solipsistic exhaustion

It’s hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn’t move at the speed of your cognition… That it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second… how not to feel ashamed of the amount of time things take, or the recalcitrance of emotional or personal change.

What if we shift the question from ‘who do I want to be?’ to the question, ‘what kind of life do I want to live with others?’? It seems to me that then many of the questions you pose about happiness, but perhaps also about ‘the good life’ – very ancient yet urgent philosophical questions – take shape in a new way. If the I who wants this name or seeks to live a certain kind of life is bound up with a ‘you’ and a ‘they’ then we are already involved in a social struggle when we ask how best any of us are to live.

I am a collection of dismantled almosts.

INTERVIEWER Do you think of yourself as having a relationship with God? CARSON No. But that’s not bad. I think in the last few years, since I’ve been working on Decreation and reading a lot of mystics, especially Simone Weil, I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t. So, sad fact, but get used to it, because nothing else is going to happen. INTERVIEWER He’s not available because he chooses to remove himself or he’s not available because he doesn’t exist? CARSON Neither. He’s not available because he’s not a being of a kind that would fit into our availability. “Not knowable,”as the mystics would say. And knowing is what a worshiper wants to get from God—the sense of being in an exchange of knowledge, knowing and being known. It’s what anybody wants from any relationship of love, and the relationship with God is supposed to be one of love. But I don’t think any kind of knowing is ever going to materialize between humans and gods. INTERVIEWER Is it stymied because of the nature of the beast? CARSON Because of the difference of the two orders. If God were knowable, why would we believe in him?

epimeleia heautou: care of self

Making an injury visible and public is usually the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was long tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious. Which means that every conflict is in part a battle over the story we tell, or who tells and who is heard.

I do this. It would be disingenuous not to proclaim my act, even tho it feels awkward and childish, in a way that reads, “me too! me too!” because reading the tweet shocked me—a/my seemingly personal act is also “a thing”.