babble
I want to make a plug for my friend Hal's blog, Hal vs. Hal. Hal writes it with another friend of his, Hal. It's fluctuated a little in erudition and subject matter in a way that I think adds flavor and holds promise. Don't mind the fact that it's appeared to have stalled
Not long ago vaguelyweird said she felt like she was drifting, and I responded with a kind of flippant irreverence about it which probably was inappropriate without explanation. The problem was that "drifting" was a phrase that took on significance for me in my inner monologue as I wandered from place to place this past summer.
A lot of it was coming out of a rejection of a foundationalist philosophical tendency which manifests itself in an obsessive search for ground. If not the self-evident ground of the rationalist, then the immediately apparent sensory ground of the empiricist, or the historical ground of the historicist, or the phenomenological ground of the phenomenologist. And it always winds up seeming stupid, alienating, unmotivated, inefficient, and doomed as a project. We're in a different era now. Just pack your bags and go. Leave the pyramid behind; take the next raft out.
This was a natural thing to tell myself as I bounced around from place to place. There was also some intellectual justification for it which doesn't really matter to me much right now.
Because now the feeling of drifting is even more visceral and for reasons much closer to vaguelyweird's. The problem with drifting, though, can't be the lack of ground. It's got to be something else, and I think I've got it.
There is never any ground, for that would require some axis in space along which some force of gravity presses us down. But lived space isn't determined by a Cartesian cube. It's determined by its contents and the gravitational and other pull that contents has on us, our attraction to some of it, our repulsion to other parts of it.
So it's just our feeling of being stuck to something that makes us believe it's the ground. Other options exist. Like flying--propelling oneself around space, exploring its contents on one's own terms.
So to be adrift isn't to be without ground. A raft in an archipelago is not adrift, it is merely in transit. It is adrift when there is nothing but indistinguishable rolling ocean from horizon to horizon.
Which is where I was just about yesterday. Among other things, it was due to another realization that the things that preoccupied me at the beginning of the summer which on some level I had expected to provide some sort of continuity have dropped away from me, and I couldn't see my future on the horizon. I was in a featureless universe, with nothing to search for, nothing to run from, nothing pulling me...
...except the current. Now I see new things on the horizon, and I'm beginning to feel the thrill of it.
And--this is the bizarre part for me--I'm feeling comfortable doing what I have almost never done before, which is purge out some of the old baggage. Perhaps it's because there is suddenly a whole class of mementos that I'm suddenly eager to leave behind me. Perhaps it's because with new things in sight I want to move faster, and the ballast accumulated over the years is making me hang too low in the water. Maybe it's because I've had all summer to get used to traveling light.
In concrete terms: I'm suddenly comfortable deleting names from my IM buddy list, which I used o be loathe to do for fear of losing some crucial tie. I'm deleting bookmarks that have been backed up from computer to computer and browser to browser for years and years--records of things I was once interested in and promised to look into again sometime.
No. I'm not beholden to those things any more. I'm free of so many things right now. In the next few months I will face the opportunity to--no, the necessity of--reinventing myself for a new kind of life, new people, a new city.
Tomorrow I go into the city to check out my apartment for the first time.
This is almost certainly totally useless for you readers. Sorry. Shortly, I will rant about crypto-anarchism.
Not long ago vaguelyweird said she felt like she was drifting, and I responded with a kind of flippant irreverence about it which probably was inappropriate without explanation. The problem was that "drifting" was a phrase that took on significance for me in my inner monologue as I wandered from place to place this past summer.
A lot of it was coming out of a rejection of a foundationalist philosophical tendency which manifests itself in an obsessive search for ground. If not the self-evident ground of the rationalist, then the immediately apparent sensory ground of the empiricist, or the historical ground of the historicist, or the phenomenological ground of the phenomenologist. And it always winds up seeming stupid, alienating, unmotivated, inefficient, and doomed as a project. We're in a different era now. Just pack your bags and go. Leave the pyramid behind; take the next raft out.
This was a natural thing to tell myself as I bounced around from place to place. There was also some intellectual justification for it which doesn't really matter to me much right now.
Because now the feeling of drifting is even more visceral and for reasons much closer to vaguelyweird's. The problem with drifting, though, can't be the lack of ground. It's got to be something else, and I think I've got it.
There is never any ground, for that would require some axis in space along which some force of gravity presses us down. But lived space isn't determined by a Cartesian cube. It's determined by its contents and the gravitational and other pull that contents has on us, our attraction to some of it, our repulsion to other parts of it.
So it's just our feeling of being stuck to something that makes us believe it's the ground. Other options exist. Like flying--propelling oneself around space, exploring its contents on one's own terms.
So to be adrift isn't to be without ground. A raft in an archipelago is not adrift, it is merely in transit. It is adrift when there is nothing but indistinguishable rolling ocean from horizon to horizon.
Which is where I was just about yesterday. Among other things, it was due to another realization that the things that preoccupied me at the beginning of the summer which on some level I had expected to provide some sort of continuity have dropped away from me, and I couldn't see my future on the horizon. I was in a featureless universe, with nothing to search for, nothing to run from, nothing pulling me...
...except the current. Now I see new things on the horizon, and I'm beginning to feel the thrill of it.
And--this is the bizarre part for me--I'm feeling comfortable doing what I have almost never done before, which is purge out some of the old baggage. Perhaps it's because there is suddenly a whole class of mementos that I'm suddenly eager to leave behind me. Perhaps it's because with new things in sight I want to move faster, and the ballast accumulated over the years is making me hang too low in the water. Maybe it's because I've had all summer to get used to traveling light.
In concrete terms: I'm suddenly comfortable deleting names from my IM buddy list, which I used o be loathe to do for fear of losing some crucial tie. I'm deleting bookmarks that have been backed up from computer to computer and browser to browser for years and years--records of things I was once interested in and promised to look into again sometime.
No. I'm not beholden to those things any more. I'm free of so many things right now. In the next few months I will face the opportunity to--no, the necessity of--reinventing myself for a new kind of life, new people, a new city.
Tomorrow I go into the city to check out my apartment for the first time.
This is almost certainly totally useless for you readers. Sorry. Shortly, I will rant about crypto-anarchism.