As I reintegrate work after the holidays, what do I think about?
I coerce my mind. Forcing it to fit into details. All energies first plunging, then tightly packed into trivial activities such as making photocopies or updating students’ schedules. The strength of compactness. A necessary density not to leave any part of my being at bay, a part that would be leaping alone, detached.
Bringing the entire artillery to catch a fly, I know. All of me together, the wholeness of my components dragged along, for this is the rule: We abandon none of us. We stick together.
This is called focus, concentration. Amateur psychoanalysts would instead see, I’m well aware, retention and a fixation somewhere in one of the various possible degrees of an unsurmounted anal stage.
For me, this ability to invest one’s totality, even into what does not require such an intense input, is nothing more than having a point of convergence in lieu of mental wanderlust. An adequate voice to support a rallying cry that cannot be ignored. Concrete moments when inventories can accurately be drawn to ensure we’re all here, nothing gone missing.
And also, dear ones, it’s how I nursed myself, year after year, decade after decade. An extraordinary focus I’m quite proud of, I must admit, despite drawbacks.
Remember what I said earlier: I started out in life with a serious handicap. A strange illness with physical and behavioral symptoms that truly impaired my functionality. I was an ambulant disaster during childhood, and detonated with some delay during adolescence. Bits and pieces of me scattered everywhere. A real mess, destroying the quietude of denial anchored all around me. They hated me for the disturbance, but that’s another story.
You ask, why the delay? Well, because I could, to a certain extent, temporize the inevitable. I did it, even as a very young child, by magnifying concentration to extremes. Locking my body and feelings into a position of absolute availability for a task.
I became very good at it and can still, even to this day, with a wink petrify my entire being and push it as a block into a narrow channel of vision. It’s magic. It’s like taking a large sphere and making it fit into the hollow shape meant for a tiny square. I can do it.
In a state as dense as the one I’m describing here, there’s nothing I can’t understand or perform. Give me a hard problem. Something I know nothing about, and let me figure it out. Or let’s look at Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Or do we want an explanation of the proof that 1 + 1 = 2? I’ll manage it.
The problem is that outside that bubble of concentration, when I read myself back, the mathematical demonstration which was correct, or the austere post-modern philosophical essay, I don’t understand them anymore. It’s like reading the work of another person. I don’t even remember what the words or signs I used mean. But I’m sure I knew a minute ago. I juggled with them so well, I vouch for that. An in-depth perception. All gone now. Vanished. Even the souvenir itself of having written this or that. I can’t recall any of the details. Just a vague impression of having been there, in the text, in the problem, in the “house of thoughts” as I often used to call it. The place where I can go, but cannot sustain nor remember.
When I was hospitalized, they submitted me, and more than once, to extensive tests. At 16, the shrink explained that intellectually indeed there was nothing I couldn’t do. There was not a discipline in this world I could not understand if I tried, but only if I went into my “house of thoughts.” And that’s when he added I would never be able to study.
What can a girl do when faced with such a verdict? Learn to weave baskets?
Believe it or not, they did teach me. They were not baskets though. They were chairs. Weaving the seat and the back. And I was good at it. I pulled on the bulrush like crazy, the tightest weaving in the class. Resistant, undeformable chairs. The best.
I didn’t argue. I didn’t fight the diagnosis. I knew it was the right one.
I could not export my “house of thoughts” into the real world. I could not operate it in a normal context such as in a discussion because it was completely cut off from me.
As I told you, it was a place where I went. It was not a part of me. Some inner secret world. No. It was outside, but to be reached I had to cross all of what I was, all my depth. And it stood at the other end of me, over on the other side. It had a sort of address. Entering a space that had no connection to anything. Just waiting for me. Just there for me. And it could not be described. It had no visible appearance, although I would say it was perfectly smooth and neatly empty. None of the content I would develop in it could be translated into an audible format. Because once out of that “house of thoughts,” I could neither understand nor remember what I had done in it.
How did the “house” came to be?
At first, it was a game. I would let myself fall. Incredible inward distances. I had somehow discovered that I could write an assignment for school this way. I just couldn’t answer any questions about it afterward, that’s true. In my normal state, I was dumb. I could impeccably prepare an exam this way, but I failed completely in the classroom once in front of the questions. Knowledge had been left in my “house of thoughts.” Even if I could go back in the house during the exam, all had been erased the moment I had pulled out.
So I taught myself to stretch the house. Study an hour before exam time, just the main stuff, learn to walk, take the bus, enter the classroom without leaving the house of thoughts. This is exactly like being blind. You cannot be at two places at the same time. You’ve got to sacrifice one. So I did.
I would forget people’s names, my home phone number, how to simply chitchat, unable to carry on any distracting activity. I would walk in an affected way, almost a robot. Rigid. Eyes, the gaze weird. Way, way before I ever took drugs, my parents and school authorities thought I was constantly stoned, out of my head. And they would yell, threaten. But luckily, I couldn’t hear very well either. And I went on stretching my house of thoughts.
The issue with my house, I think, had to do with the air it encountered as I entered and left. Somehow there was a mental draft. A gush of wind that would shake my mind, and which grew bigger as I grew older. Eventually, I had a tornado between my two ears. What a plight. It razed everything. And I snapped.
The young girl who was admitted in a psychiatric ward, as an example, read books in her house of thoughts, but couldn’t remember afterward what they were about. Sometimes, not even the title or the author. But she had read with intensity every single word. She knew she had felt powerful emotions as she read. She was absolutely certain she had developed ideas and comments along the chapters she had gone through. She had no doubt about having understood implications. She had inferred. Analyzed. Decorticated the writing. But had totally forgotten. A perfect blank.
The house of thoughts grew. It helped to survive, yes, but its side effects were devastating. It came to a point where the blankness covered most of the things I did in a day. I had succeeded in extending it quite far, but at the same time it prevented me from having a natural behavior. I didn’t sit, I had a poise. Fabricated. Artificial. An aspect I had to give myself to try and resemble a person while I was busy elsewhere, in my house.
I had to write tons of notes to remember what I had done or said.
You have no idea how consuming maintaining the house in operation could be. Energy-wise. And no one can imagine how difficult it was to land back into the world for even a short appearance.
One day, I found I could no longer do it. An atrocious event happened.
That’s the day I crashed. And everybody just went: Oh my God, she’s soooo sick. Because I was shouting at the top of my lungs, and just couldn’t stop doing so.
You see, the most unexpected thing occurred. There had been something in my house of thoughts, a horrible thing. I had seen it, and had ran away at the speed of light. Finding security in the world of people. Suddenly, there had been a presence utterly hideous waiting for me in my house. I saw it twice. And both times, I screamed like hell, unstoppable. And went mad for months.
To this day, I still don’t know what was in the house.
I’ve built since other houses of thoughts. Much smaller ones. As said, lighter ones. Versatile ones. Adaptable to the imperatives of normal life. With many doors for fast escape. And I have also set up ways of, not remembering for I still can't, but retaining enough clues to reconstruct. But I never went back to my original house of thoughts. It’s been condemned. Buried. And that’s forever.
I talked about it with one of the doctors. He agreed. Better leave it closed. Some things should indeed be left where they are, as they are, and unremembered.
I’ve nevertheless kept a few habits. The main one, I still gather all of myself when I move among activities. I focus. Very important. All of me answering in unison: present.
What if I left a piece of myself behind, a little part of me careless and candidly free, enjoying a stroll, and suddenly whatever was in my house of thoughts showed up again, and grabbed it? Hey?
Laolao
I coerce my mind. Forcing it to fit into details. All energies first plunging, then tightly packed into trivial activities such as making photocopies or updating students’ schedules. The strength of compactness. A necessary density not to leave any part of my being at bay, a part that would be leaping alone, detached.
Bringing the entire artillery to catch a fly, I know. All of me together, the wholeness of my components dragged along, for this is the rule: We abandon none of us. We stick together.
This is called focus, concentration. Amateur psychoanalysts would instead see, I’m well aware, retention and a fixation somewhere in one of the various possible degrees of an unsurmounted anal stage.
For me, this ability to invest one’s totality, even into what does not require such an intense input, is nothing more than having a point of convergence in lieu of mental wanderlust. An adequate voice to support a rallying cry that cannot be ignored. Concrete moments when inventories can accurately be drawn to ensure we’re all here, nothing gone missing.
And also, dear ones, it’s how I nursed myself, year after year, decade after decade. An extraordinary focus I’m quite proud of, I must admit, despite drawbacks.
Remember what I said earlier: I started out in life with a serious handicap. A strange illness with physical and behavioral symptoms that truly impaired my functionality. I was an ambulant disaster during childhood, and detonated with some delay during adolescence. Bits and pieces of me scattered everywhere. A real mess, destroying the quietude of denial anchored all around me. They hated me for the disturbance, but that’s another story.
You ask, why the delay? Well, because I could, to a certain extent, temporize the inevitable. I did it, even as a very young child, by magnifying concentration to extremes. Locking my body and feelings into a position of absolute availability for a task.
I became very good at it and can still, even to this day, with a wink petrify my entire being and push it as a block into a narrow channel of vision. It’s magic. It’s like taking a large sphere and making it fit into the hollow shape meant for a tiny square. I can do it.
In a state as dense as the one I’m describing here, there’s nothing I can’t understand or perform. Give me a hard problem. Something I know nothing about, and let me figure it out. Or let’s look at Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Or do we want an explanation of the proof that 1 + 1 = 2? I’ll manage it.
The problem is that outside that bubble of concentration, when I read myself back, the mathematical demonstration which was correct, or the austere post-modern philosophical essay, I don’t understand them anymore. It’s like reading the work of another person. I don’t even remember what the words or signs I used mean. But I’m sure I knew a minute ago. I juggled with them so well, I vouch for that. An in-depth perception. All gone now. Vanished. Even the souvenir itself of having written this or that. I can’t recall any of the details. Just a vague impression of having been there, in the text, in the problem, in the “house of thoughts” as I often used to call it. The place where I can go, but cannot sustain nor remember.
When I was hospitalized, they submitted me, and more than once, to extensive tests. At 16, the shrink explained that intellectually indeed there was nothing I couldn’t do. There was not a discipline in this world I could not understand if I tried, but only if I went into my “house of thoughts.” And that’s when he added I would never be able to study.
What can a girl do when faced with such a verdict? Learn to weave baskets?
Believe it or not, they did teach me. They were not baskets though. They were chairs. Weaving the seat and the back. And I was good at it. I pulled on the bulrush like crazy, the tightest weaving in the class. Resistant, undeformable chairs. The best.
I didn’t argue. I didn’t fight the diagnosis. I knew it was the right one.
I could not export my “house of thoughts” into the real world. I could not operate it in a normal context such as in a discussion because it was completely cut off from me.
As I told you, it was a place where I went. It was not a part of me. Some inner secret world. No. It was outside, but to be reached I had to cross all of what I was, all my depth. And it stood at the other end of me, over on the other side. It had a sort of address. Entering a space that had no connection to anything. Just waiting for me. Just there for me. And it could not be described. It had no visible appearance, although I would say it was perfectly smooth and neatly empty. None of the content I would develop in it could be translated into an audible format. Because once out of that “house of thoughts,” I could neither understand nor remember what I had done in it.
How did the “house” came to be?
At first, it was a game. I would let myself fall. Incredible inward distances. I had somehow discovered that I could write an assignment for school this way. I just couldn’t answer any questions about it afterward, that’s true. In my normal state, I was dumb. I could impeccably prepare an exam this way, but I failed completely in the classroom once in front of the questions. Knowledge had been left in my “house of thoughts.” Even if I could go back in the house during the exam, all had been erased the moment I had pulled out.
So I taught myself to stretch the house. Study an hour before exam time, just the main stuff, learn to walk, take the bus, enter the classroom without leaving the house of thoughts. This is exactly like being blind. You cannot be at two places at the same time. You’ve got to sacrifice one. So I did.
I would forget people’s names, my home phone number, how to simply chitchat, unable to carry on any distracting activity. I would walk in an affected way, almost a robot. Rigid. Eyes, the gaze weird. Way, way before I ever took drugs, my parents and school authorities thought I was constantly stoned, out of my head. And they would yell, threaten. But luckily, I couldn’t hear very well either. And I went on stretching my house of thoughts.
The issue with my house, I think, had to do with the air it encountered as I entered and left. Somehow there was a mental draft. A gush of wind that would shake my mind, and which grew bigger as I grew older. Eventually, I had a tornado between my two ears. What a plight. It razed everything. And I snapped.
The young girl who was admitted in a psychiatric ward, as an example, read books in her house of thoughts, but couldn’t remember afterward what they were about. Sometimes, not even the title or the author. But she had read with intensity every single word. She knew she had felt powerful emotions as she read. She was absolutely certain she had developed ideas and comments along the chapters she had gone through. She had no doubt about having understood implications. She had inferred. Analyzed. Decorticated the writing. But had totally forgotten. A perfect blank.
The house of thoughts grew. It helped to survive, yes, but its side effects were devastating. It came to a point where the blankness covered most of the things I did in a day. I had succeeded in extending it quite far, but at the same time it prevented me from having a natural behavior. I didn’t sit, I had a poise. Fabricated. Artificial. An aspect I had to give myself to try and resemble a person while I was busy elsewhere, in my house.
I had to write tons of notes to remember what I had done or said.
You have no idea how consuming maintaining the house in operation could be. Energy-wise. And no one can imagine how difficult it was to land back into the world for even a short appearance.
One day, I found I could no longer do it. An atrocious event happened.
That’s the day I crashed. And everybody just went: Oh my God, she’s soooo sick. Because I was shouting at the top of my lungs, and just couldn’t stop doing so.
You see, the most unexpected thing occurred. There had been something in my house of thoughts, a horrible thing. I had seen it, and had ran away at the speed of light. Finding security in the world of people. Suddenly, there had been a presence utterly hideous waiting for me in my house. I saw it twice. And both times, I screamed like hell, unstoppable. And went mad for months.
To this day, I still don’t know what was in the house.
I’ve built since other houses of thoughts. Much smaller ones. As said, lighter ones. Versatile ones. Adaptable to the imperatives of normal life. With many doors for fast escape. And I have also set up ways of, not remembering for I still can't, but retaining enough clues to reconstruct. But I never went back to my original house of thoughts. It’s been condemned. Buried. And that’s forever.
I talked about it with one of the doctors. He agreed. Better leave it closed. Some things should indeed be left where they are, as they are, and unremembered.
I’ve nevertheless kept a few habits. The main one, I still gather all of myself when I move among activities. I focus. Very important. All of me answering in unison: present.
What if I left a piece of myself behind, a little part of me careless and candidly free, enjoying a stroll, and suddenly whatever was in my house of thoughts showed up again, and grabbed it? Hey?
Laolao
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