An old project: What am I doing?

What am I doing?

I am writing.

But not just writing, I am also thinking. Thinking then writing.

But sometimes, as I am writing, what I am thinking changes and so I write that.

So I am writing and thinking at the same time.

Is this writing, itself, me thinking?

What proportion or character of this thinking is affected by this writing? How is it affected? Is the part which is 'I' that which is being affected or that which is doing the effecting? Or, is the problem that I am laying false boundaries around this? Why should the identification of this 'I' be defined on one or the other side of this activity that I am now undertaking?

When I read other people's writing I do not consider that I am taking literal part in them being, or their thinking. I am not them thinking that sentence. This writing, these words, are not literally I in the same way as I thinking at night.

Yet even then I use words when I think at night – I compose thinking in words, and this writing consists entirely of words. But this still does not provide a link in actual being between these words, this writing, and this consciousness I am experiencing.

Am I experiencing this consciousness or am I doing it?

The writing of these words, the practice of this language, affects what I think as I do it, and so changes what I write, but this writing is not, itself, as ink on paper, me thinking. And yet, this thinking does not take form without this writing? There is thinking that takes form without writing, obviously, but this thinking I am doing now is in some way, and to some extent, reliant on and formed by and influenced by and composed of and consists of this writing, this language, these words.

So what am I doing?

Is this writing and thinking process even thinking then? Does this act of writing defile thinking? Would thinking be better without writing? Would it then be a different kind of consciousness and a different kind of being? It would be a different kind of thinking, while still influenced by and composed of and reliant upon this language and these words (or words like these except not written). Thinking without writing would not be influenced by this act of writing and so would be different. To what extent would it be different? To what degree would that matter? Maybe it is in fact not different? How could one ever know unless one tried to write down what one was thinking without writing and then destroy the project? I suppose one could just contemplate. Contemplate in sentences and not write it down. Would this just be like pretending to write one's thoughts down, and so would that thinking still be influenced by all the conventions of the writing bar the actual physical act of pen on paper? I am not sure what different means in this either. They could be different thoughts, as I have different shoes, but not different thoughts, as all my shoes are shoes. What difference would this make, were it true?

Also, what does better mean, when there is no purpose in this for effectiveness to be measured against except this thinking's own knowability, which can not be compared without undertaking some kind of cross-comparison – either thinking only writing empty of thinking, or writing thinking that is not written.

I seem to be writing and thinking in spirals. Am I trying to explain myself? Is all thinking some attempt to explain myself to myself, or to others? Why do I attempt to take one question in one instance –'Am I trying to explain myself?' and then try to explode it and expand it – 'Is all thinking…' as if many instances of the one (or an expanded instance of the one) would in some way explain or describe more fully the underlying question, which is something about thinking?

The vast majority of my thoughts are not contemplative, but have to do with the basic daily living of life.

I did not know the meaning of that sentence until I wrote it. Actually, I kind of knew it generally, I had an idea, I suppose, of what it was going to be before I started writing it, but I did not think it whole, compose it whole in my head, then copy it from my mind word by word onto the paper. No, I had a vague idea of how it would come out. No again, I had a confidence that it would be written, and at the same time, I knew generally what I wanted it to convey. Then I started writing it, and composed it into a sentence along the way. This is what I am doing with all these sentences. But even that first 'meaning' that I claim I already knew I wanted to convey – what meaning did that have until it was/is actually said or written? How can I claim to have had/known/held a meaning that was not yet made of language? How could I ever know that unless I could test it, and in so doing I would need to use words and so the meaning would no longer be wordless and so its first meaning collapses.

So, I am probably thinking vaguely (but still in language), and then, in writing, translating, or giving effect to, or forming, that vagueness into a structured piece of scrawl called a sentence.

Again I am thinking in spirals, going forward then returning to questions I wrote before. I embark on a series of thinkings and writings about a question. As thinking and writing happens other questions and issues arise and through them I come back to answering an earlier question (have I answered any questions?). But it is not neat or regular, and I seem to repeat myself. I seem to need to restate the same thought in different ways until I am convinced I have come up with a way of framing that thought that addresses the questions asked, or at least, addresses the assumptions I assume lead to the question being asked in the first place.

Is that all I am doing? Could this be the case not just for the answering of these questions but also for the questions themselves? That is, are all these questions just different attempts (in form) at trying to ask the same question? And am I merely trying to get the right framing, the adequate precision, the correct or accurate form of the same question? And isn't that question – the one I am trying to frame, to make clearly, some kind of question that already holds the assumptions that there needs to be a question, that it can be written down; and to what extent does that, should that, undermine or underpin what I am doing?

I am writing and I am thinking. I am thinking and writing in spirals. I am trying to find out if I am asking about whether I am thinking about many things or the one thing in different forms, and whether or not these questions are many questions, or if instead I am trying to write the same question in different ways. And I am repeating myself. Perhaps it is not one thinking or question as opposed to many thinkings or questions. Perhaps it is three or seven or four separate thinkings, and eight, six or three questions. But perhaps I am missing a more important problem, which is what is the 'it' which could be one or many or three or a thinking or a question or both, or written or unwritable? And when I ask that, I am assuming the question can be answered to 'What is the 'it'?' Perhaps the question can not be answered with 'is'. Perhaps it needs to be 'What does the 'it' which could be one or many questions or thinking or both….?'

I simply don't know if 'it', whatever it is or does, does or does not require, contain, describe, or in some other way relate to one or many questions or statements or combination thereof.

 

I accept this thinking is made up of, created by, limited by and described by this language, and that this language is created by, limited by, a whole miasma of history, societal/personal interactions. Am I bound to accept that this consciousness, also made up by thinking, is therefore created and restricted and described by the limitations of language? If this thinking is language, and this thinking is consciousness, to what extent is consciousness as necessarily socialised as language?

Is this consciousness unique to me (itself)? Perhaps this consciousness, which I normally take to be intensely personal, is in fact mundanely common. We seem to think that, at the same time, everyone has a common attribute – consciousness – which is the same kind of basic consciousness in everyone, but that we are all uniquely conscious in our own selves. I am not sure what 'basic' or 'unique' means. Am I giving in to another problem about one or many? In doing this writing and trying to find out about this consciousness – am I writing about one thing – this consciousness I am now doing or experiencing, or many consciousnesses that may or may not be the same, in substance or manner, in other people? Or only some people, maybe 50, maybe 3?

But none of this will help. It will make no difference to this project if this consciousness does or does not exist, to whatever extent, in others.

 

This is not about the stuff that makes up this thinking. I am not asking about this seeing, this smelling, this writing, or this thinking. This is about the experiencing of these things. What is (or does) this 'it' that is experiencing (or doing) this thinking? I can explain all the other stuff, or someone else can or will be able to – someone will be able to find out how the light goes in my eye and into my brain and fizzles some neuron – that's easy. They will even be able to see or explain or describe or tell a story about how any number of these stuffs – sensations, experiences of senses, instances of language use, examples of comprehension, interact as fizzles in the brain. They will even be able to predict the actions of a thinking person from the combination of fizzles. But this still will have nothing to do with the 'it' that is either experiencing the doing of these things, or doing the experience of these things.

But what is there to show that this experiencing is something other than the sensations themselves? One might say that there is something that is able to recall past sense experiences and predict future sense experiences that is not itself the sense experience, unless one claims that this recollection or prediction is itself a sense experience.

If a sense were defined as something that can be measured as fizzles and the experience is something that can not, then this would fall because someone can certainly measure the fizzles in the brain when recollection or prediction happens. So I must either deny that recollection/prediction is part of the experiencing or that the experience is still not fizzled.

I want to say that the delineation between fizzled/not fizzled is wrong – but I want to keep the idea that there is a delineation between the sensation, or waves of combinations of sensations, and the experiencing of it.

What about temporality? The individual sense experiences change through time, but there is some thread of continuity in the experience of them. Admittedly the sense experiences are not individual, but a whole net, a map of connected sensations, where there can never be a single moment of non-sensation. Non-sensation would mean non-experience which would destroy the experiencing thing.

But actually not a map or a net, rather a whole mess of sensations cascading through space and time that, (and perhaps here is role for the meaning of this consciousness) I pretend to order into a coherency I commonly consider 'reality'.

So these sense experiences and this experiencing are reliant. Body and life.

Am I confusing myself without simplicity? Is this project useless? Is it like asking completely unanswerable questions, questions trapped in their own grammatical assumptions. Questions like 'Why am I going to die?'

A question like this is useless because it (the 'why?') commonly assumes a justifiable answer, an 'ought' answer. Perhaps 'what am I doing?' is similar in that it assumes an answer from a sphere to which the answer can not turn?

 

The fullest answer I can give to the question 'Why am I going to die?' is: 'Because I was born.' It is not 'Because my heart will stop'.

When the doctor answers the question 'Why is he dead?' with: 'Because his heart has stopped'. He is really just re-stating the question, for to have a stopped heart and to be dead are the same thing. Obviously he could use any other medical term – his brain no longer fizzes, his pupils no longer dilate, or any combination of these, but they are all merely re-listing the criteria that the questioner already assumes to be true – that's why the question was asked.

This kind of questioning and answering will quickly degenerate into an endless spiral of justifications: 'Why did his heart stop?' 'Because he was hit by a truck.' 'Why was he hit by a truck?' 'Because he was walking on the freeway.' 'Why was he walking on the freeway?'

And this itself can spiral in countless other directions at any juncture: 'Why did his heart stop?' 'Because he was hit by a truck.' 'Why was he hit by a truck?' 'Because the driver failed to see him.' 'Why did the driver fail to see him?' 'Because he was listening to the radio.' Ad infinitum.

At some point we decide to break the 'causal' link. We do not want to say that because the radio producer decided to play Hits of the 60s this other guy died. Playing Hits of the 60s and being dead are not normally considered the same thing (or different ways of expressing the same thing), in the way that having a stopped heart and being dead are the same thing.

But neither would we normally accept that the reason he is dead is that he was born. I suppose even this could suffer from spiralling if we were to ask 'Why was he born?' But the difference in this scenario is that even if I can not answer the question 'Why was he born?' without going into spirals I can clearly and unambiguously claim that had he not been born he would not have died.

The truck accident he may have survived had the truck been going slower or swerved and just run over his toes. Or even it may be a lie and he only appeared to have been hit by a truck when brought into Emergency.

But the fact that he is dead is absolutely linked to the fact that once he was born. Again, he could never have died had he not been born. The truck, the heart stopping, are mediums through which his inevitable death became apparent. But while it is true to say that the two statements 'His heart has stopped' and 'He is dead' mean the same thing, it is not true that the two statements 'He was born' and 'He is dead' mean the same thing. Or is it?

Perhaps similarly I can not find an answer to 'What am I doing?', or 'What is the 'it' which is experiencing something now?' by looking at the immediate evidence or substance of this activity and this thing.

 

Can it even be described? Putting aside the problems of the constructions that limit language; and putting aside the problems of the relationship (intrinsic, constructive or otherwise) between language and this thing, can something meaningful be said about this thing that experiences thinking?

If something could be said, how can I know if it is meaningful? I could say it is meaningful if it has some kind of use. 'Use' meaning that description can be in some way used to draw some other inference or conclusion, and do so with some level of certainty. That other inference or conclusion may not itself be valid, but that at least the description can be used (perhaps in a variety of ways), and (importantly) by other people, in such a way as they will be comfortable in drawing inferences or conclusions that the description provides a fairly coherent set of sentences.

 

Is it valid for me to be writing about this consciousness? Or, what kind of validity pertains to this project by me writing about it myself and about my own consciousness (or this consciousness I am now experiencing, whether it can be described as 'mine' or not)? Would there be a reduction in validity if I were writing about the consciousness (or attempting to write about the consciousness) experienced by some other animal or thing? Am I assuming that by writing about this consciousness I am now experiencing, that anything (or something) I write would have or pertain to, some extension of validity in another (or some other) animal or thing?

If I am to write about some other animal or thing, there will always be the problem of investigating the nature and extent of any validity in that (or any particular) other animal or thing. This problem will of course also be inherent in the act of me thinking about myself in the same way as any perspective will have inherent problems of validity because of it being a perspective, but can I say that this problem might be slightly mitigated by the perspective being from me of me, or could it in fact be irritated by this approach?

However, even if I can not write with any real certainty about this consciousness I am experiencing, neither can I write with any certainty about the consciousness that may be experienced by any other animal or thing. And while I am certain that I am experiencing something (or at least that there is some experiencing going on here), I am not at all comfortable with postulating the content or character of any experiencing that might be going on in/around/about another (or some other) animal or thing.

I am therefore forced to write only about this experiencing happening now, to do with me, if I am to attempt to write validly at all.

 

There are some events that are probably occurring that are probably essential to this consciousness, but which I am not experiencing. I am not experiencing the electrical impulses in my brain that in some way create and contain this consciousness. Or, is this consciousness itself the experience of experiencing these electrical impulses? Likewise with my heartbeat, or the squelching of my stomach, or the purifying of my liver.

 

 

What am I doing?

I am writing about something I am experiencing. I am finding it difficult to find a way to describe what I am experiencing, and therefore to describe what I am doing. Why am I finding it difficult? Firstly because I keep asking additional questions? Secondly, because I can't find a way to write about it.

Perhaps the problem is that I am trying to write about it rather than just write it. But isn't writing about it and writing it the same thing?

Also I am trying to write with validity. What does this mean? Does it mean that at some point in the future when I read over what I am writing now, these words will still ring true? And, that these words ring true to other people at future times?

This could certainly be a part of it. I have to feel comfortable now that at some future time I will be able to read these words again and feel that they are valid. But that is not the whole story and it only gets me one step further down the track. For even if this is true I still don't know what would constitute some way of satisfying this criteria, and secondly, I still haven't done it in relation to what I am doing now.

All I have done is write about an aim I should have about a feeling I (or someone else) might have at some future point in time when these words are read. There is also no way, using this criteria, that I can ever verify it before finishing it.

 

Perhaps because there is nothing else to write. Do away with analogy you do away with character, plot, set – everything but this writing now, and this writing now is hopelessly lost, unsure, unsettled.

Unfocused but focused solely on the one thing that there is to write about if I want to write honestly, barely – this consciousness, this writing.

Does that mean that this writing is itself some kind of analogy for what to do when I am trying to write honestly, barely? No. Any other kind of writing – any poem, story, novel, article, list, graph, function or whatever – don't they inevitably become some kind of analogy for doing this kind of writing? (But that statement may be an analogy).

Trying to answer, in the broadest and yet most exact way – the question:

What am I doing?

 

Why would I want to do this? Am I trying to prove something? Must I carry forth as if no one will ever read this? That would be a conceit for at least I will read it as I am reading it now as I write it. And there is in me some want that when I write and then read over this I will feel that I have written something that in some way makes me think/feel: 'Yes, that's true.'

 

Now there's an assumption and a symptom! Why do I care to want to read/write something that makes me feel that?

 

Perhaps I can find my way by being less direct?

 

Other people seem to think I exist as a separate existence – as a person.

I also tend to think this.

If I accept this, what are the things that I think, when 'doing' what it is to be myself? Keeping in mind that the vast majority of my daily thinkings are not reflective, there is also though an activity I undertake in reflection in which I recall experiencing senses and I believe (as I do now) that these experiences were unique in that I alone experienced them, or at least I alone experienced the perspective I had upon those experiences.

This activity, this reflection, does not prove or describe this consciousness, nor does it answer any question about what I am doing now. But I do in fact spend some time in reflecting on past experiences. This activity is almost always provoked and comes unexpectedly – an aroma caught while crossing a street, or when I look at a photograph I haven't seen in a while, or on the anniversary of some event. And when I do this remembering activity I have a sense that it is about being me – that these things have some constitutive relationship to the consciousness I mundanely experience day in and day out – again, during the experiencing of which I rarely actually contemplate these things. So if they do have any constitutive relationship to this 'I' they are certainly not everpresent in my doing or experiencing this consciousness – and they are certainly not in any other person's consciousness or awareness of me being a conscious being, at least not in the same as I experience them. So their link to my self seems rather tenuous, and their link to my first point (that other people seem to think of me as a separate conscious entity) is extremely dubious – in fact non-existent.

So they do not in any sense support a putative argument that if other people seem to think I have or am a separate and different consciousness then I must be. And I can not build a bridge of validity from the practice of doing them to the proof of my own consciousness.

Nevertheless, what are they? What is this set of recollected senses /experiences specifically?

Another way of thinking of about this would be from the fact that if I had an arm transplant I would probably still consider myself (and be considered by others) to be the same being as the one with the old arm. I could have any part of this body transplanted – my whole body and this would still hold true – except my brain. If this brain were transplanted into another body, other people would almost certainly consider that the existential being went with the brain.

But we all have brains, and what is actually considered unique about that existential being is the thoughts that happen with that brain. So what are some of the thoughts that would need to go with the brain for me to consider that it was still the same conscious being, and that that being was 'me'. I can not possibly write them all, but what are some of the more common – and important ones in terms of which ones I place importance upon. What are the thoughts I have that, at this time in my life, make me reflect and feel that I am in fact a separate conscious being with a separate unique consciousness?

This is not the same as deciding the thoughts I would have injected into a new brain, if I were getting one, that would enable me to continue to be me. These would include broad knowledge such as knowledge of my family tree, a great liking for roast duck and beer, and the ability to play the banjo with my own unique badness.

Instead, what are some of the images/thoughts that, when I have or do them, I feel I am actively being (and in a way reviewing what it is to be) me.

 

1. The smell of my father as I rest my head into his chest just under his right collar bone near his shoulder. He is wearing a dark orange, soft woollen jumper with knitted lines about a centremeter wide. I can smell him and I can feel him hold me up against him and that he is really happy to have me there. His smell is of his own unique scent. He is talking to someone over my shoulder but I am just resting my head into his chest and I am comfortable and safe.
   
2. The smell of eucalyptus bark and the leaves and grass, early morning on my grandparents' farm in Byrneside in northern Victoria, and the singing magpies as the sunlight angles down through ghost gums. A sense of freedom.
   
3. The birth of my daughter, when she was placed on my wife's chest and looked up at us. In fact the whole birth and my wife going through it.
   
4. My wife smiling up at me when I first told her I loved her and she said she loved me too. Her beautiful clear eyes. Her bedroom as we stood next to her bed, and the dark wooden cupboard behind her. Also that it was night, and the soft orange light from the lamp on her face. Then, her face when we were married in Fitzroy Gardens. The tear in her eye for happiness and the almost overwhelming beauty of her.
   
5. My wife naked. And making love to her on a ferry between Helsinki and Stockholm. Our small cabin without a porthole, and the shaded lights coming down the brown walls, painted with a Scandinavian mountain scene.
   
6. I am about eight years old and it's summer holidays and I've leapt out of bed at our house in Essendon and I know I've got a full free day ahead and I open my drawers and slip on underpants, shorts, hawaian shirt and I'm ready to go and I thought how easy and wonderful this is. My blue BMX.
   
7. The last time I saw my father conscious and alive. As I was leaving the hospital room I was at the door and turned to say goodbye and he looked at me, swimming out of his morphine induced delirium he looked at me with absolute steady truth and thankfulness, with almost bashfulness and apology and said: 'Thanks pal.' These were his last words to me and he knew they would be and so did I and he meant them solidly, meant them for everything and even though I, at 26 then felt those words deeply, they have become even more penetrating, more real, more wonderful as I have continued to grow and specifically since I had a child, my daughter.
   

The death of our parents and the birth of our children – and the echo of these events through our being, is this what it comes down to?

1. Coming back from the pub drunk one night with my wife and we put on Irish music and danced all around the flat.
   
2. Waiting outside a gallery my wife was applying for, I'm standing on lower Broadway in SoHo on a cold grey September day about 11 am and suddenly realise it's snowing.
   
3. When my grandfather took me to Windy Hill when I was about 10 years old and some player kicked the ball through the goalposts and up into the stand and it came straight for my face, slow at first then incredibly fast and whack-ring! As it hit the metal pole right in front of my nose and bounced off somewhere and the shocked ooh aahing of the people around me who sighed a relief that it hadn't hit me, and my being ashamed at being the centre of attention and my grandfather not saying anything (that I can remember) but I loved to go to Windy Hill with him at three-quarter time when we could get in for free.
   
4. Running to talk to my mother on the telephone on Monday mornings when I was a kid and she lived in the U.S. and called every week.
   
5. The great excited flap of happiness my mother flew into when I told her my wife was pregnant.
   
6. My daughter, at two years old, running down the hallway to give me a hug because I came home from work.
   

 

I could write dozens if not hundreds of these and it honestly seems, when I read back over them, that they do give me, and I suppose would give others, a much richer understanding or impression of 'me'. But really it might give an impression of what I am like, what kind of person I am. But everyone would have these kind of memories of impressions. Perhaps they are the best way to undertake this project – in a way they are a lot more 'honest' (if by that I mean true, direct and bare) than this other way of writing and thinking. But again, they would only serve to prove that it is true when other people think I exist (that if they assume this means I have memories such as these) they are right. Also, that it is true that I believe I have memories.

But it only in the end serves to show that – that these memories occur to me, that I practice them, and I in general consider them in some way constitutive of my being.

It does not describe what that being is. Again, it does not describe or show what it is that experiences these memories. Nor does this in any way describe how or to what extent they are constitutive of this self – let alone of this experience of being a self.

And anyway, there is perhaps much that would be left out – even if I wrote thousands of them – and that which is left out could perhaps be essential to even knowing what it is that I am in the first place. I would also write different ones each time I tried to write them, they are not, in the end a small finite set. They are inevitably finite, but the set is not small.

So what value does it have? Unknown.

Perhaps this project should have been written as a poem, or thrown as a drawing. What is it that makes me think that I could get any way toward satisfying this project by using this form of writing and not some other form of writing or expression, even if that form were analogous perhaps it would be a closer way of pursuing this? I will admit that this very form of writing I find difficult to define. It is masked as discourse but really it is just me trying to write what I think as I think it, and obviously I have been trained to write / think in this manner when thinking / writing about this subject (regardless of how unsuccessfully I acquit this kind of writing / thinking).

But were I to attempt a different form of expression – a poem, a song, a drawing – wouldn't that defeat the very project I am now undertaking, if that undertaking is or in fact trying to do this project – to address these issues – in this kind of writing?

Should it turn out that I am unable to acquit this project in this kind of writing – would it perhaps be better to attempt it (though of course because it would be in this kind of writing 'it' would need a new definition and motivation) in another kind of writing?

Or, is the fact of doing this project in this writing intrinsic to this project in itself?

Would it hold the same meaning – or kind of meaning – were it done in another form of expression?

 

What is the point of 'separating' these images / recollections / thoughts from the meaning of my being? If to mean something is (or is not just) to re-state it in different forms then the whole miasma of these images / experiences and (dare I write it) feelings, could equate in a meaningful way to my being, even though these images / experiences / thoughts are chaotic and stand no border, perhaps they could be equated to the meaning of me and I should just have to accept the 'meaning' side of this equation must either encapsulate or accept the chaotic character of the experience side, whether or not it is currently capable of doing so.

    Consider the concept of twelve / 12. One one side the word 'twelve' and on the other side the written numeral '12'. Does 'twelve' mean '12'? Does 'twelve' equal '12'?

    If I accept that the statement 3 x 4 = 12 is true do I also accept the statement 'twelve' means 3 x 4 or 'twelve' equals 3 x 4 is true?

    How is 'twelve' different to '12'?

    When writing according to grammar rules we always write 'twelve' when we are not writing maths, and when we intend to signify the meaning that would be '12' were we writing in maths.

    But the relationship between 'twelve' and '12' is not a meaningful relationship in any other way than that the one signifies the other. It is again a way of restating, in different pen-strokes, the same meaning of one in the other language, just like a stopped heart and death. There is a meaning '12' and there is a meaning 'twelve', but writing the meaning 'twelve' signifies the meaning '12', and writing 'twelve' does not necessarily mean '12' in the sense that the writing of one does not provide any justification or explanation of the other.

        By extension if I claimed that the statement "jumpol means WL" is true     and the statement "jumpol = WL" is true, then another person who believed     me could answer these questions:

a. jumpol means __________

b. jumpol = __________

1. WL means = _____________
   

d. WL = ______________

 

    But be no closer to understanding or knowing the meaning either of jumpol or of WL.

    In the same way I could write five hundred tomes of speculation and recollections, of diaries, poems and reams of paintings and CDs full of songs and claim that they collectively (or indeed individually) mean (or =) this consciousness, this 'I', but there would still be no meaning, or way of knowing the meaning, either of the opus or of the consciousness.

    So is this very writing trapped in the same problem?

    

    The very fact that I have names for 'feelings / things' can complicate this: Love, hate, happiness, missing someone, fear, anxiety. There is no 'other than language' symbol to which I can match these words. And also, these words themselves can not be matched to any other non-word non-symbol 'thing' that I can 'do'. For what, or with what, can I fill the gap:

a. happiness means _______

b. happiness = _________

1. This thinking that is happening means ____________
   

d. This thinking that is happening = ______________

 

And yet, undeniably, intrinsically, here I am. Unable to explain myself, or what is happening to me, or what I am doing, or even if it should be for this experiencing to explain, or describe what is happening to it, or what it is doing.

 

    So what other meaningful relationship can there be? Is it that my very pulse is straining between these words, or the downstrokes of these letters? More literal than expected – I write and breathe and my heart pumps blood. Perhaps there is a bodily symbiosis here. I am doing this because I was born. Because I was born I am doing this. I was born so I am doing this?

    Perhaps I am the inconsolable scream of the collective will of the bacteria of which I am made, as we (the bacteria) struggle desperately to find the voice to scream out our anger that we were mute in the millions of years of our existence, coming together falling apart, coming together falling apart. A flailing mess of microscopic desperation clinging together in a desperate bid to stay together long enough to . . . what?

    Perhaps the circularity is: I can not explain or demonstrate a meaning for this consciousness that is occurring until I can know what it is to explain or demonstrate meaning; and yet I can not know what it is to explain or demonstrate meaning until I can know or explain or demonstrate something about this consciousness. Because, obviously, the content or practice of meaning can not be described without a consciousness that can be applied to it, or from which it can grow.

 

    If meaning could be somewhat ascribed in some relation to the usefulness of the matter or item whose meaning is being enquired of, can I look in that way to the meaning of this consciousness?

    But then, 'what use is this consciousness?' is a stupid question. I can see clearly how asking the use of many matters or objects can draw out the matter's or object's meaning, but to ask it of this consciousness seems immediately incongruous. This is because there can be no meaningful alternative. That is, the question 'If there were not this consciousness what would the use be?' is entirely ridiculous and does not in any way advance this project.

    In other words, that approach is meaningless because it has no use!

 

How could this project end? Firstly, when I am satisfied in some way that it has finished because there has been some kind of resolution to the project. This could mean either I feel satisfied that all has been written and there has or has not been some kind of resolution, or I am satisfied that enough has been written, though not necessarily all, and I feel there has or has not been some kind of resolution. In both of these cases the fact that there has not been some kind of resolution to the problems in this project does not necessarily mean there has not been resolution – or, the fact that there has not been resolution to the problems but I feel enough or all has been written will be in itself a kind of resolution, or end, to this project.

Secondly, I could die or be rendered in some way physically or mentally incapable of continuing.

Thirdly, I could just stop or give up, or decide to do something else, or decide to stop doing this.

In both the second and third cases the project will cease in actuality even if it has not been finished according to the parameters of the first case.

And fourthly it could finish or stop for some other reason of which I am not currently aware.

 

Should this project be redrafted into themes? Why am I not going to redraft it into themes?

Firstly, because there could be something gained in re-reading it, whereby the order in which these thoughts came to me might later reveal to me something about the way I think and about what I am doing.

Secondly, key to this project is trying to write 'truthfully' – that is, that writing in this form is the reason I call it a project, rather than an essay or a book or a poem or a cat. This means accepting messiness, disorder, because perhaps (no, in fact) this thing that is experiencing this is messy and disorderly.

This seems to lean toward an intention to demonstrate this thing – as distinct from define it – which might be better done in essays or poems or swims.

    Why justify this? It would only require justification were the original intent of the project be to best define / demonstrate this thing and then I would need seek the 'best' medium in which to operate this project.

    But this project did not start that way.

    This project started simply by me writing 'What am I doing?' and then trying honestly to embark.

    To change that would be to abandon this project. So this could now be a cause under 4 above, (though now it has to be a fifth criteria) whereby this project could end because I abandon it deciding this project itself can not adequately do what this project set out to do, which would in turn be a case under the first criteria (whether that be that all or enough has been written).

 

    Why am I doing this? I don't derive any particular pleasure out of it, not that that would be important anyway. It is not that I am unhappy or discontent in any particular or individual way either. I am in fact probably more sure of myself and happy now than I have ever been.

    Statements like that threaten to turn this into some kind of diary. This is not a diary and it needs to stay focussed, but there is perhaps light to be shone on the project by exploring the question of why am I doing it at all in the first place.

 

    I can approach this by asking a number of questions, each in themselves indicative of the assumptions that underlie the inquiry:

    I could ask "Why did I want to do this when I first set out to do this?" That question presupposes a kind of inductive reasoning teleologically, the validity of which I have no proof. Why would my first intention, even if I could acertain and describe it define why I am doing it now? And then what validity could or should pertain to any answer to that question to the overall project?

    I could ask "Why would I want to do this project?" Again, while the answer to this question could fall into or across broadly psychological, philosophical, sociological, or even anthropological ideas, any answer in or across or within any of these ideologies would not go any way, evidentially, toward resolving this project qua this project. Again, any answer along these lines would merely reek the ideological perspective from which these broad criteria operate.

    Perhaps when I am finished, if I finish under the first criteria, I could ask 'Why did I do this project?'. Then I either need to assume that the outcome of this project will itself provide the answer, or that some other (as yet unknown) ideology would equate to it.

 

    Perhaps I am an empty thing, my thin shell a tight sheen of letters.

    Perhaps this is all water and blood, salt and hair.

 

    I am going to need to explore the thing 'feeling'.

    I am not sure if 'feelings' always run parallel to thinkings, as is I suspect commonly supposed. If I were stopped at any given time and asked 'How do you feel?' I would be able most of the time to give a fairly simple answer using the normal code of words. But I am not often stopped in this manner so I do not go through my days 'feeling lost', 'feeling in-control', 'feeling happy'. This, in the same way as I do not go through my days 'feeling conscious', or being consciously aware that I am conscious, or that my heart is beating. I do not stop and check to see if my heart is beating.

    But there are times when I feel myself feeling things. When I think back to what I wrote earlier about images that constitute me I think they may have been feelings.

    When my two year old daughter pats my shoulder and says she loves me there is something in this that heightens my sense of being, without explanation, inexplicably. Is that what I am trying to explain? That feeling of being and meaning that feels unquestionable, yet I am questioning.

 

    Were I not to have that word 'self', would I a) need to have some other word to signify the meaning purportedly held by the word 'self'? b) not have a 'self' in fact? c)have a self in fact but not know it because I don't have a word for it? d) Have a self in fact but be unable to express this fact because of lack of lexicon, yet at the same time be vaguely (or acutely) aware that there is something for which I need a word? e) have another word that expressed something different in meaning, but whose meaning encompassed the content of the meaning of the word 'self' in this language.

 

Perhaps this all an excuse, and I am ignorant of my mundanity – dull and brilliant.

 

Perhaps I am the loneliness my wife feels when I am away, or perhaps I am the cost to my employer.

Here is a list of things that happen and be that might provoke others into their seeming belief that I exist:

    My physical presence

    The sounds they hear that seem to emanate from me

    The money they pay me going out of their bank

    The money I pay them

    The mess I leave behind, my footprints

    A memory they might have of me from the past

 

Even if I do not write this to conjure a reason, nor to measure a worth; yet it is a practice born of reason, and veined with the idea of measuring worth. It is the practice that fogs this, but it is also the practice that holds this (without dissolution)?

 

This is being written with one voice but it could be written with more. I am able to converse in dialogue in my head yet I have insisted in writing this as one voice, as if from one being. Of course I am one being (I am almost sure of that) but am I necessarily one voice? I use different voices when I speak to different people about different things all the time. There is no way I would speak to a work colleague the way I speak to my wife, and vice versa. Except of course for the basic politeness at the surface of our regular conversing.

So why are you writing as if it is from one voice?

Because I am trying get to something.

You can't tell me what it is you're trying to get to?

No. But that's the point.

You are going to end up finding out something more banal than you hope for.

What is that?

It's going to come down to some simple cliché. And it must, because whatever it is you are doing it is not unique, unless you suppose you are unique in some way?

I've already been over that, I am not unique in that all of us, I assume, experience this experiencing thing, yet I am unique in that this does seem to be me and me only experiencing these things in or from or about me. And I realise that this individualising is in fact not unique.

That's right in a pretty basic sort of way. You are going to end up plushing out some platitudes though if that is the track you are on. And it's going to be something like: The meaning is in the journey itself; or the meaning is unspeakable, and in the breathing of life through your body.

And would it be wrong if I did come to that kind of conclusion? Or are you intimating that I should avoid certain varieties or fields of possible answers if I, or you, suspect that they are potentially only going to yield plain, common answers. What validity is there in trying to do this project on the proviso that I do not come up with some cliché or common dull resolution. Anyway, I'm not sure any more that this is about an answer.

That's already pretty close to a cliché. Tell me, why are worried by all this stuff? Why embark on this journey at all?

Two reasons. One I want to write a big thick book about everything I think about this in the best and most honest and straightforward way I possibly can. I want to fully interrogate this phenomenon of my being with all the intelligence and thinking power I can possibly bring to bear. I am thirty-five, and I may fail, but I really want to give it a big honest go.

That's already more than two reasons you're giving me.

Secondly, I want to write a big thick heavy book that other people can get into and understand and scrape around the insides and pick bits out of and maybe get something....

So other people are in fact intrinsic to this project? Sounds to me like you are thirty-five, you feel you have not done enough in your life. You have not lived up to the promise you yourself believed you had in your twenties, and now you are trying to claw back some of that hope, some of that, let's be plain, some of that rush of being young again.

When I thought I would begin writing in two voices I didn't expect to have this kind of interrogation. You are just using easy assumptions as to why you think I would write this book. You are the one with the cliché, my friend, not me.

Testy.

Well.

Well what is it then? Are we going to make any progress going like this? Or are you just making me speak/write these words out of trickery?

I had hoped another voice would lend a hand in this project, rather than try to reduce it to a game of analyse myself.

What else could another voice do other than interrogate the other voice? Did you think we would sing a duet?

You are a cynical bastard.

You don't mean that with as much force as it appears on the page.

Can we cooperate?

Why? That would be pointless. Then it would just be one voice. We have to fight in order to make this progress. We have to argue. Dialectic. And that's another thing, why have you not been citing all the people whose ideas you have been stealing?

That's a side issue.

No it's not. You are pretending this is all your work when if any undergrad were to sift through this they could pick it apart like a bale of hay.

Three reasons.

Can't you keep it to two reasons?

One, because I do not want to get ensnared in the mess of inferring this one thought to one person and this to another. The whole bloody book would be footnotes.

You read David Foster Wallace ten years ago?

You didn't get what he was on about you were too young, and anyway he didn't use them for the reasons you're suggesting. Two, because where would I start?

I'd suggest the beginning.

And in a way I have. When I started this and I'm talking about 'I', should I have begun with an essay on Descartes? Or should I have taken it right back to the Greeks(1)?

And when I was writing about the logical possibilities of the knowability of the self, should I have stopped and diverted into a whole thing on Hume and Wittgenstein(2)? The project would not have got off the first few paragraphs if I had stopped to cite everyone. And even then I may not be citing them correctly.

You could try, many people make careers out of it.

And thirdly, I admit and wholly understand that everything I think and write and speak comes from the thoughts of others. This language, this way of thinking, the logical traps I am caught up in, all come from the western tradition and have been covered before. But I am doing this to use my own mind to the best of my ability.

You said that before.

And if my mind is filled by the thoughts of others so be it, but I must push on. Should I cite Samuel Johnson for the meaning of words?

OK. There is nothing new in this. Can we move on? But, at the risk of being too abstruse and citing Beckett, where should we go? Are we two here standing under a tree on the road?

Now you're the one sinking into cliché.

No, I'm just citing the sources for the next feeling I have. Was Godot a cliché when Beckett wrote it? Was he just explaining something we all already knew, or was he inventing something?

The best works are those that seem to reveal to us something obvious. They make us feel we already knew what they teach us but we just weren't able to open our eyes in our souls well enough to see clearly until that work of art helped us see. In this way the artist can do both, that is, both show us something we always feel we have known, and that that something, because it is the first time we actually feel it, is something new.

That's nice, but I already knew that.

I don't think we're getting very far with this.

Am I able to speak about you without speaking about me?

Is monologue any less of a restricting factor in this project than dialogue?

You often think in dialogue.

What I mostly do is play out scenes in my head about the future. Imagining what a person will or could say and what I should or would like to say back. I lay awake at night scheming and worrying.

Most of the time things do not turn out the way I imagined they would, and rarely do I get to actually say the things that I planned to say when stressing desperately at 2am.

Of course, later, all those situations (except for a few) that I spent hours stressing about, in retrospect seem silly, and in fact I can hardly remember what it was that had me tensely strung a year ago. But at work there's always something.

You writing a diary now?

That paragraph gave me pleasure to write.

Where are we? Who am I?

That's the point. You seem to be confident, you are a voice untied to this project. A voice being introduced to it. You are a voice of careful cynicism. You are a useful voice to me. I use you often when I am looking at the shit people put in front of me most days in the form of proposals, papers, plans. I use you to screen the crap away. Then you give me comfort. Then you criticize me for whatever you can.

But I am you.

I know.

Why don't you write a book about a turtle? Or a seagull, or a boat full of animals? Write a something that means something that has pictures in it. You love the Little Prince. Why don't you write a picture book?

Would this be dishonest?

How? Sometimes it's better to tell a story than tell what you think.

But that's what I am trying to find out. Can I describe myself in this form? And anyway, any story I tell is going to be from me.

 

If a book were something that merely carried you along to a conclusion, then the writer should just delete everything up to the last line and then submit that to a thinking audience. Nay, the last word. Nay again, merely the full stop.

 

It is one thing to know or feel someone is feeling something, it is another thing to altogether to feel it, to know it yourself. How does this relate to knowing / feeling / writing about oneself? When oneself is the subject how well can one both be and fell and watch oneself being and feeling oneself being and feeling at the same time?