I remember, when I was younger, feeling amazed at the sureness of others, how clear they were in who they ought to be, how they ought to respond to stimulus, circumstance, and how even to engage one another. It would never have occurred to me that this was something instinctive, a belief and behavior in accordance with native impulse. Surely it had to have been learned, instructed from outside, achieved as in the sense of gained — a wisdom received, then practiced. A mastery of life skills. Street smarts and people skills as a kind of command. Personality as a perfection of practice.
It didn’t then even cross my mind that most if not all people are absolutely winging it, in conversational banter, in romantic scenarios, political debate, moment-to-moment living — just riffing, repeating something they’ve heard, aping behavior they’ve seen, mimicking thoughts they’ve recently overheard, which are themselves similarly only recently received. A series of rippling impressions and manifestations and movements from people who, just like me, have no fucking clue what is going on.
It wouldn’t have occurred to me because of the way we talk about identity and belief and selfhood and personality as if it is so clearly defined. So static and complete, as if those subjects are not constantly in a kind of quantum flicker, vibrating all over the shop, and not ever really existing anywhere at all ever. And maybe this is a singularly English language conundrum, the use of simple present tense is-ness, when identity-ing and belief-ing and and personality-ing are perhaps aa bit more present continuous activities? If not outright Schrödinger’s cat-like qualities that only appear where we are describing them because we are describing them in that place.
The substance of which at least I must have inferred if not understood totally consciously when I was a kid: that language creates worlds. That articulating an idea is to bring it into existence, or at least into the dimension we can reach with consciousness, though perhaps only summoned from some other, less-form-specific goopy plane of forms beyond. That language can capture these soupy trawlers of the depths (of reality and consciousness, perhaps), and in hauling them close to the surface of our recognition make them into a shape we can use ourselves, to make tools of, to pass along to others.
And even then — this, I guess, was when I started to really fall hard for books and movies, maybe in early adolescence? say between ten and thirteen? — I think I understood, even if I could never myself have described this notion, that language, and the process of storytelling, was not only bringing things up from the depths of feeling, giving them name so that we might better recognize them and perhaps understand them, but that it could also spin from whole cloth, could, weaving its way into the cerebral sphere, project, constructing castles of imagination — could make recognizable and, again, communicable, the wild, weird, wonderful, or terrifying fantasies of our dreaming minds.
Which is a lot to put on language, granted, to make of it a bridge between experience and reality, with identity, with other people, though I still know of no other ways to reach them. Which can at times be overwhelming, and can cause me to stay back, to retreat, to pull up that bridge and escape into an un-described other of my own. Because what would have blown my mind when I was younger, and what still unmoors me today, stupid kid that I am still, is that so many are using language, and creating fantasies, in such spectacularly bad faith, for the same reason one uses a toxin, with the intent to disable, to manipulate, to maim. Projecting as in projectile, harmfully, hurtfully.
And I think I spent a little too much time this week reading, listening to, and watching all of the demented, bad faith bull shit, and I now feel a bit sick. Poisoned with the rage and feelings of futility that are precisely the toxic states intended by the poisoners, by the mediums they/we use to communicate. Feel the doom and terror and frenzied anger of their fevered dreamworlds. And feeling like I need to find new ways to engage, new ways to retreat, new ways to nourish.
Yesterday was a travel day for me, and, as often happens, with increasing intensity these days, the doomscrolling kind of broke me. As did questions of how to do my job while America falls into fascism, how to be a person, friend, human today, flickering between the doomscroll and dissociation, how to be both more present and more protected, more radical, more real, more myself, and perhaps a little less described, how to pay rent, to resist, and then how to dream better, to write, to read.
Obviously I’m pretty sure that it still all comes down to language. So I hope you are finding the stories, the conversations, and the ideas that nourish you today. We’re going to need them.