The notion of putting things inside of other things (i.e. plugging a cable into a device, putting food inside a box, etc.) is unique to humankind and the higher primates, for the most part, and is really a “modern human” (in the anthropological sense, so ca. a few dozen thousand years) development.

This implies that the notion of nonsubjective interiority is a high order conception. But maybe that’s not really the case and I’m extrapolating more than is justified.

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Second post within a couple of hours. I’ve been working on photos and I feel a kind of deep frustration right now at something or other, but I can’t tell what.

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I was never the little boy that wanted to be a fireman, a police officer, a soldier, a construction worker, or any of these “man” professions.

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People really do have a radically broad range of personalities. I see some of the people living here at I-House and I think “how can you possibly be that way?!”

This is despite my early university education in cultural anthropology.

I think the thing that shocks me most is the variety of speech acts and, more specifically, the framings of experience and naiveté that they imply. The categories of experience and naiveté are amongst the most problematic in human interaction because they concern themselves directly with what, for lack of a better term, I will call cultural ontology while at the same time being indexes to respect (or the lack thereof).

I routinely see these interactions here at I-House in which one person demonstrates to another his or her sophistication, in response to which the latter’s eyes twinkle in that “geez, aren’t you a silly hick?!” way. It’s easy to grant the relativism of almost anything other than sophistication, to which for some reason in modernity/postmodernity in particular we attribute a kind of absoluteness akin to the speed of light in a vacuum.

Sophistication, metropolitanism, and cosmopolitanism are supposed to be the acultural underpinnings of a new hypersaturated, all-encompassing epistemological transcendence, but instead they are just like scarification or child-rearing practices, only very few people realize this, instead positing a kind of universal world-weariness where none exists.

I have no idea what I’m saying at this point, I’ve been here in silence for too long and all words are once again beginning to mean the same thing.

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I remember walking in Chicago in the rain in various kinds of emotional distress at various times of the year listening to varying pieces of music. At one point it was the Pumpkins’ “Soma,” then later it was Neubauten’s “Ich Gehe Jetzt,” then finally, before I left it was Fleetwood Mac and “Dreams.”

Ironic, that.

You always suppose or posit in advance an awareness of the ephemerality of your current state of affairs in general, but this is totally different from actually living and knowing. I don’t know why it should surprise me that imagining and predicting are different from living and knowing, but nonetheless it does.

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It’s getting late and I’m getting stupid. ;-P

on which I want desperately to post but on which I feel an utter lack of words. I say that but I also wonder at times like this whether a lack of words isn’t really just a lack of the courage to write them or to face what I think at all.

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I stood up and walked to the other side of the room and noticed a small puddle of muddy water on the floor right where I was squatting. It somehow makes me happy to see evidence of my having been here tonight; I feel something like a ghost.

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I’m imagining a scene in which a man comes home from work by subway after long hours at the office. As he goes up the stairs from the station to the street he sees a small flower growing in a crevice where the station meets the sidewalk. His first impulse is to pick it and carry it home with him, but just as his fingers clench the stem he feels a pang of guilt and stops. He lets go, stands up, and backs away, bumping into several people. He walks half a block to the corner and has to wait to cross the street. While he waits he looks back toward the station. At first he feels shock, believing the flower to be absent, but then he realizes that his view is obscured. He shrugs and walks home, but when he arrives he feels an incompleteness about the day and pours himself a double scotch before going to bed early.

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I took the 3-train home even though it was on the 1-train track and hit the 1-train stops. I did this because the MTA man on the platform told me it was a 3-train making all 1-train stops. What I want to know is why it’s a 3-train in that case… if it’s on the track of the 1-train and it makes those stops, then why is it not the 1-train? One car in the train had the (1) sign out, but all the other cars had the (3) showing.

I don’t suppose this puzzle merits this level of attention or is indeed even a puzzle at all.

I’m gonna work on some photos, I think.