Feeling Intellectually Alive

on forgetfulness, boredom, desire and aliveness.

[forgetfulness]

Annie Dillard stalks a muskrat. For forty minutes she watches him, and he doesn’t seem to see her at all. How could he? She is no longer there. She is perhaps the creek, the night sky, the muskrat himself. A bush! Who knows? She is “as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate.” Wonderful. Dillard writes with an intensity that borders on religious devotion. When I say I love Dillard, this is what I mean.

I look down, kneel, and press my cheek on my cat’s cheek. It’s been raining for days here. A grey cloud hangs low and doesn’t dissipate. Could it be the same cloud from yesterday and the day before? I close my eyes, he purrs. For a moment here, I rest.

Iris Murdoch looks up and spots a kestrel. Thank God for that. She forgets about herself too. She forgets about her “anxious and resentful state of mind.” Unselfing. The temporary suspension of the relentless ego. You get out of the way, and wouldn’t you know it, you feel your most alive.

“It is second nature to me now and I have noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

It’s true. In a constant conversation with myself, from my room to the kitchen, the bus to the city, morning and night, the computer, the phone, it’s enough. There is nothing new there. Nothing that hasn’t already gone stale. It’s a skill to know when to give it a goddamn rest.

I give it a goddamn rest.

I stop and let myself out. I look up and rip at something that feels like the centre. It is not the centre. I am not the centre. What a relief.

Other times, I stay inside. I sit on the little brown couch near my window and slide the book from my desk over to my lap.

Where was I? Not here.

But soon I will return and what will I find?

Vangel Naumovski, Heaven and Hell 1962

[boredom]

There is a very insidious form of occupied emptiness that we mistake for boredom. This compulsive consumption of content stimulates engagement but forecloses the very possibility of any form of sustained attention. It feels much worse too. So much worse! Like life is devoid of meaning. Fragments of this, fragments of that. What is interesting anymore? Could it be that nothing is interesting anymore? Would you believe me if I said that?

Georg Simmel, a German sociologist, observed in 1903 that the incessant over-stimulations of city life tended to produce what he called a ‘blasé attitude.’ A sort of indifference that protected people from the noise and the busyness. Years later the architect Siegfried Kracauer, a close student of Simmel, took this observation further. City dwellers, deep in the hustle and bustle of it all, “eventually no longer know where their head is” he wrote.

Kracauer’s remedy was simple: “extraordinary, radical boredom.” This was how we would be reunited with our lost heads, because actual boredom, let me tell you, is rich and full of possibility. It can make you feel whole again! Fascination, that invigorating feeling, very much lives at the far side of boredom. And it’s only when you’re alone, with nothing to do, that you can have a peak at the absurdity of your mind, the unscripted ideas that surface, the strangeness of life right in front of you, right inside. And what about outside? What can you finally see? Should I bring back the muskrat? The kestrel? The black freckles on my cat’s lower lip? To be bored is to learn to notice. What you want, what is there, what is not, how you feel.

Adam Phillips writes that boredom is an important developmental achievement for the child, yet it is often reprimanded by adults. Adults expect children to be endlessly interested rather than allowing for the child to take the time to figure out what interests them first.

“Boredom is actually a precarious process in which the child is, as it were, both waiting for something and looking for something, in which hope is being secretly negotiated; and in this sense boredom is akin to free-floating attention. In the muffled, sometimes irritable confusion of boredom the child is reaching to a recurrent sense of emptiness out of which his real desire can crystallise…” Adam Phillips, On Boredom

A secret hope' I see. Something being negotiated privately. What might come? You don’t know it yet. I don’t know it either. Leaving the phone alone is almost like an act of faith then. Leaving everything alone. You are protecting a space for something that might arrive, without guarantee. Can you endure it? Faith is about endurance. Boredom is about endurance. As Kracauer suggests, “you stay home, draw the curtains, and surrender.” For how long can you stay like this?

If that is too soft a statement, he also said:

“People today who still have time for boredom and yet are not bored are certainly just as boring as those who never get around to being bored.”

[aliveness]

The sensation of being alive is not a given. It doesn’t come simply because we are here and breathing. I’m certain one can very much be alive and not experience that aliveness.

D.W. Winnicott, a psychoanalyst and paediatrician wrote about the ‘true self’. The self that is rich because it is non-compliant. It is the child who is still committed to play rather than adaptation and is capable of spontaneity and surprise. In other words, the person that remains different from others, and therefore cannot be predicted by others.

But when the environment demands too much adaptation too early, the child builds a kind of protective shell. (You’ll notice a pattern soon.) They become more agreeable, more legible, flattened. Their true self starts quieting. They become more and more like everyone else.

We all have a false self, it’s necessary. The vulnerability that comes with remaining true to yourself at every single turn is too much to take on. But to live a life primarily within the margins of what is expected of you, or what is decidedly normal, is to stab your true self in the heart with a blunt knife and slowly deflate.

Arendt in The Life of the Mind writes,

“The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse. Without thinking, the human mind is dead.”

Thinking, for Arendt, wasn’t merely a problem-solving tool, or a reasoning toward conclusions and certainty. It was a way to keep questioning the self, holding things open and remaining in the question over and over again. An unexamined self, one that is seldom questioned, risks remaining unchanged.

So now we know ‘aliveness’ and we know ‘deadness’. We can equate deadness to sameness. A terror of complexity, uncertainty, difference. Deadness is the abolition of all three. What Christopher Bollas calls the ‘fascist state of mind’. It’s a form of protection. A way to hold on to something very tightly, something you recognise and understand, in a volatile, ‘out of control’, strange, strange world.

But an overly-familiar world is a world that is no longer true. Because what is true keeps changing. And what keeps changing must be freshly examined and newly understood.

Vangel Naumovski, Black Cradle of Bright Life 1963

[intellectual aliveness]

The pursuit of knowledge and the experience of falling in love share the same movement. It’s a reaching across a gap towards something that remains unknown. This is what Carson writes in her essay Eros the Bittersweet. The reason that falling in love and coming to know make us feel so genuinely alive, so electric, is that both position us at the edge of ourselves. We’re grasping at what we don’t yet possess.

To be aware of a desire, is to notice a little opening, (a question, an emptiness, a gap) and to notice a little opening (incompleteness, mystery, potential), well, a little quiet time. A little boredom for “free-floating attention to crystallise into a desire.”

What else? New, unfamiliar, sometimes difficult books. New, unfamiliar, sometimes difficult experiences. A little opacity here and a little opacity there. A new language, a new framework. What about a strange way of existing? What about a new world? What about Lispector? What else don’t I know? Goodness, what do I know? The more I seek to understand, to close the gap, the more the gap seems to widen. There is too much to know in this world for the gap to ever close on its own. So what has happened? Well, likely I got distracted. Likely I forgot to participate. Likely I forgot it was all very serious.

Here I think of Sontag. A voracious reader. Unstoppable really. Reading for her was a way to feel active and alive. And even if she says time and time again in every interview that she was not a very disciplined writer, you will learn that Sontag is full of contradictions. Like most writers, she kept a journal. Many journals. In them, lists of books, films, music, philosophers, writers. Who else can she read? What else can she learn?

I admire her capacity for enthusiasm. That’s what I think of when I think of Sontag. Enthusiasm. Committed to what she called the ‘wisdom project.’ I admire how she preserves and protects her receptivity to the world. It requires a degree of seriousness.

To take yourself seriously, I think, must mean to take the world seriously. And if it’s easier, which most often it is, one can go about it the other way around. See the world as it is (go back to the beginning, back to Murdoch). Odd, changing, fascinating, painful, miraculous, intense, subtle,

In At the Same Time, Sontag writes:

“I'm often asked if there's something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview, I heard myself say several things. Love words, agonise over sentences, and pay attention to the world. Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth that I thought of some more recipes for writer's virtue. For instance, be serious, by which I mean never be cynical, and which doesn't preclude being funny.”

[cynicism]

A deadness in a life feels much like cynicism in a life. Everything is equally corrupt and equally meaningless, so what is there to do? I would say there are many things to do, but the door must be opened first.

Cynicism threatens to make us numb to atrocity, and indifferent to the possibility of change. Another protective cloak from the volatility of life. But what happens then?

Well, the world starts becoming smaller and smaller, closing in on you at rapid speed. In that small place, you might start to think that you really know everything there is to know. The walls, the floor, the switches. What else is there? If all the doors have been locked and there is no place else for you to go, I would believe it! I would believe you know it all! But you can’t be familiar with a whole world, that is absurd. You can only be familiar with a speck. That’s it. A tiny speck that you hold up like a prize. But nothing that small is a prize. Unless it’s a leaf, an ant, a grain of sand, but then there is no way you could know everything there is to know about a leaf, or an ant, not even a grain of sand. Those are not small things at all.

So maybe I wouldn’t believe you.

Speaking of things that are much larger than what we can see. The library in my neighbourhood. That big, light-filled building, brimming with change, from all angles, past and future, in this world and out of it. Preserve your enthusiasm! That’s what my library would say. That’s what I hear. I also hear a small child, they’re learning to walk. The child does not need to learn to laugh nor scream. The child laughs and screams as I scan books on the shelf. Chee, Patchett, Sedaris, Sontag. The personal essay. Never be cynical! Take yourself seriously!

bell hooks positioned cynicism as fundamentally opposed to the practices of love, community and liberation which she deemed essential not only for social transformation, but for personal wholeness (is your head stuck on now? can you feel your body?). She saw this dynamic play out on both intimate and political scales. In personal relationships, cynicism manifests itself as the refusal to believe in the possibility of real intimacy or the possibility of long-term loving commitment. So as it goes, we protect (!) ourselves from heartbreak by never fully opening up, which guarantees the isolation we fear.

Politically, cynicism tells us that people in power will never change and therefore everything will continue the same. A deadness in a life, a deadness in the world. If we’re too cynical to believe that resistance matters, we won’t resist. We can then definitely guarantee nothing will change.

Maintaining hope becomes a necessary practice for survival. Reading can be a discipline in that hope but only if you take it seriously. Only if you come out of hiding, lock yourself out, and pull yourself up with your whole damn body and stand at the very edge of what you know. From there, a world that does not end. From there, humility.

Intellectual aliveness isn’t seperate from our political or relational lives. It’s what makes honest engagement possible in the first place. Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil developed while observing Eichmann’s trial. Ordinary people committing atrocities not because of some monstrous conviction, but mostly due to thoughtlessness. An unwillingness or inability to think critically. When we stop examining our assumptions, stop paying attention, and find continuous learning too effortful or time consuming, we become very vulnerable. We hold a tiny spec between our fingers and deem that the whole world. Deem that enough. Deem that no one else’s. Do you know how easy it is to snatch something so small out of your hands?

Democracy itself depends on people who can think for themselves, and who can articulate dissent. It depends on people who know what cannot be taken away. What cannot be dangled in front of them because it resides inside a body. Inside a mind.

This is why totalitarian regimes always attack intellectual life itself. If you can’t think, you can’t discern. If you can’t think, you don’t know what’s at stake.

Vangel Naumovski, Green Oasis 1968

Reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek always feels like a prayer to me. A long, long prayer. This is what I mean when I say I love Dillard. I close the book and place it on my nightstand. A little hope there. A little patience. An opportunity to find myself, not through myself, not that again, but through the world, through people, art, poetry, forest, sky. Every night, and most mornings after, I resist everything else that is trying to pull at my attention. Pull at my enthusiasm. Pull at my compassion. I will not be tricked. Not now. This is all very serious.

I am reading.

I am not here.

I am not available.