A Wall, Not a Mirror
A reply to Vae, in feeling and in thought
Transcript:
Responding to:
So, 𝐕𝐀𝐄 𝐁𝐀𝐓𝐀𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐄:
You published an essay last week. It came out of a question I asked, the question being, what actually produces action? You were generous about the question. You were more generous than you needed to be. At the end, you asked something of me. You said that before you do what philosophers do, before I dissect it, I should feel it a little more first.
That’s fair.
So I’ll do that part first. I wrote a poem this week, and it’s called “Winter’s Fall.” I’ll read it, or remember it, and then I want to say a few things about the essay.
Winter’s Fall
Nightfall, we say, and leaf-fall. Add one more:
Say winter-fall. The solstice shuts the door.
Time leased autumn. Fall ships west alone.
Seasons, like music, named on the loan.The cataract froze standing. Lungs outward press.
Waterfalls held fast, in their misted dress
Under their halted lace. There’s bass in the dark.
The torrent ran a needle through lofted arc.Nearest in January, when warmth seems lean,
the sun, diamond-still, three rises between,
then turns. The cold digs on while luminance, shot tall.
Say winter-fall again. The water moves: winter falls.
Okay. About your essays.
A lot of…Alot of what you said, I agree with. And not politely. I agree with what you put in print. You say understanding alone doesn’t change anyone. I wrote a book that says the same thing for about 250 pages. You say repetition is how people actually change, and you’re right about that too. You’re also right that nobody transforms by trying to carry every crisis the world offers at once. And I agree that nobody is built for that.
Where I part from you is not over whether feeling matters. Of course it does. I part from you wherever thought begins to sound like some inferior instrument, as though feeling has to rescue us from it. The question I asked wasn’t simply what produces movement or change. It was what produces action in accordance with an ontology.
Repetition changes people, but it can train cowardice as easily as courage. Experience shapes people, but it has produced tyrants in equal measure with saints. Something still has to judge the direction and decide what deserves to become action. I think that’s where thought is. Uh, It’s not subordinate. Thought is a masthead. Feeling may provide force, but force without direction is only movement. Conviction gives the will something to enact. And action puts it into contact with reality, and what survives that contact has the opportunity to become character.
There’s a sentence in your essay where you describe sitting on the floor in front of a mirror for hours, over months, and you write, “I felt until nothing had a name anymore.” I believe you. And I believe those hours did do something. But it’s here where I look at what happened next. You came back and wrote a book about it. Your book has a title, and it will be at my house Friday.
After that, you wrote an essay which is careful, deliberate, and made entirely of names. And that’s no contradiction I’m holding against you. I think it’s part of an answer. Nothing you felt on that floor reached me, or anyone reading you, until you gave it form. A feeling with no name is no less real, but it is private. You can’t hand it to anyone, and nobody can help you carry it.
And naming is not necessarily what kills a feeling. Sometimes naming is what lets it out of the one body it happened to be trapped inside. In this case, yours. I’m thinking. I guess, you could say the poem works the same way. Feeling may have begun “Winter’s Fall,” but feeling didn’t finish it for me. I had to listen, distinguish, connect, name, revise, and finally speak to you.
I also don’t think feeling and emotional intelligence are, let me rephrase, I don’t think feeling and emotional regulation are the same thing. Suppression is certainly not regulation. But neither is allowing whatever rises to assume authority merely because it arrived with some form of intensity. Regulation is being able to feel without being, without being… unconsciously governed by what you feel.
You said that feeling made you more narcissistic, and I think that mattered greatly. Later, you describe the uh, seduction. The seduction of feeling necessary, or worthy, or responsible for the world. I think, I think you said “God’s favorite.” Naming the impulse is honest. But naming, to go back to what I said earlier, is not the same as mastering.
The ego is perfectly willing to confess if the confession permits it to retain its seating, or remain where it is. Awareness is not command. The evidence comes afterward, in what a person repeatedly does. Thinking:
Perhaps that’s why I care very little for declarations of identity without conduct behind them.
“I want to make you happy.”
“I want to be this.”
“I care about that.”
“This is who I am.”
Laughs
Fine. Show me.
James put it pretty plainly: faith without deeds is dead. Words can point, and maybe they can promise. Perhaps they can. Perhaps they can steer. But action is where they incur cost.
The next thing I thought about was when you mentioned gifts. You ask, “What is your gift?” and then you say it is the only thing a person has to act on. And I part from you here decisively. That lands on gift as a singular item, as though one answer has been issued to each person, and as if the work of a life is to find and serve it.
Paul thought that too when he wrote to the church in Corinth. He was wrong. That has not been my empirical experience. I’ve had more than one gift because the first two of mine died. There was a younger version of me whose gift was to throw things one hundred miles an hour. It took thousands of hours to reach that, and so much daily work. There was another gift of mine, and that was flying helicopters. A brain injury took that from me.
If a gift were one envelope with a name on it, I’d be out of mail.
I’d be finished twice. What I found instead is that a gift can be built and earned. You pay attention to something closer than feels reasonable, for longer than feels reasonable. The attention compounds until you can do something you could not do previously. I firmly feel that a gift can die while the capacity to build another remains.
So when you ask, “What is your gift?” I’ll take a step back and I’ll ask instead, “What have you been listening to?”
You mentioned mirrors. I mentioned them earlier. I mention you mentioning them, and I prefer a wall. A mirror keeps returning the self to itself. The wall gives me resistance. It has no flattery. It doesn’t reassure me. It doesn’t become demonic, or become ancient, or offer any other version of my own face to interpret. It remains a wall.
I listen to a thing until I understand it, and then I own it. That’s the entire method. It’s how the poem happened. I listened to winter longer than felt reasonable, and found that “fall” could belong to more than one season (un-transcribable). But I noticed that a waterfall can freeze on the outside while the current keeps running underneath it.
perihelion, the sun is closer to us in January than in July. Much closer. Whether a northern winter can feel the nearness or not lacks relevance. Eventually, those facts stop being trivia, or trivial. I understood the structure well enough that it became mine. And I named what’s mine, and you name what’s yours.
I’m loath to talk about this, but it feels appropriate.
I can denote that I operate this way in love as well. It’s not just philosophy. If we want to invoke feeling, we can.
I know how ownership sounds to people who have seen it handled badly. They hear a cage, and I won’t name it outright, because the proper word is paramount.
The word is mistrusted today, but when I say ownership, I mean ownership. I don’t need the word translated into something gentler. Within the realm of consensuality, the control is real, and the surrender is real, and this asymmetry is part of what being chosen means.
Let me tread carefully here.
Complete ownership, complete ownership means complete responsibility. Because the more power I hold, the less room I have for vanity, emotional instability, ignorance, or careless appetite. If I can’t govern my temper, fear, desire, desire to be correct, especially, well… I have no business or right governing anything another person has entrusted to me, let alone something so fragile and beautiful.
Consumption, as I mean it, is not destruction. It’s a building process. It’s the end of distance between understanding and responsibility. I take what is mine so completely into my attention that I cannot pretend to not know what my power does to it.
Anybody with enough force can break something fragile. There’s no mastery in that. The mastery is in the holding itself. The control, the edification, the ruling without breaking the person who trusted me with that - power. And then using that understanding - to build something even more beautiful out of them.
It’s not a diminishing. It’s not. Fallacy.
There’s truth behind what I’m about to say next, and I don’t share this with anyone because it seems obvious and no one really knows it. But to lose your ability to lie and still be completely accepted is the ultimate reward for the soul. It’s what all religion strives for.
Within ownership, someone can put down the exhausting work, the concealment, the management of every consequence, and be known completely without being abandoned for what is known - So completely. That can be blissfully freeing. You can ask any of my partners. They are better positioned to describe the freedom. I am better positioned to describe the stewardship and responsibility of carrying such an obligation.
And that’s where I’m speaking from.
And from those feelings, that’s why I cannot accept awareness as the highest term. Power does not become benevolent because it understands itself. A person can name every shadow they possess and remain ruled by all of them.
I’m not going to negotiate forever with some shadow and give it a throne because it emerged from somewhere deep. No. I will make it mine, and bring it under order, and decide what function it will serve for me. And in doing so, I become responsible for what it does through me.
That is what you’re calling integration, as I understand it. Not every part given equal rank, but every part brought under one government; one governing body.
There’s one other place I want to touch that you mentioned, and that’s technology. I think you said that technology arises, or does not arise, I can’t quite remember off the top of my head, it arises from nature. That does not establish that it is balanced. And I need to counter that with cancer, which is natural. Wildfire is natural.
Nature contains creation, yes. It contains predation, collapse, repair. It doesn’t ask us to confuse one for another. Natural, to me, natural tells me where something came from. It tells me nothing about whether or not it should be left unchecked.
I think technology is also more than a mirror. A mirror reflects. Technology multiplies, accelerates, it selects. It can reward with algorithms, or it can take away with those same algorithms. Our tools develop faster than our capacity to govern them. Saying they belong to nature does not resolve the problem. It makes stewardship all the more necessary.
You mentioned crisis. Crisis can seduce the ego. Absolutely. A person can make an identity out of saving the world because being necessary feels so… validating. Maybe it feels better than being ordinary. But abandoning the fantasy of saving everything does not relieve us of responsibility for what is actually, was actually, within our reach.
Transformation does not simply happen in the background. Or, anyway, change happens anyway. Rot is change. Collapse is change. Infection is change. Transformation worth wanting requires direction.
So maybe, the difference between you and I is smaller than it looks. You sat in front of a mirror until the names fell away. I listen to a thing until it became mine and its name arrives. I don’t think either one is the human road, because I don’t think there is only one. I think there are as many roads as there are bodies.
I just don’t think words are the enemy. I don’t think feelings are wrong. I don’t think power is good just because the person holding it can describe what it feels like.
You asked me to respond with feeling, and it was harrowing to reveal a part of myself that only those who truly know me, know me by. I appreciate your time, and I appreciate you, and I appreciate your honesty.
So I guess, in sum, you asked me to respond with feeling, not philosophy. So here.
(Video cuts off from Substack length)