| thoughts from a cunning linguist | |
I'm convinced that every time I move, the objects in my house get bewitched. Books seem to copulate and reproduce. Socks return from their exile to meet up with their mates again. An entire sleeping bag that I thought was lost or left behind suddenly appears in a closet. And every little thing for which a new home must be found or which must be packed in a box and shipped to another home far away grows teeth and sneers at me every time I pass it.
Yes, I think my apartment is turning against me. I believe there is a script in here somewhere for a horror movie, if only one can find it.
This might my cue to run for the basement where I will, of course, be fed to my own food processor by walking bookshelves or tossed in the dryer and whooshed away to the land of missing socks.
Come to think of it, this might be preferable to packing.
"Taste," wrote Immanuel Kant, "is the ability to judge an object, or a way of presenting it, by means of a liking or disliking devoid of all interest. The object of such a liking, he says, "is called the beautiful." The "sublime," on the other hand, he says, is "what is absolutely large...large beyond all comparison... That is sublime in comparison with which everything else is small."
The above makes me think that the strongest, most intense forms of desire are sublime. Isn't what we want somehow always in excess of what our minds already have or can hold?
I've found myself thinking a lot about Kant in the last few days. I've always been fascinated by his ideas about the sublime and the beautiful. I've only rarely wanted with great intensity. But each time it happens to me, I get this sense of the absolute largeness of it. The sublime has often been associated with events or states in nature that the mind cannot take in all at once. (Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Mont Blanc" is one of the most famous examples of the sublime in poetry.) But I think it relates to the mind, too.
I'm not sure Kant is right about beauty being devoid of interest. But the sublime itself seems both difficult and delicious, awe- and terror-inspiring--all at once.
Then again, maybe wanting just is what it is, and philosophy is just a poetic way of saying so.
I seem to have a reputation among my friends for picking people up at every conference I attend. It's now a running joke. Nobody asks me how my paper went. They usually look and me with a smirk and say "So?" And I usually have a story to tell.
When flings are flings, the stories are usually not hard to tell. When an affair becomes more complicated or something more important seems to be happening, it's hard to describe to other people--hard to describe without sounding like a Hallmark greeting card, that is. Emotional drama has a Freudian feel about it, whereas social drama seems to exude allure: it appeals to people's sense of prurience and their desire to know the sordid details of other people's live. And we can play to that in telling our stories.
But it's this other thing that stymies me. I can tell you that I met an amazing woman at The Stupids. I could describe the intensity with overused words and cliches. I could talk about sarcasm as the "obstacle" to the happy ending of a romantic comedy that spanned only two days. But somehow, I think, this really means something only to people whom it's about. And even then it's incomplete, barely a gesture. I guess it's just hard to write about desire in the first-person singular. All this is just to say that something very peculiar is happening with this woman and I don't know what the narrative arc is yet. So the story does not yet make sense as a story.
The one thing that does seem to be "the story of my life," though is that my desires seem always to be played out over long distances and often via technology. I've considered this in other blog entries, but I wonder what it's really about. But more to the point, I wonder how one does it well. I'm especially concerned with balance: with balancing the life of the here and now with the emotional life of the elsewhere; with balancing the non-computer here and now with the virtual here and now. Past experiences are good teachers and I guess short of predicting the end of a story too far in advance, the best one can do is occupy the space of "unknowing" or "not-yet-knowing" without being utterly consumed by the lack of knowledge itself.
That, I suspect, is my lifelong project.
Why is breast cancer the public women's issue par excellence? Even Canada's national banks are on side, with CIBC selling pins and sponsoring The Run for the Cure.
Now first, let me be clear: I'm not against breast cancer research AT ALL. I do think the research is limited (how many studies do you think are designed to figure out if lesbians are at higher risk of breast cancer than hterosexual women?). But I'm all in favour of the research that is being done.
What I wonder about is why this is the most visible women's health issue? Why the commodification of one disease?
One of the most disturbing effects of the focus on breast cancer is that many younger women are now being encouraged to get mammograms. At the union conference I attended last weekend, one woman got up and told all the young women to go have a mammogram. She was an authoritative speaker, this woman. I wonder how many of the younger women are about to follow her advice. Vigilance and breast self-exams are good, I think, since they enable women to check regularly for, well, irregularities in breast tissue. But pumping yourself full of radiation at a young age seems to me to be fraught with problems, too.
Can this type of prevention not be undermining its own potential benefits?
And what about other "female" diseases? How much research funding are they getting?
What, in the end, is the effect of advertising on disease management and on healthy solutions? Perhaps we are fixated too much on that Great Maternal Breast, as if the health of the breast itself were symbolic of the health/disease of our family values.
God knows, Bush Whackers love their breasts. But perhaps we need to to be weaned off, just a little, so as to gain some perspective.
Good-byes have to be the oddest things. At their worst (or best, depending on your perspective), they are fraught with anxiety, sadness, and sometimes even eagerness for reunion--all at once. But the oddest kind of good-bye is the good-bye you say to someone to whom you aren't really close. It leaves an odd feeling in the stomach. It's not sadness (because the person is leaving); nor is it regret (because you wish you'd been closer to the person). It's just the oddness of finality. And aren't we conditioned to resist finality and to mourn any relationship that has had some good in it, even if the goodness was not substantial enough to be significant? Perhaps it's also the oddness of not really knowing whether it's true that you won't see the person again. It will be a crap shoot: you don't know that you will indeed keep in touch. You also don't know for sure that you won't. Maybe it's that unpredictabilty as it relates to your own behaviour that produces the weirdness. What a strange psychological space.