Privacy of Experience

Eight o’clock.

It’s a Gloria day. I’ve just gone to the store for the basic daily stuff and a Snapple tea for her. The sun is out and there are no clouds. Aesop heard a cat screech and went ballistic for a minute. I’m kind of pondering the nature of introversion just now. I wonder if it’s related to how assertive a person is, or unassertive as the case may be. I was thinking that Coleridge used his imagination and constant talk as a defense for a scared and nervous person inside. My old psychiatrist was very righteous about being an extrovert but it’s not for everybody, depending on how natural it is for people to be shy and withdrawn. Probably we’ll never know the truth of this… My mind hears music by Debussy from Images for Orchestra, taking me back to my birthday in 1995. My dad took me to Fifth and Pearl Shops downtown where I got a couple of new CDs. After that he drove me to the top of Skinner Butte for a look around at the city… I think that in my case, introversion has been a matter of having toxic parents; and yet how can I say this when I have positive memories of my dad since I became sick? Nothing is ever very simple. I guess that’s the thing to keep in mind. Also it’s so hard for people to communicate with each other: our minds are inevitably private and personal, like when you read Virginia Woolf. If it were not for language, we’d never know anything about each other’s thoughts. It is naive to say that everyone’s experience is the same. My psychiatrist was wrong at least on this point. And the Debussy keeps playing in my head, inaudible to anyone but me. 

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The Parthenon Question

Nine PM.

I tried to take a nap, but lying in bed, I could only hear echoes of the Steve Khan music I’d listened to very early this morning. Now I feel wooden like a zombie or some undead person. I’ll avoid Dr Pepper after this, for it kind of poisoned my system. Just before seven o’clock tonight it cleared up, giving us two hours of sunshine. Hearing Khan’s music vaguely recalls Ulysses to my mind; I was exposed to both as a senior in college, when also my mother had cancer and needed surgery. After Joyce I started reading Sons and Lovers on my own time, a beautiful book by D.H. Lawrence, back when our minds were not enslaved by a brainwashing god and government and it was okay to think and feel something human.

Much more recently I read Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf, who raises the question of whether the beauty of the world would endure or rather perish, and what will it take to preserve it. This is still an issue today, for those of us with open eyes and a feeling heart. While the world seems to be dying, we let the humanities fall to ruin: the things we used to live for that were worth living for. Woolf was undecided on this question, but I’m sure she wished for the beautiful things to last perpetually, like the trip to Greece to see the Parthenon at the end of the novel: a fitting climax and perhaps a statement of triumph for the works of humankind. So now, who’s going to write the next Jacob’s Room to answer the same question for our time?

Two Worlds

Two thirty. Kate was very smart. I miss chatting with her. She had a lot of common sense, and an instinct for the ordinary. She really liked the Carlos Williams poetry I introduced her to. She was not a Romantic at all, but rather was drawn to analytic philosophy, including Russell and the Vienna Circle. Once I understood where she was coming from, we could talk about Carnap and so on for hours and days, even years. She came along at an opportune time in my life… Funny. Only a few years ago, I had a delusional fear of Edgar Poe’s poetry. I believed it was satanic. Of course I don’t believe in the devil now. The medication took care of that. Before this med, there was alcohol for the psychosis. If religious delusions were real, then I wouldn’t fight them off with drugs and rigorous mental discipline. Schizophrenia is a disease. It is a condition of messed up brain chemistry. I agree with psychiatry and not talk therapy. Science is always the best solution. People don’t understand that the human brain is the base of behavior. The mind is no more than brain activity. And yes I am a materialist. Religious people can argue with me till kingdom come (which will never happen).

Eight twenty. I’m going through a weird kind of struggle. In 1862, Hugo thought materialistic philosophy was the privilege of the wealthy, while religion was the fare of the poor. I find this to be true in our own time as well, and I’ve been immersed in both worlds. Going from Hugo to Woolf was to revive my college learning, which really was a materialistic thing, with a few exceptions. Now I don’t know which way to turn. My old psychiatrist told me that I had fallen low, in terms of my status. This only made me rebel against him and turn to the church. Was that a mistake? Or will I come out of all of this the wiser? I should probably finish Les Miserables.

Notes on Virginia Woolf

Six thirty. Over halfway through Jacob’s Room, the plot finally presents a conflict. His girlfriend cheats on him. He sees her walking away on the arm of another man. The motif of perishability has shown up a few times, particularly that of the written word. Woolf is pessimistic that individuals ever really get to know each other, and all this language we use just falls dead. So that our private worlds can never be communicated to one another. At this stage, Woolf suggests that this is a lamentable condition. A few years later, however, in Mrs Dalloway she rejects the idea of violating one’s privacy. It makes me want to go and reread Mrs Dalloway. In her own way, Virginia Woolf deals with problems of epistemology, of knowing what we know, but she applies it very personally and humanely. It is by means of language that we know about other people, but language itself is frail and fragile. Communication breaks down.

Two fifty. Woolf also discusses how language can be preserved, for instance in the British Museum, where Plato and Shakespeare and many others join together in a great mind. Then she talks about people being historical functionaries, mere actors in the same roles for centuries on end. Jacob didn’t seem fazed by the girl’s infidelity. The book doesn’t have much of a plot. No real conflict so far, so I can’t imagine what will be the climax.

I might as well finish my reading. What can I make of Jacob’s Room?

Seven o’clock. Again, in the book I’ve encountered the theme of durability, whether beautiful things can last or not. Woolf doesn’t have a definitive answer, but raises the question recurrently. The other theme I keep seeing is how well we can ever know other people. Language is inadequate to really get at the truth of the people we think we know. And what we do know is perishable. So by turns, she brings up durability and perishability, never settling on one or the other. In one passage, however, she states that only beauty is immortal…

The climax is Jacob’s trip to Greece, especially his experience at the Acropolis. This beauty will outlast everything on the earth.