A collection of my translations~ and other things.
I'm going to Alain's soon, I'm going to Alain's soon. It's a feeling of excitement and despair at the same time since I know I won’t get anything done at his, as in, even less than I get done here. I think time spent at Alain’s is like Heidegger’s second kind of boredom. All the time I have to make the difficult decision of whether to go out or stay home; any Philosopher knows this conundrum; no matter how much you like human interaction there’s always some higher work that you could have stayed at home doing. But a Philosopher needs Life Experience too, he needs a life to analyse. I found a feather on my bedspread. There was an hour before I had to leave and I spent it stupidly, looking at the ceiling and stuff like that. Even a walk to a bus stop is bursting with content. Mostly it’s the people: assigning them to categories, making up personalities or careers for them, finding the hot ones whatever you want to say. Making intense studies of human character or nature or condition from such little observations is, to my mind, possible, but this isn’t actually what I end up doing each time I go out. I have a much easier time looking at bits of trash on the ground or shopfronts or the sky. That’s why I think homeless people are the greatest antidote to a soulful walk – the reason I was looking at the ground in the first place was to be in my own world and not be distracted in my soulfulness by the hordes. But then there is a methy dirty face looking up at you and who could be all philosophical after that? I’m well aware that philosophy does nothing for society and I can’t save you. I just have to imagine that were everyone all provided for in their physical needs, they would get bored and turn to thought. And I wonder if these people ever tell themselves “it could be worse” or feel survivor’s guilt. Do they know that to me they represent the whole of the human condition? But my struggles are so minimal, what can I know of the human condition? If I’m making a fuss about doing or not doing an assignment, all I need is a walk down and up Swanston Street to make me stop in at the library on the way home. My walk to the bus stop never has any homeless people. Though if you try hard enough you can still learn something. For instance, the kind of outfit that makes a person appear studious. It’s usually an Asian girl with a minimalist but fashionable coat on and a neat ponytail. Something else you can learn from walking about is the futility of your own existence or dreams. There’s no way to calculate the percentage of humanity that has literary or philosophical ambitions, but when I’m standing in a crowd I often think that if even five of these people had a similar goal as me, how could I compete with them? Then the opposite is also true. If only one percent of this crowd is overtly interested in literature, that means that the other ninety nine percent are going about the kind of usual life that I can only dream of, a life where you don’t think too much about the fact that you’re leading a life; you’re too busy actually leading the thing to think anything much about it. All high and mighty statements of “the human condition is reason” or “philosophy is the truth and the greatest happiness” or “art is the Godhead” don’t actually apply to anyone who doesn’t get any money from their parents. It’s easy to forget sometimes that homework takes up such a tiny tiny fraction of human experience and the other ninety nine percent is solely the struggle for survival. Still, the Ancient Greeks, who one must imagine as being in a constant state of plague and war and disaster and murder, found time to think about what makes a good speech good. And all the primitive tribes of the world for hundreds of thousands of years have gone on making myths and epics of incomparable artistry to many works today. You’d think that the works would get better and better seeing as they have the whole of the human literary canon behind them but they don’t. And let us not forget about religion. Still, in a throng of hedonists how can I think that my mediocre essays will mean a thing? Dylan must have been out on a walk because he wasn’t answering the door. I’d bought a Coke from the bakery on the way; it was glass and everything. I put it down on the deck and watched the condensation seep into the wood. It was just the wrong time of afternoon and very hot. I took my shoes and socks off, lining the shoes up neatly on the step and laying my sweaty socks across the deck to dry. I unbuttoned my dress to expose my singlet and pulled it to my waist like a skirt. I picked some lint from my left big toe and left it on the leaf of a pot plant next to me that had little red bulbs on it. I saw Dylan coming up the street and laid down, a hand on my stomach and the other under my head. I pretended to be asleep to see what he would do. ‘Hi lady’ he said while opening the gate. I didn’t move. ‘Are you hot?’ while coming up the step beside me. I shot a ‘why did you ask me that’ look at the sky before getting up and squeezing his be-denimed butt. Dylan’s house isn’t messy but I don’t know it’s got this feeling to it where you can tell a single guy lives there. I brought Bell here once and she said it looked like a crack house. Which is true but it’s hard to explain why that is. And I bet you he never even bothered thinking about anything other than the insulation or the plumbing when he bought it, things I wouldn’t even know existed. I don’t think he considered whether it looked cozy as I would have done. Ah, coziness, scourge of my life, let me be rid of you, let me not think whether a house looks philosophical. All the same his house is cozier than mine could ever be because he does things like rotating the mattress and Putting Stuff Away Where it Belongs. Only the mattress forms a valley on both sides because he sleeps in the middle when I’m not there, and this formation results in us drifting towards the center, colliding in our sleep and rubbing together like tectonic plates. At Alain's house, Being and Time does not act much differently to how it does in my apartment. I sit on Alain's jute rug and stare at a corner of it poking out of my backpack in much the same way as I would usually stare at it. Only now there's a man massaging my scalp and telling me about his day, which helps me zone out and not think about it too hard. “... so that's what they said, it seems like the paper is going ahead, but we have to mention the neoliberal issue…” Alain is an academic, which is part of the reason I've started dreading my degree so much recently. Not that he isn't successful – he has a house and a job, which is more than I can say– but a great percentage of his work hours are spent on activities like emailing kids about what were we supposed to do for homework gain?, or having a series of zoom meetings about whether he ought to change a word in the title of one of the modules of his course, and the actual research element culminates in two or three papers a year. Which is a perfect job, as far as most jobs go, it's better than changing septic tanks or selling drugs, but sometimes I think that at least if I was in some horrible field I could say “the world is so unfair” instead of just the usual old “the world is so boring”. So Alain's job has nothing wrong with it at all, only it wasn't the kind of cloistered cold-stone Latin-motto life of an Assistant Professor that I had imagined. That could partially be attributed to his being in the school of Design and not of Classics or what have you, but you’d expect philosophy of all things to have a little bit of crumbling-book-from-the-1800s but not so. Though my school met most of the exterior criteria of turrets and clock towers (and this was exactly the thing that made me choose the school in the first place) as soon as you set foot inside the buildings you are greeted with smart boards and office chairs, not wooden pews or inkwells. And I had been inside my supervisor's office, which represented to me my plastic and linoleum future than even her intellectual bookshelves couldn't save. I took one of her classes in first year as a core subject, then another one in second year without realising she was the lecturer, and then in third year another one that she taught but only because I was interested in the topic. By that third year I was embarrassed enough about it to read a couple of her papers just in case and approach her with a question I already knew the answer to because I thought that building a repertoire with someone was the kind of thing you were supposed to do as a university student, and I had the feeling that it might be my last opportunity to do so. If I had not approached her, I might not have had the courage or been bothered enough to submit an honors proposal of my own accord. But here I am. At first, after our conversation, I felt an elation for living someone else’s life, and I enjoyed the image that formed in my head of myself from the perspective of the other students in the class, who also doubtless wanted to build rapport but knew not how. How! How? Emulate me, that’s how, but I can’t guarantee you’ll ever be as able as I am able because it’s easy enough to come to a teacher with a question, but near impossible to steer the conversation to a debate about a topic that just so happens to overlap with that research she did in 2015! Yes, I did stay up the night before thinking about how I would do it, but it only took me a night whereas it would unquestionably take you ten!!! I knew I had made a mistake when the following week she approached me to say that she’d like to email me a few papers I might be interested in, and not even one of the two borderline attractive males in the class had fallen to their knees and begged me to have sex with them, ‘O mysterious and intellectual one’. With Alain I felt regressed, and sleepy. I probably said already about how I’m doing Heidegger’s boredoms for my paper, but basically Alain is like the second kind of boredom. The second kind of boredom is, for example, when you go to a party and it’s very fun and you talk to a lot of people, but then once you get home you realise that it was boring, that you were bored, and that such events are only distractions from the true and singular aim of life: to philosophize. So, I don’t mean to say that Alain bores me, because he doesn’t, but he does distract me, and that makes him possibly a more dangerous existence than if he had merely been boring. Of course, if I found him boring I wouldn’t be going out with him. But despite not being a sort of boredom, I still believe Alain falls into the second category. The difference between the boredoms hasn’t got anything to do with the quality of the boredom itself in my opinion, because you either are bored or you aren’t. The difference is, I think, temporal, and represents a large problem. By temporal, I mean that the boredoms relate to different spans of time. The first kind of boredom is the sort you get when waiting for a train. The boredom lasts about as long as it takes for the train to arrive. The second kind of boredom happens at a party, or maybe during an otherwise interesting lecture or movie or whatever. Most of the time you don’t even realise you’re bored. So, that kind of boredom lasts for as long as it takes for the party, movie, or lecture to end, but I’m also of the opinion that it extends a little bit further than that, if you’re the sort of person who takes things to extremes like I do, because if you notice at one party that you’re bored, then naturally you have to wonder if you weren’t actually bored at all those other parties you went to. Thus the boredom from one event sort of bleeds into your conception of past events and future events, so that this sort of boredom is somewhere in the middle of immediate boredom and eternal boredom. Then the third kind is eternal boredom. I can’t remember what example the Big Man gave for the third kind, only that it’s kind of transcendental or sublime or whatever you want to call it. It can happen at any time and it feels like being bored with the whole universe. If I had to explain to anyone what it’s really like I might get put away and called suicidal, but that’s not necessarily what it’s about and most of the time it goes away in a couple of seconds unless you’re having a really soulful day. I actually think that Satre’s Nausea phenomenon is similar if not the same. It’s like your brain forgets to ascribe language and concepts to things for a bit, and you see through to the reality of how meaningless and unconnected everything is. But just leave it for a while and you come back to yourself once you get hungry or something. I think there are less intense variations of it too, which happen on days where you’re feeling less suicidally inclined. It’s a feeling that makes you think ‘what is this?’ or ‘where am I?’. At least, that’s what I read into it, but I don’t know Heidegger well enough to say for certain. You’ll recall that I actually haven’t started doing any research for my paper. Because the third kind of boredom is so all-consuming, it’s easy to imagine that it has some kind of philosophical significance. It also seems to happen even when you thought you were happy, or had forgotten about all that philosophy shit for a moment. Since it appears when you’re elated or depressed indiscriminately, it could be argued that it goes beyond emotion. It’s like a more innate emotion, behind all your other emotion, that the minute ups and downs of regular life usually serve to cover up. The most convincing solution I have found, convincing mostly because it takes the form of a convenient aphorism, is that the answer to the boredom is to study the phenomenon of the boredom itself, and investigate those facets of life that are the only ones capable of producing a level of feeling so much deeper than you are usually subject to, in other words, this particular boredom is urging you to study philosophy, the only solution to that kind of cosmic unease. Well, I don’t know, in my case it would be philosophy, but for someone else the answer might be creating tapestries or welding or something. I don’t have much testimony to go on, other than my own. It’s perfectly possible that Heidegger also poses the solution in the form of ‘Studying Being’ but of course he would say that since he’s a philosopher, that’s like asking an acupuncturist what the solution to your medical problem is. Big surprise, it’s acupuncture. And so, the reason that Alain sometimes bored me actually had nothing to do with him being boring or not, and everything to do with the fact that being with him was preventing me from being a philosopher, time spent with him was time not spent in that most important of human pursuits, but instead in watching Total Recall and gorging myself on a plate of lentils. All of this of my own volition, however. Since I knew that staying at home would probably mean looking longingly at Being and Time and gorging myself on oatmeal. Besides, I had got into this relationship in the first place because I was under the impression, mistaken or not I still have not found out, that in order to be a philosopher, and hence to study the human condition, you have to actually go out and experience that human condition and all the guilt and boredom and heartbreak that comes along with it. Primum vivere, deinde philosophari. You can’t just sit in your room thinking about thinking about it. If I could say with any confidence that going out with Alain was an endeavour with the consequence of Life Experience and Fodder for Philosophy then I could justify it. I asked him. ‘Do you think I’ve learnt a lot from going out with you?’ He squeezed my boob. ‘Sounds like a you question’. I got up off the rug and sat on his lap facing him and blocking his view of the TV. This is the position I usually take when I’m trying to get an answer to a philosophical problem I’m having, as it seems to make him more receptive to inquiry. ‘I think I’ve learnt about what a comfortable relationship looks like…’ ‘Well, there you go then’. ‘But isn’t there anything more, like, something philosophically significant?’ ‘Uh, isn’t everything philosophy?’ I wished he would be more dialectical. ‘I wish you would be more dialectical’. ‘I don’t know what that means’. He was kind not to get annoyed at me for trying to engage him in my problems all the time. A lot of the time I just ask him the questions to see what he will say, already having my personal solution decided in my head, and if his aligns with mine I give him a kiss. If he doesn’t agree with me I try and test my position against his. But he always gives in. I got off Dylan’s lap and sat by his side again. He had this depressed kind of couch that made it hard to sit like a girl, no matter how I sat on the couch it made me feel greasy and hunch backed. So I stood up and went round the back of the couch to massage his head like he had been doing for me before. “Can you do my neck? Here?” he said. I did his neck instead. Now, writing in my diary an account of whatever happened that day, I find it hard to remember even one thing I talked to him about.
Later that evening Dylan played synthesizers in the other room while I lay on the bed with my top off. There was no aircon in the bedroom, only the living room, and having just left the living room five minutes ago I was still acclimatised. It felt like a warm bath, and lying there I found it hard to tell where my limbs ended and the air began. Dylan had an old house with air vents in the ceiling. I don’t think they worked anymore, but I enjoyed dividing its grid holes symmetrically every way I could think of, or seeing how many squares I could count before I lost track. There were six holes by six holes, so I would count how many 1x1 holes there were, then how many 2x2. If I were more mathematically inclined I bet there’s some pattern that you could use to calculate the total amount of squares, but I do it more for time-killing than for mental exercise. I rolled onto my front, onto my elbows. I was eye level with a dead fly on the windowsill. I’d brought Being and Time into bed with me, hoping that reading philosophy in bed would be an attractive enough activity that I might consider opening it. I picked up the book and put it on the pillow in front of me. It was too big to hold up like you would a novel. On the pillow, it recalled to me an image of a great heaving bible or some other tome that one might find placed on a satin purple cushion, covered with a class case. Playing along with the image it conjured up I decided to consult it like an oracle. I didn’t have any questions so I just opened it at random. Dasein comports itself towards something possible in its possibility by expecting it. Expecting is not just an occasional looking-away from the possible to its possible actualization, but is essentially a waiting for that actualization. Ominous much? It didn’t mean anything to me. I shut it again and laid my head on top of it, my ear to the cool plastic of its cover. I could just hear my own heartbeat, nothing epiphany inducing. I went to see Dylan. After a little bit of squeezing his butt cheeks to the beat of the music, I asked, “Can I have a bath?” He screwed up his face like he was thinking about it. “What about a shower?” I asked. “Okay,” he said. I had noticed, recently, that Dylan doesn’t like it when I take baths. I didn’t particularly want a bath right at that moment, and I mostly asked just to see what he would say. But now that he had expressed distaste for it I found myself wanting to have a bath. “How come I can have a shower but not a bath?” “You can have a bath if you want,” he said. “I know I can. Why did you make a face about it though?” “I don’t mind, you can have a bath.” “I don’t want one anymore.” “Okay lady.” Dylan has a real talent for wheedling his way out of a dialectic without even realising he’s doing it. The key is to barely listen to me, to not care about the issue, to never admit to having any emotions. I can’t hate it because I know it lets us avoid an argument. If he were more like me, we might spend a few hours a day theorizing about bathtubs. Isn’t it strange, though? If I had some inexplicable aversion to baths, I would take a bath a day until I had worked out why that was. How can he spend every day completely unaware, analytical of his idiosyncrasies? What’s wrong with a bath? I did kind of need a bath, but now I couldn’t take one since I’d said I wasn’t going to. So I went back to the bedroom and got a flannel then went back to the bathroom and peeled my sweaty panties off and put them on the towel rail. Dylan looked at my boobs for a couple of seconds and then went back to his drum machine. If I were a functioning adult, I would have more qualms about somebody putting their dirty panties on my towel rail than I would about them having a bath. Whatever. “What if we had a bath together? That would save water, too,” I suggested, guessing at the origin of his unease. “Uh, not tonight lady. I want to finish this track.” I slapped a hand on my head and looked up at the ceiling. “I didn’t mean tonight necessarily.” “Okay then, maybe next week.” “No,” I said, “I’m not inviting you to have a bath with me. I’m just trying to see what it is you have against baths.” “I don’t have anything against baths.” My whore bath method is to do top to bottom for all the regular bits, so face torso legs, then do my other bits in order from most sanitary to least sanitary. I put a corner of the cloth in my butt crack and held on tight. “Look, I’ve got a tail.” Dylan turned around and smiled, and pinched my ass. I let the cloth free and hung it up on the towel rail.
The next morning I left at nine for my meeting with my Honors supervisor at ten. This wasn’t a regular thing, she just said she wanted to have a last chat before the holidays so I have some time to think She said things like that, things like: I could take some more time to consider all the possibilities and that one can change one’s topic even after it’s already been accepted, et cetera et cetera. (About her topic being something she wrote an essay about in class (boredom). The teacher set the essay questions and that’s why she feels guilty about it.) Other students might get annoyed or bored if they just ended up doing the exact same topic they already wrote an essay about without even really considering some other options, but not I. I don’t have any original philosophical ideas of my own. So when someone says, pick any topic you like, that’s a crisis for me, because the kind of philosophical question I spend most of my time thinking about might be something like: “what kind of food does a Philosopher eat?” Whereas when a pushy professor says, here, I wrote out some points that you might want to include in your honors proposal, and all I have to do is put it in a form and press send, it doesn’t make me feel good necessarily but it’s much less self-reflection, and my process of self-reflection is so elaborate it might take a few years of journal-writing before I even decide I like a field of thought (epistemology) let alone a particular thesis topic. Maybe it’s unconventional, and immoral, but having this guaranteed topic gives me another year to work out where the hell I am and what the hell I’m doing. I predict that I would be a great academic, if only someone was there to come up with the research questions for me, like they do in undergrad, and after that let me the hell alone. Maybe the reason she was so adamant about me doing this for honors, was that she was enamoured with the idea of a student being inspired to further education because of an assignment she assigned. I thought about it the whole train trip, bus trip, and during the walk to her office. It was an issue I’d had the exact same opinion about and the exact same train of thought about a number of times already, but my brain had decided to rehash everything in that moment and there was nothing I could do about it. [The meeting.]
I went around the city trying to get inspired. My favourite way to do this is to go shopping because it doesn’t require any actual creative or intellectual input, only the thought of it. If I were really a philosopher I might sit on the lawn outside the library and write in my little brown book, but if I were a real philosopher I wouldn’t have thought that I ought to be doing that, it would just be happening, so I decided that doing so would be a futile pretense. I had been down that particular street too many times for it to offer anything new to me except maybe the people, but the people were the same as they always were. The emotion I had felt at the fair was gone, even though it had felt so much like an epiphany at the time. Now I realised my stupidity: you can’t call it an “epiphany” if all that you’re realising is that society is a machine and that time marches on without you. Still, I would rather feel, at least, that each moment is educating me or awakening me even if it isn’t, than to know the emptiness of anything that imitates (approaches) an awakening. I pick a line of bricks to stick to in order to evade a man conducting a survey, trying to signal to fellow beings on the street that these are my bricks now and let me pass, and aren’t you going to give way? I’m not doing it. Further up the street at the crossing I see a man and a woman, one of them must be blind because there’s a cane tapping on the ground in front of them, but I can’t tell who is holding it as they’re both wearing a pink shirt and seem to form a single entity, the bob of their walk synchronized. I’m too busy watching them to see that the light of the crosswalk I was aiming for has gone red, so I flinch and step back onto the pavement. My sudden stop parts a sea of people that were walking behind me and they pass me on my left and right. I stop again on the other side of the road thinking where I ought to go and decide to look at the stationary. I go up to Russell Street, looking sideways the whole time at the library, trying to frame my vision in such a way that I can’t see the cars parked beside it on the street, imagining that I lived 100 years ago and turned my head in such a way that this might have been the exact view I’d have had of the library, of course I might have already died in childbirth or something so there’s no point thinking about it. On the escalator down into Officeworks I put my hand on the rail then take it off again then put it on again to see what it feels like. I go through all the aisles just to kill time, knowing that I don’t really want anything and hoping maybe the mere sight of writing implements will make me feel all academic. I’ve already got three notebooks at home that I bought thinking I might feel like doing Heidegger if I looked at them long enough. But those aren’t ones I bought here, the ones here aren’t nice enough to produce such an effect. They do have moleskins, which I guess meet all my criteria for being ‘nice’, but the price tag recalls to me on-the-road hipsterism or kitsch bar poetry and typewriters, and if I wrote the worst pulp dribble you’ve ever seen in a children’s school notebook then at least it would be authentic, not that there’s anyway to think, “you know what? I’m going to be a writer” without completely demeaning yourself, not to be horrible about it. Part of my spite in that moment probably had something to do with the customer who was in the aisle with me. It occurred to me that I probably looked just about as hipster as anyone in boots and a square dress. But he was wearing blundstones chinos and cropped green bomber jacket. He pulled a thin volume from the display and let the pages flip from one hand to the other. It’s not any different to what I’m doing, coming here hoping to be inspired by the aesthetics of a blank page. Meaning I can’t tell if he’s here with the same goal that I’m here for: so I resolve not to judge books by their covers or whatever you want to call it, not that I ever remember my resolutions. I just think that if you were a real writer or a real philosopher, you would go through notebooks on such a frequent daily basis that firstly, it would be unthinkable to buy a moleskine every time, on an artist’s budget, and secondly, you would have long ago figured out which book suited you best and you wouldn’t have to stand here flipping through any of them. We all have to start somewhere, I suppose, but start in the clearance section if you have any intention of doing something for real. It occurs to me that I’ve been standing and looking at this man from the corner of my eye a little too long now so I get out of the aisle. I stand in front of the pens pretending to consider them and then get three sixty-cent biros like I always do. I went past my supermarket on the way home. I looked in at it through the window on the street. The actual aisles and everything were a little below ground level. I saw my reflection in the glass without really seeing it, because the light outside was too bright. Maybe at night time I would be able to see myself better and wouldn’t get this strange feeling, a feeling like I wasn’t really there, I felt like a piece of rubber or styrofoam, thick and gelatinous. I was looking down at the store so it was like I was looking at a dollhouse or a play. I watched a woman put a tin of something in her basket. Her skin looked like cheese, she was a big lump of cheese and her arms were moved about by strings hung from the ceiling. Her basket was green, but I could have sworn that the baskets at my store were black, and I felt like I’d been betrayed, that you could spend twenty hours a week in the worst place on earth and not notice a little detail like that. It occurred to me that if five minutes ago someone had come up to me and said, for $100, what colour baskets do they have at this store? I would not have been able to answer, not that anyone would ask me anything like that but if they had, I would have thought about it for the rest of my life. I would be compelled to memorise or at least notice the colour of everything in the world for the next week or so. Currently, it was still in the realm of forgetability, so I peeled myself away from the window and continued to my apartment; the stairwell smelt like curry.