I haven’t been to this site in a long time. Thought I’d see what’s happened to the place. It’s the same. So I guess I won’t be back any time soon.
Something did catch my eye – a very old thread started by Dunamis about “the thing in itself”. I engaged Dunamis in some conversation about his ideas. He was so smart and articulate. And I think I finally sort of get what he was saying to me. But what I don’t get is my questions to him. I just do not understand why I did not listen to or respond to his points in any relevant way. If a practical joker were to take the content of our conversation, remove all contextual cues, and present it to me, I would probably identify myself as a hapless idiot in that conversation. Maybe I was just sucking up to him, trying to look smart, trying to comprehend and respond to the little that seemed to make sense to me. Maybe I was just asking questions aimlessly in the hopes of drawing him out, showing that I was smart but clueless, so perhaps he would descend to help guide me up his mountain.
God, that last sentence is too awkwardly homoerotic for me to continue the paragraph’s train of thought. And this one isn’t going much better. Okay, in the next sentence I’ll start again. My point is that while I can speculate on my past self’s intentions, I really don’t know what I was thinking or why. Even stranger, I’ve contemplated this temporal barrier to self-understanding before – I can remember thinking these thoughts at several junctures in my life. It’s like my life timeline is a long hallway, strangled with locked doors. The mental archivist has lost the keys, and so cannot reanimate these older selves cryogenically preserved in long-term memory.
But maybe it’s deeper than that. Maybe my brain has so restructured itself that I can no longer feel and think as my old self used to feel and think. Maybe that old perspective is physically gone from the universe. Maybe the mental hallway door is locked because behind it lies only vacuum. I can never stand in 20 year old aporia’s shoes again. Sure, I can speculate, I can tell stories about him, but I will never know what 20 year old aporia would have thought of my stories, how he thought his life was coming along. Maybe this is why it’s so hard for parents to understand their children sometimes: they have lost the mind of a child. A parent of sufficient age just can’t remember what it’s like to fixate on something, to want it so bad, that failing to get it means you have to scream until you feel your face flushed with blood and fury.
Or maybe I can’t understand my intentions back then because I had none. I had no goal but to get away from myself, from my thoughts, from my shame, from a certain hopelessness for the future. That’s why I came here. And that’s no mindset from which to undertake difficult philosophical conversation. No – you have to want it. You have to be really curious and excited to understand what’s going on in the world, in the mind, in language. I was just here to get away from myself, not to get into the world outside me. I wanted a nowhere, a mentally and emotionally sanitized world to be safe in. I wanted to be safe, warm, and staring intently at a wall of text that I would hardly remember the next day. I wanted to think just enough so that my brain would not recoil at how the hours mutely passed; how it did not know what to do with a life that was slowly ticking away.
It’s a rather strange feeling, looking back on a self from a couple years ago and feeling so distant. So incommunicably far away. And yet as you think on it, you slowly feel yourself coming back. But not really you; just snapshots, memories, emotions, and a resurgent self-narrative from today’s self. The narrative of a psychologist who tries to understand a patient. Not the narrative of a self understanding itself.
The old self can never be reanimated. It can only be reconceptualized. Beyond the locked doors, in the timeline of the mind, there is no cryogenically preserved self awaiting the order to thaw. There is only an empty room with walls covered in writing and rewriting by new selves. Palimpsest self-narrative. Like medieval monks, we have no way to save the old self’s self conception. We simply write over it, again and again, until our quills finally break.
