Meantime, wanna hear about my new job? One of the loveliest things about it is that I don’t go into work until 11, which means having a couple hours every morning to do things like write and drink coffee and put something in the crock pot for dinner (all of which I have done this morning.) This is so perfect, because the morning hours are my most energized and self-motivated, so I think I’m going to love my new routine.

The job itself is also pretty great. I’m assistant teaching at a Montessori school, which for practical purposes means I’m shepherding a passel of young ‘uns through lunch, playground time, naptime, and all that. Now, I’ve heard a people say that moving twenty preschoolers from place to place is like herding cats. I beg to differ. It is like herding seventeen dogs and three cats. Most of the children will pretty much line up when you say and where you say. It’s the two or three recalcitrant strays that make it challenging; you need to get them to stay with you, but the more attention you devote to bringing them in line, the more likely your seventeen obedient pups are to mill around and scatter as well. I haven’t yet found a solution to this problem — it’s one I faced in my previous job as well, but only for one hour every week. Now I get to devote about half my workday to it, so check back with me in a couple of months and I expect I’ll be an expert. (Or I’ll have gone mad and started sticking rabbit bones in my hair.)

That frustration aside, I really love what I’m doing. I like small children. I’m always afraid that people will ask me why I like small children, and I don’t really have an answer. I’ve been around kids continually since I was one myself, so I’m very comfortable with them. They’re not all that different from adults: they crave power, stability, autonomy, and affection, and are figuring out strategies for getting each of these things. I have a lot of sympathy for that.

As I think about it, though, one of the biggest things I appreciate about children is how receptive they are to love. I’ve talked about that feeling I sometimes have, of feeling like I’m overflowing with love and have nowhere to pour it. It’s hard to give love to adults without building up a lot of trust first; I don’t mean my trust for them, I mean theirs for me. We are naturally skeptical of any stranger who wants to give too much to us. We’re used to the idea that people behave selfishly, and we want to know what they’re going to demand in return. Small children, though, are usually very comfortable with the idea that adults everywhere exist to love and nurture them. So I can see a little girl crying on the playground, and go over to her, and even though she just met me that morning she’ll crawl into my lap and sob out her woes about how these two other girls won’t be her friend, and she’ll let me cuddle her and comfort her. And a burden in my heart is eased.

So. I think I love my new job. And now it’s time for me to go do it. Cheers.

I suppose one could argue that the best way to approach a day like this would be to suck it up, put on my earrings and a good attitude, and go out to meet the day, full of anticipation for the wonderful things it may bring me, even though staying in bed till noon isn’t one of them. I say phooey on that. I’m sulky and I intend to sulk. Sure, I’ll be smiley and pleasant with the kids and their attached grownups, but I’ll be faking it. Part of being an adult with excellent emotional management skills is getting to be in a bad mood when you damn well please.

I had forgotten you died. I always saw you as living beyond them, joining the city of mourners, knowing but never understanding that your love, who died — as you thought — on the morning you were to marry her, was never yours at all. That underneath your measured courtship, your civil gallantry, two wild flames ignited, flared high, and snuffed out. You would have lived to an honorable old age and never understood it any better. You loved her with all the fervency you had; your heart was broken when she died. In your mind, forever, the names are “Paris and Juliet,” and though the rest of the world speaks of a different story, it could never sink in for you.

And I suppose that is why you died. You thought you were the gallant lover, fighting to defend your beloved’s grave, and you could not possibly have seen that your enemy was fighting not to desecrate it, but to die on it. You would never have died for love; only children and fools do that. Romeo was a child and a fool, and if you had lived past that day you would have always been faintly bewildered that both the lady and the glory went to him. You deserved far better. But deserving matters little enough in the rest of life, and hardly at all in love.

You should have lived. Your own story’s logical conclusion was a loving wife, a few handsome children, the respect of your fellow citizens. You would not have forgotten her, but you would have mourned and moved on. The strange conclusion of your first love would have given a prick of humility, always, to the way you saw yourself. I like to think it would have sharpened your sense of humor, taught you to hold lightly your assumptions about the world and your place in it. Their story would have faded into the foundations of your character, something that happened to you when you were young. Instead it is you who have faded, just one of a ring of stones surrounding their great pyre. Yours would have been a better life, but theirs was the better story.

To the county Paris, noble and patient, gallant and kind, loving far too calmly and too wisely for the story he found himself in: te saluto.

There’s been a lot of heartbreak and loss in my world over the last four months. Most of it not mine… I’ve had a bit, and it’s been rough, but several friends of mine have suffered much more catastrophic losses, and I’ve been close by during the aftermath. So I’ve been thinking a lot about pain, and loss, and the experience of dealing with them.

And yesterday I had a bout of stomach upsettedness, don’t know where it came from, but there it was, and I couldn’t help drawing analogies. Because both things go more or less the same way. It comes in waves, right? You feel generally unsettled and wrong, and impaired in your life… and then the feeling intensifies… and then you just can’t concentrate on anything because of how bad it is… and then your entire world is consumed by the awfulness of what you’re feeling, and it’s unbearable, and you think you’re about to die and wish you would. And then it’s over. You’re shaken, you’re white, but you feel, actually, fine. Like you can get up and live life normally. And you do, for a little while. And then the unsettled-ness starts to come back, and the whole cycle begins again.

Whenever I’m sick to my stomach, at first I fight the urge to vomit. Like I can somehow prevent my being actually-sick by preventing that obvious symptom. This holds out, sometimes, for the first couple of cycles, but by the time those are over I’ve clued in to how much better I feel if I just let it come. Sure, that moment when your whole body is given over to the sickness, that’s an awful moment. But you pass through it, and then you have the few minutes or hours of being okay. The awful will come back. But so will the okay. And because you have a body that heals, the awful won’t come back forever. (Though for some people it lasts a long, long time… I’m thinking of my friend with hyperemesis gravidarum, and honestly, I can’t imagine.) It’s much better to let the awfulness peak and ebb than to draw it out in sustained misery.

I’m learning a pain-coping strategy that is similar. There’s no need to dwell, to fix attention on what’s been lost, or what can’t be had. Awareness of it will creep in without a lot of effort or invitation. And when it does, when it gets so bad that I can’t distract myself, my strategy is to let it be, let it grow, let it get to that point where it consumes my body and my mind and there’s nothing else in my world. Because that state can’t last forever, and afterward I get a span of peace.

I don’t know if doing this gets the healing done any faster, but it feels better to me. More tolerable, even though the peaks of awfulness are absolutely intolerable. When I’m fighting the awfulness, trying to keep it from peaking, it adds another level of tension to my already-racked body. If I surrender to it, I am expressing my trust that my body is stronger than the awfulness, that I will heal. Even at the worst moments, that brings some comfort.

So here’s where we stand. One of Rorty’s biggest shticks is his rejection of foundationalism: the idea that beliefs and statements are, or should be, justified on the basis of fundamental, self-evident beliefs. Like a good ironist (and this is so much of why I love him), he doesn’t try to argue that foundationalism is wrong on any absolute grounds — just that it’s useless and often harmful. His vision of a utopian liberal society is one where everybody recognizes that their beliefs and language systems are contingent, and doesn’t let that stop them from proclaiming those beliefs, fighting for those language systems, in the public square.

Here you go, quote:

A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with suggestions for new practices. But this is to say that an ideal liberal society is one which has no purpose except freedom, no goal except a willingness to see how such encounters go and to abide by the outcome.
…
To sum up, the citizens of my liberal utopia would be people who had a sense of the contingency of their language of moral deliberation, and thus of their consciences, and thus of their community. They would be liberal ironists… people who combined commitment with a sense of the contingency of their own commitment.

All well and good. His vision holds together — there’s no self-contradiction, no inherent flaws. But I cannot imagine it actually happening. I cannot imagine a society where people were so content to let go of any kind of foundationalism, and simply let “truth” create and re-create itself through public dialogue and the imaginations of strong poets. Maybe I’m wrong, but apparently I believe that the need for foundational beliefs of some kind is deeply engrained in human nature. Not for all humans, maybe, but for enough of us to make such a society practically impossible.

And then again, maybe all. In the last half of the “Contingency of Community” chapter (which is where the quote comes from), I may have spotted a pinprick of a hole, just the remotest trace of a foundation in even darling Rorty’s thought. Let’s see if you agree with me.

Here’s a telling sentence:

This Oakeshott-Sellars way of looking at morality as a set of practices, our practices, makes vivid the difference between the conception of morality as the voice of a divinized portion of our soul, and as the voice of a contingent human artifact, a community which has grown up subject to the vicissitudes of time and chance, one more of Nature’s “experiments.”

It’s the very last phrase that I’m looking at. Of course he doesn’t mean it literally, doesn’t really argue that “Nature” is an agent conducting experiments through biological and cultural evolution. It’s a metaphor; but as someone who takes metaphors very seriously, he must expect to be held accountable for its use. He doesn’t argue it, but he does see things that way.

Here’s another one, italics mine:

In my view, however, the purported opposition between reason and its other (e.g., the passions, Nietzsche’s will to power, Heidegger’s Being) is one we can abandon when we abandon the notion that “reason” names a healing, reconciling, unifying power — the source of human solidarity. If there is no such source, if the idea of human solidarity is simply the fortunate happenstance creation of modern times, then we no longer need a notion of “communicative reason” to substitute for that of “subject-centered reason.”

Richard Rorty is firmly behind the idea of human solidarity. He’s passionate about it. He is correspondingly passionate about decreasing cruelty. I can’t find a place where he says it explicitly, but one could make a strong case that he believes it’s the most important social goal.

So. What I see here, facilitating Rorty’s anti-foundationalism, is a profound trust: trust that human solidarity is stronger than any forces that might destroy it. Because without that trust, you have to choose between your commitment to solidarity and your commitment to the “free and open encounters” between ideas. It seems to me that there’s an unspoken assumption in these pages that the latter will always strengthen the former, that the marketplace-competition of ideas will ultimately move society toward kindness and tolerance.

If that assumption isn’t present, then I would expect to see Rorty address it, to say something like: “My own commitment is to human solidarity, and even though I recognize the contingency of that, and that a future society might develop other priorities, I will fight (with words, of course, the only weapon permitted in the liberal society) for human solidarity with my last breath.” But I don’t see him saying that. Maybe I’ll encounter it somewhere, but I haven’t so far. And if he doesn’t say that, then he’s carrying the assumption that human solidarity is stronger and will win in the marketplace of ideas. And that — to me — seems just a little bit like a foundation, no?

And this is a bit of a leap, and might just be me projecting, but that telltale use of “Nature” in the quote above… well, any time someone personifies “nature” or “the universe” I call foul play, because if you attribute any kind of personhood to those concepts, you’re talking about a god. I don’t care if you don’t want to use that word because of its cultural baggage, but that IS what you’re talking about, my friends. And to see it pop up in Rorty’s work suggests to me that on some remote, barely-conscious level, he believes that God is on his side: that is to say, that Nature’s continuing experiments will result in the development of the kind, tolerant, liberal society he hopes for.

I’m not claiming that he thinks he believes this, still less that he thinks other people should believe it. I’m saying that this belief dwells somewhere within him, and that that is what allows him to contemplate his own ideas without agony.

Because this is the problem with anti-foundationalism: most of us care about something other than the prevalence of anti-foundationalism. Most of us have other goals for society, for ourselves, goals that we desperately desire should be realized. If we accept an anti-foundationalist position, then we must acknowledge that we are completely on our own in fighting for these goals. If enough other people happen to share them, they will probably prevail, but there’s no guarantee that that will be the case. If you truly believe this, and are truly committed to your goals, there must be a certain agony with which you contemplate the world: you want to win, you will do everything in your power to win, but you know that you may lose.

Some people have the emotional fortitude to live in this agony, and this is beautiful to me, and I salute them. I don’t see it in Rorty, though. He is very peaceful, very optimistic. I think that Rorty, like myself, has a little, niggling, irrational belief that it’s all going to be okay (and by “okay” I mean, “the way I want it, with love, kindness, and freedom prevailing”). I wonder if he knew it when he was alive. I wonder what (if anything) he knows now.

People say “Just be yourself” like it’s easy. Maybe it is for them, I don’t know. For me, the only time I can easily be myself is when I am alone, or surrounded by perfect strangers. If there are people around who I have any interest in at all, it’s as if little copies of those people appear in my head, and those copies all have wants and reactions and opinions, and they all get pretty loud. “Myself” becomes little more than a backdrop for all these other voices, and I can’t recover anything it might be saying until I’m alone again.

I don’t have any illusions about the accuracy of these voices. I’m not hearing what the people I’m with want and think, I’m hearing what I think the people I’m with want and think. Why my brain feels the need to construct these models, I have no idea. Well, okay, I have a few ideas, but no theories. And I can guess that it’s connected to several of the traits I like best about myself, like compassion and empathy, but it’s also connected to things I like much less, like lack of self-confidence and feeling like I don’t matter. It’s got its uses, but in general it really gets in the way of being a human being, which is something I’m trying to get better at, so I’d like to learn to turn it off.

I may have some strategies coming together. There are activities I do, like singing or spinning, that make me feel pretty solidly grounded in me-ness, and engaging in those before I go out helps a little bit. Taking a little time to think about who I am and what I want also helps… though again, not that much, because all it gives me is a laundry list to refer to when I’m actually in the social situation. It doesn’t help me connect more closely to the way I’m responding in the moment.

I had an epiphany, a few weeks ago, that has made a tremendous difference in my mental landscape when I’m alone. The epiphany was this: when I daydream about an interaction with someone else, the person in the daydream is also me. Sounds obvious when you say it like that, and also sounds kind of Jungian (it’s Jung I’m thinking of, right?), but it really hadn’t dawned on me before, not with that resounding gong of Important Truth. I do a lot of daydreaming, so that was good to realize (took less than three decades! Hurrah!) I think maybe applying the same idea to those copies-of-people that go shouting in my head will be similarly helpful: like, Hey Ginny, you’re not actually telepathic, so whatever the model in your head is saying must say more about you than about the actual other person, hmmm?

The tricky part is, I have to do that in real time, whereas when I’m daydreaming it’s just me and I have all the time I want. So I’m expecting it’ll take some practice. We’ll see.

What gets to me about Rorty is his sheer audacity. Philosophically he’s a pragmatist, veering towards relativism: he’s much more interested in what works and what doesn’t, what effects ideas have, than in matching ideas to some absolute truth. Dabbler that I am, I haven’t read any other pragmatists (except a wee bit of William James), so it’s possible my reaction to him would apply to the whole school of thought. But Rorty’s the one I read, so we’ll just talk about him.

This is what he does. I’m reading Contingency, irony, and solidarity, and in the first chapter he lays out a very simple and coherent argument that “truth” is only ever relative and contingent. The argument runs thus: “truth,” as applied to statements about the world, is a property of language. Language is made and used by humans, and the universe actually cares diddly-squat about how humans look at it. (Need I say that that’s a ridiculously simplistic and careless way of putting it? I’m just trying to get across the general notion… I’d love to discuss that idea, but if anyone wants to get into it with me please give me a chance to express it better. Kthanks.)

Then he does this:

But if we could ever become reconciled to the idea that most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it, and that the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary rather than being adequately or inadequately expressed in a vocabulary, then we should at last have assimilated what was true in the Romantic idea that truth is made rather than found. What is true about this claim is just that languages are made rather than found, and that truth is a property of linguistic entities, of sentences.

Italics his, bolds mine. Is it just me, or is that fucking gorgeous? It’s like, “here, let me show you exactly how this tool is broken, and let me continue to use it while doing so.” It’s more than philosophy, it’s poetry. It communicates the heart of his thought (as I read it, anyway) more directly than paragraph on paragraph of explanation could do.

I can see why the Ginny of three and six years ago wanted to throw him across the room, though. It is audacious, no? I don’t doubt for a minute that he knew exactly what he was doing… in other works I’ve read, he’ll do the same kind of thing — make use of words and concepts while explaining that they’re broken — and then he’ll point it out. To the well-ordered mind, it’s infuriating. But my mind is less well-ordered now, and I love it.

I still have quibbles with him — his attitude toward science, rationality, and argument lacks the charity he extends to almost every other kind of human passion. I don’t know if he doesn’t realize that it is a passion for some of us, or if he thinks it’s one that’s too dangerous to let live. But a relationship would be no fun if we agreed on everything all the time, so I’m pretty much just delighting in him all-around.

So I got home, sequestered myself, and did my favorite quasi-meditative activities… lying down and listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams, spinning while listening to my Arachne mix CD… and then I started to journal.

I had three topics in mind I suspected I needed to work on. I got through the first one. That was scary enough that I decided to emerge from the cloister into the world of brothers and football and meatballs and hamster families. And blogs, apparently.

The point of this story is that I really like that I can do this now — feel something wrong, know what I have to do to get at it, and then do it. It’s a big step for me. Those who have known me for a while know that my response time to emotional stimuli is, well, slow. I’m tempted to say glacial. Whereas some people, if you do something that makes them angry, will lash right back at you, it will take me about 24 hours to even realize that I’m angry. And then another 24-48 to decide what to do about it. This makes me spectacularly good in a crisis, since any emotions that might cloud my judgement don’t even show up until it’s all over, but it is not so great for things like relationships, where people have a reasonable expectation that if they ask “what do you want?” or “how do you feel?” I should at least know the answer.

Coping with this has been a continual project in my life, and I’m very pleased that I’ve progressed to this point: I knew something was off pretty much from the moment it went off. I still had to squirrel myself away in private to figure out what it was, but at least I spotted it.

It’s almost funny, because of the timing. I’ve had stuffed animals fall apart before, but this is the one I’ve had the longest and hugged the closest, and while he’s certainly aged, in 25 years he hasn’t lost so much as a tuft of fur. And suddenly the stitching on his neck starts to give way, and it functions as such trite and obvious symbolism for my life recently that I checked on him every time I woke up in the night, figuring it must have been a dream. Wasn’t a dream. Just a touch of hilarious synchronicity.

What you need to understand, and what most of my friends know very well, is that this bear is very, very special to me. I’d save him, in a fire, before I’d save my laptop, or pretty much anything else that isn’t actually alive. As a child I had a vast collection of stuffed animals, and I mean vast. Upwards of thirty. They all slept on my bed with me, and I would rotate conscientiously between them to make sure none of them felt left out or neglected. Choosing only a few to take with me on trips was always hard and required much thought. I won’t say how old I was when I scaled back on the stuffed-animal mania, partly because I don’t remember and partly because I’m sure that it was embarrassingly old (certainly a number in double digits, and possibly closer to 20 than to 10.)

The animals are still technically in my possession, all along the top of my old bookshelves in my parents’ house. A handful have come with me everywhere I moved. And the one, the most dearly-loved, the one I still sleep with if I’m sleeping alone, is the bear, Chocolate.

There’s a lot more to say about Chocolate, but I don’t expect it would be of general interest. Suffice it to say: I love this bear. When Tom Hanks wept at the loss of Wilson the volleyball, I totally got it. I would feel the same way if Chocolate were ever lost or destroyed. I’d get over it, I’m not crazy, and also I’m not a castaway without human contact… but for a short span of time, I would be pretty crushed with sorrow.

So last night he started to come apart at the seams, and it was a total shock to me. Dan said that this could be interpreted as a sign of psychosis, but I’m going to say it anyway: it was startling and uncomfortable to have such a sharp reminder that Chocolate is, after all, nothing but fluff and fabric.

Okay, now I’m going to try to redeem myself, because some of you are surely thinking, “She’s like a crazy cat lady but worse!” Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve realized something about myself which I kind of already knew, but never fully expressed. There’s a certain kind of energy — the kind you pour into other people, in intimate or nurturing relationships. Just like with physical or social or other kinds of energy, people have different-sized reservoirs of this energy, and it’ll vary depending on time of life and basic character and I don’t know what else. And I… I have a lot of it. A lot. Way more than I know what to do with. There have been times in my life where I’ve felt this almost physically, that I was bursting at the seams with love that had nowhere to go. It’s a weird feeling. (Does anybody else have the faintest idea what I’m talking about?)

Anyway, so in the light of these realizations, and my feelings about Chocolate’s near-decapitation, I can see that the stuffed-animal obsession was about having someone to love– lots of someones. I invented personalities and emotional needs for each of them, just so I could have emotional needs to tend to. (And I do this with a lot of other inanimate objects too. There’s a reason everything in my life has a name.) It wasn’t as if I didn’t have real people to tend to as a child– I played Lieutenant Mom to my baby brother and sister, and on the whole I delighted in that role. But even with that, I had plenty left over.

I don’t know when I really started to recognize that love is dangerous. I’d certainly gotten the message after age 12, which was the first time a boy I liked really hurt me. I value my inner peace and comfort, and am pretty protective of myself, and as I navigated my teens the voices of authority I heard were all telling me to be more protective, to hold back, to be careful. They can’t be blamed; I’m sure when I have teenagers I will be terrified at the thought of their giving their hearts to other teenagers. But all they did was reinforce my own fears. I was a lonely girl, but I was safe.

I started to break through the fears when I was nineteen and dated for the first time. From then until my graduation from college, I had a rich emotional life– much richer than it was before or since. And I learned a lot about loving real people, the complexities and the fuzzy ground and how a little pain is actually okay (and a lot of pain, while not okay at the time, is survivable.) And then I had my heart broken twice in quick succession, and I kind of went to ground again.

I feel like the last few months, since October, have been a process of rebirth. And looking at my broken bear this morning, and seeing that he is fluff and fabric, and realizing how intently I have poured my love into him anyway, because it has to go somewhere– all this has put the capstone on my new thought, which is this: I am a grownup, and I can pour my love into real people, even if they have nothing to give back, because I have a lot to spare.

I never did get the hang of Thursdays. – Arthur Dent

When I did get back to sleep, I dreamed someone broke a glass, and I tried to be careful walking out, but I wound up with shards all over my pant legs that cut me when I tried to cross my legs, and with a whole bunch of deeply-embedded shards in the sole of my foot, that hurt a lot when we tried to pull them out. If that’s symbolic of something, I don’t really want to know.

‘Tis a dark, dark day, Thursday. – Dan Brown (no, not that Dan Brown, the cool one)

And then of course when I woke up I got that dreadful-but-catchy 90s song in my head.

Blargh – me