Sunday, August 29, 2004
(11:14 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
This is not a post
I don't want to be writing a blog post right now. I've had three false starts so far, one of them quite lengthy, and that's rare for me. It's not simply that I am not saying what I want to say, but that I don't want to say what I want to say. It was going to be something about writing, wondering whether blogging and academia have come together to neuter me -- a thoughtlessness on one side, leading to writings no one would ever want to read; an impossible standard of rigor on the other side, leading to writings no one would ever want to read. There are good reasons to write what no one wants to read, but if they don't want to read because it's contentless or completely dull, then I probably shouldn't have bothered writing anything in the first place.Along with this refusal of writing comes a more general refusal. I've started to listen to four different CDs and stopped them all in -- what? disgust? -- by the third track. I've wondered if coffee might help, but the thought is unappealling. I'm sick of being itchy all the time. I'm sick of my itchy head. I'm sick of taking a shower in pool water every day. It seems like there should be a solution for that kind of thing -- that maybe, somehow, we could get some relatively clean water in Kankakee that wouldn't dry me out. Since the first week at Olivet, I have been itchy. I don't want to sleep anymore; in fact, I want to go back in time and somehow have my morning back. To do what? When I started this post, I was rejecting every possibility as somehow wrong, but somehow writing, even pointless, stupid blog writing, is getting me moving.
I'm sick of my allergies. I'm sick of my gross carpet that I haven't vacuumed since Justin moved out, because the vacuum broke that weekend. I have wanted to clean my house for several weeks now, but I'm always disappointed to find that it's not as dirty as I thought it was. I want to take everything out of my room and vacuum every square inch of the carpet and dust the woodwork around the floor and basically make it so that when I'm done, the dust will have been thoroughly defeated. But to everyone else in the world, my room looks as though no one has lived here for the past six months -- a stark and lifeless museum exhibit.
Lately I don't know how to talk to people. If language is a medium of communication (which it is not), then I think that the problem is much more serious than my failure to communicate clearly. Sometimes, when the message comes through garbled, the failure lies in the message itself. It's all very Hegelian: the failure of our apparatus of perception is the failure of the object in itself. And I've got to tell you -- my object is thoroughly divided right now. Lacan's idea of the divided subject always made a lot of intuitive sense to me, but I feel that it's getting more and more severe and that for both empirical and structural reasons, I will never be able to make anyone understand directly. Still, a few data points:
- Are you fucking kidding me? You actually believed him when he said I was moving to Milwaukee? Do you think I'm a fucking moron?
- Is there any particular reason that you need to use me to work out your still unfinished business with Olivet Nazarene University? Sure, some people were assholes, but there were good professors and a fine library. I can think of nothing that I wanted to learn and failed to learn solely by reason of attending Olivet (i.e., not due to my own sloth, etc.).
- And much as the asceticism bothered me, maybe that was okay. Maybe it's also okay that I didn't find a girlfriend during those four years, because not having to deal with the stress of being pressured to get married (if not by her, then by everyone else; see point 1) was worth the stress of having to settle for self-abuse for a few years.
- I did mention once, in conversation, that while I was very confident in high school, my Olivet experience trained me to think that if it seemed like something really good was about to happen, it probably wasn't -- but couldn't that be simply the process of moving from high school to adulthood? Moving from this enclosed environment in which every petty struggle seems to be of world-historical importance to the laissez-faire indifference of the adult world -- from having concerned mentors and disciplinarians worried about how you will turn out to having no one give a fuck as long as you pay your bills -- is jarring.
- The shifting agendas, conscious and unconscious -- it's all too much to keep up with. It's disconcerting sometimes to step back and observe how few people want simply and purely to be friends, without using one to fill in some lack in themselves or without wanting to change one. O friends, there is no friend! What do we get at the end of Derrida's Politics of Friendship, with its marathon quality, but the uncanny feeling that perhaps friendship properly so called has never yet happened -- or at the very least has not happened as often as it seems to have?
- And can men and women be friends with one another? Insofar as an answer is possible, I would say yes, and I would say that on my list of true friends, people I feel like I can really trust, who have some loyalty to me -- forgive me if I don't name names -- women may well predominate. Time will tell.
They were emotionally turbulent times, but when I look back, it always seems so peaceful. I forget the nights when I would throw things and kick the furniture or when I would cry myself to sleep, and I remember discovering Ben Folds and Shostakovich. I remember the first time I listened to The Fragile. I remember working my way through Pelikan's Christian Tradition and learning about all the saints and when she would come over (almost deserving of a capital S!) during open dorms and sit on my bed and lay on my pillow, as though it belonged to her, because it did. O felix culpa, O necessary failure!
Some things don't need to be said, and I have been in the business of saying them for years now -- but I wonder if they're even sayable, if pulling them out of their hiding places might not change them into something else, something a little more menacing, and if saying them might change me, too, into a wounded creature, armed with a greivance, telling anyone and everyone. I can't keep a secret. You should know that before you get too tangled up with me. It's all public domain. I'm horrified to have a secret, because it will always turn out that someone knew the whole time. It's happened before. It's happened every time. Give up on secrets, for me at least -- the things that are really secret, that need to remain secret, will take care of themselves, through the simple working out of language itself. We have accumulated millenia of wisdom in those grammatical and semantic structures, and by now our language has learned modesty, if nothing else. It does not seek things too great for it. What is necessary, above all, is to learn how to speak and how not to speak -- and second, to care and not to care. But first of all to speak, to say the yes that comes before the opposition of yes and no. Amen.
