Choose your poison

That thing where someone spends their whole life writing around problems they don't care about, problems that just happened to be there when they came on the scene, that formed their geography, mountains and lakes, coasts and skies. It's especially sad when you see them write their way out of that irrelevant landscape in late academic life, maybe never realizing how defunct the problems already were, and then appending in a last chapter or last paragraph a child's fantasy of new work, (it seems:) work they really want to do. It's sometimes framed as a promise, but often it also feels like a resignation (handing in the slip ...), a last stab at getting a flag in the ground.

How to spot the spies in the court, the false leads, the problems that are invented in the process of thinking (like cross-contamination in hospitals)? But how can we know this stuff, sometimes? Wittgenstein apparently showed up centuries of concern in philosophy, but is something that lasts for centuries ever a false problem (a problem that has no bearing on human life)? And still not everyone has absorbed his lessons. The real question: How does one not waste one's life with this stuff?

To inhabit your theory with fullest imagination, to really try to hold in your head a fully realized energy map of the world. Then individual thinkers are like shocks to the system, try to upset it. If your whole map holds -- that is not a guarantee of relevance, or timeliness. What makes a map relevant at any moment over others is whether the vision of humans in it is something we need at that moment (at that moment in public life, at that moment in the life of theory). Theory is always a desperate grab for the possibility of self-portraiture.

Runner

I was on the subway when things went live. Some signal came my way, some alarm that caused me to take stock and catch myself and snap to and realize that I was in a moment, though I didn't yet know what the moment was. The first signal always precedes awareness, like the whole lost history before consciousness kicks in (in a baby, in the world). I can only write out a list of events without chronology, since awareness is the start of chronology. But this list is also fiction, because how can I really know? I was on the subway, on the platform, walking from one end toward the other, thinking about nothing. Was my first apprehension of the event itself, or of a reaction to the event, which is nevertheless a part of it? It could have been a voice raised higher and sharper than the encompassing hum. It could have been a shift in another's body. A yell, or pounding steps that entered my ears but hadn't yet been connected in my mind to eventfulness. A body running. By now I definitely knew, by now I went live. How did I go live? Physically, I held my chest, my shoulders -- where my breastplate would be -- stiff. I was brought to a slow stop, like a bumper car with the electricity shut off. (How did we get this emergency response programmed into us, that brings crowds to a standstill in an event that's, as newscasters say, developing? For it's surely the mass response that creates the least chaos, the smoothest surface for the intervention of official forces, if not the response that makes the most sense for individual survival.)

That running body, the escapee across the subway platform, his run is so vivid and so startling because nobody runs like that, nobody who follows the rules, anyway. It's a run that doesn't give a shit about us. Seeing it, I want to do a number of things all of a sudden. First, I want to know it -- it attracts me terribly. It sets itself on a repeat loop in my mind, a real-life GIF. I want to tell about it to others (because in telling it will seem like it belongs to me?). It's out of my world, and I want to make it part of my world -- I want my world to meet it, to be at the place where it and mine can touch. The turn away from that run is a locus for all the turns away from paths not-to-be-taken that resolve into the path that, eventually, forms, all the not-cities and -lovers and -jobs and -nights where you go home at a decent hour, stepping away from a house full of noise. It requires nothing less than the courage of finding more than partialness in what you have.

And another feature of our obedient programming comes into view, the impulse to normalize the strange, even as we hope for and would give ourselves up for the strange. What do I want when I tell my friend N, after getting off the subway, about that dense unapologetic run? Is it judgment? What happened to the world, and what am I now, too late, trying to restore?