- We have to be careful not to adopt theories merely because they give us pleasure. On the other hand, I haven’t figured out how else you would do it.
- The most creative emotion is dissatisfaction. This is lucky because we can expect to never feel satisfied.
- In 2022, Aziza Abu Sirdana, a Palestinian refugee in Toronto, stabbed herself in a case meeting with a government manager. She lived, and she was taken in by a Jewish family. After this heartwarming conclusion the CBC’s follow-up ceases. You have to imagine that many of our government and business systems only function because most people who feel a strong and justified desire to stab themselves in the stomach in front of a functionary don’t do so. The pressure of the institution’s normalcy is overwhelming. Instead most of these people go away and stab themselves in private where they won’t trouble anybody. If stabbing yourself in intolerable institutional meetings became more common, however, a law would be passed to criminalize stabbing yourself in the stomach.
- Some philosopher may have said that much suffering comes from our inability to force ourselves to do what we think is best. It seems as if it should be simple. I want to keep my house clean, but I don’t. In his essay on T.E. Lawrence, Deleuze suggested that certain kinds of shame are shaped by the mind’s false belief that the body is a seperate and lesser entity. The mind is “ashamed of the body…ashamed for the body. It is as if it were saying to the body: You make me ashamed, You ought to be ashamed.” Even more precisely, maybe this is something one part of the mind says to the rest of the body-mind complex. I guess that is what they call the superego. The self-mutilative fantasies caused by shame, such as having your head crushed with a sledgehammer, make sense if sent from this mind-part. Destroying your body would free the superego from its incompetent prison, so that it could become a genius and win a Rhodes scholarship. I had a citational trail I thought I might chase down, but when I got home I was too tired, so instead of reading or writing I lay on the couch and ate cheesecake.
- You don’t get a choice, intellectually or socially, but to align yourself—against something, for something else. Or do you?
- Recently I tried to explain to a friend my reading of Rocky Horror Picture Show, which involved the word “semiotics.” Although she was game enough, I realized how many layers of explanation I had to walk back through to render my idea intelligible. The intellectual borderland through which a person becomes an academic reader — almost despite herself, out of desperation for a fix — I haven’t travelled far enough through these territories to forget how reading was before. I sometimes fear that I’ll lose the ability to communicate with anyone in my social world about reading. I’ll be like a gibbering professor who’s seen the sigils of R’lyeh, or a holy fool. An outsider might believe this desire for the obscure comes from sneering pretension, but I swear to you I am unnaturally compelled, sweating, terrified.
Anyway, I think people who don’t read this way deserve a better explanation than I received. I should record here before I forget: Without introducing you properly to the world of signs, high-school teachers made symbolism seem like a secret encoded message from that tricksy jester, the author. Forget that! Now you must look for how the text tells you what is true about your life, the real life you are living, and how beautiful it is or how horrible, and much of that truth will be encoded in symbols, because the text is not literally about anyone’s life, but is instead about, for example, a transvestite mad scientist. Haven’t you ever noticed that the Rocky Horror Picture Show ends on a black screen over which is intoned by a chorus the single word MEANING? I was trying to tell my friend, I know this sounds crazy, but isn’t it fun? - Let me try again—in this type of reading, you will develop a new sensitivity to the comprehension that happens before language, a practically tactile chill which you feel sweep over you when you read something you believe to be correct. But here’s one problem: I often have the instantaneous delusion, when I’m listening to a foreign language whose tonal refrains I’ve studied enough, that I am understanding something, when I literally don’t understand.
- Taking reading like this on as a hobby does tend to make you feel like one of those people who devotes years of her finite life to creating a scale model of Pittsburgh in Minecraft. “Well, everyone does something, usually, anyway,” says the retiree who visited every CrackerBarrel in the USA. “So we thought we would do this and it would be fun.”
- I began to think of my will as a shallow terra cotta bowl in my chest filled with water and would picture myself cupping it in both hands.
- Almost any new habit you adopt for two weeks will feel like the secret that will finally allow you to manage yourself happily and competently forever. Do this enough and you may decide that variation is better than gimmick.
meghan cunningham 