My intention was to leave it at that…work on putting together The Grand Narrative (see yesterday) and letting my brilliant statement of intent sum it all up for awhile. You know, get down to business? However, I am still figuring and when I figure I have to put some of the things I figure somewhere. I usually remember everything, but rarely at the right times and some ideas I am scared I will not be able to retrieve until it is far too late.
They are big and some of them are frightening. They flash like fins in waves. I am good at riding them now, sharks and whales and waves, silvery pompano. If you were me, you’d realize that was simply effusive gratitude for the chance to have seen in my mind the ocean.
This project contains a lot of fleeting moments, flight of idea. That is one phrase I think I’ll keep from the “mental health” model. Flight of idea…it is a beautiful thing in my mind.
A bird and a thread unwinding.
I am getting my language back, slowly and in fits and starts. I seized it fully for a minute and then it was badly wounded. I could hardly write at all last winter. That’s why I stopped writing. That’s not true. I wrote some very poor essays for an online psychology course or two. Balked at the DMS-IV-R, but didn’t really care all that much. For months I was completely detached, because of the risperidone…emotional blunting, de-vestment. I read all about it all and about how trauma changes the structures of our brains and about how the onset of “mental illness” is often preceded by trauma, either acute or sustained.
Then I got a job and I learned some more. It has been a very busy year.
I have saved some people’s lives, just by being myself.
What a wonderful thing that is…
Other people I have hurt, also by being myself. That happens.
I figured out something today and I know it is true in some very real ways.
There is a certain feeling of resonance when an idea is referenced and cross-referenced and tested and supported and verifiable by evidence…truth?
I can back this up…and so can a lot of other people. This is about what it means to be human in this world, to be human in ways that we did not consider, but that are actually very important.
That affects us all in ways that are more profound than you can even imagine at this particular point in time…unless, of course, you are one of the rare souls who have actually read this blog in sufficient quantity to understand the simplicity of the meta-theme, if you can do the math.
In that case, you know exactly what I am talking about.
Someone said of Don Delillo’s Underworld, “…the best books teach you to read them.” Well, this is not a best book, it’s a clumsy narrative blog written by a lovely human being who is just trying to keep making sense…to stay alive in the best possible ways.
So, here’s an idea: Pick a day or a week…random…see what I wrote…if I wrote anything at all…chances are that I did, somewhere…but, there are gaps here…still, I have a solid record of some long, strange stretches of time.
I tore apart a lot of ideas and took a lot of pictures.
Some of it holds, some of it is absolutely preposterous. Some of it is probably fairly upsetting. It may even enrage you. I’m sorry. That was my point…that when we are kept from understanding ourselves and the world, we get scared and when we get scared…we get angry and confused and we lash out and skitter back and forth. We are animals. That’s how we work. I’d say that humans are unique in that we are all prone to being frightened by ideas. Which is a little strange. Then again, our whole world as we know it has been built on ideas. A lot of them are really bad.
I think that ideas scare some animals, intelligent ones…dogs that whine when it’s time for their companions to go to work?
I wonder if the whales and dolphins that beach themselves are scared of ideas?
That hurts my heart.
I don’t need to say anything else.
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