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in love with my philosophy professor
Sep. 18th, 2024 12:27 amIn my first year of college I read Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. Not in its entirety, mind you, nor with any amount of enthusiasm, a denser text than I’d ever managed I struggled through pure force of will reading and re-reading night before, morning of, minutes before my lecture, highlighting in three different colors as if the visual stimulation could somehow jumpstart my brain into comprehension. It was a 100 level course but even in the introductory lesson I immediately grasped a sense of suspension, classmates referring to texts—Kafka, Camus, Plato—that I, woefully under-read, had never studied and had no foothold in. When I spoke into the empty receptacle of the air I did not look for responses from my classmates, moreso to hear my own voice, admittedly for partly vain purposes but also to know that it could still make sound. My professor echoed my words with a better shape; I stared only at her face, blocking the rest of it all away, the classmates, my friend next to me watching the physical measure of my own inadequacy, my ego and my shame—distance, distance, distance.
I find it easier to write about things that have passed than are still happening, a certainty in facts that have already expired into remembering. Actually it is only my third week of classes, and I have not read Kierkegaard so long ago that I can truthfully refer to it in the past tense. In lecture what I thought A meant about esthetic living was proven wrong, but I still clutch onto the fragments that are significant to me, this idea of holding life at an arms length, as if it were a work of art. A disassociation, a romanticization: myself as the protagonist. But unlike A, it was not endless possibility I chased, not the boundlessness of beauty, but the existence of it in itself, a whole object that I could hold and something that would stay. On the weekends I drank too much, puked up everything I regretfully held in my adjusting stomach, losing, in the groggy mornings, the intricacies of the memories, only impressions of senses: dew from the grass on my socks, my body twisting frictionlessly against the merciless exhalations of collective drunken pleasure, and starbursts of smoke held for too long in my ribs and my lungs. A distillation of a desire put into purpose for one night. To be somewhere outside of myself, with the other people, on the other side of the glass for once. In a strange way this distance from my body brought me closer to it, letting myself loose pinballing shattering the fragile structures of my imagined reluctance. To stop thinking so damn hard. In other words: to be consciously unconscious.
The foremost method to hold beauty is to be beautiful. I believed this for a long time, so what I desired was to be desired. A persistent cynic in my own subjective reality, I really think that my beliefs are nothing more than personal delusion without external reinforcement. What does it mean that for a year I starved myself into despair, that I had crossed back over into an era of desperate over-indulgence to repair what damage I had done, what does it mean that no one noticed either way? Now in college I am still reconciling a sense of distance from my body as it had been to how it is, the physical healing against my admittedly still-fixed mental state. This distance, an alienation within my own skin, was not like the serene alcohol-induced un-inhibition, but a lack of control that I berated myself for. I tried to rationalize myself into healthy understanding, but no matter what I did—gain or lose, up or down—felt like the wrong choice. I wanted someone to tell me I was doing the good thing. I wanted someone to prove it, but no one could. Partly this is why I had the idea that I was such a repulsive creature; it was as simple as that. If I was wanted I would be wanted. And yet. Le plus loin, le plus serre: the farther you go, the tighter it gets.
I am probably a little obsessed with my philosophy professor. She has a set of writings on her website, some essays I could wring out of JSTOR, other reviews, cultural criticism on the Washington Post or n+1 or something or the other, names that meant nothing to me but the idea of status. In a publication I hadn’t heard of, she interviewed another philosopher. He has written books about the “perceptual and sensual textures” of love and war. Distance from oneself. From one’s homeland. From the realities that exist away from, but nonetheless influence, one’s life. In class, Professor had defined alienation as “a problematic separation” between subject and object. Again, in the interview, the two embark on a brief excursion to define the difference between desire and longing, namely that desire requires an object of desire whereas longing retains the sense of absence without the knowledge of what, exactly, is missing. Exorcising my wanting did not make me strong, did nothing but make the delineations of what that was even blurrier. Laboring on it through navel-gazing half-essay. Now I know not what I want because all I want is to want, and to want well. I maintain that to be human requires some degree of self-reflection; to that extent, some degree of desire. Freire said it is a quality of humans to strive to be more fully human. We are not born whole, but we are born subject. And yet, most of us are lucky if we can even locate our object of desire, much less grasp it. In that case, longing might be the natural state of humanity.
I find it easier to write about things that have passed than are still happening, a certainty in facts that have already expired into remembering. Actually it is only my third week of classes, and I have not read Kierkegaard so long ago that I can truthfully refer to it in the past tense. In lecture what I thought A meant about esthetic living was proven wrong, but I still clutch onto the fragments that are significant to me, this idea of holding life at an arms length, as if it were a work of art. A disassociation, a romanticization: myself as the protagonist. But unlike A, it was not endless possibility I chased, not the boundlessness of beauty, but the existence of it in itself, a whole object that I could hold and something that would stay. On the weekends I drank too much, puked up everything I regretfully held in my adjusting stomach, losing, in the groggy mornings, the intricacies of the memories, only impressions of senses: dew from the grass on my socks, my body twisting frictionlessly against the merciless exhalations of collective drunken pleasure, and starbursts of smoke held for too long in my ribs and my lungs. A distillation of a desire put into purpose for one night. To be somewhere outside of myself, with the other people, on the other side of the glass for once. In a strange way this distance from my body brought me closer to it, letting myself loose pinballing shattering the fragile structures of my imagined reluctance. To stop thinking so damn hard. In other words: to be consciously unconscious.
The foremost method to hold beauty is to be beautiful. I believed this for a long time, so what I desired was to be desired. A persistent cynic in my own subjective reality, I really think that my beliefs are nothing more than personal delusion without external reinforcement. What does it mean that for a year I starved myself into despair, that I had crossed back over into an era of desperate over-indulgence to repair what damage I had done, what does it mean that no one noticed either way? Now in college I am still reconciling a sense of distance from my body as it had been to how it is, the physical healing against my admittedly still-fixed mental state. This distance, an alienation within my own skin, was not like the serene alcohol-induced un-inhibition, but a lack of control that I berated myself for. I tried to rationalize myself into healthy understanding, but no matter what I did—gain or lose, up or down—felt like the wrong choice. I wanted someone to tell me I was doing the good thing. I wanted someone to prove it, but no one could. Partly this is why I had the idea that I was such a repulsive creature; it was as simple as that. If I was wanted I would be wanted. And yet. Le plus loin, le plus serre: the farther you go, the tighter it gets.
I am probably a little obsessed with my philosophy professor. She has a set of writings on her website, some essays I could wring out of JSTOR, other reviews, cultural criticism on the Washington Post or n+1 or something or the other, names that meant nothing to me but the idea of status. In a publication I hadn’t heard of, she interviewed another philosopher. He has written books about the “perceptual and sensual textures” of love and war. Distance from oneself. From one’s homeland. From the realities that exist away from, but nonetheless influence, one’s life. In class, Professor had defined alienation as “a problematic separation” between subject and object. Again, in the interview, the two embark on a brief excursion to define the difference between desire and longing, namely that desire requires an object of desire whereas longing retains the sense of absence without the knowledge of what, exactly, is missing. Exorcising my wanting did not make me strong, did nothing but make the delineations of what that was even blurrier. Laboring on it through navel-gazing half-essay. Now I know not what I want because all I want is to want, and to want well. I maintain that to be human requires some degree of self-reflection; to that extent, some degree of desire. Freire said it is a quality of humans to strive to be more fully human. We are not born whole, but we are born subject. And yet, most of us are lucky if we can even locate our object of desire, much less grasp it. In that case, longing might be the natural state of humanity.
