It’s the first day of spring, rebirth, and the equinox, that turning point of the world, and it is beautiful and clear, luminous, springlike in all senses, in a way we rarely get here. I stayed up too late and life’s events and the semester have created turmoil, but I can see the spring so clearly and feel the world balance and shift itself. It is happening to me.
If you place yourself in the center of your life and grant yourself the authority you need — and turn off what Jonathan and Clarissa are now calling the (negative) “radio in your head,” Radiohead — you will see clearly and not carry the proverbial weight of the world on your shoulders. I am trying to do this, and I might succeed.
In graduate school all the professors were grappling with poststructuralist and postmodernist theory and I could not run with or against it at an intellectual level because I was so opposed to it viscerally. It was as though I were saying: but I do not wish to decenter myself, or to be knocked off center! I have only just gotten into a position to step up to the plate, or onto the mound and throw, and I do not want to step down!
Then in Reeducation I learned that everything I knew was wrong, that I as a person was wrong, that my vision was not to be trusted, and that as a wrong person I did not have the right to control of my days or plans for my future. Not being Christian I did not see these things as Christian dogma in a perverse version, nor as negative counter-transference from the patriarchy, and I took on the task that was handed me.
That is the strange burden I have been carrying since. The way to put it down is to place yourself in the center of your life and accord yourself the authority you need to act. As I say, decentering and deauthorizing were the name of the game in postmodernist theory, and my reaction against that was so very visceral. I should have taken that reaction directly to the right analyst, because it was and is key.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 