Some Revision
Jul. 10th, 2010 05:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lhexaEvery year or so I read through the entirety of my journal, as a means of maintaining continuity with my past. This time, I thought I would post a number of corrections to things I found which were (or became) untrue, misleading or misstated, as well as a number of answers to questions which were not, at the time they were written, rhetorical. The responses are heavily weighted toward older entries, as you would expect. Also, I was originally going to leave out links, but I found that Google searches for the quoted text strings actually fail.
Read or skip, as you prefer.
Anyway, the reading I did in the events of others' lives was enough to remind of an old theme in my life, the recurring feeling that I inevitably abandon my friends...
As it turns out, no, I don't -- in fact, I stand with my friends more determinedly than anyone else I know, said friends included. I abandoned Devin and Paul, both from high school, but they were not friends but responsibilities -- though to my shame, I allowed them to think otherwise. Raki I did not abandon; rather, I rejected her, about as violently as I was then capable. In fact, that rejection was one of the healthiest decisions of my life, considering how the sickness of that friendship weakened all my others. There are no other pertinent cases.
I came to believe that being in a sustained position of not knowing where one stands with respect to any other person, of not even having any particular standing with another, but still to want to insert oneself into the social patterns that can so easily be seen around oneself, is enough to ruin any person if maintained for too long.
Actually, I've come to thrive on the reality of not knowing where I stand with respect to the groups to which I belong. The inquiries and manipulations requiring to form, enforce or perceive a definite such stance would obscure me from myself, and concerns about how to insert myself properly would only make that insertion less interesting. The "ruin" I mentioned comes from being in such an indeterminate state with one's close friends.
That, then, reminded of one fantasy of death that I do have -- it is of walking, or more often riding my bicycle, through unknown roads until I finally collapse from exhaustion.
I no longer have this fantasy.
Often I find myself marvelling that I can ever feel disgust at material things or the people around myself when I myself am an entire world of sin and failure... *sighs* ...And it looks like another long, tiring weak of exploring this world.
Well, that was the inner tundra-like biome I inhabited at the time, one of "sin and failure." Exploring the world revealed it to be much larger than that one cold area.
Have I been poor game for that huntress Sleep?
On average, yes. But there have been times when I was a magnificent hunt, possessing a wakefulness sufficient to deny her best attempts.
My draconity has thus far contained a kind of complacency - among other things... an odd gap prevented me from fully applying my ideas about it, as I revised ever further the words which delineated the ideal; perhaps I knew that in the application of the idea (as opposed to the fact) of draconity lay its eventual disproof.
Yep. No more need for the "perhaps".
It was with pride that I gradually stopped asking for and expecting the same sort of material gifts that others got... though it was with dismay that I stopped seeking emotional consolation from anyone but myself. It has been some seven or eight years since I have been comforted by anybody; I can actually remember the last times...
This has changed, though I don't think my friends generally recognize when I'm seeking to be comforted.
And now I reach the part of the journal where my words convey the greatest suffering I have ever experienced, words written in the week or so preceding complete collapse, jagged things marking the harsh transition between two years in college and two years in and out of mental hospitals. I have nothing to amend in those words, but I bring them up to note that I left them undeleted so as to fight the shame I felt in them -- and now, amazingly, the shame is subdued. There may come a day when someone points out how very insane I was, how I became megalomaniacal, paranoid, messianic, manic, and all sorts of other irrational things, perhaps with the aim of implying that the insanity never quite departed. To this I can now respond: even if the effect of that insanity will always be with me in some way, I accomplished something amazing. Most people develop their minds over the course of an entire youth, never having to rebuild any of it, never seeing the structure of that mind particularly threatened. I did see it threatened -- torn down, in fact -- and reached a point where several psychiatrists had told my family that I would never be functional again. But what happened, instead? I rebuilt my fucking mind. Far from being ashamed, I am proud of that.
I can already tell that this will be the defining event of my life, because right now I have to either be healthy or get caught in a spiral of increasing drugged helplessness.
Hah, no. I am not so simple as to be defined by a single event, not even one so severe as that.
Almost every day within my memory strikes me with pain; sometimes I wince visibly.
I still have the odd trait that painful memories never become less so, but now I have a matching complement of joyful memories whose ability to make me smile also never fades. It is good that my memory is strong. I just needed to fill it out more.
I swear once again to renew this promise whenever it has been broken.
Fuck you, psychotic episode.
But what use is severance after that which is diseased has been excised? Why be reborn when no life is at an end? Why fly when you're not likely to survive the descent? The ornithopter flew, but only charitably could you say that it landed.
There was a period when these question were not quite rhetorical, when I desperately wanted to experience the form of inspiration I call "flight" regardless of its effects. Now, although I will continue to tug at similar but lesser experiences, and continue to transcribe the results of the former ones, the yearning for flight -- a yearning which would have been a compulsion if I actually knew how to do it -- has cooled. If it needs to happen again, it will happen, I think. May it never need to happen again.
Words are our living tools, in effect perceiving reality without our involvement, and each has its own range of senses with which to perform that task.
I no longer think this. We are always involved, whether or not that involvement is perceivable. I still describe ideas as living things, though.
In grade school, your classmates are your bullies. In high school, it's your teachers. As an undergraduate, you find that your textbooks and assignments take up the role. In graduate school, perhaps an internalization occurs: being bullied requires only one person.
It depends on the graduate student, but thankfully this internalized "bullying" is not universal.
I hope that the friendships I've started there (and elsewhere recently) last, because I really like these people (should I say "you people" yet?).
They did!
Some time ago I came to the conclusion that, at a given time, I could do only two of these things: work, school, and philosophy. So I accepted that two years of my life (of which a half-year is now completed) would be a low period.
I was wrong about this. The six seasons following this statement ended with my best writing yet -- which means my best self-creation -- and began with my second-best. Yet I worked, studied and thought all at once. When I adapt fully, I can do amazing things; unfortunately, I am slow to adapt.
And when it is the right time with the right mood, I will be in the city, a million people and as many sights, and find that it contains not a thing to distract me.
I was completely right. When one of those two types of inspiration (blooming and burning, I call them) is ready, there are no distractions.
Given my recent self-training in expressiveness, which has come such a long way, I ask myself: why do you remain so focused on understanding style?
When I wrote this I actually didn't know the answer! (Which is, in a sentence, that my particular method of creating myself is writing myself, therefore I must develop a style in which and with which to do so.)
So when I take down notes (which is rare anyway), I try not to keep them around, and burn the paper copies once I've transcribed those worth keeping.
That was a short-lived habit, actually. For a little while I did the same with my textbook work: when I finished the textbook, I would watch all the solutions burn. I later found that dropping them in a recycling bin is just as poignant.
Next semester I'm going to have an eyehole or tie sewn into a good down pillow, and carry it around hooked to my backpack.
Okay, that was silly of me to say. I still need to take a pillow to my office, though.
But my tendency has been to create and discuss philosophical ideas playfully, and regard physics knowledge as something awe-inspiring.
This difference no longer remains.
Back when I drew, blank paper... well, that's a subject for a later entry. Let it suffice to say my experiences with academic philosophy in some ways paralleled those with art, and that my experiences with art left me convinced that to earnestly try to become an artist would destroy me.
...And now I'm trying anyway. "Destroy" was an exaggeration, but drawing is harrowing for me.
For the anticipated future it will suffice to say this: I fear, deeply, that in a romantic relationship I would be either false, neglectful, or abusive.
As of the last five seasons, I no longer have this fear.
Hmm, I just reached a section whose correction needs to go unsaid. Hopefully there won't be any more of those.
To provide a brief, incomplete list of situations I've recently given life and hope to within my mind: being introduced to a new form of art; showing off the marvels of a physics laboratory; helping out with financial troubles; saving a friend from physical danger; being held in a time of pain; showing off odd pieces of clothing; making a video of my dog and I playing at wolves, then giving it away; meeting new and wonderful people through a friend; and finally, heh, presenting, after long work and thought, a piece of writing that touches personally.
I have now done all but two. Saving a friend from physical danger is unlikely, and making a video of me playing with my dog no longer seems worthwhile.
To be a dam or channel for humanity's impulses are equally unsatisfactory choices, when the river in question is a tainted one. I seek the alternative. I have not found it.
I still haven't found it. Perhaps that alternative does not exist, it being the alternative to "triumphing not over pain, but over the prevailing reaction to pain."
It is the exception when in the company of a friend I am not facing... away from the world. (That is the value of friendship to me.)
Wow. That changed.
Nothing on my journal is friends-locked, and nothing ever will be. Isolation protects me better than secrecy, at the moment. And if the worst happens, well, what's the worst that can happen?
As a small exception to that first statement, I left "A world ends nonetheless" locked for a year out of consideration for Raki, but it's now public along with everything else. I also removed the ban placed on her from commenting in my journal, after being sick of seeing it every time I looked at the preferences, and later found the worst that could happen was that Raki had been foolish enough to keep reading this thing.
Do I live up to my words?
Considering those words contain a code of conduct stricter than the Pentateuch, the best I can say is: for the most part, yes. But not always.
Do I live what I write?
Yes, I do.
Read or skip, as you prefer.
Anyway, the reading I did in the events of others' lives was enough to remind of an old theme in my life, the recurring feeling that I inevitably abandon my friends...
As it turns out, no, I don't -- in fact, I stand with my friends more determinedly than anyone else I know, said friends included. I abandoned Devin and Paul, both from high school, but they were not friends but responsibilities -- though to my shame, I allowed them to think otherwise. Raki I did not abandon; rather, I rejected her, about as violently as I was then capable. In fact, that rejection was one of the healthiest decisions of my life, considering how the sickness of that friendship weakened all my others. There are no other pertinent cases.
I came to believe that being in a sustained position of not knowing where one stands with respect to any other person, of not even having any particular standing with another, but still to want to insert oneself into the social patterns that can so easily be seen around oneself, is enough to ruin any person if maintained for too long.
Actually, I've come to thrive on the reality of not knowing where I stand with respect to the groups to which I belong. The inquiries and manipulations requiring to form, enforce or perceive a definite such stance would obscure me from myself, and concerns about how to insert myself properly would only make that insertion less interesting. The "ruin" I mentioned comes from being in such an indeterminate state with one's close friends.
That, then, reminded of one fantasy of death that I do have -- it is of walking, or more often riding my bicycle, through unknown roads until I finally collapse from exhaustion.
I no longer have this fantasy.
Often I find myself marvelling that I can ever feel disgust at material things or the people around myself when I myself am an entire world of sin and failure... *sighs* ...And it looks like another long, tiring weak of exploring this world.
Well, that was the inner tundra-like biome I inhabited at the time, one of "sin and failure." Exploring the world revealed it to be much larger than that one cold area.
Have I been poor game for that huntress Sleep?
On average, yes. But there have been times when I was a magnificent hunt, possessing a wakefulness sufficient to deny her best attempts.
My draconity has thus far contained a kind of complacency - among other things... an odd gap prevented me from fully applying my ideas about it, as I revised ever further the words which delineated the ideal; perhaps I knew that in the application of the idea (as opposed to the fact) of draconity lay its eventual disproof.
Yep. No more need for the "perhaps".
It was with pride that I gradually stopped asking for and expecting the same sort of material gifts that others got... though it was with dismay that I stopped seeking emotional consolation from anyone but myself. It has been some seven or eight years since I have been comforted by anybody; I can actually remember the last times...
This has changed, though I don't think my friends generally recognize when I'm seeking to be comforted.
And now I reach the part of the journal where my words convey the greatest suffering I have ever experienced, words written in the week or so preceding complete collapse, jagged things marking the harsh transition between two years in college and two years in and out of mental hospitals. I have nothing to amend in those words, but I bring them up to note that I left them undeleted so as to fight the shame I felt in them -- and now, amazingly, the shame is subdued. There may come a day when someone points out how very insane I was, how I became megalomaniacal, paranoid, messianic, manic, and all sorts of other irrational things, perhaps with the aim of implying that the insanity never quite departed. To this I can now respond: even if the effect of that insanity will always be with me in some way, I accomplished something amazing. Most people develop their minds over the course of an entire youth, never having to rebuild any of it, never seeing the structure of that mind particularly threatened. I did see it threatened -- torn down, in fact -- and reached a point where several psychiatrists had told my family that I would never be functional again. But what happened, instead? I rebuilt my fucking mind. Far from being ashamed, I am proud of that.
I can already tell that this will be the defining event of my life, because right now I have to either be healthy or get caught in a spiral of increasing drugged helplessness.
Hah, no. I am not so simple as to be defined by a single event, not even one so severe as that.
Almost every day within my memory strikes me with pain; sometimes I wince visibly.
I still have the odd trait that painful memories never become less so, but now I have a matching complement of joyful memories whose ability to make me smile also never fades. It is good that my memory is strong. I just needed to fill it out more.
I swear once again to renew this promise whenever it has been broken.
Fuck you, psychotic episode.
But what use is severance after that which is diseased has been excised? Why be reborn when no life is at an end? Why fly when you're not likely to survive the descent? The ornithopter flew, but only charitably could you say that it landed.
There was a period when these question were not quite rhetorical, when I desperately wanted to experience the form of inspiration I call "flight" regardless of its effects. Now, although I will continue to tug at similar but lesser experiences, and continue to transcribe the results of the former ones, the yearning for flight -- a yearning which would have been a compulsion if I actually knew how to do it -- has cooled. If it needs to happen again, it will happen, I think. May it never need to happen again.
Words are our living tools, in effect perceiving reality without our involvement, and each has its own range of senses with which to perform that task.
I no longer think this. We are always involved, whether or not that involvement is perceivable. I still describe ideas as living things, though.
In grade school, your classmates are your bullies. In high school, it's your teachers. As an undergraduate, you find that your textbooks and assignments take up the role. In graduate school, perhaps an internalization occurs: being bullied requires only one person.
It depends on the graduate student, but thankfully this internalized "bullying" is not universal.
I hope that the friendships I've started there (and elsewhere recently) last, because I really like these people (should I say "you people" yet?).
They did!
Some time ago I came to the conclusion that, at a given time, I could do only two of these things: work, school, and philosophy. So I accepted that two years of my life (of which a half-year is now completed) would be a low period.
I was wrong about this. The six seasons following this statement ended with my best writing yet -- which means my best self-creation -- and began with my second-best. Yet I worked, studied and thought all at once. When I adapt fully, I can do amazing things; unfortunately, I am slow to adapt.
And when it is the right time with the right mood, I will be in the city, a million people and as many sights, and find that it contains not a thing to distract me.
I was completely right. When one of those two types of inspiration (blooming and burning, I call them) is ready, there are no distractions.
Given my recent self-training in expressiveness, which has come such a long way, I ask myself: why do you remain so focused on understanding style?
When I wrote this I actually didn't know the answer! (Which is, in a sentence, that my particular method of creating myself is writing myself, therefore I must develop a style in which and with which to do so.)
So when I take down notes (which is rare anyway), I try not to keep them around, and burn the paper copies once I've transcribed those worth keeping.
That was a short-lived habit, actually. For a little while I did the same with my textbook work: when I finished the textbook, I would watch all the solutions burn. I later found that dropping them in a recycling bin is just as poignant.
Next semester I'm going to have an eyehole or tie sewn into a good down pillow, and carry it around hooked to my backpack.
Okay, that was silly of me to say. I still need to take a pillow to my office, though.
But my tendency has been to create and discuss philosophical ideas playfully, and regard physics knowledge as something awe-inspiring.
This difference no longer remains.
Back when I drew, blank paper... well, that's a subject for a later entry. Let it suffice to say my experiences with academic philosophy in some ways paralleled those with art, and that my experiences with art left me convinced that to earnestly try to become an artist would destroy me.
...And now I'm trying anyway. "Destroy" was an exaggeration, but drawing is harrowing for me.
For the anticipated future it will suffice to say this: I fear, deeply, that in a romantic relationship I would be either false, neglectful, or abusive.
As of the last five seasons, I no longer have this fear.
Hmm, I just reached a section whose correction needs to go unsaid. Hopefully there won't be any more of those.
To provide a brief, incomplete list of situations I've recently given life and hope to within my mind: being introduced to a new form of art; showing off the marvels of a physics laboratory; helping out with financial troubles; saving a friend from physical danger; being held in a time of pain; showing off odd pieces of clothing; making a video of my dog and I playing at wolves, then giving it away; meeting new and wonderful people through a friend; and finally, heh, presenting, after long work and thought, a piece of writing that touches personally.
I have now done all but two. Saving a friend from physical danger is unlikely, and making a video of me playing with my dog no longer seems worthwhile.
To be a dam or channel for humanity's impulses are equally unsatisfactory choices, when the river in question is a tainted one. I seek the alternative. I have not found it.
I still haven't found it. Perhaps that alternative does not exist, it being the alternative to "triumphing not over pain, but over the prevailing reaction to pain."
It is the exception when in the company of a friend I am not facing... away from the world. (That is the value of friendship to me.)
Wow. That changed.
Nothing on my journal is friends-locked, and nothing ever will be. Isolation protects me better than secrecy, at the moment. And if the worst happens, well, what's the worst that can happen?
As a small exception to that first statement, I left "A world ends nonetheless" locked for a year out of consideration for Raki, but it's now public along with everything else. I also removed the ban placed on her from commenting in my journal, after being sick of seeing it every time I looked at the preferences, and later found the worst that could happen was that Raki had been foolish enough to keep reading this thing.
Do I live up to my words?
Considering those words contain a code of conduct stricter than the Pentateuch, the best I can say is: for the most part, yes. But not always.
Do I live what I write?
Yes, I do.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-24 03:08 am (UTC)*grins* I think you were around when I first started talking about flight, in a previous lifetime...