news from the black hole
my life at the U of C
Monday, November 10, 2003
So I've decided that this is going to be a kind of online Pensieve/mental garbage disposal for me. Laugh at me if you will for my attempts at profundity (that is the noun form of "profound," no?). This was actually written before the beginning of the quarter; I may have gotten stupider since then:
I’m going crazy.
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, the narrator speaks of the “mythos” created by society and how those who step outside the mythos are the insane.
The epiphany of the day was that language is what makes us human—a grid placed between us and the world by the culture into which we are born so that we may organize and categorize and in a specific way understand what we see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. But it is not only between us and the world that this framework for comprehension is placed; it is also inserted between us and…us. Our thoughts and our emotions. Superego and ego. Maybe none of that is right, which implies that there is no “us” save that which society has created. But what I mean is that the way in which we understand our own thoughts and feelings is also molded by concepts we have accepted from childhood as real and objective. Love, sadness, anger—these and others like them are the names we try to apply to the sensations of our brain and body. And I wonder if we don’t try to mold those sensations to fit the names when we can’t find the right word.
.: posted by Lindsay 10:31 PM
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