inspo/interiority

Instead of thinking gigantic thoughts, I tried to focus on something small, the smallest thing I could think of. Someone once made this pew I'm sitting on, I thought. Someone sanded the wood and varnished it. Someone carried it into the church. Someone laid the tiles on the floor, someone fitted the windows. Each brick was placed by human hands, each hinge fitted on each door, every road surface outside, every bulb in every streetlight. And even things built by machines were really built by beings, who built the machines initially. And human beings themselves, made by other humans, struggling to create happy children and families. Me, all the clothing I wear, all the language I know. Who put me in this church, thinking these thoughts? Other people, some I know very well and others I have never met. Am I myself, or am I them? Is this me, Frances? No, it is not me. It is the others. Do I sometimes hurt and harm myself, do I abuse the unearned cultural privilege of whiteness, do I take the labor of others for granted, have I sometimes exploited a reductive iteration of gender theory to avoid serious moral engagement, do I have a troubled relationship with my body, yes. Do I want to be free of pain and therefore demand that others also live free of pain, the pain that is mine and therefore also theirs, yes, yes.

When I opened my eyes I felt that I had understood something, and the cells of my body seemed to light up like millions of glowing points of contact, and I was aware of something profound. Then I stood up from my seat and collapsed.

He'd always wanted to become quantum dust, transcending his body mass, the soft tissue over the bones, the muscle and fat. The idea was to live outside the given limits, in a chip, on a disk, as data, in whirl, in radiant spin, a consciousness saved from void.

The technology was imminent or not. It was semimythical. It was the natural next step. It would never happen. It is happening now, an evolutionary advance that needed only the practical mapping of the nervous system onto digital memory. It would be the master thrust of cyber-capital, to extend the human experience toward infinity as a medium for corporate growth and investment, for the accumulation of profits and vigorous reinvestment.

But his pain interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his distinctiveness, too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible, he didn't think, to computer emulation. The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother's breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflection he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He'd come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that's not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end.

And yet: what if she didn’t? What exactly would be gained by dragging him through Bradley Grant, through Santa, through the abortion, through Rancho Los Amigos? She could clear her conscience by groveling in the dirt, but was it really a kindness to her husband? Now that Perry’s calamity had brought Russ back to her, might it not be better to simply love him and serve him? He was like a boy, and a boy needed structure in his life, and wasn’t remorse a kind of structure? She would never be simple, but she could give him the gift of thinking he’d wronged her more than she’d wronged him. Might this not be kinder than dumping her complexities on him?

It could have been Satan asking, but she didn’t think it was, because the temptation didn’t feel evil. It felt more like punishment. To not confess her sins to Russ—to renounce her chance to be chastised, maybe pitied, maybe even forgiven—would be to carry the burden for the remainder of her life. The unending burden of being alone with what she knew.

[...] Then there is live music played by an energetic group of men in their midtwenties to late thirties, including Rob on bass. But it turns out I hate the music, which is mostly screaming and loud drums. It reminds me of high school. For a moment, I feel sad for them, these grown men holding on to their teenage years, but then I feel sad for myself, because I don’t have anything that I am as excited about as they are about their band and its ear-piercing music. Carrying this sadness, which feels both delicate and heavy, like a big glass mirror, I decide it’s time for me to go.

I think I'm actually starting to understand. I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence still-born there. To understand this you have to become this.

No, I told not a soul. I may have been only ten years of age, but even I knew that confessing to being spied upon by a snazzily dressed senior citizen who flitted into and out of reality was not a clever move. My adolescence came and went, but still I felt no need to 'explain' the Watcher to myself. Lots of things in the world we don't understand. Endocrinology. Airline ticket pricing. Spousal intentions. Life trundles on regardless. The Watcher was just an occasional blip in my otherwise normal existence. Very occasional, very normal. [...]