Thinking about the reasons why people choose to engage in or disengage from certain types of narrative or archives of their own experience. I mean this both in terms of making records (public or private writings or artworks or artifact collections/collages) and also in terms of setting up mental spaces of a certain character, with specific limits.

I experience long periods of absence from record-keeping due to actual fear of giving permanence to certain feelings, emotions, mental states, experiences; fear of injecting certain thoughts into others’ minds by giving voice to them. (How does this relate to parenthood and the desire to control our children’s perceptions of us before they are even born?)

Changing archives: the strong urge to purge journals of past entries that don’t fit with current ideas/ideals of self, only to discover later that the criteria upon which I was sorting no longer seem to apply — particularly judgments on spiritual vs secular, intellectual vs mundane, art vs artifice.

What qualifies as authentic? What qualifies as well-designed?

. . .

I don’t want to read a novel, or even a published diary (originally written on paper), or correspondence, or philosophical texts — I have a very specific desire to read a particular kind of early-90′s era online journal that very few people are making anymore. I still crave that particular form.

. . .

My belly is so taut (taught). It’s hard to stand from sitting. My back aches. I have been straining so hard to fit my life into some sort of framework in anticipation of this baby, there is no room for anything else. In my mental life, I feel constricted, I want to open out. I want to stick certain pockets of the past back onto me and expand out through them, but I also realize this is incorrect. I shouldn’t be attempting to fit back into old clothing I’ve outgrown, in hopes that wearing it will make me look nice enough to work up the courage necessary to enter the new clothing store. There is no need to reclaim my lost selves. I have not lost them. There is no losing anything that is actually real. The past is not a place to look for myself. The past is not a place at all.

Where has my mind been all this time? The same place, all along. Radical inclusion is radical exclusion. Reject all possible personas — embrace their intersection.

. . .

Persistent problems with the idea of work, why my “work” never seems to be the thing I’m interested in. Some sort of box I create around it, so it becomes insulated from other aspects of my intellectual/perceptual life, when, in order to flourish, it should be constantly infused by them, part of a hydraulic, pulsing, live system.

“Work” is bland immediately — a task to be completed. It is shocking to me when I find myself talking about my “work” at social gatherings and other people have the impression it is exciting, that I find it interesting and alive.

Where *is* the aliveness in my life? The baby is unmistakably living — moving, kicking, growing, changing. Is this also true of me? I must be moving and changing too, even if I can’t always feel it.

. . .

It takes a very concerted effort to live this close to the beach without experiencing the ocean every single day, without really even noticing it for weeks at a time. Stop doing all that work to avoid seeing something so beautiful. Identify the effort you’re making and STOP.

For me, writing and speaking seem to be very different pathways to getting words out. When I write, I don’t necessarily hear the words in my head before I mark them on the paper. When I am writing well, I rarely seem to have any idea what I am going to “say” before I say it. But with speaking, I seem to think knowing what I’m going to say is a requirement to break silence at all, while most other people do not. People talk about extemporaneous speaking, thinking out loud, having no filters on their mouths. I don’t relate to this. If I want to brainstorm, a pen is required. I filter everything before it is spoken, and vast numbers of unverbalized thoughts are lost.

. . .

At the vision conference, my sixth or seventh time going, I had a dream about signal detection theory. It was either that wetting a kitten’s fur increased the signal-to-noise ratio, or that drying it did. I downloaded recordings of white noise on my iphone to try to drown out the snoring of the postdoc, my friend, sharing the hotel room with me. One of the mp3′s had a heartbeat embedded into it, but still I couldn’t sleep. I kept trying to hide from all the scientists, lest they expect me to be one. There were rumors of my advisor smashing a coffee cup on the floor. I continued to have nightmares about my talk for weeks after giving it. Nothing ever seems to change, except that some of the high school kids who used to come to the lab are the ones authoring papers and winning the Best Illusion of the Year.

I went to mass this morning for the first time since Easter. It is hard to go these days, I feel like I am viewing everything taking place at the altar from a great, great distance. There was a time I was so close to every word the priest spoke, so present in every gesture, I could see right into the bread as flesh and wine as blood, would tingle and shake with a sensation of actual participation in the sacrifice, every syllable imbued with this overlay of past in present. Now like so many others at so many times I stand there reciting my Latin from memory without even the grammar I so painstakingly learned holding it up. Everything held far away and at the surface. I think of the scandals. I wonder who I might have given the impression that any of the ritual were truly necessary, that any of the dogma and the structure were a substitute for God.

At home I read about Isabella Blow, I watch YouTube footage of the second plane crashing into the Trade Center, the towers collapsing, the TV anchors trying to stifle their panic. I didn’t watch much of the coverage at the time. It just didn’t occur to me, since it was all happening right outside. Having anxiety dreams again, I listen to recordings of Faulkner from the 50s, thinking the sound of a Southern voice might soothe me like my grandparents’ farm. I often think if I went back to Georgia I might finally be able to write about New York… of this whole decade almost I’ve spent here, so little is recorded that I wonder if I have really lived here at all. With the taxi drivers, I still pretend I am new in town so they won’t expect me to know where I’m going.

I haven’t been writing. I’m applying to graduate school, to study something related but different from what I’ve worked on all these years, and between reading and talking to people and researching programs in psychology of language, psycholinguistics, etc, it’s consuming most of my time and energy. It’s very exciting though, because no amount of reading and talking to people and researching programs has made me any less convinced that this is really what I want to do. As someone who’s experienced numerous seeming breakthroughs about What I Want To Be When I Grow Up that only held up for a few hours or days or weeks, I find this incredibly reassuring.

A couple days ago, I was making a vague attempt to study for the GRE, and the prep book I was using included a reminder in the math section that anything raised to the power of 0 is 1 (x^0=1). Of course, this is something I learned in middle school and used in many subsequent math classes, but I realized I didn’t actually know why the answer is always 1. The GRE study book didn’t explain it, and I don’t think any of my teachers ever explained it either, which was a big problem in my entire public school math education. Math, even relatively easy math like algebra and geometry, was often presented as a set of esoteric formulas to memorize, not as a rational system we the students could actually understand. We were very rarely required to prove the formulas we learned, just to spit them back out on the exam.

So I texted Mitsu to ask why anything to the 0 is 1. And he called me back, from his car, where he was driving somewhere with Sue, and both of them tried to explain it to me.

“What’s x-squared times x-to-the-third?” Mitsu asked.

“x-to-the-fifth.” I said

“Right,” he said. And then he tried to explain why that same rule of addition of exponents meant that x-to-the-0 had to be 1, but I didn’t understand what he was saying. Sue tried too, but I still wasn’t getting it, and finally Mitsu just said, “Write this down.”

So I got a pen, and he dictated the equation to me: x^(a+0)=x^a*x^0.

“Oh!” I said, looking at what I’d just written on the corner of my GRE workbook, “I get it now!”

The exact same words I hadn’t been able to understand over the phone, when written out in front of me, seemed totally clear.

“Text me if you have any more math questions,” he said.

Yesterday, I read this in an essay by George Miller, in the book Language by Ear and by Eye: The Relationships between Speech and Reading (which is actually the proceedings from a conference held in 1971):

“The written proposition is a tangible representation of an act of thought. It is a physical thing, an object, and it can be reacted to as any other object can. Thus writing made it possible to react to one’s own thoughts as if they were objects, so the act of thought became itself a subject for further thought. Thus extended abstraction became possible, and one of the brilliant abstractions recognized by the Greeks concerned the form of valid arguments. And so, out of writing, was logic born.”