… When they called you crybaby or poor or fatty or crazy and made you into an alien, you drank their acid and concealed it… Your courage was a small coal that you kept swallowing… – from "Courage," by Anne Sexton
I've been wanting to write something about those last two lines, 'courage as a coal you kept swallowing,' for so long that I forget precisely what the content was meant to be. Now I find myself thinking about middleschool, and being told by others that I was a lesbian, and how I took it and said, "Yep." Not because I really thought it was true, but because I thought if you owned what other people tried to shove on you, they'd never own you. I had a similarly wrong-headed approach to good intentions, where I would lie about what I did and why I did it, saying I did bad things, so that my good intentions remained good, instead of self-promotion, let me tell you just how good I am, ma'am. But it was a relief to be a lesbian. The reason they called me it was because I was deficient in some womanly sense -- meaning that no boys thought I was hot -- but calling myself a lesbian was a right-back-'atcha, I-don't-like-you-either-move. I wore anything that made me look unisex for the majority of school. Funnily, frivolously, a big part of growing-up in college involved me realizing that if I thought something was beautiful, that was enough of a reason to wear it. It would not somehow 'clash' with me. This is how I came out as a straight woman. For a few years, though, every time I put on a scarf or a cardigan or a skirt, I was waiting to be ripped to shreds.
I decided not to go forward with philosophy, and when I recount that decision in the most authentic-feeling way, I say that it's because I could not write the damn papers without clawing them out at the last minute. You feel nude when you say "Moran's account of self-knowledge lacks the right kind of error," and I felt nude when I bought my first big red scarf and wore it over my same-old grubby clothes. Now I wear big honking boots and primary colors and give no fucks, but I still feel that former nudity, when making claims, and I wonder about whether or not this is a womanly thing, too.
Most of the women in my graduate program apologize before they speak, on any very public occasion. Most of the young men do not.Usually the apologies take the form of good scholarship: "Apologies if I misunderstood, but..." acknowledges that you are responsible for understanding the material, even if you failed to live up to it. Sometimes I wonder how much the apology is a way to consolidate even insults, particularly if the same point is phrased like, "I'm sorry if this is stupid, or a waste of time, but..." The point being that if others say that it is stupid or that it is a waste of time, you knew it, you said it first, at the very least they're confirming some part of what you said as true. It might even be courageous, to admit that you're fallible openly ... yet it seems more courageous to speak without qualification. And though so many young men do, sometimes you wonder if speech involves any courage, or is it just normal, does it take more out of some people to go without a word on the matter. Sometimes I wonder if difficulty is any sort of a guide for normativity: if it's hard to speak, speak more; if it's hard to sit quietly, count your pencils. Which is the coal to keep swallowing?
My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything. –Susan Sontag
Sometimes I wonder if choosing not to go forward with philosophy is a choice not to commit, on more than one level. I fantasized immediately after the decision about all the things I'll read and see – and felt weightless, for the first time in years. At some point, I became afraid to read things. Not because of any difficulty in comprehension, rather the dangers of comprehension: I'd realize that some of the deepest beliefs I have, about goodness and how to conduct oneself, would turn out silly, misguided, unfounded. I did my work on practical reasoning, agency, and general methodological concerns. I'm a pretty good reader. And I always loved that philosophy, unlike everything else, seemed so demanding of every reader. Neutrality in the face of an argument was impossible. Either it followed, or it didn't, and you ought to say something about why. When I decided not to continue with philosophy, I felt that some philosophical responsibilities, like eventually owning up to certain terrifying arguments in my field, had been lifted. I was just a conceited woman in a scarf again. That's a kind of fear of commitment. But I was also afraid of only doing this work for a long time. Now that I am just a conceited woman in a scarf again, I wonder if I gave up the good work of a lifetime to half-ass it all. I suspect what Sexton meant by the coal is the temptation to buck duty. I can't tell if it's harder to keep going or stop going; I can't tell if difficulty tells you anything about what you ought to do.
Charles Peirce wrote in "The Fixation of Belief" that doubt was difficult, whereas dogmatism was not. For a few years, now, I've been in that in between place, and I've wondered about how difficult doubt really is. (I wrote about it once.) The easy reply is that when doubt is easy you're not actually doubting anything. This seems to be the difficulty in speaking and writing. If it's too easy not to write something in the name of full consideration, maybe you're not really considering it; if it's too easy to commit yourself to something, maybe you're simply avoiding real consideration. There's a part of me that thinks that difficulty ought to be the guide here, but I'm not sure why, or how one can tell.
I'm still reading those big bad articles, by the by. I'm still scared. But now, it feels less like I'm letting the team down if, in the end, I agree that many moral claims aren't true, don't make sense, have no basis, or if I say that some piece of philosophy is not important, I cave to the skeptics. There were things that I thought someone ought to believe, and ain't I someone? Now I feel like I owe only a different kind of ought. That's difficult, too. I find myself more worried about living well than I was when I expected to go forward. I find myself thinking about how committed I am at every moment, what I eat, what I do, how I interact with entertainment, how I help others, what I say to my parents on the phone. I want to try to write about them. That's difficult ... and good. Wish there was a bigger bang here. Just wanted to write that I am thinking about writing.
2 comments:
S., beautiful post! I especially appreciate your contemplation of how to interpret the difficult things in life: "I can't tell if difficulty tells you anything about what you ought to do." That line reminded me of a part in "Letters to a Young Poet" (Letter VII) where Rilke writes, "People have (with the help of convention) found the solution of everything in ease and the easiest side of ease; but it is clear that we must hold to the difficult; everything living holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself according to its own character and is an individual in its own right, strives to be so at any cost and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to the difficult is a certainty that will not leave us...the fact that a thing is difficult must be one more reason for our doing it."
That's an excellent quote, Derick. I've never read Letters to a Young Poet, but I've always wanted to, and this gives me more reason to.
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