As the assiduous reader will know, this weblog exists so that I can extirpate from myself that whiteman’s voice and rediscover my own. It is, in other words, a playground in which I am learning for the second or third time in life not to be cruel to myself. One of the ways I am cruel to myself is through excessive obedience to destructive rules, and rebellion against this via the flouting of constructive principles.
At this moment I am tired, too tired. It is my fault because I am engaging in Chinese style self criticism over a text I am trying to edit. The detractors to this text have attacks not on the content but on the integrity of the writer. This, I discern, is what sends me over the deep end. And in various other situations over the past three days I have negotiated or argued, sought permission instead of just moving on ahead.
I tend to forget one has the option of leaving, that one is not obligated to stay, that one can in fact do as one sees fit, that one is grown up now and does not need a permission slip from all comers. That forgetfulness is one important reason why I stay up so late every night: I think now I cannot be seen, now I can be myself with impunity, no permission slip required. But the result is that I am so tired, I want to give up on everything. Perhaps I could allow myself more moderate retreats: leave conversations when I want to, and re-permit myself to sleep.
For respiration and re-inspiration we will post two paragraphs from my favorite recent post. This is a post inspired by Vicente Huidobro, according to whom words should have fun, jump and play.
I decided to do a Ph.D. the day I understood that this degree existed. This took place before I started kindergarten. Thus it was that my academic career and my full acquisition of formal language began almost simultaneously. My recurrent question was whether thought preceded language or whether, on the other hand, language informed thought and to that extent, produced it. As a person recently initiated into language I was already nostalgic for the direct contact with the world I was in the process of losing. I wanted to believe that that consciousness of and with the world was also a form of thought, but my experience of language acquisition and its influence upon my mental processes suggested to me that speech came before what we call thought. I was further concerned that when I learned to write, I might find that writing preceded speech.
Where would my intuition go then? I wondered. Would I still be aware, while sleeping, of the planets in their orbits and the crickets chirping, and the vaguer, yet still strong presences emanating from the trees and paintings, and gathering near my head?
I requested reassurance from several adults on these issues – reassurance they refused to give. “We, too, would like to believe that thought precedes speech, and speech, writing,” they said, “but these are Romantic ideas and we are not at all sure of their absolute validity. You will have to do a Ph.D. and conduct your own research on this matter if you are to discover an answer that will be satisfactory to you,” they intoned. “I will begin now,” I said, but I was informed that I must first attend elementary school, and that Ph.D. programs related to the topic I had just outlined would probably require that I learn French.
I was enchanted to learn that there was French, because this meant there were more languages in the world than I had realized. I began to study French as soon as I could.
These were the first choices I made in life and I did not vacillate – I knew from the beginning that among the reasons I had come to the world was to say things, draw pictures, and meditate upon this research question. I have tried to undertake this meditation in certain prison like circumstances, it is true, but on the other hand I have felt very much freed lately and I believe it has a great deal to do with centering upon the idea of first choices. I feel balanced then and notice the breath in my diaphragm. I feel taller. I feel that the pile of things to do rises not up above my head, but only to my knees. I feel that I am handling that pile easily with my left hand while with my right, I compose my magnum opus. I feel that the horizons have expanded. I feel I have new muscles. I feel that my vehicle has been endowed with a second engine. It is as though I were at a pleasant way station. We live here nicely now, but the tracks will be finished soon and there are many stops ahead.
That was what I said a few days ago. I do not feel it now because I am so tired. Yet when I wrote those paragraphs they felt more real than any of the darker paragraphs I have written. I began the custom of exhausting myself when Reeducation found me to be too positive. Yet they still feel truer to me than any lament, more genuine, as though they came from the source and not just some eddy or pipe.
For years and years I searched for those words, tried to make contact with them. I could see what they were but I could not touch them – they were on the other side of the glass – yet I knew they were as close as the next room, as the other side of my hand. Then the other day I found myself writing them, right from the navel. I am not giving them up.
Permission to live and to be someone, I note, was granted already by the mountains, oceans, and winds that hold us in their sandy bowl. I seek things I already have – the right to exist, to think, to write, to speak – from entities not actually empowered to grant them.
The right to exist: I note that every time I feel an urge to cry out to someone, I am my own person! I do not belong to you! I have let things go too far. Perhaps they are presumptuous and overbearing. Perhaps I have given them power over ne. I have a penchant for believing I need authorization. But our existence is already authorized by the stars, and is breathed at us daily by the sun and trees.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I get superego problems when I get tired. I lose the broader perspective, and see only the need to perfect myself. That is a ‘spirit’ I can overcome by enduring with it, and seeing that with bodily replenishment it does not endure.
The matter of someone walking into my punch is another thing. Hattie did it recently. And people will continue to do it. The only thing I can say is: “Sorry you walked into that punch. But all my life, I’ve been a fighter……”
Well, when I get tired I am vulnerable to getting swept along in the agendas of others, I lose my center and edges. (Now that’s interesting, though: being tired as a way to become the person who doesn’t hurt my mother’s feelings, because they don’t have center or edges … ! AHA – I stay tired out when I feel I need to be in an altered state, a weakened state, for others’ sake, to become someone not to challenging to others … THAT is why in Reeducation, with my X toward the end, and in this town generally I have refused to sleep, so I could be as malleable / weak / etc. as was desired, AHA … now I may have figured out a good enough explanation so as to take seriously this refusal to sleep and not do it!)
Your punch – if you refer to the discussion on the last thread, I don’t think that was fighter like, I think it was just belligerent. I was irritated and didn’t want to hit back because I didn’t want to be in the convesation in the first place and also because I’d have hit too hard. The things you were coming with were precisely what the provincial colonial elites say in the region I am studying to justify the continuation of a status quo which benefits them. I have a distinct impression that is not what you want to identify or be identified with.
Well to be honest, I was just moving around very slowly, inbetween doing something entirely different. The belligerance was a projection. I held no malice. I was actually quite distracted whilst talking to you.
OK, so a disencounter of distractions. What I learned is, I should have stopped it. I was distracted too, and so responding to comments as they came rather than stepping back and saying wait.
No, you underestimated your expertise in relation to mine, even though I kept saying that I was only guessing (whereas, obviously, you have done substantial work on this).
That was your main mistake.
NO. The scholars I am dealing with are the ones who underestimate my expertise in relation to theirs.
You were unfortunately using some of the same points they begin with, as I have already said.
I kept saying then stop – I don’t want to discuss this at a conversational level now. I do not want to be needled about it with elementary questions like, “Well, you do realize Americans sometimes cannot understand other cultures, right?”
I have already explained at great length that your comments were unfortunately the same that these Brazilians use to start their conversations and that it wasn’t helpful to also deal with them coming without context on the blog.
I have already pointed out that this was not the point of that post.
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But really – not a huge deal – I was in the middle of writing something related to experiences I have not worked out, which experiences have to do with boundaries – and I reacted to words on blog – all of this was not the time to be tangling and I was in before I knew it. C’est tout.
OK. I will stop speaking to you at your request.
What I was talking about anyway, was something different from what you were referencing.
I was trying to convey something about primary defence mechanisms, not “culture” or something simple at all.
Primary defense mechanisms – in the original conversation? I’d say mine kicked in when you seemed to ignore my request to not get into the whole thing further just then.
I am not requesting you to stop speaking – just strongly suggesting we chalk the whole thing up as a Weird Event and not worry it.
We can take up the primary defense mechanisms question sometime, it’s interesting.
Jennifer: What did you say that devastated me? It must have escaped my attention.
If you have something to say, e-mail it to me, don’t post remarks over here.
Your writing is getting incomprehensible.
Haha! I know. Hattie made a comment on Jennifer’s blog that Jennifer did not like and she said so in no uncertain terms. All of this is, at least at one (important) level, about all 3 being tired of being told they are from countries with bad external and internal policies and need to think about it (as though they had not). I am not impressed by the “I am a fighter” stance or the “punch” – especially if, when other people respond in some sort of kind, they’re told they’re just being irrational. I find that quite problematic. Gotta remember though: the actual enemy is Da Whiteman!
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Jennifer wants in part for me to see that because of what US history is and the way many Americans act, certain Brazilian scholars react to certain statements and suggestions in certain ways. But I am already so acutely aware of this that it gives me writer’s block on this paper. If I worry about it TOO much, I can’t get objective, and if I am TOO understanding about it, I forget that THEY may in fact be far more invested in the status quo than I. These elements are hard enough to juggle in themselves. Then added to it is my visceral reaction to certain experiences in Brazil years ago that I have to keep a distance from for current purposes and also resist generalizing from. This last part is the most difficult.
Thanks for the clarification! And that’s a good way to look at things.