lhexa | Recent Entries

I wonder what remains in me of friends who are now absent. Kevin, an amazing first friend, left something like a steady golden light, a sort of beacon, fitting for two child explorers of the nighttime. Casey, I suppose, would be an old leaf pressed into a book. Devin is a note tucked away in a place I won't forget, saying some such as, "Remember: you, though honest, deceive." A.J. met me with passion, with an anger greater than my thoroughly controlled own, and I imagine left behind a pair of brass knuckles. Raki, unwitting recipient of a neurotic's unhealthy friendship, remains as a shard of glass, sharp, embedded, what remains when the thin, transparent boundary between inside and out is shattered.

I had much cause to think of glass last night and tonight, after I broke into the apartment of my upstairs neighbor around three in the morning. The facts of the night do not cohere, at least not yet, so pardon me for giving little better than a list. The smoke alarm had sounded for twenty or more minutes, the apartment had filled with smoke from the oven, the lights were on, I tried knocking, my neighbor claimed to have been sleeping with ears plugged, though she was fully dressed when I poked my head through the broken window, the police were called anyway, so I should have done that anyway (though their response would have matched mine), and in the insomniac hours to follow I heard crying, then after a friend arrived laughing, from upstairs. As that friend arrived my neighbor knocked on my door to thank me, and told the friend that I had saved her life. That was an exaggeration.

What I remember most doggedly is the sensation of my foot going through the window, and a little moment of awe at my apprehension of its fragility. Even leaving the aforementioned exaggeration aside, I am confident that I did a good thing. But I feel something akin to panic when I realize that I do not know what it is, this good thing that I have done. I walked downstairs last night over a layer of broken glass, I laid awake thinking, among other things, of broken glass, and when I finally slept I dreamed of broken glass.

I spent several of my childhood summers at Inspiration Point, an opera camp in the Ozarks. Many stories from there need to be told, but I will proceed slowly, as the material is too valuable, too rare to shape in bulk. For now: at Inspiration Point there was a place called the Red Barn. Built over a steep slope, its foundation contained the scene shop, with wide doors letting out near the stage, while its ground floor contained a maze of costumes and accessories, with smothering aisles of bewildering clothing and odd little rooms overflowing with shoes and hats. The top floor contained a slightly elevated platform holding most of the props, and more besides that platform, but I cannot remember the more, only the prop space. I revisited Inspiration Point two weeks ago, and once more explored the entire Red Barn thoroughly, but I still cannot remember anything on the top floor except the prop space.

At first I was afraid of the space because of the bats that lived above it, and while my mother accompanied me up there to show me that they were harmless, that wasn't to be the only fear that I braved to see that space. It contained marvels, objects which had enhanced the camp's productions, such things as ornate books, plastic fruit, toy pistols and pocket watches. I was particularly fond of the antique swords, which I would swing around imaginatively for the minute or so my arms could lift them. One day while roaming this space I found a new reason to be afraid of it, for I had not yet encountered Tarot cards. I found a deck of them, flipped through it, fascinated, until I reached one of the scarier cards, then bolted in fear. A combination of curiosity and pride eventually led me back, though for a long period I would refuse to look at the table that held the deck. Thoughts about the nature of courage, pre-philosophical you might call them, occupied my mind while the fear was still strong. By the time of my return, the remnants of the fear had turned into something sublime, and instead of courage I thought about continuity.

A later musing on continuity occurred as I drove home from Dallas today. A peculiar craving had snagged me all weekend, namely a desire for Taco Bell food, but the preferences of friends and family had precluded stopping there, until I found myself nearing home with the fixation still present despite a sizable meal a few hours prior. I wondered at this craving, my ideas not budging it, as though it were irreducible. However, I recalled by chance what may have been the first time I ate that food. That day Kevin and I had climbed, swum, explored, and, knowing us, probably discussed heroism; now, we were being driven home from the state park, lounging in the back of my mother's minivan with seats folded down. Our doubtlessly worthy efforts had left us drained and hungry, but there was cheap and copious food to be found on the way back, adding satiety to serenity. Kevin and I shared many profound moments, that one among them; and yes, some stupid corporation shared the moment with us, too. Having remembered this moment, the craving dissipated. I do not want to seek out a grown Kevin now, as I would rather miss the child than mourn the adult. But I suppose a discussion of sorts may still be had with him: I can still ask Kevin the child his thoughts about what Eric the child became.

I endeavor to maintain continuity in order to develop the good in my past while isolating the bad, but two major discontinuities hinder this effort. At twenty the major part of me died, after which there could be no continuity but purposeful continuity with what came before, leaving a self continued by inheritance rather than identity. More pertinently, before fourteen I was wordless, my writing having not yet begun. For all later times I can read myself, but for times prior I must remember.

When I returned to Inspiration Point two weekends ago their summer session had just ended, leaving people scurrying to pack and leave. I walked among the bustle, looking at my childhood locales both with impunity and without permission. I visited the costume shop, the sleeping quarters, the stage and the dungeon-like dressing rooms below them, and no one knew I did not belong there. By sneaking into my past, I discovered it to be real. I found that I can, by grace or cleverness, as it were lean into my past and dispel its wordlessness by giving it words such as these. And in my re-exploration of a sacred place from my childhood I encountered one of this world's perfections: the Red Barn was still there, the prop space was still there, the deck of cards was still there, and the card Death was still there.

The Kindness of Symbols.

While trimming archived directories, I found this piece from about two years ago, which I had intended to expand to a full entry. But I think it stands on its own.

What life can I find inside myself?

There are plants, at least. There are flowers and weeds: I know because they bloom occasionally. There are trees: some of the ideas have been growing a long time, their roots burrowing deep into my past. There's fungus: I can tell by the timely decay and recycling of ideas that are rejected and dead. But there isn't much in the way of fauna. There's so little, in fact, that when something mammalian appears (from some undefined outside) it does so with the force of revelation, giving me an idea that could be the basis of an entire academic or creative career, if only it would stay (rather than just leaving tracks or remembered glimpses).

Thoreau said, "With thinking we may be beside oneself in a sane sense." I extend that by claiming: with imagination we may be inside ourselves in a sane sense.

Every 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.

The above is, I think, the most difficult integral I've ever evaluated. Usually the strategy on such integrals is to figure out which of the variables gives an easier integration, and do it first, but in this case I had to handle both at once, performing the following substitutions one after the other:

Doing just one leaves a mess that looks just as bad as before, but doing both produces an amazing cancellation. Not only that, I defined the second new variable as an implicit function of the remaining old variable, only later solving for the old variable explicitly. That's a trick I've never used before, and it entails some messiness with the limits of integration. The entire problem (involving conservation of momentum with a moving charge) took me about two and a half hours, and now I'm thoroughly proud of myself.

Problems like this are why it is said: differentiation is a skill, but integration is an art.

From a discussion with Dw about how and whether consciousness can be given a different structure.

[Consciousness] surely feels unitary: you spy the environment through a system of interpreters, and if the system breaks, where are you then?

True, I feel unified, but I need to be aware of both the limits of the unity and also the extent to which the arrangement I form within it is arbitrary, mutable and/or partial. The unity is bounded in that, as far as I can tell, my mind is larger than the conscious, unified portion of it, with some elements only coming into awareness during sleep or during unusual moods. And the arrangement is arbitrary in that another organization may also provide a description or explanation of unity, say the unity of an ecosystem or the unity of a flock.

The system in question (the interface, in your terminology), as far as I can tell, is fairly resilient: it fails me, but it does not break. I take the systemic failure that you mention to be one of apathy, that of knowing what you should do or want to do but being unable to do it. You and I both know that the interface between thought and action does not stand up well against repeated exertion of willpower: eventually, one fails to respond to one's own exhortations. But even then, the interface requires only rest to return to (at least partial) functioning, contrary to the idea that it is broken or damaged. The fact that we get bad results from the interface does not entail that it is broken, but that we do not know how to use it well.

Though I don't interpret the problem as a problem of interface, finding a solution to the problem of apathy is one of my main motivations in developing a different internal organization. My current personality simply cannot muster the discipline and devotion that my ambitions require. I have tried relying on willpower, but that engenders a cycle of alternating frenzy and collapse: I work hard until my will gives way, then I waste time until I have rested enough to exert more willpower. It is not a healthy or efficient way of acting, much less an elegant way (in the corvid sense) or wise way. Since power has proven inadequate, I have to look to other concepts to provide the solution to apathy, and an ecological system of metaphors may be rich enough to suffice. Also, I take the problem of exhaustion to be a special case of the problem of apathy, because I have found that being exhausted does not actually render me incapable of doing what I want to do: when exhausted, I'm not much slower at math, writing, or research than usual, and yet exhaustion usually stops me from doing those things.

Maybe that is an illusion, but then one has to uncover reality first. Travel around and past the distortion, but you have to know the terrain to do so... or at least a way of seeing the right path from the many others.

Not necessarily. As I argued earlier, in some cases it may be impossible to judge between competing systems of concepts without actually using those concepts. I have experience with the power-oriented organization of identity, but I don't know that I can weigh it fairly against the alternate organization without first implementing the latter, allowing it to shape my experience.

Ultimately, the best way to learn the terrain is to travel it.

I think part of the reason we organize internally according to power is because the thing seems so cohesive...

It does seem cohesive, but there are still gaps. What are individual thoughts, feelings and moods in a hierarchical identity? What are actions? (Clearly, the intent to act would be the king's command, but what would the act itself be?) I also think that another reason we organize according to power is because power (in the form of authority) is one of the few things that every human being knows thoroughly from experience.

More, the cohesion is a misleading one. I can pick a muscle of my body and tell it to contract, but it does not follow than my relation to my physical actions is one of command and servitude. If I were to try to walk by sending commands to individual muscles, I would fail at it due to the complexity of the motion, and the same is true of the majority of my actions. Nor do I perceive, either internally by introspection or externally by observing my behavior, that walking usually requires a command. I can cogently make this observation because there are times when complex physical motion requires an exertion of command over myself, namely when I am exercising and finding it difficult to continue. In that case evidence of an exertion of power appears both internally (in a resistance by the part of me that wants to rest) and externally (in the slowness or incompleteness of my responses to my coach's counting). There is causality between my thoughts and my actions, but it is one of power only in an overly broad sense of the word: my physical activity is more a matter of coordination than command. There is a sense in which you can say that a conductor commands a symphony, but someone who actually does say that may not understand music.

The benefit of a figurative description is its ability to aptly equate unlike things, and the description in question is a figurative one: a kingdom befigures a person. (Note, being figurative does not entail being false, arbitrary, subjective, or undecidable.) However, it requires the most subtle aspects of a person to be represented by another person (the king, or in similar models the driver of a chariot or master of a household), which I take to be a flaw of the representation. I think the ecological figure is better in that it equates a greater diversity of unlike things, although there are still cases where I have to equate something with itself inside the figure (specifically, my awareness with the awareness of a specific animal inside, which I take to be my core identity). Also, while the hierarchical figure includes the interface (using your three layer theory), my figure only describes the innermost layer. More on that later.

Perhaps in our case, it's also one of history: Cartesian dualism is very hierarchical.

Yeah, it seems to be a prevalent strain in Western thought. The book by Foucault I've been reading recently lists example after example in which some classical Greek thinker exhorts his reader to master himself the way a husband masters a household or a lord controls a city. The relation of lord to city, husband to household, and person to drives were all considered isomorphic. I guess the most famous example is Plato's image of the soul as the driver of a chariot, whose two horses are two classes of basic human drives. Also, human beings seem prone to internalizing power relations, for instance by equating morality with obedience to the law. Perhaps people organize themselves internally according to whatever is most prevalent and pervasive in their lives, and little, if anything, rivals power in that regard.

Since much above referred to it, here are some of the details of that alternative way of organizing myself internally, which I am trying to implement -- thus far, I have only done so partially, as I habitually revert to the old hierarchical organization, among others.

My ideas are the individual creatures within an environment; given that such ideas recur with minor variations, I can identify them as instances of a species. (I'll use "to be," "to identify," and "to figure" instead of a more precise "to be represented by" or similar constructs, for brevity's sake.) The sophistication of a thought corresponds to the complexity of the creature. I generally don't try to equate ideas with known species at this point, though. At any instant I take myself to only be a single such idea among the rest, usually a fox but sometimes a fisher instead, my awareness of my inner state being his awareness both of himself and his surroundings. This is what I meant by "reducing myself to the idea of myself" in the previous entry. The most significant aspect of that reduction is that while my ideas are part of my inner world, they are not part of myself.

The interactions among creatures figure the interactions among ideas, such as inference, analogy, elaboration, articulation... you could call the set of all such interactions reasoning, broadly construed. Predation is particularly important, as are the interactions among members of a given species, but there are also such interactions as sheltering, parasitism and symbiosis. Following both Cavell's idea that moods are to the world what the senses are to objects, and also my own realization that the range of what I can think differs significantly from mood to mood, I identify mood with place in the figure, characterized most readily by biome and climate. So a desolate mood would correspond to an arid location with little life, a despairing mood might be a swampy one with its own well-adapted ideas (that are not the ones I need, and ill-adapted elsewhere), a cheerful mood might be a temperate, thriving grassland or forest, and a thoughtful one might be the span of a river. These identifications are all tentative. The place (the mood, or more generally state of mind) is not only characterized by biome, but also by other conditions affecting an entire place, so that a sudden, excessive exhaustion during an otherwise good mood might be identified as a storm or cold snap, inhibiting the normal activity of the creatures within.

That's the outline of the new system of metaphors, as it stands. As far as the problem of apathy is concerned, the new system may allow me to distinguish more finely in my ability to control myself and exert power: individual creatures (ideas) can be killed (rebutted, rejected, discarded), but not so classes (species) of similar ideas. Thus I learn to accept the regular reappearance of harmful ideas I associate with my psychotic episodes: I cannot control their existence, but I can control how I interact with and deal with the ideas. More, while I have a free hand in responding to individual ideas, to such things as biomes and weather (moods and other, unnamed inner conditions) my only short-term option is to adapt. This addresses my tendency to respond to exhaustion in an unwise manner, namely forcing myself to keep working until I collapse. Perhaps more importantly, the system allows me to make finer distinctions among conditions which would normally be grouped under such broad headings as exhaustion, impatience and desolation, allowing less crude responses. (As a recent example, I contrasted a "cold" exhaustion in which I can choose what I attend to, but not work on it steadily, with a "wet" exhaustion in which I can work on something steadily, but find it difficult to reorient myself and start on a different task. The latter type of exhaustion limits my mobility, so to speak, the other my free energy.) Finally, the system of metaphors implies that ideas require nourishment every bit as constant and many-elemented as the nourishment of an animal. While my mind can make use of a number of resources comparable to that of an ecosystem, I have only come to identify and secure a bare few of those resources.

This inner organization has a fairly broad domain, but I still have to rely on many unrelated concepts to shape and make sense of my inner nature. I even, fairly regularly, have to resort to the notion of power, that an impulse is an unruly subject to be controlled. That's fine: I expect every body of concepts to have only a limited domain of usefulness, so I will need multiple such bodies to serve all my purposes and needs. I'm more dismayed by the fact that, despite how long I've developed this alternative, I can muster only a weak defense of it, and cannot defend the system more fully (to you, or to myself) without first implementing it. In response to such dismay I consider Emerson's remark, "Far be from me the despair which prejudges the law by a paltry empiricism." The ideas I develop now, as self-indulgent, subjective and tenuous as they are, are steps on the path to a less paltry empiricism.

Across the street from my grandmother's shop there once lived a kind old woman named Nora. During that span of my life (roughly my early years in grade school) my mother worked a second job as a costume designer for a Dallas theatre, so she would often use my grandmother's sewing machines, tables, and supplies of fabric, with me along to spend my time as I desired. There were always books to read, or games to play, or the overgrown plot out back which I never fully explored. Sometimes I would also cross that vast street and knock on Nora's door, because she was always home. We would eat snacks together and talk about things. Only scattered, unclear memories remain of her: the well-stocked, thoroughly organized pantry; the strange old technology, lacking all of the unobtrusive sleekness I knew; the dining room table that stood always ready for guests; the bedroom which was never quite as clean as the rest of the house. Notwithstanding the terrifying loneliness I sensed even then, I respected and wondered at the significance of every item, that each brought with it a series of memories to be invoked with a question. In that house, I behaved with a delicate awe quite unlike my usual heedlessness.

I remember the music boxes most clearly. Nora collected these, and had more than a dozen in her living room. All were purely mechanical, activated by turning some knob or handle. Most had a set of little prongs tuned to specific notes, twanged in sequence by a rotating cylinder. None were ever quite in tune. Whenever I visited Nora, before the snacks or the conversation, I would turn on every single one of those boxes, hunting the room thoroughly to make sure I had not missed any. Both Nora and I would then revel for a little while in the abundance of music. As I remember, it was not a cacophony, but rather the beautiful disharmony of an orchestra warming up. There are various little exercises which I do consistently, like performing estimates in my head before reaching for a calculator, or looking up a new word in the dictionary: these exercises ensure that my mind will always be able to do what I most need it to do. One such exercise is to recall what I felt when I realized that the house across the street from my grandmother's shop had been torn down.

In my fantasies I help my friends in big, decisive ways, by being the right person with the right resources at the right time. These are unrealistic fantasies, because the pivotal moments when a friend needs (and can receive) such help are vanishingly rare: I can think of only two times when I was able to decisively help someone with a single action. More realistic, and frankly more valuable, is the help I can provide in imperceptibly small portions, by providing consistent support, conversation, perspective or even just presence... the help which consists in being a kind gardener to those around me, helping what is worthwhile in them to grow. As one of many rewards for that activity, I may on occasion be invited inside someone else's head, to observe the objects there with a delicate awe, and to set the music there to playing.

***
It is a strange cord which ties me to my past, because the more strands I cut the stronger it becomes. I do not mean I should not cut at what ties me, but that I should cut wisely. I can be a better person than I have yet been shown.

From an email conversation about gender politics.

If I were in the same situation now, and didn't know how happy I'd been for the past two and a half years, I'd be reticent. I would feel like choosing to get surgery would not only be my personal choice, but a statement to those around me that I considered surgery a right thing to do and accepted the political system that defines people based on their genital configuration. And that would make me uncomfortable. In one sense, I don't have the option to accept or not accept that political system; it is no matter what I think about it, and the decision to fit into it in different ways while working to alter it is a personal choice. But it's one I periodically feel called on to defend, and I am glad I made the choice at a time when I did not have to defend it in this way.

In some ways that makes me go ugh, because if it's a correct choice, shouldn't I be able to defend it?

Heh, this will be the starting point for a long digression of my own. Until recently (recently being the last three-fourths of a year), if asked about gender, I would have said, first, that the gender binary should not exist; and then, if pressed, that I had not thought much about it. But two encounters brought into view the problems of this position.

The first was a discussion with a local acquaintance about his dislike of trans people (there's no way to put it that's both honest and kind to him). While I think he was rationalizing his dislike of specific people, I didn't have a good response to his argument: namely, that trans people reinforce the gender binary. (So when you do learn to defend the choice powerfully, let me know how!) However, the encounter did bring to mind the possibility that there is a psychological aspect to the position of anti-dualism: that its vehemence is evidence of the grip that the binary has over people, unreasonable adherence engendering unreasonable opposition. You do not passionately decry something which has no grip on you. And I have seen the anti-dualist position itself veer into judgmental and exclusive behavior, for instance in the move to exclude the transgendered from feminism. This opposition to the binary might itself be a form of living under its power.

(By the way, you came up in an earlier portion of that discussion as an example of why gender studies are worthwhile.)

The second encounter was a conversation in which a friend brought up casually how she had found it difficult to learn to be a woman when growing up in a mostly male environment. Presumably many people think in such terms, but this was, no lie, the first time I had met with them. And this was a woman who, to the best of my perception, had drawn only good from the concept, so that I was assured in an instant that "learning to be a woman" is not only intelligible but potentially beneficial. An unreasonably anti-dualist stance would claim that such learning is mimicking, that one learns to be a woman as one learns habits, not that one learns it in the sense that one learns a skill or a subject. (And how else would it be intelligible for a woman to speak of learning to be a woman?) If someone draws nothing but good from their (concept of their) gender, I am not justified in telling her the concept should not exist.

This brings me back to the argument to which I had no good answer. I have wondered why I have difficulty finding a middle ground between the argument itself, which claims that transitioning is just a blatant manifestation of the gender binary, and the powerlessly relativist answer, which claims that the only thing that matters is the happiness of the individual, refusing to note any broader significance. Now, in the articulacy provided by a rich conversation, I think that this difficulty arises from a move which I find deeply distasteful, namely a move away from decrying the binary. (To note the difficulty of this move, note that it is usually presented weakly as a matter of pragmatism, in a line such as "No one of us can eliminate the concept of gender, but we can work to dismantle it from the inside." The line moves the conversation forward, yes, but what does it concede?) So that perhaps I should not just present my task as that of dismantling the gender binary, but also of creating a better binary. Which is also to say, creating a binary, period.

I do not have an answer yet, but here is a sketch of an answer, written to some undetermined "you". Yes, transitioning involves the concept of a gender binary, but such a thing as a good binary is possible, and such acts as transitioning may help to create it. For the moment, set aside anti-duality as an unvarying principle, and consider what a good binary would be. It would not be exhaustive, but rather would have ample middle and outer ground. It would have varying importance: one person may find it useful only to make others' descriptions intelligible; another would find it a significant attribute, but hardly the most so; another would find in it guiding principles, and draw strength from its various aspects; yet another would step forth into their life with a vision of a new womanhood or new manhood. The misunderstandings produced by this variable importance would be a fact of life. Finally, it would not be tyrannical: having found oneself somewhere within this binary, one would not then be forced to live at that same point forever. The possibility of transition is essential to the idea of a good binary. You could help to create such a binary.

And yes, in the meantime, continue to dismantle the old one.

In trying to reconcile a contempt for falsity with a proven ability to deceive, I have settled on the dictum, "Nothing deceives better than the truth." This dictum can be circumambulated in two ways. The first way suggests that lying is a crude form of deception, not only unethical but inept, and that if I wish those who encounter me to develop wrong ideas of me then nothing will serve that wish better than honesty. People have good noses for unusual efforts on my part to shape their perceptions, but are comparatively unaware of their own misapprehensions. The second way says that to find the truth, I should seek out those areas in which people are best deceived, advice which sums up much of psychoanalysis. Where people most willfully lie to themselves, most forcefully repress themselves, or most violently project and externalize, I may find good insights into their nature.

It only today occurred to me that there is another idea of deception, corresponding to a different type of trickster, which says that you have yet to fully exercise your powers of deception until you have tricked yourself.

From a discussion with Dw under the "At least an animal" entry.

Common to such solutions [to the problem of greed or power] would be that they require a certain indirect strength of being: not the strength of power or repression, but the strength of, when finding out that there are no final victories, to persevere - to keep outwitting (or redirecting, or what the solution may be) those forces, that the sum of the temporary victories keeps said forces from advancing.

That was a valuable comment, the kind to send me into several hours of prolonged, intense thought. I regret being so late in addressing it. The comment showed me a foolishness in my ideas about how I should respond to my failings. While I persist in believing that I must outwit those failings, turning their own natures against them, the very fact that I can outwit my failings indicates that I have been viewing them the wrong way. Namely, I have viewed my failings as enemies, as objects of recurrent struggle and conflict. However, to outwit or trick the same opponent multiple times is unlikely, and to trick the same opponent in the same way more than once is near impossible. More, just as there are no final victories against some aspect of myself, there are no final defeats -- even if I give in to some shortcoming this week, next week will not find me much less able to face the challenges of my life. Instead, spurred both by your comment and from related discoveries about the concept of akrasia, I have come to think: in the long run, my failings are not my enemies, but merely unworked or poorly worked material. They are the substance of myself that cannot yet accomplish the things I desire of myself, and I do not need to oppose but to shape them.

One failing that caused some grief this summer was the fact that I find it difficult to cook for myself. This failing -- I would not use such a strong word, were it not for the aforementioned grief -- generally results either in my eating cheap TV dinners and junk food, presumably making me less healthy, or in my eating out too frequently, draining the small income of a graduate student. When your comment reached me I had fallen into the habit of viewing the impulse to eat junk or eat out as a minor vice to struggle against, but in reality these impulses are only vices in some contexts. Realistically speaking, I will frequently be too tired, too distracted or too absorbed in thought to be able to cook for myself, and at such times eating out or eating cheaply (depending on what I can afford) is not only reasonable but smart. The failing is real; however, it is real not because certain impulses are inimical to me, but because I have not, to date, shaped myself wisely. I know from the testimony of friends that cooking can be a complex and rewarding activity, potentially as engrossing and enjoyable as a videogame or novel. But in my adolescence I only valued the most abstract skills and knowledge: such things as philosophy, physics, mathematics, writing, and drawing, with not a single practical skill among them. Should I develop the ability and desire to cook -- as I already have, to a small extent -- then I will rarely face a conflict between prudence and impulse, but rather a choice between impulses to cook or to eat out, to be made on grounds of prudence or expedience.

To generalize: my inner state may frequently resolve into a conflict between and impulse and some other consideration, but the fact that this is a conflict is conditional, not essential. Should I become wise, it is not that I would become stronger in this conflict; rather, it would cease to be a conflict altogether. That is not to say that all inner conflicts can (or even should) be transmuted away. I stand by the assertion that I cannot come to expect comfort or rest, that I will always have something within myself to struggle against. But if I continue to learn, grow, and improve, then exactly what I struggle against should change from year to year: I should not be forced to use tired old tricks against a canny old enemy. That would be a life of what is called resignation. Unending conflicts invariably become desperate ones.

For a less mundane example, there is apathy. This is unquestionably one of my worst failings: that I know there is something I should do, and yet do not do it. I have puzzled over apathy for years, and have not yet come to a full solution to it. But I have recently realized that apathy is only bad in the way that a blank page is bad. It is not an opponent but an emptiness, and my attempts to anthropomorphize it, to suss out its passions, reasons and nature as I successfully do with other vices, are attempts that always fail: I cannot create something out of nothing, much less something to struggle against. Instead, just as I stare at a blank line and wonder why the words do not come, I stare into an inner void and wonder why I cannot act. It is a worthwhile wondering, but the conditions needed for action are as multifarious and subtle as the conditions needed for inspiration. My body will tell me if I need food, sleep or shelter, but it will not tell me if my more abstract needs are not being met, or if one of my rarer inner resources is running low. I have often found that apathy is overcome by such a thing as companionship, reading or exploration, despite there being no clear connection between such goods and the action stymied by apathy. In both the short and the long run, viewing apathy as an enemy, even an enemy to be outwitted, is again wrong: the space that I vilify as apathy needs only to be filled, and my difficulty is the difficulty in finding the right substance to fill it.

Having mentioned the value of outwitting my failings rather than overcoming them, I should also give you an example directly demonstrating that contrast. So, here is an example that I have only recently come to articulate, involving a shortcoming that I have only recently outwitted: feeling disgusted by others -- by humanity, by strangers, and sometimes even by friends. Should I respond as had been my long habit, and attempt to address the disgust with an inner discourse on its unreasonableness and harmfulness, then the disgust would hardly be exterminated, but would instead gnaw at me for as long as the mood that unearthed it lasted. You've tried simply reasoning your way out of a failing: you know that an inner discourse does not prove effective for long. It is an example of meeting power with power, by meeting the power of an impulse or emotion with the power of an argument. In this case, I have found that disgust is instead killed by bringing it to light. Disgust simply cannot last when its object has the opportunity to address it. I call this response an outwitting because it subverts the implicit logic of disgust, namely that it should not be aired, because its object is too irrational or too unethical to handle it. If this reasoning were actually true, then bringing disgust to light would only lead to its confirmation and strengthening: the object of my disgust would disgust me further. Instead, I find that people respond in ways that require me to look at them in a new light. Granted, I have only three clear examples from my own life to support the conclusion that disgust dies when brought to light, but those plus some indirect evidence are enough for me to commit the idea to writing. By indirect evidence I mean: when the object of disgust is (as is most common) someone I don't know, say a chance encounter on the street or on a comment thread, then no such thing as bringing disgust to light can happen; still, I imagine its object taking that opportunity, I play through a little fantasy of what might happen, and find it partly as effective.

For years I treated my recurrent feelings of disgust as an enemy, where others might simply have vented it. But it, with other concurrent struggles, eventually brought me to the position of the earlier post: I should expect no final victory over these so-called enemies. The only force which will effectively undo such an enemy is its own subverted logic, as in the case of disgust: rather than come to master myself, meeting strength with strength, I should outwit myself. That path, now, brings me to the point I reached when thinking about your comment: when outwitted the enemy ceases to be an enemy, and the inner tension no longer resolves into an inner conflict. Disgust is a low, crawling emotion, often to be found a short distance beneath my conscious thoughts, and no doubt it will always remain in some quantity. But in bringing it to light, I have learned a little about judgment and criticism, and have begun to form an ethics of criticism, a set of considered standards for when and what. I have also better learned to adapt to the emotional vagaries of forthrightness, the frustration, indecision and guilt that come after I refuse to shelter disgust in secret. The feeling became a provocation to actions that would broaden my experiences, ethics and skills, as well as an indicator of a need to deepen my involvement with others, namely those others I had started to hold in contempt. The disgust proved to be good sustenance, good material for something better. I do not know, but I posit that my other internal struggles have the same reality: that they are only struggles in the short term, and if they continue to be struggles in the long term then it is because I have failed to properly work the substance at hand, the substance which in whatever way resists my efforts.

How far should I take this thought? If the clay of myself hardened into the wrong shape, then I may smash it. If the words of myself come out incoherent, then I may delete them. If a life that exists inside me is harmful, then I may introduce a better species of thought to prey on it. If I discover a better material, a better form or a better principle for the creation of myself, then I should not hesitate to dismantle, destroy or deface what came before, to reduce myself to nothing more than the idea of myself. After all, it is an idea that is most readily improved.

When Zarathustra descended from the mountain, he found that it was Christmastime.

...And once again I forgot to sign it.

I passed my qualifying exam!

Part of a conversation with Cube about identity and insanity.

...I don't have a character, much less one for each species. So I describe the identification as a set of affiliations, implying some degree of loyalty to humanity's present understanding of the two species. That understanding includes the literature tied to the animals (though tied very loosely, in the case of the fisher).

So less a pure furry and more one interested in furry (historical and present) as a lens for understanding humanity?

Neither. Not the former because if a pure furry exists, I don't know what it is. Not the latter, because understanding humanity is a side concern. I'm a furry in order to ensure that I'm at least an animal. I mean to imply that the development of humanity has made the majority of its members something less. Purposes, appearances, activities, perspectives are all less than animal (they go into, they compose what is animal), but human beings are reduced to being, in a vital sense -- that is, reduced to embodying or living -- such things as purposes, appearances, activities, perspectives...

At present humanity is something less than animal. Once I can figure out, to my satisfaction (or rather completion) how I am an animal, maybe then I can try to envision humanity as a higher form of life.

But to get back to the previous point, my understanding of what is fox-like or fisher-like will be human understandings thereof, my capacity for understanding them being a human one. Even if, as I argue (and once argued for draconity), what is fox-like and what is fisher-like cannot be reduced to a subset of what is human.

...Disconnected from a purposeful life by the structures humankind has built for itself. Tricky to undo...

A later part of the conversation.

...I think that more insight in this problem [of boundless greed] can be found in the idea of the fox. There's the insight that hit me with so much force when I first read the Ysengrimus. Reynard isn't any less greedy than Ysengrimus, but his is, in short, a different (and better) form that greed can take. He makes use of cleverness rather than strength, and his ability is what can redirect the raw drive of an Ysengrimus. Power, or the need for power, can't be repressed (that only replaces power with power), nor can it be reasoned with, but it can be outwitted.

All of these magical or divine creatures humanity has described provide ways of coming to terms with what is limitless in a person, whether it be power, suffering, love, patience, or any of the other things that have been expressed at various points in history... any one of which has the capacity to completely reshape human society. The vulpine answer is, in short, that divinity is cleverness. The application of this idea, in my case, is that whatever anger, pettiness, insecurity, delusion, vanity, hopelessness, and resignation might exist in me (and there's much at times), they can all be outwitted. (Again, for emphasis... not controlled, and not reasoned with, but outwitted.)

The downside to this approach is that, like Reynard, I have no final victories over my failings... hunger will never be more than a day away, and Ysengrimus or his kin (that is, what they represent) will always reappear to test my cleverness again. The fox is not the form of one who most values rest, comfort, or endings. But it works.

I hope there's something in there you can use.

Today I stayed an hour after class, stretching myself. On emerging into the day I found myself inside a mass migration of small, brown butterflies. I was surrounded by dozens of them, all impelled north by some instinct. I avoided the highway on my way home, and instead accompanied the butterflies up a side road. I briefly considered following them further north, to find where they congregated or dispersed, but they have their destination, and I have mine. And, in the end, won't I be able to claim that my destination was determined by something better than instinct?

Part of a paragraph from an email conversation with Dev.

...My specific emotional talents are not ones likely to help you. There are several modes or methods with which a person can initiate a powerful emotional interaction, which is to say an interaction that is the opposite of superficial. Counseling is one such mode; relaxation and the affectionate melting away of anxiety is another; the mutual exploration of inner worlds is a third. However, confrontation is also such a mode, and it's the only one I'm any good at. Whether or not it is good for the situation at hand, I return habitually to the method which I am best at...

( Long and highly structured. )

I despair in silence. I am not alone in this, but three weeks ago I managed to find words for my despair for perhaps the second time in my life, and discovered for myself the calming effect of voicing it. This calm brought me the strength to give my physics presentation, but it worried me as well, because it brought an unfamiliar mood, lacking a familiar tension. I wondered whether I needed that tension to drive myself as I am accustomed, as though my emotions were a rope I used to pull myself up, and that rope needed its knots. But today brought back a better-known mood, one which assures me that the progression of emotions on which I rely has not been broken. It assures me that I felt the calm of sleep, nothing more. Here is what I learned these past three weeks.

A person alone cannot voice his own despair, and needs trusted friends, lovers, family or peers for the task. Call that the nature of despair. A person who tries, on his own, to give his despair words will fail, and produce something plaintively incomplete. (As much as I admire Cube for his efforts to voice his worst emotions, those efforts often have such a quality. Sett, too, but to a lesser extent, because anguish differs from despair.) I've come to marvel at how easily this incompleteness can be recognized, and how often it will be met with revulsion -- though it is often a justified revulsion, caused by a need that the reader or listener knows cannot presently be met. The revulsion, in turn, encourages silence on the part of whoever despairs. The silent despair (the quiet desperation) may as well be a conspiracy, for the effect it has in promoting secretiveness and shame.

Despair, as most of you already know, is unreasonable. It does not have the irrationality of an argument with invalid logic or unsound premises, but rather the unreasonableness of an argument that goes unspoken. In despair, the breaking of silence, in the rare circumstances in which it can be accomplished, amounts to the finding or dawning of reason, and so can have just as profound an effect, and just as cathartic a one. My moment of catharsis three weeks ago came when Spotty, catalyzed by Whines, told me, "You can't live in Emerson's backyard." The statement had me crying all over again, because those are the words of my despair. I want to be Thoreau, but I can't. There is no Emerson for me. I can't find wisdom in solitude: because I have no wise company to punctuate that solitude, I end up living alone with both my cleverness and my foolishness. I have no one with whom I can discuss philosophy as an equal, and my attempts to esteem others as such equals have only brought fierce disappointment. And even when I find a place I can consider sacred, something so trivial as a police officer can drive me away. I am not wise. Worse, I do not know how to become wise.

There is a sense in which a person, alone, can nonetheless come to voice his despair, by creating another person (a character) to voice it. I managed to do so late in my second year as a philosophy major, in a period of near-total isolation. In the entry that follows you can find the characters who voiced my despair in philosophy, and the words they gave me.

So, after a weekend where I felt ready to quit graduate school (thanks Spotty and Whines for being there for me during an emotional collapse), I ended up giving my first ever real presentation Wednesday morning, about the Hamiltonian formalism for photons. The presentation is a weekly one in which members of the group fill the rest in on their research, and I volunteered for it two weeks ago -- whether an ordeal or not, it's a good idea not to be forced into such things. The presentation went fairly well, and hopefully all future ones will be easier on me emotionally. Thankfully, I took the opportunity to practice it the night before, which helped me considerably when it came to facing down postdocs ready to question the entire validity of my approach.

What I considered the centerpiece of the presentation, a derivation of the photon Hamilton equations from the assumption of stationary phase using a variational method, was stopped two-thirds of the way through by my professor, who said everyone there (a dozen-and-a-half graduate students and postdocs) should know how to do it already. (As it happens, later on one of the graduate students asked me how I got the equations of motion anyway.) Lots of good questions were asked, though for some of these questions I only thought of answers after the presentation. Clearly I need to work more on giving an overview of my work, and connecting it to current research. But, once again, hooray for milestones, and now it's relatively easy going until qualifiers.

Until a short time ago I was staring happily at a graph of a cute little photon wriggling around inside a plasma bubble. It was the output of my first successful simulation: one that concurs with the experiments downstairs, while at the same time providing corroborating evidence for an interpretation of their results. My program has a long way to go, but it's an accomplishment nonetheless. *grins* Hooray for milestones!

Portions of two comments from a discussion about terminology on Rax's journal.

For anything except humanity, I love to learn new categories and distinctions, no matter how technical, specialized or academic. When it comes to humanity, though, I much prefer the chaos of natural language.

But shorthand descriptions to express ideas within an in-group aren't necessarily harmful... Many of these things are terms used by actual people trying to describe their lived experience simultaneously with being categories and distinctions.

Well, the distinction I'm using here is not between categorizing and non-categorizing language, but between technical language and (what I might as well call) natural language. All the usual caveats about dualism apply, but when speaking to you I hopefully don't need to recite them.

Keeping in mind the distinction between meaning and sense (sense is what a person means by a word, meaning is what it means independently of any one person -- a word can have multiple meanings, and each meaning can have multiple senses), I think the distinguishing aspect of technical language is that its terms each have only one sense. Plenty of technical words eventually become natural (and here you see one problem with the adjective "natural"), by acquiring further senses: this is part of Putnam's "semantic division of labor." Once they do so, assuming I notice they do so, I'll use them without qualms. But in human activity and identity, even when a person unquestionably fits in some category, that person will fit into the category in a distinct, individual manner. The multiple senses of natural language allow one to acknowledge and often describe this individuality (in what sense is this person charitable, or cynical, or difficult? In what sense is he a Christian, or a dragon, or a philosopher?); technical language, however, does not allow this. I value that individuality, and the acknowledgment thereof, very highly (perhaps too highly), so that's why I avoid technical language in describing humanity and human beings.

I have a pet theory that all new words (and all new meanings of words) come into common (natural) use from either technical language or metaphor. (Slang, by my definition, is a form of technical language. Which isn't even all that questionable a statement according to the more common sense of "technical", that is, specialized language prevalent only within a certain community.) My preference falls heavily on the metaphor side, which partly accounts for the fact that I scorn any community's specialized language when it comes to describing myself: I already have a world's worth of things to use as metaphors of myself.

A small observation from a meeting of two groups: the theoreticians called the laser probe pulse "it", while the experimentalists used the pronoun "he".

Another reposted comment, this time a response to this entry by Krinn.

I don't think I can offer anything better than my own experiences, but hopefully you will find some use in them. Please pardon me if I presume more background information than you actually have.

If [some people are] nice as long as things are going well, but under even the slightest stress they turn into hideous people, well, they're not nice.

This matter has actually caused me some worry in the past, because in some ways (particularly financially) I simply have not faced hardship, and in some situations (bouts of insanity) I know that I am a worse person. However, those periods of insanity may be useful in that they show that I do have an ethical center that remains unchanged during extreme emotions or uncontrolled delusions -- put briefly, when insane I am neither dangerous nor mean, even if my ability to interact with others in a reasonable fashion disappears. My hope is that dealing with such states is the same as dealing with all other moods (learning to accommodate, counterbalance and use them), and the difference lies in how very far removed the moods are from my normal set.

I've also been through long enough and severe enough periods of depression to know that my standards of reacting to others survive those periods, but also that my ability to go out of my way to help others disappears. So if I want to have a positive impact on the world around me, rather than simply dealing with the moral quandaries that happen to fall into my lap, I have an obligation to maintain myself emotionally.

Unluckily, I have never experienced severe financial hardship, and may never know whether I would be able to withstand that. The closest I can come is to keep in mind Thoreau's exhortation, "Cultivate poverty like a delicate herb." But doing so proves nothing.

I know what the right thing to do is, and I consistently fail to do it.

That's a fairly big problem for me, as well, but one where I have made steady (if slow) progress since realizing it some six years ago. That struggle is far from over, naturally. As far as I can tell from working on myself, methods for dealing with apathy can all be described as methods of self-control and self-knowledge, and there are benefits and disadvantages to each.

In a method of self-control, one doesn't worry about what causes the internal resistance to action; instead, one layers other tendencies atop it, which counteract that resistance. One example: establishing new habits for oneself. Another: structuring one's life, say by organizing it around a schedule or by organizing it around other people. The advantages of these methods are that they are relatively fast (you could establish a new habit in a few months), and that they can be very effective. The downside is that each method of self-control comes at some fixed, recurring cost -- the block of time lost each day to a habit, the effort in maintaining a schedule, or the inability to act without the company of friends, say.

In a matter of self-knowledge, counteracting apathy takes second place to understanding it, with the expectation that said understanding will someday allow you to overcome it. Here you can't name discrete methods as easily as in self-control, but some examples are questioning oneself regularly, being open to unusual experiences and thoughts, and being engaged critically by others. The advantage: a gain made through knowledge does not require a recurrent cost. The disadvantage: self-knowledge takes a very long time. I'd roughly say that what can be accomplished by self-knowledge in a decade can be accomplished by self-control in half a year.

It may be obvious that I heavily prefer the latter, though I hope I have not put too much bias into my words. Most of my attempts to instate new, better habits fall apart quickly, and I find the idea of structuring my time to be repellent. On the other hand, nowadays whenever I am doing something mindlessly I instinctively ask myself, "What am I doing?", which often allows me to break the habit and do something better. I've learned how to focus on long-term goals and meet them well, but I still don't know how to effectively react to short-term needs that arise and can be resolved quickly. While very much committed to my path, I can't recommend it without qualifications.

I think most people can mix methods of those two types, but devoting oneself fully to one or the other would probably preclude its counterpart. In knowing yourself you question yourself and undermine your motives in controlling yourself, and in controlling yourself you complicate yourself.

"My first Eastercon was Seacon in Brighton in 1984 -- a huge and wonderful affair. I was 23, wide-eyed and delighted by the convention. Bumptious, gawky, ransacking the dealer's room for Lionel Fanthorpe books for Ghastly Beyond Belief, occasionally mistaken for Clive Barker (why?) and starting to suspect that I might have found my tribe. And now, 24 years later, I'm some strange old-timery creature, at an Eastercon of 1300 people that's the biggest since, er, Seacon in 1984, and, despite the worries that friends have expressed to me about the greying of fandom, there seem to be an awful lot of people here the age I was at my first Eastercon or younger, an amazing amount of enthusiasm, and a lot of people who are having their first convention, and who may even now be suspecting that they might have found their tribe." -- Neil Gaiman

That is a worthy story, but it is not my story. My story is below.

The people present in this story will recognize themselves in it, though I apologize to the two friends whom I have momentarily made into archetypes, and thereby only described insofar as they relate to my experiences during the convention. It's only for the story's duration, really. *grins* For those who can't stand reading it, pardon my style. Also, thank you, Orin, for inspiring me to write the report of my first convention, even though it is a bit late and I no longer remember the exact order of events.

***

Ah, this beautiful liquid of gestures, costumes and talk! I am enamored of you, furry fandom, and I will know you. I attended this convention because I had been promised the presence of both a guide and a sage. The sage was here with many of his students, who all wanted to learn the ways of empathy. The guide, who was to arrive on the second day, knew how to lead me to the sage, and also to other worthy people. But on the first day I was left to search these many camps for the face of a newly nomadic friend, from whom I begged and was granted a place to sleep.

Awaking within this strange mass that fluidly changed friends to merchants and performers, I had no reason to linger in the company of my benefactors, for after leaving the convention I would soon return to interacting with them normally. I wandered, and discovered the halls and the river, with everything flowing to and from them. The guide arrived and met me, then allowed me to follow as he tracked down the sage and introduced me to him. But the time of a sage is precious, and I could not yet demand any of it, so I joined all the others who were swept along in this group. I thought: Yes, I sense the patterns which surround me. In time, I can learn them. I am immersed in the element, but I am not yet of the element. Am I approaching that mythic emotion which all my friends name with awe? This individual stream of people at last flowed to a still pond, but my guide was turned away with the harshest of words at the door to the place where the sage rested. As I later realized, a student of the sage of empathy is still capable of cruelty.

The guide, though he had not achieved his central task, still had much to show me. Together, we wandered and eventually met an interesting person who, despite the rush of events, still retained time; leaving her, we dined together at a place far from the convention; and we wandered the nighttime streets of Pittsburgh in pursuit of further sustenance. Eventually I left the guide behind: to my shame, I abandoned him, though I could not do otherwise. The sage and I have never since met, nor have I or the guide since been able to lead one another. I returned on my own to the beautiful liquid, to be in the element, but not of the element. I happily observed everything occurring before me, and when my eyes were full I turned to the literal river and was alone; more, I repeated this pattern many times. I returned to the familiar discipline of alternation which defines the role of the outsider. I learned.

How gladly I thrive on the feeling of not belonging!

Here's a reposted list of responses and impressions from the superb novel The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, by Victor Pelevin. (The book is mainly about foxes, by the way.)

Seducing someone via a theological argument seems like the hottest thing ever.

Pelevin has a good excuse for creating a character that us humans can actually relate with, in the explanation of the foxes' memory. I'm glad he thought of that, since excessively human non-humans are a pet peeve of mine.

Not once did A ever express a desire to become human. Finally. I get really sick of all the quisling foxes in literature and film.

I'm adopting "heads and tails" as an affectation.

The best comparison I can think of for A's attitude toward classic literature is with Nietzsche's attitude, which is intensely personal, making all the great insights in those works seem like gestures of friendship toward the reader, and making all the great errors seem like outright betrayals. Of course, A has a better reason than Nietzsche to think that way. :>

The characters' conversations about great (and not-so-great) authors were not abstract discussions thereof but ones that related them intimately to the characters' lives, which I take to be a sign of an author who has himself been deeply shaped by such predecessors.

Pelevin's (via A's) approach to Buddhism is markedly an outsider's. The satori-like (and somewhat Socratic) exercises seem composed by rote, and at times almost a recitation of dogma. Since these appear more toward the end, it was a bit of a disappointment, but not much of one.

I like that foxes receive plenty of explanation, and werewolves almost none.

Pelevin managed, in a tiny passage, to exactly encapsulate the arrogance, boyishness, confidence, and enthusiasm that I associate with wolves, namely in the letter to Alexander from his mentor ("Transform! WOLF-FLOW!"). I burst out laughing when I read that, and at several other moments too.

The sense of humor is one that I find myself starved of in American entertainment, and one that I'd like my own to approach: critical and perceptive without being cynical, spiteful or malicious. In particular, A's attitude of simultaneous fondness for and weariness with Russia was expressed in some great ways, and I also dug the way every fox spoke disparagingly of her own native country.

I felt I learned a few subtle things about Russia, though one can get the same from any good book set in a foreign country and written by a native thereof.

The book kept me from completing my grading when I should have. :P

The story uses a displaced structure that was once brought heavily to my attention by an amazing professor, with the story being told by a character in the story. You can see the same thing in Heart of Darkness, Steppenwolf, and scads of Poe stories. I've come to associate the technique with highly personal writing, as though it adds a barrier or layer of protection to the actual author.

It seems to be unfortunate that I haven't read Lolita yet, because there was a heavy subtext (sometimes not-so-sub text) about A's appearance that I could sense but not follow.

Those damn Taoist exorcists! Okay, so there was a cultural touching point there that I simply don't know, as I also noticed that a Korean anime about a fox (Yobi, I think it's called) there was a Taoist exorcist. I would like to know the common lore, but things like that aren't well-suited to internet searches.

It's a shame noone can hold his own against A in an intellectual debate, since when she does let loose the effect is dazzling.

Damn good book. I've already passed it on to some local friends. I will bite whomever calls it pretentious.

Oh, and some favorite quotes that I bookmarked while reading:

"I always avoid arguing with people, but this time I just exploded and started talking seriously, as if I was with another fox."

"'And what do I smell of?'
"'I can't really say... Mountains, moonlight. Spring. Flowers. Deception. But not a wily kind of deception, more as if you're having a joke.'"

"In the north of England there are several privately owned castles where aristocrats are bred from the finest stock and raised specially for hunting by foxes -- the output isn't all that large, but the quality is excellent."

"Foxes have a fundamental answer to the fundamental question of philosophy, which is to forget this fundamental question."

So, in an unusual moment of clarity this evening I realized that an excessive fear that had lingered for more than two years had now become surmountable. I nervously checked a final, unread email from an old friend, and found it astonishingly toothless, astonishing because I had long ago become accustomed to her emails leaving me feeling lacerated. In retrospect, it seems that the messages were only painful when she was making a concerted effort to communicate with me.

From a discussion elsewhere:

"As much as I would like to believe that the people who dislike me do so because they are idiots, chances are that's not the case. There are social influences that will cause any person to behave or speak less intelligently than she is capable of; given that, idiocy is no explanation if you do not explain what engenders idiocy and makes it momentarily acceptable. There's a saying that goes, 'Do not attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity.' But from my life, I've learned that the better maxim is, 'Attribute nothing to malice or stupidity.'"

Good riddance, you failure.

Strangely, said failure will soon live in a mansion about half a mile from my childhood home. Said childhood home was once in the area of the worst crime in Dallas, and the neighborhood is still lower-class, but the demographics change quickly as you go east.

I think I will take some friends within throwing distance of that mansion carrying a few old pairs of shoes, for cathartic reasons.

Here's a rather neat problem from my calculus textbook:

"An especially prolific breed of rabbits has the growth term ky^1.01. If 2 such rabbits breed initially and the warren has 16 rabbits after three months, then when is doomsday?"

From the following words my next project will take its form.

-----
I have begun to write myself. I began long ago, when to find myself I gave myself words. I originate in a wandering style, though you now read me at the end of a long reduction and exclusion. Having risen, I became someone who walks; having thought, I became someone who errs. So I grew capable of humanity's ways. Having seen, I became someone who overlooks; having written, I became someone who revises. So I learned the rudiments of denying and altering my being human, by envisioning and articulating myself otherwise. Ultimately, I ceased to envision myself, thus ceased the struggle to exist in both my words and my images. The final image -- the enduring, greedy image -- shows a boy, on his knees, in a row in a section on a floor of a vast library, wanting to read it all. I am not mistaken in hungering, but I have made my mistake in hungering without limit. Thus I write. The following are two of the questions to be answered in me. Where does my arrogance end? And how far do my ambitions extend?

Insanity is a problem on which I have made some progress. I have followed our most central metaphors until they loop into something dangerous: I have let high be good until goodness is vacuum, and bright be intelligent until intelligence burns away vision. We who try to be human carry humanity onward, following its errors and reconceiving its forms. We are subject to its reasons and prey to its unreason. We are those responsible for shaping history forward. My ambitions extend into certain of our common ventures, whether or not you recognize their common ground. And I may easily overextend: I return too often to that lofty mood in which concentration ionizes and diverse fantasies present themselves, from ideal little social responses to scenes of grand triumph, with me to decide which of them will enter the first stages of the progression from fantasy to dream, from dream to ambition, and at last from ambition to reality. It is a difficult decision, because I already have many responsibilities, both mundane and internal, and hesitate at one more. Yes, I am responsible to my fantasies, for to deny one that I have kept is to be untrue. I am responsible to my dreams: they nourish me, but I must nourish them as well. Most of all, I am responsible to my ambitions.

Midway through high school, some time after discovering philosophy, I wrote a list of what is good. It was hardly the only list I had written, though most I had the good luck and good sense to discard quickly. (My writing, like my life, traverses such lists, often to arbitrary effect. But I may write and live better.) This one, however, was too grand and too meaningful: I wrote it well. This was a list of values, of things worthwhile, sparkling destinations, and however much I reassured myself of its provisionality I could not afterwards outdo it. I still remember that list's beginning in a single entry, and its slow expansion over the course of a few months to include nine items, a philosophy and an ambition nestled within the nine. I also recall the order of its contents' inclusion, save for knowledge and beauty, which were added together. Now, I even realize how the list's final entry halted any further expansion, though for a long time such realization stayed beyond me, thinking as I did that my time off the ground could be nothing but good.

Now, however, my ambitions must acquire better forms, and I have lived with the old ambition too long to simply discard it. Instead, the list will be refigured. As far as my concepts go, the list's contents are easily reshaped, despite being a part of me. They have as yet little form but what I have given them. There are other concepts, call them animated ones, that were and are more difficult to refigure. I once had to acknowledge a spiritual crisis in the following terms: "To fully understand something I must embrace it and reject it in turn, and I have yet to..." The ellipsis anticipated years' worth of doubt and self-disgust, as I argued and pleaded with an idea that preferred me in its teeth. Luckily, I have since moved on to a fuller way of involving myself with what I value and what I cherish, dangerous though such involvement may become. Here is my way of refiguring the list: If I truly believe something to be good, then I should be willing to avoid parts of it, claim some of it as my own, and, where I am willing to devote myself, pursue it.

-----
I was once a philosopher outside the scholastic cage, but that does not mean I was a good philosopher. Self-indulgence and arrogance -- a far more encompassing arrogance than remains now, an arrogance like an atmosphere, in which to breathe -- were my guiding vices, ones which easily competed with the paired virtues of creativity and civility. I may have accomplished rare feats of learning, but my styles of discussion, writing, and thought degenerated as they developed. Again and again I created a system or argument like a labyrinth, subtle, winding and many-pathed, to be learned and then escaped. Oh, I had points, I had profound and central points! But you could only reach them tired and lost. And so it was that I, coming finally to face the reality of philosophy in this world, before which I could be at most seminal (and in any case minute), at last lost myself and tired myself out: by my lack of wisdom and lack of reason I failed philosophy. At last I could only breathe to it: I will understand you by rejecting you. I will deny you, I will fear you, and I will flee you. Where wisdom is lacking, a declaration of what one will completely reject is an act of either arrogance or despair, and I despair in silence.

Yes, I know avoidance well. Not only to find myself do I lose myself. When something internal hungers after me, such as a sense of unending intellectual and emotional debt, I also move to lose myself, both in the world and in my mind. I travel until the signs become unreadable and the entire ecology of rationality becomes something external to me, leaving me with the quiet things, myself among them. Even if I did only skirt insanity this last time, with delusion avoided -- really, Lhexa, avoided? and this "writing myself" undeluded? -- I still suffer from familiar aftereffects. Here are the ideas become something more than geometric, no longer fitting together; here are the emotions that assemble into something charismatic before another person, but tug and gnaw at me watersnake-like when I am alone; here are intellectual powers sparking at random, talents spending themselves uncontrollably, and a woven identity unravelling. My entireties are connected: I cannot distinguish between my good and my evil. Fortunately, when it comes to what to avoid, I do have a central thesis from which I can draw many implications: I have gone insane, thus I am not a philosopher.

Comparable to the places I am to go are the places I have left behind. Prior to the tower of physics, there was the basement burrow thereof; before the warmth of friends, there was the cold university; before that place's harsh realizations, there was the soft isolation of high school; before the flowering of pride, there were my first declarations of identity; before the city, there were the mountains. Each site gave me treasures which I might yet lose somewhere in the space of a tired silence, if I do not ensure that I can always recover them. More, I find I should go far afield in recovering what I value. The treasures of my life are never so much kept as cached, memories, insights and emotions hidden for future need. I do not need to possess myself, nor keep what is mine. It is not mine by virtue of placement, nor am I myself because I am the person at hand.

Please forgive me as I speak of myself. I may be the only person to whom I can give words. You and I converse, if we converse, along the thin border between a person and the world: we supplement each other's senses. If my speech must reach you from further away than most, then you hear it from beyond your usual range, just as I am so often brought points of light from unimagined distances. My friends are the colors, and every reunion restores some pigment to a gray world, a hue lost while, blind to myself, I follow my voice. My friends will forgive me when I run on, and who else has a word in what I can recover? I have a burrow, a little Maupertuis of my own. I have what sustains and nourishes me. I have clothing that suits me. I even have a tower of theory and experiment to ascend regularly. What I claim as mine I need only describe.

I feel I came into this world by climbing down from a tree. What are my words? (Small thing, be still. Let yourself be nourished.) I know the easiest emotion to exploit. You can seize it. You can shape it. You are not wise enough to choose otherwise, so I know. (Even Dr. Cavell? Even your friends? Yes. And I am willing to do an evil thing for the sake of a human scholarship.) There are as many territories for the action as there are distinct people on this planet. I might see through your very eyes if the chase takes me behind them. (I would tell you of the place of ice. It too moves. Let me take you there in a story.) I have found my two high niches in the ecosystems of rationality, ecosystems where nothing human has yet appeared nor will appear. (Want to know what kind of affection exists in an animal's gaze? Ask which animal.) I walked to a high point and launched myself to the void, which shivered me apart. What did I see in the ascent? (The third and most dangerous hound, which led and still leads the pursuit of youth, which may harry me from my own, I named Ambition.)

The pursuit will be long.

-----
My list of what is good contains happiness, freedom, knowledge, beauty, love, wonder, honor, and flight. I now follow Kant in omitting life.

Like you, I spent much of my childhood hiding. Everything worthwhile in me started out vulnerable to sight, weak against nothing so more than coming out too early: such are the games, aspirations and worlds of a child who knows to keep the clay of himself away from all calloused hands. But perhaps I learned my talent of stealth too well, and became a material no longer under any others' hands. I do not know. Now there is a need to look back as far as I can see, to find out when I first began to arrogate what was around me, when I began to involve my very identity in everything I learned. Of the creations of my past, what survived, and what fell into ruins? I can only undo myself to the extent that I continue myself. My wreckage is my foundation. I know where to find it.

Even in childhood I inhabited places behind and beneath: behind fences, beneath manhole covers, behind sealed trapdoors. I remember many such places: the deck of my grandmother's house, under which I would crawl and sleep; near the opera in the mountains, the cramped loft where I delved into fantasy worlds and the little gullies where I created them; the shadowed mesquite paths which so excited my imagination, beyond the schoolyard fence; the long culvert whose first traversal required much courage, among whose side tunnels I found the place of cockroaches; the platform for storing old curtains, its trapdoor eventually sealed, but afterwards reachable from the sound booth through the space between walls; my shrine beneath the overpass. There were other places, and among these others a specific one relates to my ambitions.

I often skipped high school. My favorite place to skip classes, usually in order to think, read or sleep, was the highest landing among the dozen or so staircases in the huge complex. Being the only landing letting onto the roof (another place I enjoyed) this was the only protected one in the entire school. A high wall resembling a chain-link fence divided the next landing below evenly in two, and unlike that to the roof the wall's door was always locked. The wall did not, however, extend to the ceiling. By climbing diagonally up the stairs' railing I could reach the perpendicular railing of the top landing, and clamber right over it, the twenty-foot gap below becoming less fearful as I gained experience with the climb. At some risk I could enter a space that resembled, but only resembled, a cage, for when I entered it my thoughts took motion within a vaster realm. By climbing into that space I caged the school, and could for a short time be safe from its appetites. Behind that wall of woven metal I was a philosopher. In that place I weighed institutions on scales better balanced than any I had been shown. I thought well and abstractly, though a strong sense of danger and isolation remained. And there I considered each entry of the list of values. Hidden, scared and alone, I contemplated goodness.

I believe I have left many dreams idling in that dusty place. To study there safe from school was, among other things, to learn arrogance: to learn, as Thoreau put it, that it was I in all the philosophers who glimpsed a new truth and wrote it down from its high place. But the other side of the talent also needs learning: that it is you, humanity, and you, reader, who see from behind my eyes when I am fully understood. Your brilliance might someday shine from my words, and your stupidity might speak through them. So I admit: I too own a garden of untouched vanities, one with very high walls. I built, or rather wove those walls (as the cage of my school was woven, from metal and fear) to keep you -- a universal You -- away from the self I cultivated in that garden. In the time I kept You away I nearly mastered everything arboreal: I learned how to take root, how to feed myself on light and fundament, how to grow, and how to bloom. My ambitions now are to attempt something higher.

Morality should often be secretive, for morality is vulnerable while it is maturing. For now, I hide myself and my morality in open view, in words illegible to all but me. What is not yet readable may become so, and what is not writable as well, if one develops one's skills to match humanity's. My being uncomprehended is only humanity's incomprehension. It is a small thing.

-----
Who I am cannot yet survive abstraction. My attempts at picturing myself -- attempts made before I chose between style and vision as methods of self-creation, thus attempts to combine the two -- turned on me and became monstrous, so that I next had to write weapons against them. In one such attempt, I tried to convert a capacity for flight (which I foolishly called draconic) into a gift for others, into an ornithopter many could fly, but I built it before realizing there were intimacies between flight, insanity, and my specific evil. In another such attempt, I thought to make myself the equal of one of this world's histories: I conceived in myself a vastness and a vacancy suitable for an entire human endeavour, namely philosophy. But to complete myself I must undo a mistaken myself. I can no longer simply decide what I will become, which is to say that a decision is now only an initial stage in the transformation. Rather, I must limit the limitless within my appetites and personality: I must give my greed for knowledge an intelligible form, then my virtues and vices an isolating particularity. I need limitation, constraint and form, else I die mediocre. So: I set out! I am thus bound.

Call mine the crisis of insanity. As far as my ideas are concerned, am I divine or not? What powers of shaping and reshaping do I possess? These forms of fisher and fox, how much may they be me? My impositions have already begun to take shape. I have found, and will find again, parts of identity situated in the past -- I mean not only my little past -- there to be left discarded, claimed for my own, or pursued as though alive. Learn as we may, we still do not know how we are to become.

A fantasy that has been kept, but which cannot nourish you, becomes a delusion. A dream that no longer guides you has become an injury. An ambition that does not become reality is simply a failure. But I have been a mere staging ground for such creative processes too often: now, I want to no longer value everything worth valuing. I carry the hope that someday there will be things, good things, that I can see and like without arrogance, for I do not extend to them. They will be things beyond me. It is the hope that there will be that which I can fully not be; it is an answer, it is not the only answer: arrogance ends where I end.

Every so often a new line of my specific insatiability becomes visible. Greed, as you know, can be found in wanting more of what one has. But what of the greed in wanting what is true to be true? I want you to exist.

"Hi Eric,

"I hope all is going well.

"Dr. Rindler told me many good things about your performance in his course.

"I would like to invite you to come to UTD and may be give a talk to the cosmology & relativity group about what you worked on here at UTD or perhaps some other topic you recently learned/read about.

"Let me know, and I can arrange for your travel and lodging in Dallas.

"Dr. I____"

Er, huh. That's neat. Flattering, but... my research last year was way too sketchy to be presentable. I'm not taking him up on the offer.

Maybe such invitations are common for graduate students. Even so, it's a nice salve for my recent self-doubt.

It's not often I have to maneuver my bike around a house stuck in an intersection.

Write, Lhexa.

I do not know any person less rational than myself. I never will. The errors I find in others' reasoning lack the subtlety and insidiousness of those in my own: they are lesser offenses against reason. There are the twists of meaning I recognize as mine, where my words fulfill my use but defy another's understanding; there are the thoughts that form a regard without coalescing into actual beliefs, thoughts thus standing apart from critique; there are the topics so singular that they exclude all other consideration from my mind, and lead me to ignore those needed aspects of my behavior which mark me as someone with whom one can reason. But do I have any mind but my own? Or any moods but these that govern my perspective? When can what I am extend beyond myself? You who would converse with me, acknowledge the limits I have discovered for myself, and acknowledge what I know of my own capacity for unreason. We do have much to offer each other.

I owe some loyalty to my perceptions. They often tug my mind toward something between a sensation and a theorem, something of the world and my being in it, something there to be brought within consciousness by thought and by mood; by luck, too, and by a peculiar eloquence that leaves what I write full, containing more than I can explain, a wonderful always more. But I go astray in following my perceptions, until life, with steady demands that can no longer be met, as it were keeps me from myself. Then home confines when it should rejuvenate, and conversations with friends do not break but only limn my silence: I despair. And my despair argues without eloquence. It argues so as to leave me without words. It brings forward the ideas that render me speechless (the same ideas that would, that have rendered me speechless when spoken by friends), the new emotional laws of a very small inner world. Ah, I am such a moody person. But there is a world outside. There is a forward.

I have my paths.

I'm going through QM problems at a steady pace, which is good... but this night's mood, compounded of an unwelcome visit and my toying with direct products, doesn't lend itself to regular, everyday details. So.

There is only one kind of wave function of maximal certainty, the bell-shaped Gaussian: symmetric about its expectation value, with one extremum and two inflection points. And there is only one potential in which it exists stably, the potential of the harmonic oscillator, that which approximates all equilibrium. The Gaussian is its lowest energy state, though all others may be derived recursively from it. In analogy: be at some fixed point, and be at your lowest in it, then you will be at your most measurable.

I write foolishly. Why have I set out on this path of self-creation, knowing as I do that I haven't the wisdom for it? Seven months since its inception, the first work of a project beyond reasonable proportions sits at three thousand words, with two gaps (three prior to tonight) left to be filled before I have a draft. However, I am not as committed to silence as my project might have me believe. Growth involves waste. You who are reading, whoever you are, ought to (and will) see more from me than the systems of that elaborate project. I still exist, as I often tell myself in response to an odd internal inquiry. I will try to convey to you the view from this side of the abyss. My words serve many moods. Perhaps you share some of them.

I grow strange in distance, I know, but I grow sick in company. I cannot hear you except as you, and your voice does not always carry beyond the noise of your person. But I need that outside voice. A lone voice grows hoarse, loses all its resonances but those near at hand, thus loses all coherence but inner; however, when voice answers other voice one may hear another in oneself, and oneself in another, and know that something and someone distant resonate. It is a lonely night, when my words reach noone but me, and the sky itself echoes them back to deafen me in narcissism, though each one calls out to friends. Are you out there?

Last night was good. I completed some eight easy Quantum Mechanics problems, mostly stuff relating to 1D problems. But I had forgotten how strange such work makes my dreams... I can't relate the details of last night's first dream, partly because much of it has slipped away and partly because it was halfway mathematical in content. It somehow involved attempting to establish a means of communication with another world. The dream eventually forced me awake as it became more abstract, even though I quickly lost any ability to articulate the (mathematical) communication going on. I awoke with angular Mayan patterns (half-felt, half-visualized) tracing their way down my legs and patches of heat on my skin that moved from place to place. Eventually my thoughts and sensations became normal enough to bring a minor realization: an ideal measurement creates an infinite probability current. (Said current uses a delta function in time.) I puzzled over that fact for a time, eventually writing it down on a certain list in case it ever turns out to be significant. Then, because this is the way such nights work, I toyed mentally with the probability current for a couple of hours more before being able to fall asleep again.

I still exist. Last semester was good, this semester is very bad. More details after it's over.

I needed to be humbled, anyway.

So. Um. I skirted insanity. For the first time during an experience such as that of the last two weeks, I skimmed along the edge of insanity without entering it. I reached the stage of being completely wrapped up in a personal fantasy, so that the boundary between internal and external activity (imagination and action, to put it another way) disappeared; however, I was able (with significant help) to turn aside before any of my fantasies were fixated into delusions. I did not manage to avoid hospitalization, once again by police officers -- institutions, of course, recognize irrationality far before individuals do. However, a renewed struggle with psychiatry and a bill of some two thousand dollars are both prices that I can currently pay, thanks to experience and student loans. And frankly, they are small prices for what I've accomplished.

This time I came back with four realizations, which is at least double the most I've managed before. The three of lesser importance can be stated clearly without any delay: first, I realized the harm that I was doing my intellectual and emotional life by my secretiveness; second, I realized that I have noone here at UT Austin with whom I can converse about physics, so I departed for Dallas in order to find my mentor; third, I stopped believing in geniuses.

More importantly than all three of those realizations: I found my voice for the last time. I discovered the final resonance which would give me a full voice. I found the voice of a fisher. Fans of the obvious may now applaud.

It turns out that the voice of a fisher has two volumes. One volume is soft. The other is terrifying.

Do I live up to my words?

Do I live what I write?

No cut this time. I only post entries every two months. Why take the chance that a friend forgets to click on the ellipsis?

Finally, I get a chance to sit down at a computer here in Austin and type without being logged off every ten minutes! If any of you have wondered why you haven't heard from me, it's because I moved six days ago, and was without Internet the entire time. That's a good experience, by the way... having to take a small journey in order to write to my friends. I think I'll do without Internet access at home. A telephone is open to debate.

I applied to six graduate schools, and was rejected from half of them. I finally decided to study physics at the University of Texas at Austin, the school of oil, cattle and transgression. My impressions of the school itself will have to wait, although I like what I have seen of it, and the physics department itself appeals to me. The city is fantastic and beautiful, though right now I'm iffy about the people who inhabit it. There is an unusual concentration of Doppler jerks, for instance. I can't predict how my impression will change as I go along, considering I haven't explored much besides the university and my own neighborhood.

I'm already in love with said neighborhood, by the way. I inhabit a roomy corner efficiency in a small complex, with my truck tucked into a little niche off the alley. The lights in the apartment follow a strange hierarchy... at first I was tempted to make a K-map of their operation, just to figure out what pattern they followed. One wall has now been covered with nearly full bookcases. There's plenty more to say about the place, but it can wait. However, I do want to mention my method of finally teaching myself to cook... once in Austin, I forced myself to eat nothing but what I cooked myself: no restaurant food, no precooked food, and no eating entire loaves of white bread anymore. I've held to that manner of learning so far, even if I occasionally break down and eat raw materials; however, I am proud to say that I ate my first good meal in the apartment this morning.

The neighborhood has a coop grocery store, small laundry with tailoring service, and a neat toy store within walking distance. That's just covering the useful places I've found in a week. I've also discovered a route to the physics department whose length consists of two-thirds parkland, a few side streets, the crumbling walls of a seminary, and an overly grand petroleum engineering lot. I am going to have a lot of fun showing my friends around the neighborhood and the university.

Speaking of my friends... the parting with my Dallas ones was not as painful as I anticipated. I sent letters of thanks to each of them before I went, so perhaps that explains the ease of departure. In any case, they were very good to me during this last eight months, helping me to become more comfortable with skritching and cuddling, and providing the impetus to become more forthright and assertive. Though the matter is still moot, my attitude towards sex has relaxed somewhat... partly by medical necessity. On the other hand, the months before were not easy socially: I cut ties with my oldest friend around March (though I still remember her too often), initiated some minor conflicts, and discovered by experience how very much I prefer small groups of friends. I dropped eight or so people from my reading list on Livejournal, mostly because I had only met them a few times and we had not talked in a long time. The couple I dropped for other reasons know them. I do find myself undercommitted, though... it really is time to resume seeking new friends, both in Austin and online.

I graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics, summa cum laude, as I already mentioned. The classes I took during the spring semester were "Survey of Western Art: Renaissance to Present," "Automata Theory," "Complex Variables," "Theoretical Concepts of Calculus," "Geometry," "Optics," "Relativity II," and the senior thesis writing class. Most of the professors were unexceptional, though a few stood out. The geometry course had a wonderfully loose format, but the teacher put far too little effort into the class, mainly (I think) because he was following another's materials. The art history course was quite fun, though the tests emphasized rote memorization. The professor could have been one of those matronly speakers on NPR, which was amusing when she talked about how Michelangelo liked his male nudes, or when she was flipping through the slides of the Goya ones. *grins* I did my writing assignment (a stylistic analysis) on a painting of a fox by Courbet which hangs in the Dallas museum. Finally, Dr. Rindler (whose name appears in the previous update) was both my lecturer in relativity and the adviser for my thesis. I wrote the core of the paper (even if I considered it an outline at first) the second week of classes, and added details, references and padding later on, so that it didn't trigger a huge crisis at the end of the semester. The relativity class was also very fun, although Dr. Rindler didn't cover all the material he wanted to reach. I made three A's and five A plusses. Just as in high school, my last year as an undergraduate was epic.

I think that I've grown out of my Kung Fu school. The last month I was there, the problems just seemed to pile up -- being taught by somebody less skilled (in some respects) than me, listening to an arrogant, criticism-only master, and being teased excessively by the steady members. I quit a month and a half before moving. I intend to enroll in the Judo club here... I think close range grappling will be a nice change from grandiose forms, even if it does mean I'll never get a black belt.

There is one more entry to write in the style project, which has provided most of this journal's activity in the last year, but I can't write it yet. I don't have enough skill, or insight, or need, or something. Anyway, the project is now closed, whether or not I try to write that final piece in the future. I get to move on to new topics, now.

The next update on the details of my life won't take eight months.

I'm slowly going through all of my possessions, packing some of it, getting rid of more... but I think I need to stop for tonight. The nostalgia is intoxicating; it's making me giddy.

Among the items I found while sifting through old things was the letter which I will excerpt in a moment. It was a treasured piece of text, and I was glad to find it again. The writer was Dr. McEnerney, a humanities professor at Chicago, to whom I showed several of my rambles. The excerpts here come from a response to the largest of those rambles... a response only written after I had given him some notes to help decode the thing. He generally showed my pieces far more respect than they deserved.

"As I said, I found your notes of purpose very helpful in finding a way to say what I hope will be useful things about your essay. You've helped me in the way I described: I wasn't able to settle on what to say about any given part of the text, because it wasn't obvious to me what you intended that language to accomplish...

"(To add something that may seem banal to you, I should first congratulate you on having this conception of your paper: that is, the conception of the paper having paragraphs inside sections inside larger sections, with every part of the hierarchy accomplishing something for the whole. As I said, I suspect that you see this is banal, but I work with many writers who simply don't think of their writing in these terms, and I think you're right to do so.)

"What I think is most important here is not so much these specific paragraphs... I think the larger point is that you often write with very little margin for error, both for your reader and for yourself. In what will doubtlessly seem strange to you, even offensive, I think that you write with so little margin for error that you may need to add redundancy to your text. This must sound odd: everyone praises concision and condemns redundancy. However, redundancy is necessary in all writing: we could not well proceed without it...

"One of the key tasks of any communication act is building in enough redundancy in the message so that readers can recover from any confusion in understanding the message. Here, you have so little redundancy in communicating the relationship between the paragraphs that I could not recover from my confusion about the role of the 'dominance' paragraph.

"I would certainly agree that a goal of writing would be to hold redundancy to a minimum. However, I don't believe that writers can perfectly predict the ways in which readers will process the text. To be sure, I've argued all year long that writers ought to think about this, and improve their ability to predict, but I hope I have not implied that you can do this perfectly.

"This is a common experience I have in reading your work: straining to construct in my own mind the chain of relationships that, in your mind, connect the sections and paragraphs of your writing. And I'm afraid that the solution, redundancy, will continue to be distasteful. Of course, there is nothing like an absolute rule here. When the content of the text is not taxing, when readers can readily grasp the implications of the discussion, then they need much less redundancy, many fewer reminders of the hierarchical relations. But when the content is demanding, and readers are working hard to follow an argument or explanation, then we're back at the place of readers needing to see explicit statements of essential relationship. To repeat the language from above: such redundancy allows readers to recover from outright misunderstanding or from misconstruing a more subtle structural signal.

"I also immediately admit that there is a quite reasonable theory of writing that says that the kind of explicitness that I'm describing here is not just distasteful, but actually harmful. You can argue that writing is better when redundancy is kept to a minimum. There is a sense in which redundancy is giving in, yielding to a less rigorous understanding. This may be ultimately a matter of aesthetics, but even if so, that does not, to my mind, make the argument less compelling. In any case, I'm quite willing to accede to this argument, as long as the writer who makes it will accept that readers may not, in fact, be able or willing to read with the rigor required."

When asked to criticize my writing, a friend once described it as convoluted, abstract and irrelevant. I know how to deal with two of those criticisms. Irrelevance results from the purpose of this journal: it is written to myself, and the prose takes a form that another can read only because I recognize the risks of involution. As my purpose changes, in other places or formats, what I write acquires relevance to others. Abstraction, a more serious flaw, can be corrected, both by training myself in writing about the concrete and by studying authors who can couch abstractions in material terms, Thoreau being, to my mind, the most skilled at that task. Convolution, however, is a flaw that I know how to avoid or work around, at much cost, but not fix outright. The fact that I often savor it -- my favorite entries from this journal are also the most convoluted -- indicates a problem more complex than a bad habit or a self-indulgence, one which I must come to understand before this writing will be of use to anyone but myself.

I do not think that my style can fail for being the expression of someone lost. The entities which interest me may aptly be called natural mazes; such are a wilderness, a city, a personality, a clique and a mathematics. They all have their sudden cul-de-sacs, unexpected connections, stretches of uniformity, and variety of ways. An unguided, which is to say an individual, path through such a subject will be convoluted, though such complexity can be reduced by traversing a path many times, shortening it and learning it well. I do not know what to relate of my trips through those mazes. These images are not ones in which I can describe the whole of my writing, just the convolution therein. Some writers describe a reliable path through, or into -- in any case, also out of -- the subject, some merely describe their favored destinations, and a few will, kindly but extravagantly, tell you to lose yourself there. What I can say is that if you explore it earnestly, you do not lose yourself only once in such a labyrinth.

Moments of complete directionlessness (call them dead ends reached) have their awkward, abrupt places in my writing. Unguided investigation, understanding it as I do to be unguided exploration, repeatedly arrives at a point where the path disappears, the walls loom unbroken, or the equations do not reduce. So why should these dead ends have any place; why not just give the origin, destination, and the best route connecting the two? -- An introduction, conclusion, and body, to use another parlance. I give my halted steps because error, corrected error rather, has its place in knowledge. The student who reaches a dead end in a problem, calculates there needlessly and at length, backs up, and takes a different approach has thereby gained knowledge that the checker of tables cannot appreciate, and it is not always the same sojourner who returns from a long delay. Those ideas which I can bring myself to think, yet not think through, are the ones that affect me most; moreover, if the moment is one of being lost, they sometimes bring me to the point of alteration. And there are times when my steps guide me unfailingly to nowhere. They guide me to a place of outer stillness and inner change. My most necessary transformations occur in these secluded places of one approach, and can neither be chronicled nor related. They occur in those places where having gone one can only come back.

What makes its way, after much time, into writing is not the error itself but something gained from it; to indulge myself in math wordplay, the product of transformations is the transformation of a convolution. Perhaps I may soon become skilled enough that every convolution in style is an altered form of a convolution in life and thought, tracking the uncommon turns, transitions and connections valuable in my own. What's more, I feel that there is justification for this representation, though I cannot yet articulate it. For now it will have to suffice that there is never just one proof of a theorem, that unlike facts often have a common import, and that a running animal omits steps.

The style of writing (a worthy one, best for many purposes) most antithetical to my own emphasizes clarity, detail and easy perusal, training writers whose greatest virtues reside in anticipating a reader's response. But one of the needs which underlies my convolution -- a more important one than personal changes, or faithfulness to the subject -- is the need for completion, for the ability to stop writing. If I speak unwisely I will always need to say more. Rather I would like to write compactly, pressing as much experience and significance into each sentence as I can, not contenting myself with one or even two meanings, until I am exhausted in the recounting and have exhausted my meaning. If I were to attempt a clear style, even an academic one, I would be forced to write at far greater length than I desire. In attempting a multiplicity of purposes and approaches I err on the side of convolution, where I once erred on the side of longwindedness, before I learned that the boundary I can walk in two paragraphs I can jump in one sentence, leaving the reader's path undecided.

Today resembles yesterday: years past still cling. I awake as though not yet human into a cold moment, my friends the morning dew on my coat, soon to be shaken off. Telling myself that today I will be less untrue, I slowly prepare stiff limbs for a day of things I will not say. The light now dawning through my eyelids gives reminder of how far I have gone afield, and how much ground remains to be covered before I can again deserve rest. An eternity has created the day before me, and the day will create a new eternity. Be they the shine in my fur, my friends will await my return, I think, my next night; but for now I am not for them.

My plan was to wait until the biannual update to mention this, but I think it's important enough to announce early. I graduated last weekend from UT Dallas, with a degree in physics, summa cum laude. I walked with a copy of Walden tucked into the front of my pants, under the gown.

I'm not sure why I'm so proud of that last part.

I'm not worth reading about yet. This moment of a once-philosopher's life, a shameful and overly pained one, is no place to linger too long; the sign, standing by the road that dominates this desolate internal scene, says, "Wiser people than you moved on."

And why should my writing affect me less than it affects another?

Staying true to my past matters to me, but in moods like the present one moving forward and away from it matters even more. Personalities do change; I am evidence of that fact, though my development has been aided by an otherwise unhealthy emotional flexibility. Yet some of my worst qualities remain, still strong, well after first being unearthed and confronted: narcissism, arrogance, diffidence, silence, distance... none are tendencies which can be undone in a few days' work. Nevertheless, over time narcissism can be avoided, arrogance humbled, diffidence coaxed away, silence broken, and distances bridged; I can change.

I do not think I can rid myself of a certain cunning, vulpine fear, which argues: better to outwit pain than to overcome it. The suffering that has been overcome, forced down, and forced out will always return in another curl-up-and-cry day, albeit in a different form. But the clever response, which halts pain the more effectively the more intense it is, puts the feeling into words and allows it to stand exposed, so that both recurrence and rereading will make the words and the lessons more lasting. Perhaps others would favor other methods of moving forward, and write for other reasons; however, I find mediocre that writing I do which leaves me entirely unchanged.

Why remain in the shape impressed on me by the circumstances of my life? My childhood was too slipshod and amateurish in crafting me, an overambitious, underplanned, clumsily constructed and all too soon abandoned project in human life. The world as it is cannot complete me, but I can make my own attempt, and take myself forward into my dreams, even if they are ones I did not choose for myself. I would be my own journeyman's piece, evidence that I can do better. And I am rapidly approaching the beginning of a long nascency: others suffer through graduate school, but I'll come alive in it, chronicling what I can, learning with style.

How can I justify not rising up to my world as well, to find the germ of good present but dormant in every event, and let it grow in me? Any word ever said to me in affection was more than circumstance; those words pointed to something beyond, even as they pointed away from their situation, and thus perhaps went unnoticed by a mind too fastened to the present. There are so many good things to become, so many ideals presented to me piecewise by friends and mentors throughout my years, that to be defined exclusively by the first two decades of my life would be pitiful. Such definition is not inescapable.

One of the oddest literary conceptions I have is a form of writing which grows, lives, and even dies distinct within the confines of a single work, paralleling its author's transformations; such a kind of work befits a period of nascency. I would like a person reading it to be able to discern such things as: in this passage a common realization was reached, in this other one the point of frustration; here the author licked his wounds for a little while, before feeling strong enough to return to his life; in this paragraph something small, a grudge perhaps or an old preoccupation, died, and a new creature took its place.

I want to undo myself in writing.

"It is, again, an ordinary neurotic relationship, in which both partners wish nothing more than to end it, but in which each is incapable of taking final steps because its end presents itself to them as the end of the world. So they remain together, each helpless in everything save to punish the other for his own helplessness, and play the consuming game of manipulation, the object of which is to convince the other that you yourself do not need to play. But any relationship of absorbing importance will form a world, as the personality does. And a critical change in either will change the world. The world of the happy man is different from the world of the unhappy man, says Wittgenstein in the Tractatus. And the world of the child is different from the world of the grown-up, and that of the sick from that of the well, and the mad from the un-mad. This is why a profound change of consciousness presents itself as a revelation, why it is so difficult, why its anticipation will seem the destruction of the world: even where it is a happy change, a world is always lost."

-- Stanley Cavell, from "Ending the Waiting Game," an essay in "Must We Mean What We Say?"

Quoted in memory of a friendship that was once good. The situation wasn't as harsh as what Cavell describes, but it was indeed neurotic enough for this section of the essay (one about Beckett's "Endgame") to stick in my mind.

My friendship with Raki was my oldest one. I'm not happy about how I ended it, but I'm glad I did. A better, more vivid world awaits me.

A description of the most important parts of the last six months of my life follows, behind the usual ellipsis.

I'll get the bad part over with first: starting a few months back, I've had gradually worsening (though recently under control) chronic cases of epididymitis first, then later prostatitis, specifically prostatodynia. If any of you are really curious, you can look the terms up. On the physical side, I think it's an unquestionable sign of the severity of pain if it has me huddled over crying while waiting for a prescription to be filled. On the mental side, I'm a bit disturbed that the reason I'm willing to relate this experience is a discussion in one of Cavell's works, which I read as: "Of course I may not know that another is in pain. But to claim that it is a philosophical problem is to repress the fact that it is a personal problem, a failing on my part or his."

Good news now! An unrelenting, merciless tide of good news which renders any melancholy quite temporary. To start with, summaries of my classes from this semester, in order from worst to best:

Modern Physics II. The class was nearly entirely qualitative, on a freshman level of sophistication. To make it worse, the lecturer was a bad one, on the verge of retirement, and inclined to long anecdotal detours (mainly complaining that the big Texas accelerator was never built). It's neat to have met someone who knew Heisenberg, though, and later on I adopted the strategy of studying for another class, only listening when I caught something interesting. I'm ashamed to admit that my final essay was plagiaristic, being a paraphrased version of a discussion in one of my textbooks. Grade: A. Memorable quote: "One time in Germany, I had a conversation with Heisenberg about the atomic bomb..."

Abstract Algebra I. Another incompetent, though far livelier, lecturer. His lectures were advanced enough, but nearly impossible to follow, and he wouldn't even write down definitions. However, the subject is fascinating in its own right, so I worked through the textbook on my own, doing problems from it in class... I showed up to ask and answer questions, not to try to follow the lecture. Occasionally I would be startled when he turned around and yelled something at the class, though. A+. "NO! Zey are ze complex numbers!"

Contemporary Physics. The very first class in the physics sequence, and thus way under my level of knowledge. For some reason, I didn't have transfer credit for it though, and so I had to take it as a senior; and fortunately, it covered some things that I needed to review for the physics GRE, namely introductory optics. The lecturer was pretty good, though I've had far better. On the down side, there were occasional errors in his presentations and answers to questions, and the laptop and projector frequently malfunctioned; on the up side, he was a very nice and helpful (well, not to me) person, and the class included lots of physical demonstrations, which are neat at any class level. A. "This is a nearly perfect glass sphere, made specially for our department thirty years ago. The material allows you to see the path of the laser beam as it passes through."

Survey of U.S. History II: Reconstruction to the Present. A required class, but nevertheless very neat. The lecturer was a graduate student, but very good, and interested in her students' learning. Also, the course had an unusual focus on black and women's history in the U.S., which for the most part you don't get in high school. The assignments were easier than I'm used to in non-math, non-science courses, consisting of a few really short (three page!) papers and some small quizzes. The tests, though, were the hardest of the semester. They consisted of eight paragraph-long responses, and one several-page essay, per test, in an hour and a half. A+. "The revolution will not be televised."

Linear Algebra. The professor in this course was the best lecturer of the semester. His classes were interesting, funny (he had a good sense of humor), and well-organized. He also answered lots of questions after class, and clearly enjoyed teaching. The only problem in that regard was that he went too slowly in the course, and didn't get to the material in which I was most interested. Also, this was a sophomore-level math course, and pretty easy for me... to the extent that I made perfect scores on almost all of the quizzes and exams (and would be pretty annoyed when I didn't), and ended up (via bonus questions) off the grading scale. Another annoyance was that the problem session (mandatory, due to quizzes being administered there) was held a couple of hours before the time I normally woke up. A+. "Now I'm going to show you something wonderfully horrible..."

Classical Mechanics. My first graduate class, and I put a lot of energy into it. I probably learned the most in abstract algebra last semester, but this is a close second: it went much further than any previous course in classical mechanics, covering analytical mechanics in a lot of detail, and other topics (notably rotational dynamics) with more sophistication than I've encountered yet. On the down side, the professor (Wolfgang Rindler) spent too much time on subjects that were (to me) elementary, or at least familiar. The professor himself, though apparently suffering from an early stage of Parkinson's disease, was a very good one, and from what I hear prominent in his field (relativity). He had very well-planned lectures, and was the most helpful professor out of class I've encountered yet; I had lots of conversations with him, extending on the class material in many ways. The problem sets were sometimes intense: for example, he had to switch to legal-sized paper about halfway through for the questions, and some completed ones spanned five pages covered with handwriting, toward the end. The tests were fun. A. Dr. Rindler wanted to give me an A+ (the only one of the class), but plusses and minusses aren't allowed for graduate courses. "As a physicist you have a bag of tricks, and you will always be adding to it."

That's all the classes. On a related subject, there's the Physics GRE, whose score I just received tonight, an exam which I studied for a ridiculous amount, on which getting 80% of the problems (100 in three hours) right will get you the top score. Normally, I have plenty of scorn for standardized tests, and hope that institutions of higher learning give them little to no credence. However, this time around I have to hope that the graduate schools to which I'm applying worship ETS (who administer the GRE), because I got a score of 990 out of 990, with 91 problems right.

I've applied to six graduate schools, including one backup (UTD, my current school) which accepted me before my application was even complete. All but UTD are first- or second-tier, in the terminology of nervous seniors who don't yet know that the grad school rankings are untrustworthy. My grades from Chicago are decent, from UTD excellent, and my letters of recommendation will all be strong; one's from Dr. Rindler. So my chances of acceptance are good. Also, next semester (my last as an undergraduate) will be epic: I'll be a double-time student, all but one course will be upper-division, and my classes will include the General Relativity course taught by Rindler. From a textbook he wrote himself, which can be good or bad. To conclude the subject of schooling, I've found I have notably more discipline and emotion when it comes to studying than I did last semester, and a greater understanding of the conditions for learning, as well.

My friends, close and casual, are great. Without their company I would never have done so well this year. Locally there's a group of furs to spend time with, including weekly Tuesday gatherings at the place of one friend, Fuzzwolf (aka Mark), and frequent Saturday gatherings. Online there's the generally interesting writing on LJ, and more specifically IM conversations (too infrequent) with Paul (Yomatsuri, née Holophote here) and others. I'm no longer a mute at parties, and I'm apparently even developing a good (though hit-or-miss) capacity for ad hoc humor. I'm getting pretty comfortable with physical contact. I've got a little more courage when it comes to confrontations, though not much more than before. I've also done rather a lot of learning from the experiences of others, who have experienced more (socially, at least) than I have. All of these are good developments.

Having resumed Kung Fu about seven months ago, I'm progressing surprisingly fast, despite having to miss a bunch of weeks due to illness, and only being able to attend class once per week. I make up for the rarity of exercise by making said exercise harsh: the criterion for a satisfactory workout is, for me, to be sore two days afterwards. My leg strength and flexibility are increasing noticeably; I think I'm about where I am (ahead in a few respects, behind in others) where I was several years ago, when I left the discipline.

My mother now has kittens... three of them, black, grey, and tabby. They like to reenact scenes from "Shadow of the Colossus" with me. Really, three kittens are much more than three times as cute as a single kitten, which is already unfathomably cute. So I'll refrain from descriptions, since said descriptions would never come to an end. Their names are Love, Truth and Courage: hopefully somebody will recognize what that's from.

The writing project (er, project about writing) I outlined a dozen or so posts back is still in progress, but in greatly changed form. I realized that, even if I had the energy to write encyclopedically, I would not have the desire to read the results again later. So now only a few, very vital topics are getting attention in this LJ, and there are several more to go before I'll consider the project complete. Once that's done the current preoccupation with the subject of writing will end.

That's it. Though I'm happy to answer questions.

I adore the company of my betters. In fact, I needn't look far to locate such company, for in most activities, among them some very common ones, I rank as an amateur. That they are people who do what I can't, or (more fortunately) do well what I can do poorly, is why my friends continue to be instructive, helpful, fascinating and heartening ones; an imperfect doppelganger of shared interests would not compare. When they are superiors in fields that are distant to my own concerns, appreciating the company requires attentiveness and energy... though sometimes it happens that finding myself in (indeed part of) the purveyance of a foreign, yet vital talent, I shyly let another's desires bypass my own. In contrast, there is the experience of being surrounded by those who excel me in the areas I claim, where appreciating them requires less energy, but more humility. In such company -- and so far it has been rare company, for me -- I feel that a commitment to the aspiration requires a commitment to the people who aspire, and a continuous willingness to let them influence me. The point is not moot: in less than a year I will be in graduate school, among many who are more talented in physics than I am.

So what form could the influence of my peers take, in a style of writing unfamiliar to them? A work useful to students of physics in the way I envision should, I think, be something that could not have been written by anyone other than a student of physics, and a good one at that. That idea alone is enough to assemble a list of attributes which should appear in writing, perhaps even in style: a demonstrable proficiency in all basic physics; an area of expertise, and a concern for the continuing development of the field; an enthusiasm undimmed by the trials of graduate study (or at least rekindled after their passing!); an incorporation of the facts and methods of physics, as well as the terms of criticism and appraisal of the field, into my thoughts themselves... What I really see proceeding from the influence of great physics students, however, is something more: I imagine a person, an impossible person, so thorough in his mastery of physics that the entire content of the field is rich material for analogy, humor, fantasy, argument, and especially metaphor. I want to write as my hypothetical better could write.

Well, for that I have my more wakeful moments; I have that better self who lives beyond the day in which he writes. A greater part of my time will be given to less grand objectives, most immediately in ensuring that no hidden motivation survives encysted within my personality; for instance, the belief that I would make a better philosopher than physicist. The one-sided conflict between physics and philosophy, namely the contempt of great physicists for philosophy, is an unfortunate but not unfair one: physics is, in a sense, philosophy's failure, the development that proved philosophy to be undeserving of a dominant position in human knowledge. The contempt -- and perhaps with it the inept philosophy of many physicists, and an awareness of the ignorant physics of many philosophers -- will soon enough be internalized in me. I am sure that the conflict must find an internal resolution, one without a predetermined victor, before I can venture, in writing, a new contact between the two fields.

My computer is returned to me restored! Thanks go to Rick for this deed. In celebration, here is a piece of ephemera of five years' age, which would otherwise have been lost.

"Postsubsequentialism, proceeding from the premise that all human power relies on material assets (henceforth to be called 'materia'), recognizes that during the course of history these more and more tend to become the possession of a dominant party, which, no matter how great its stockpile, will nevertheless seek more powerful materia. This accretion is opposed by a worldwide assortment of disenfranchised opponents, led regionally by charismatic and uniquely talented bosses; however, because the dominant party acquires, from the very start, privileged access to medicine, armament, and specialized technology, partisan interests tend to prevail over opposing ones, despite the historical necessity of the steadily increasing strength of the party's opposition. In the end, this recurring destruction of resistance tends to increase the experience, wealth, and materia of the dominant party. Furthermore, this increasing materialization of power is facilitated and given an overarching narrative structure by a network of unknowing allies and supporters, who, due to the peculiar codification of their society, are required to be non-players in the struggle of the partisans; moreover the demands of the party's acquisition of power often force these supporters to limit their discourse with said partisans to the repeated utterance of a single pre-conditioned maxim, required to be of use to their masters in the party. Although the dialectical process of party and opposition proceeds according to rigidly defined patterns, its participants unerringly describe this historical movement according to a predefined, and often self-contradictory and irrational, narrative structure, in an attempt to legitimise the accretion of power and disassociate the party from that which controls it. The accretion of materia is of great importance to postsubsequentialism, and many postsubsequentialists have dedicated their lives to studying this process of materialization."

Skill is needed in crafting anything, but a live idea is an animal to be caught, and I am sometimes a resourceful enough hunter. Let the feeling of pursuit, the sense that here is an activity of living things, be something that characterizes my writing, not the ease of long training, the impression that the prose at last presented was written many times before, albeit never so well as now.

I've come to wonder why I give such respect to my dreams, greedy things that they are. Often I feel I want to inflict myself on the world. Philosophy itself has history enough of arrogance and imposition, its ideals of truth, and means of investigation, being with rare exception meant to stand above all else. So it is with me, despite a distrust for philosophy's weakness, systematization. I want to reveal, inspire, and challenge... anything and everything! ...but even more I want to be the person who revealed, inspired, and challenged. In one's dreams, the audience is a large one, and the dreamer essentially apart from it, above or in front of it. And in pursuing my dreams, in having seen some of what they entail, I've come to ask myself why the person in that favored position ought to be me. Questions addressed to, and owed to myself: Why are you so often resistant to being touched emotionally, being inspired? Why do you shy from debates, even philosophical ones, nowadays? Why are you so apolitical, so quietist? Why do you want to write what you cannot bring yourself to say? Why did you fail at philosophy?

It does not dismay me that tomorrow will be as today. However, it does dismay me that my desired profession is not, so to speak, my calling. It implies (particularly considering I have ambitions in physics to match my ambition in philosophy) that while said profession is something that will be attained with sustained effort, which I often exhaust myself in providing, the actual calling -- once the object of similar, if comparatively undisciplined, effort -- cannot be pursued in such a way. In physics I can guarantee myself a measure of success, perhaps even a high one, simply by ensuring that every day I am better at physics than I was the day before. This program, supplied enough energy, can take me far, and has already. But similar questions, even more pressing ones, arise as in philosophy: Why should it be you who succeeds as a physicist? Why not those many other talented, intelligent, and able students? Have you fallen -- again! -- under the spell of some image of accomplishment, of greatness? Why do you want this? Philosophy is a passion, a duty, a failing and an everything; for it the question "Why not, how not?" overwhelms the question "Why?". Physics I merely love.

No, it does not dismay me.

* * *

Perfection is for those who want eternity. Completion is for those who want an eternity to end.

I've been considering using psychological cues from videogames to help in my studies.

For instance, I could have a tape recorder play one of those "goal completed" sounds, like the jingles from Metroid games, every time I complete a problem or finish reading a chapter. Similarly, every time I get the wrong answer on a problem, I could play a suitably frustrating sound, like Mario screaming as he falls into a pit.

Every time I finish an assignment prior to the night before it's due, I could give myself an index card saying, "You have unlocked a full night's sleep!"

During finals, I could hum some vaguely apocalyptic, final boss music. Plus I would embellish the exams' titles. "Multivariable Calculus Final," for instance, would be crossed out and replaced with "Gigavariable Excalculodeath".

Just some thoughts.

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January 2012

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Syndicate

Page Summary

Broken glass
Lean Into
The Kindness of Symbols
(no subject)
Some Revision
Math bragging
Inner Environments
Nora
A sketch of an answer
Deception
Response to Dw
Christmas comic (large image)
(no subject)
At least an animal
(no subject)
Modes of powerful emotional interaction
The Nine Charioteers
Voicing Despair
Milestones 2
Milestones
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
Con Report: Anthrocon 2006
(no subject)
No context for you.
No context for you.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
Ambitions
(no subject)
(no subject)
*stares*
The New Emotional Laws
When voice answers other voice
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
Eight months' update: life moves forward
(no subject)
Convolution
Worth mentioning
Change
A world ends nonetheless
Six months' update: in which I brag
Aspiration
(no subject)
Questions owed myself
(no subject)

Style Credit

Base style: Tranquility III by branchandroot
Theme: Autumn Clouds by dancing_serpent

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