Beginning
Conversations like this one that I had at the shelter tonight (there are two constants in my life: on Monday I go to the shelter, and on Thursday I eat a burrito for lunch. We hold these truths to be self-etc) are among my favorite acts in the realm of language, even though they are barely conversations at all.
Client: don't you agree that no man is an island? (minutes before I think he was accusing me of being a republican, this was related)
Me: I do think that, yes.
Client: well then, if someone isn't briefed on the music of the spheres, don't you think that could have certain... Consequences?
Me: (I think about this) yes. I do tend to believe that.
Client: (long pause, probing gaze) so what exactly is on the wire between you and me?
What is on the wire is I'm embarking on this project to figure out how to think, write, and talk about what I guess is mental illness, but really one goal of the whole endeavor is to be able to better name and circumscribe this category of things that I'm interested in. I talked with a professor in the comparative history of ideas department at my school who gave me one piece of advice about embarking on a big, interdisciplinary, broadly-defined project: to be absolutely ruthless about boredom. As in, ignore everything that doesn't completely light you up. No room for it!
So I've been reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and The Philosophy of Psychiatry and these crazy collections of essays about the body that my friend Alex put on hold for me at the ivy-covered used bookstore near school. A history of the clitoris! This fellow Renaldus Columbus claims to have discovered it in 1559! Did you know? I guess it goes with the last name.
I feel excited in a just-starting-out way about a lot of things in my - our, all of our, planetwide - life right now.
Three questions for the new year:
What are you working on that is important to you?
What are you working on that is not important to you?
What aren't you working on that is important to you?
Love.
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