Guess and check?” Well, since we’ve long since determined that there is no way to verify the veracity of communication – theoretically or practically – it’s more like guess and guess. As a means of bridging distance and unclenching fists this ranks alongside jack and squat.

So the issue is…what? Achieving connection? How much are you willing to suffer to achieve some passing connection to a numerically distinct self? It’s really not that amazing. There’s no promise of felicity or even satisfaction. It’s a blinking light like Voyager proceeding in one direction: away. That’s you.

What else is there, then? Oh, don’t pretend that you don’t know. There is body. Haptics. Brainstem shit the likes of which you’ve summarily dismissed in passive aggressive pride. That’s what there is. Body has solutions where artifice has none.

Certain problems will be overcome, but it can be safely assumed that many others will simply cease to be. The system of pulse and procedure that led to such ungainly proposition and, let’s be frank, wholesale misery, is a necessary condition for their perpetuity. You can deny that child sustenance and it will surely wither. Why cut off so many heads when you can just disbelieve?

On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning

by Haruki Murakami

"One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.

Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.

Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl - one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you're drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I'll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.

But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can't recall the shape of hers - or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It's weird.

"Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl," I tell someone.

"Yeah?" he says. "Good-looking?"

"Not really."

"Your favorite type, then?"

"I don't know. I can't seem to remember anything about her - the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts."

"Strange."

"Yeah. Strange."

"So anyhow," he says, already bored, "what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?"

"Nah. Just passed her on the street."

She's walking east to west, and I west to east. It's a really nice April morning.

Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and - what I'd really like to do - explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock build when peace filled the world.

After talking, we'd have lunch somewhere, maybe see a Woody Allen movie, stop by a hotel bar for cocktails. With any kind of luck, we might end up in bed.

Potentiality knocks on the door of my heart.

Now the distance between us has narrowed to fifteen yards.

How can I approach her? What should I say?

"Good morning, miss. Do you think you could spare half an hour for a little conversation?"

Ridiculous. I'd sound like an insurance salesman.

"Pardon me, but would you happen to know if there is an all-night cleaners in the neighborhood?"

No, this is just as ridiculous. I'm not carrying any laundry, for one thing. Who's going to buy a line like that?

Maybe the simple truth would do. "Good morning. You are the 100% perfect girl for me."

No, she wouldn't believe it. Or even if she did, she might not want to talk to me. Sorry, she could say, I might be the 100% perfect girl for you, but you're not the 100% boy for me. It could happen. And if I found myself in that situation, I'd probably go to pieces. I'd never recover from the shock. I'm thirty-two, and that's what growing older is all about.

We pass in front of a flower shop. A small, warm air mass touches my skin. The asphalt is damp, and I catch the scent of roses. I can't bring myself to speak to her. She wears a white sweater, and in her right hand she holds a crisp white envelope lacking only a stamp. So: She's written somebody a letter, maybe spent the whole night writing, to judge from the sleepy look in her eyes. The envelope could contain every secret she's ever had.

I take a few more strides and turn: She's lost in the crowd.



Now, of course, I know exactly what I should have said to her. It would have been a long speech, though, far too long for me to have delivered it properly. The ideas I come up with are never very practical.

Oh, well. It would have started "Once upon a time" and ended "A sad story, don't you think?"



Once upon a time, there lived a boy and a girl. The boy was eighteen and the girl sixteen. He was not unusually handsome, and she was not especially beautiful. They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others. But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100% perfect boy and the 100% perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.

One day the two came upon each other on the corner of a street.

"This is amazing," he said. "I've been looking for you all my life. You may not believe this, but you're the 100% perfect girl for me."

"And you," she said to him, "are the 100% perfect boy for me, exactly as I'd pictured you in every detail. It's like a dream."

They sat on a park bench, held hands, and told each other their stories hour after hour. They were not lonely anymore. They had found and been found by their 100% perfect other. What a wonderful thing it is to find and be found by your 100% perfect other. It's a miracle, a cosmic miracle.

As they sat and talked, however, a tiny, tiny sliver of doubt took root in their hearts: Was it really all right for one's dreams to come true so easily?

And so, when there came a momentary lull in their conversation, the boy said to the girl, "Let's test ourselves - just once. If we really are each other's 100% perfect lovers, then sometime, somewhere, we will meet again without fail. And when that happens, and we know that we are the 100% perfect ones, we'll marry then and there. What do you think?"

"Yes," she said, "that is exactly what we should do."

And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west.

The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other's 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully.

One winter, both the boy and the girl came down with the season's terrible inluenza, and after drifting for weeks between life and death they lost all memory of their earlier years. When they awoke, their heads were as empty as the young D. H. Lawrence's piggy bank.

They were two bright, determined young people, however, and through their unremitting efforts they were able to acquire once again the knowledge and feeling that qualified them to return as full-fledged members of society. Heaven be praised, they became truly upstanding citizens who knew how to transfer from one subway line to another, who were fully capable of sending a special-delivery letter at the post office. Indeed, they even experienced love again, sometimes as much as 75% or even 85% love.

Time passed with shocking swiftness, and soon the boy was thirty-two, the girl thirty.

One beautiful April morning, in search of a cup of coffee to start the day, the boy was walking from west to east, while the girl, intending to send a special-delivery letter, was walking from east to west, but along the same narrow street in the Harajuku neighborhood of Tokyo. They passed each other in the very center of the street. The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts. Each felt a rumbling in their chest. And they knew:

She is the 100% perfect girl for me.

He is the 100% perfect boy for me.

But the glow of their memories was far too weak, and their thoughts no longer had the clarity of fouteen years earlier. Without a word, they passed each other, disappearing into the crowd. Forever.

A sad story, don't you think?



Yes, that's it, that is what I should have said to her."