I met this guy. He has a horse named Pride.
He tells me this and it was weird because his demeanor changed. I didn’t pick up on the social cues that were happening. Maybe he had a gay kid. Maybe the kids thought the horse was gay, so the family named it Pride. Whatever. It seemed to me there was some progressive ideology cropping up in Hardin, Co. and I was happy albeit a bit perplexed.
Later I realized the horse was white.
The dissonance I’m experiencing while writing these journals is as existential in nature as any I’ve ever felt. Existential angst.
My hands feel alien—that’s the physical sensation that precedes a seizure.
Typing through it and stringing together coherent thoughts, regardless of the noise in the room or in my mind, helps prevent a crisis.
I read a paper on Wittgenstein recently—on the ways Viennese modernism influenced him. They argued about language and to what extent it could be impartial or neutral or unbiased. This was the intellectual context of his philosophy:
Some of the most enduring works of art, literature, and philosophy produced in Vienna around the turn of the last century question key concepts of liberalism and Enlightenment – such as the notions of progress, of the coherent and rational subject, and of a stable and unproblematic relationship between subject and world in which language is nothing but a neutral and transparent mediator – in ways that seem to prefigure contemporary debates.
Michael A. Peters (2019) Wittgenstein and the ethics of suicide. Homosexuality and Jewish self-hatred in fin de siècle Vienna, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51:10, 981-990, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2018.1548881
Wojnarowicz said the invention of language changed the experience of our feet on the ground.
The preinvented world is mapped onto the primal world in unexpected and counter-intuitive ways, creating a sort of existential friction.
Reflection from 2019 seizure journals. For an overview of the project, click here.