False Starts

 I recently moved into a new apartment. It is quite nice and I have been here for about a month exactly.

I had minor surgery that affected me far more intensely than I anticipated. It was a difficult experience. A coworker and I had spoken about it: "General anesthesia will kind of rock your world, man." He was right. It rocked my world.

I have begun and stopped several pieces of writing.

One is loosely on Eugene Gendlin and the problem of human growth. Human growth is difficult because growth and violence seem to be strangely and intensely knit in us. Growth and violence are generally intertwined. Here I understand growth as the actualizing or fulfilling of natural potentialities. By violence I mean the impeding, arresting, or somehow hindering the actualizing or fulfilling of natural potentialities.

 

Violence reaches its peak or limit in the killing or murdering of a being; thereby the greatest violence has been done and the being can no longer grow. 

 

It is not clear where growth reaches its peak.

 

To fulfill one potentiality is to deny the possibility of another potentiality. If a being has more than one good alternative, then one good alternative must be denied. The denial of that potentiality is, by my current definitions, an act of violence. 

 

Thus choice, and perhaps action, is a necessary combination of growth and violence. 

 

Human life, growthful or otherwise, can be of a particularly violent sort. The dilemma seems to arise out of the divide in our nature between rational and politics, science and society, or individual and communal goals. I take all of these dyads to be synonymous, but they are different and its not quite right.

We cannot fulfill our individual potentialities without fitting our activity into the activity of those around us. We must find 'roles' or 'jobs' to fill. It is perhaps impossible to escape 'society' all together. 

But the roles available in a community are finite, and are not constructed, generally, with the purposes of makes individuals happy, but with the collective project of that society.

In good socities the pursuit of the collective goal does produce roles and occupations that are good for the individuals as well.

But more often than not there seem to be a lot of bad jobs. 

This means that my growth is predicated upon a certain amount of systemic social violence. I read Zizek's Violence in 2011. I suspect I still am carrying something from it.

The other two pieces of writing are both on R.D. Laing and esoteric writing. I recently finished reading Laing's The Divided Self and was delighted. What a wonderful book. What a wonderful thinker. I really enjoy his writing for its humor, clarity, and frankness. He has a pithy way of putting dilemmas. I haven't spent much time with his poetry, but some. 

The more I think about it the more it makes sense to connect esoteric writing and the problem of 'mental illness'. Esoteric writing refers to a complex rhetorical and philosophical practice used in the construction of philosophical (or controversial) texts in politically persecutory environments. Writers will have to seemingly outwardly conform by producing an 'exoteric' or surface argument of a book. At a deeper level, however, they are making perhaps more subversive or philosophically rich arguments in an 'esoteric'. 

 

The problem of esotericismis the problem of managing the relation between surface and depth in the necessarily double life of a human. 

 

I am me and the part that I am playing. 

 

I am Riley-being-a-therapist. Me and the role both are and aren't being something different. I am the role. I do not exist without roles. Yet I have persisted in spite of roles, implying that I am something more than the roles. 

What is this pretense that is necessary to human life? Why do we have to show that we know what we are doing. Part of being competent is being able to put on the performance of competence. The difference between being and seeming is so difficult for us.

Sometimes we feel the gap between ourselves and our role so violently. I love and hate the joke about an employee at Wal-Mart or somewhere similar taking off their name tag and fighting a customer that was being insulting. "I don't care about this job enough to not..." In a moment like that the being has erupted through its part in the action of that moment. 

"Yeah we're gonna need to ad lib this, this can't go down this way." Because there always scripts to get us through a moment. But the script does not necessarily give life.

I learned from Laing and others that there is a phenomenon within the world of schizophrenia referred to by clinicians as 'double bookkeeping'. Someone struggling with psychosis may have a good idea of what the 'external' world expects of them (how to behave in a store, etc), and they also answer to a different world, an 'inner' world in which the signs and symbols of meaning don't follow the same rules. They answer to a more exacting order. Double bookkeeping is meant to describe the phenomenon of individuals experiencing psychosis keeping track of both of these layers: surface and depth; inner and outer.

Esoteric writing is double bookkeeping that is necessary for the philosophical life, in the fullest sense.

My lasagna is ready and I'm tired. Goodbye.