Returning, again, to another present, you think about the fact that, when you first heard this conversation, you had thought about what it might mean, and what your own thoughts might mean about you, all in the course of 30 seconds; even though it took you much longer to write all these thoughts out, and even though you’re sure it must take much longer than a minute to read them. In attempting to summarize them, you find that these ideas were much clearer in your head, instantaneous even, but that their explanation is actually quite lengthy, and that the mutable words—easily shifted, as an adjective could be qualified or removed, a period replaced with a semicolon, a comma or aside added—are to an extent disloyal to the concrete thoughts they are intended to convey.
You wonder if this is reflective of your own profundity, or if everyone’s thoughts are this difficult to express. You think about how all these jumps from one cultural reference to another indicate that these interstitial moments carry universes within them; how the spaces between letters, words and sentences may be canyon-like, even though we walk over them so easily; how our individual grammar, our path from object to object, our experience of time, may be distorted to great lengths with just a little bit of introspection. This thought makes you appreciate how miraculous it is that communication ever succeeds; but, it also makes you afraid of your being able to communicate your thoughts successfully to others.
Your advisor once referred to your writing as a series of loops, where one statement leads to another, but first you have to explain all the necessary causes and consequences of the initial statement, so that the second statement could make sense as a result of the first; but, by the time readers reach the second statement, they had forgotten what the first statement was, what the long thought-train was intended to prove. Your advisor repeatedly stresses that these loops are “beautiful”—you’re unsure if she really means this, or if it’s a translation of her native bella (which Italians use much more generously than Americans use “beautiful”), and, frankly, you’re too afraid to ask—but that they can make your writing a nightmare to get through.
You wonder whether this writing style reflects some profundity on your part, an excellent capacity for associative memory and close reading, to stitch together the manifold patterns of the world, to more accurately convey reality according to the difficult-to-comprehend (and even more difficult to represent) twists and turns that we experience.
You once attended a lecture wherein the professor referred to time as a kind of reticulated history; when you first heard this, you thought he meant that history oscillates between extremes, and that the only rectilinear progress is the accumulation of more history beneath the present, as one layer moves left, atop another layer that moves right, which is atop another layer that moves left, etc. Now, you think about the reticulum like a road that travels through a forest, winding back and forth upon itself—such that, as one drives down the road, one can only see about a 100 yards in the distance, then, upon turning, one sees another 100-yard stretch, while being unable to see where one just was—while the spaces between each stretch are obscured by the trees. You imagine that the metaphor accurately conveys what it feels like to read a sentence, where you can see all that follows a phrase, but where you cannot see all that the author has written at once.
You think about Dante’s opening to the Commedia, where, midway through the journey of his life, he found himself in an obscure and sinister wood, with the straight path lost to him. You think about how Dante’s Commedia is anything but a straight path, about how its labyrinthine movements carve through the bowels of the earth, and about how it is only at the end, when he reaches heaven, that the universe is laid evident before him, like a book being opened. You wonder if we are all looking for a way out of the woods, and question if it is ever possible to reach those paradisiacal heights described by Dante.
And, thinking about the woods, you think about pragmatic philosophy, about William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty, and about Wittgenstein’s fly in a bottle. You wonder if we are traveling through some medium of which our understanding is always severely limited. Would it be any easier, or any more worthwhile, to create a philosophy of ethics than to list all the times of one’s life when one should eat an apple rather than an orange? Will we ever be able to predict the future such that we could know what we will be hungry for at 2:43pm on June 15th, anno domini 2036? Will we ever be able to codify all the desires of each person, each organism, each cell on this planet, such that we could determine their optimal movements, like a delightfully orchestrated universe? Or are we better off looking at the world in 100-yard segments, trying to find the end of each godforsaken turn? What exactly is the score—is it a 3/4 waltz, a 2/2 march?—and how am I to dance to it?
You think about Heidegger using a metaphor from Kant in his Being and Time, where we are all walking through our own homes, with the lights out, trying to stumble our way past the furniture, trying not to trip on the steps as we make our way to bed. You think that we cannot know it all at once, but that we have to develop modes of familiarity and comfort—just as we cannot know what song will be playing in each elevator, all the sounds that will come to barrage us, but we can still let loose and tap our feet from time to time.
You think about the fact that you have been raised to believe that minds are deep, like wells, that we have all our thoughts and memories present at once, that we may draw from them at will—so that, when we take a test, and write a date next to a corresponding event, we are not simply following a learned pattern of stimulus and response (conditioned in the hours of studying beforehand), but are picking out the dates from our neatly organized mental charts.
You think about our minds as actually being flat, as following a sequence from one point to another. You think about the fact that you could never write down all you ever knew, that you could not recall everything that Heidegger ever said or recite passages of Being and Time from memory (and, even if you were able to recite it, you would only know a word at a time, in a well-conditioned sequence). But, in defense of your intelligence, you note that you can often recall sudden details from another author when you find similarities between what one person is saying and what another once said—that you can suddenly remember apples, when they are evoked as a kind of metaphor for oranges.
You think about the fact that you don’t like to take notes, because you find them to be distracting—that, when you focus on what’s being said instead of writing it down, you’re able to recall discussions and lectures when you’re asked about them. But, without some initial stimulus, you cannot evoke what you have seemingly learned by paying attention; you have no physical location you can point to and say: “it’s all here.” You wonder if note-taking is therefore useful as a way of having a fixed, certain location of one’s knowledge, or whether it simply leads to the amanuensis-like proliferation of the same words; whether the notes are the same as the texts they are meant to describe, and whether we ought, rather, to trust that we can go back to the texts or to our memories when needed.
You wonder whether note-taking truly makes recalling information easier, or whether it creates a greater textual haze through which we have to parse, more pages to read and words to listen to, before we’re able to be sure that it’s all already been written or said before. You think about the fact that people barely read through all the notes that they’ve taken, about the fact that most of the dates and events that we record in our notebooks are easily accessible through encyclopedias and online-data sources anyway, and you decide that it’s mostly just a waste of paper. You decide that other people use a page as a canvas on which to trace their thoughts, that you prefer your own head as your canvas, and that other people are not able to flip through all their old canvases, in much the same way that you cannot return to all your old thoughts.
You think about whether intelligence would be more accurately measured in the ways that we create associative maps, mentally or physically, and how successfully we are able to navigate those maps. In the age of Wikipedia, virtual indexing should be more widely appreciated—we should think of intelligence as a means of being able to follow our instincts, while having confidence in the direction those instincts will take us, while developing a familiarity with our thoughts as part of our bodies and as part of our collected network of documents, texts, images, etc. You hope that your decision not to take notes reflects your ability to be in tune with your body and your cyclical processes of being at a level which is greater than (or in a form which is different from) that of your colleagues; but, you fear that you might also be damning your years of study to a certain death, to waste and forgetfulness.
You still worry that your inability to take notes effectively and your wayward writing style both reflect some pathology on your part: an inability to stay on topic and to see the bigger picture, to remain within a singular pattern; an inability to mold the twists and turns of life so that they are clearer and more comprehensible. Your professors often remark that they enjoy reading your work, that they find great insight in it, and that your sentences flow smoothly together, even as they lament that the overall structure can seem contradictory or unclear. In thinking about time, in attempting to always situate yourself in an instantaneous and fading present, you often think about all there is that you are not seeing; when your professors make these comments, you wonder whether they are seeing what you are not, or whether you are seeing your own temporal blindness, while they are not seeing theirs—whether there is a greater, unseen mental picture to which you have to accommodate yourself; or whether your offering, your insight, is that there is no such picture.
You wonder whether parsing out your ideas in the style of Analytic philosophy—with each idea subdivided into points 1, 2, and 3, and with each point subdivided into sub-points 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 2.1, etc.—would make your writing easier to comprehend on a spatial level. You think about the fact that you like to use em dashes as precisely that form of temporal distortion/expansion—that definition of a term which takes place between one word and another, in the middle of a sentence—which you are trying to discuss. You think about how much you can accomplish linguistically, just by changing the way your words are arranged on the page. But, you worry that altering the way that you present yourself would also alter the content that you present, i.e. that your ideas only make sense in their haphazard form, that their haphazardness is what is novel and, in its being truthful, inevitable.
You think about the idea of irony in relation to history, where irony relies on the understanding of a rhetorical form, is able to underline the behavioral patterns present within that rhetorical form, and thereby highlights or break from the flaws intrinsic to that pattern. You think about irony as being particularly evident in the moment, like when a character breaks the fourth wall, and you feel that you are able to laugh at and escape the pattern underlined by such meta-narrative breaks, even if you are unable to create a succinct and clear definition of the pattern that the author is ironically critiquing in that moment. You think about the fact that this idea is clear to you, even though you lack an explicit example, and wonder how many examples would be necessary before this pattern could be acknowledged by a reader, or whether it is already acknowledged via that same mode of recognition which causes an audience member to laugh when films like Clue and Knives Out parody the unrealistic tropes of detective fiction. You think about the fact that you yourself feel much clearer in your idea now that you have been able to list two paradigms of it, but feel that you were still able to trust in it regardless.
You wonder whether irony ought to be left to that inexplicable mode of recognition that you have attempted to identify above, or whether we ought to record every instance of our lives so that we could document and thereby discover our behavioral patterns. You wonder whether the escape from addictive or unhealthy behaviors is more easily achieved through an ironic and literary awakening, through aesthetics and instinct, or whether we ought to put ourselves under meticulous biometric observation (so that we could finally and reliably determine what it is that we will want to eat at 2:43pm on June 15th, anno domini 2036).
You think that your being able to come up with examples like the “2:43pm etc.” one above is key to your capacity for humor: that you are repeatedly able to deploy the same phrase to denote the same event, so that it becomes an ironic way of identifying a pattern. You wonder to what extent humor relies on being able to create instantiations of a rule (e.g. the aesthetic rule is laughter, and comedians are able to guide their behaviors in constant search of a laugh, even though they are unable to define, in an ultimate sense, what humor is). You wonder whether you are more easily able to recall your examples (and others seem to easily be able to recall them), because they are humorous, or if the causality is inverted, so that they are humorous because you have been able to recall them.
You think again about the comedian in search of a laugh, and liken it to each artist being attuned to some aesthetic principle, to each person being in search of a goal—about how we are all melodically trying to keep in tune with a score that we are still learning, and that we can’t quite make out. You think again about intelligence as a kind of familiarity with the darkness of one’s home, of one section in Hundred Years of Solitude, where a blind, elderly woman is still able to cook, clean and be the matriarch of her household, simply by following the sounds and rhythms of the day—like a cartoon mouse being carried by the yellow, ethereal curls of cheese waft—and you hope to someday find that kind of melodic trance with the universe.
But, you worry that maybe these jokes are themselves part of a behavioral pattern which is unhealthy and addictive; that, if you were to measure out and record your behaviors and moods, you would find that they are ultimately unfulfilling; that you ought to submit yourself to greater observation to evade these patterns, even though you are to an extent unwilling to put in the effort required to do so. You think about the dichotomy between instinct and effort, ease and labor, and you wonder if history is nothing more than the extent to which we are willing to exert ourselves in order to parse out what has happened, to submit ourselves to observation, to delve into the gaps between each moment.
You wonder, then, if the difficulties of re-reading through our notes, reading tomes of history, literature and philosophy are representative of those difficulties in pushing deeper into our subjectivity. You wonder whether that reading is repetitive and wasteful, or whether we conjure that image of waste as a means of excusing ourselves from attempting that labor. You wonder what role trauma plays in our inability to parse out that history, and what extent our lives are ruled by trauma and repression—from the most extreme examples to the seemingly mundane events we go through and forget day-by-day.
You think about your own cognitive behaviors, and a pattern that your parents call the “monkey-monkey-underpants” effect. The name comes from this scene in Gilmore Girls, where Lorelai attempts to document her thoughts in order to understand them (much like you are doing know), and complains that her mind is a connotative jungle with no clear path from one idea to another, using “monkey-monkey-underpants” as an example of her cognitive absurdity. You think about the fact that people often don’t understand what you are intending to tell them, and wonder whether that’s because your linkages don’t, in fact, make sense, or whether it’s because you’re better able to see those links than others are. (Is your “2:43pm etc.” an example of a rhetorical form with clear linkages, or an amusing but ultimately incomprehensible one?)
Indeed, the “monkey-monkey-underpants” trinity is supposed to be representative of something that doesn’t make sense, but you yourself are able to see a link between its three components. You think of a monkey as a common representation—probably owing to Curious George—of an unkempt and childish mentality. You can imagine a cartoon monkey wearing only white boxers patterned with red hearts, on a card intended to make fun of an energetic but unorganized recipient. You think about the repetition of “monkey-monkey” as exemplary of someone who is unable to contain themselves and speak clearly, the same kind of person who would run downstairs to the kitchen wearing nothing more than his underpants. You think about the fact that the metric character of the phrase—which compresses six syllables into a quickly uttered word—is indicative of the kind of speed that evades control and comprehension. When you say “monkey-monkey-underpants” to someone they get that you are trying to describe an over-eager and unorganized person, even if they weren’t able to predict the usage of that term.
As is often the case, you have difficulty determining whether you have different instincts than others, a different music to which you should dance—or if now is just not a good time for dancing. You wonder whether that energy ought to be restrained, or if it is a resource that should be explored and expanded. (You think about writing an essay entitled “Discipline and Punish in the Age of Autocorrect,” about how, now, even our most minute actions are regulated, and are regulated by indifferent formulae and machines: from YouTube’s and Facebook’s algorithms, to our phones’ constant changing of our spelling and grammar, to Google’s autocomplete function. You wonder whether hyphenating the word “Auto-correct” will highlight the dual sense of the word auto, insofar as we have been trained to correct ourselves, and insofar as we are being corrected by automatic, mechanistic processes.)
Being raised with a diagnosis of ADD, you have a powerful inner critic, who always repeats the word “focus,” but you have a hard time determining what exactly it is that you are supposed to be focusing on. Focus always presupposes the dominance of one behavior over another, something that you should be doing but are not, some other way of being than the one you’re in right now. You imagine that your experience with the word “focus,” has much to do with your awareness of time: how it slips quickly but painfully by, and how there is much within it that we are not seeing, much which we still need to learn to train our minds to see, much on which we can “focus.”
You feel that you always have two monkeys on your back, one perched on either shoulder, and each can come up with convincing arguments for why what you’re doing is right, and you have to learn when to trust the one that tells you to forget where you’re going and see where your instincts lie, and when to give in to the other that always demands a destination in advance. In battling these two monkeys for all your life, you feel that it’s impossible to have such a plan, but still fear that maybe it’s your own pathology—your own inability to see ahead and stay within the lines—which prevents you from living like others do.