1/30/22: The Fifth
Can I Handle it?
A Fever Dream
My recent posts have had a lot of substance and content, but this week I feel like doing a more personal reflection. So that’s what it’s gonna be. There will be substance and content still, but it’s gonna flow from me and not from “something I’m reading”. I’m going to start with a dream I had the other night, while recovering from the effects of my booster shot.
Here’s the dream:
I dreamed that I was talking with [REDACTED] about some topic like geopolitics, and then I noticed myself being more interested in the sensation of moving my finger than the conversation. So I cut him off and said it was boring, I'm leaving. He seemed distraught.
I left and thought what is actually interesting? The answers: "moving my finger [while paying attention to the bodily feeling] and trying to talk to girls, books are boring although there's a few left I wanna read".
But I felt guilty about having hurt him, and I realized that the reason I couldn't pay attention to physical sensations was because I needed some alone time, so I went back to apologize, saying it wasn't his fault, I just haven't had a lot of time to myself lately. He seemed ok with that answer.
Freud says in Interpretation of Dreams that every dream satisfies a wish. Important: the dream does not merely represent a wish, but satisfies it within the material of the dream. So the question for dream analysis is to uncover the wish, which Freud saw as always being in a distorted form, unacceptable to consciousness.
Sadly, Porn, writing 100 years later, claims that, actually, our minds don’t even bother to disguise our wishes anymore1, because we’re not Victorians, living in a culture with a steep divide between public and private. For us moderns, the default is public, and our dreams reflect this by being relatively undisguised. We can interpret the literal material of the dream in a straightforward fashion, but what we should be careful with is the thoughts or justifications contained within the dream, because that’s where we hide and defend ourselves from knowing about our desire (think “defense mechanism”, Freud has seeped into the water supply).
My dream starts out with an intellectual conversation, one I might have been having at any typical social situation, in which I get bored and walk away, hurting the other. What follows is the defense: “oh, intellectualism isn’t interesting anyway, I want to do these other things instead” and the guilt and subsequent apology.
What are they defending against? The fact that I do care a lot about intellectualism, and have a desire to deprive the other. Why do I want to deprive the other? To “balance the scales”, because I feel deprived myself, unheard, too busy entertaining others (and why do I feel that way? I’ll come back to it later.)
The defense is in thinking that, actually, what I want to do is attend to my body and talk to girls (look at my day-to-day life, revealed preferences: it isn’t. I also have plenty of alone time.) You can read my last post if you want to know more about how I got to this conclusion, which shouldn’t be too shocking because most people have wishes like this; I’m not going to excerpt more Sadly, Porn this week, although I’m going to use its toolkit. And in a sense, this blog is a more direct fulfillment of the wish to feel heard. Even if nobody reads this, Substack hears me. “Sounds fake.” Then who am I writing to?
Trolling and Philosophy
The question that follows immediately is “what is intellectualism doing for me?” Why have I been reading and talking with people about ideas? My conscious answers, from the midst of my emotional nadir, were (a) that I wanted to get the equivalent of a philosophy undergraduate on my own, and (b) that I wanted to solve my emotional problems and ultimately learn to relate to people, re-socializing myself.
I have no idea whether I succeeded at (a), because I still have no idea what an undergraduate philosophy degree contains. I haven’t read Critique of Pure Reason yet, so I guess I’m not there, but I have learned a lot. I do think I made progress on (b); my perspective and ability to recognize emotions is far broader than 4 years ago, and I don’t think the event which triggered my “episode” could happen again:
But is this all there is? A common pattern: I post something online, people reply in anger, we get into an argument, and I leave angry. This happens over and over again, and is something I would disavow. “No, of course I don’t want to upset people, why would I do that?”. But since it keeps happening, maybe I should look for something inside it that I want.
A friend noticed this a while back and gave me a hint: they told me that my tweets have “b8 affect”. What they meant was that I like to troll, rile people up, poke at hidden things which set people off. This was way worse in my @simpolism days, where I’d get into hours-long arguments with the evopsych crew. What’s going on here?
Astrological Digression (Skippable)
Let’s take a digression to use an astrological mirror, and see what we see.2 My natal chart contains: Mercury in Cancer in 12th house trine Moon in Scorpio in 4th. Let’s interpret by keywords: Mercury is “communication; the mind; short journeys. Urge to express one's perceptions and intelligence through skill or speech. Need to establish connections with others; need to learn,” 12th house is “secluded service. retirement; escape; sacrifice; hidden life of the unconscious”, Cancer is “Feeling, reserve, moods, sensitivity, self-protection”. So, Mercury in Cancer in 12th means “communications, mental activity, and learning happen on the level of emotion with some sensitivity and reserve, oriented toward that which is hidden.”
Next piece: Moon is “response; fluctuation. Urge to feel inner support; domestic and emotional security urge. Need for emotional tranquility and sense of belonging; need to feel right about self.”, Scorpio is “Penetration through intense emotional power. Compulsive desires, depth, controlled passion, secrecy.”, 4th house is “home (base), enclosed spaces, the subterranean or unconscious.” So Moon in Scorpio in 4th means “need for emotional security takes place paradoxically through emotional penetration, specifically in relation to my subconscious.”
Trine is “easy flow of energy, the two planets work very well together”. So, combining the two, we derive a reading that my communicative and mental needs, which act through feelings and in regard to hidden things, have an easy exchange of energy with my emotional needs, which involve digging deep into my psyche in order to feel secure. Pluto is also right on top of my Moon, which means that an additional desire for death/rebirth or self-transformation is integrated with this desire for penetration and security.
End of Astrological Digression
How I read the above is that I’m using Twitter to troll myself into change. I’m using my relations with others, where we reveal hidden emotional material together through intellectuality, to break down my own beliefs, so I can transform (broaden) myself and develop a sense of emotional security. This is my real response to the Curious Cat anon who asked how I dealt with anxiety.
Whether this is right, or just another defense that explains away my enjoyment by appealing to some extra-personal framework (in truth: it’s both), it has the key to interpreting my dream: we were talking about some topic like geopolitics, and I was bored. Why was I bored? Because it was irrelevant to my goals, to my overarching desire3; from my perspective, if I can’t do something with it, then it’s irrelevant.
And what do I want to do? Better probe my own depths, and also better understand the other. People can talk for hours about topics like economics and geopolitics without ever expressing a single personally revealing sentiment. This is what Eric Berne called a “pastime”, “a way of warding off guilt, despair, or intimacy, a device provided by nature or culture to ease the quiet desperation.” So I got bored, and in the dream I lived out the childish yet satisfying wish of “getting back at them” (“depriving the other”) for causing that boredom, an act which breaks the “social rules”.
The other thing I noticed about my use of social media to get into fights, is that it’s usually after the fights that I find myself reflecting most deeply on the topic, because suddenly things got personal, we’re no longer indulging in a pastime but in a game. What anger reveals is the subject’s relation to the topic on an emotional level, rather than as an abstract nexus of ideas. And I’ve come across far fewer situations of my own anger on Twitter this past year or two despite covering the same intellectual material, which means something worked; I was able to develop enough security to write a post like this, which could be read uncharitably as a “self-own.”
This approach to knowledge, of picking up ideas, getting heated, and then being able to let them go, is “dialectical”, in the sense I quoted from Žižek in the footnotes to my last post:
True cognition is thus not only the notional 'appropriation' of its object: the process of appropriation goes on only as long as cognition remains incomplete. The sign of its completion is that it liberates its object, lets it be, drops it. This is why and how the movement of sublation (aufheben) [transcending] has to culminate in the self-relating gesture of sublating itself.
…what is released into its own being in speculative cognition is ultimately the object of cognition itself which, when truly grasped (begriffin), no longer has to rely on the subject's active intervention, but develops itself following its own conceptual automatism, with the subject reduced to a passive observer who, allowing the thing to deploy its potential without any intervention of his own (Ziltun), merely registers the process.
Or as I said years ago:
The end point is where my deepest intellectual commitments are revealed as objects external to me, that I bind myself to through a leap of faith, rather than of belief or knowledge or “truth”. That’s what I tried to draw out in this thread, in clunky language, as I reach for something just beyond my grasp:
Miscellania
Phew, now for some lighter stuff. Something more technical, attached are the most important paragraphs of Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, that I recommend anyone read, because they set out the blueprint for “psychic trauma” and provide notes on its form that I see missing from most discussions of the topic, lines and file-folders and zig-zags and concentric circles:
And another great psychology quote, on the “social double-bind game”, which opens up the contradictions between “🐝 yourself” and “play your role”:
Both of the above relate to this powerful Instagram meme:
Song of the week (thanks to @strnglft for the recommendation, I love how it makes the world feel SLOOOOOWWWW. Listen LOUD):
Thanks for reading! I hope this was a breath of fresh air for some of you who disliked the more effort-post style of my previous digests.
Like the dream I had this morning: I was at a coffee shop, having an espresso, and I remembered that I was out of coffee at home, so I bought a bag at the coffee shop. What’s the wish? I am out of coffee at home and I do need to buy more today. Straightforward.
A digression on the astrological digression. You might be thinking “what the hell? How does this help anything, how is this useful?” The trick here is in “reading by omission”. The symbols themselves are polysemous enough to permit a huge number of actual interpretations. Let me describe an alternative that fits the same material: Mercury in Cancer in 12th is journeys across town to hidden or empty beaches, trine Moon in Scorpio in 4th means I go to there to reflect on life and howl at the moon. But this is not a useful reading for the purposes of my undertaking in this post, nor is it true — I do like visiting Coney Island at night, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable howling at the moon, probably because I have Saturn in Aquarius in 7th square Moon: I would feel ashamed of myself for breaking what I consider the rules of public or shared spaces. The data always fits the interpretation, but it nudges you to think in a different direction than you might normally do.
And what about the “defenses” in my dream, talking to girls and attending to somatic experience? These seem like things I “want to want”, that I “would do if I had time and energy”. This should orient me toward something that’s missing, and I’ll have to explore that another time, probably not in public.