#tell marcel i'm ignoring his text posts

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uuugggghh for days on end i’ve felt well enough to be restless and bored but not well enough to sustain any kind of activity or focus

i’ll get invested in something for a few minutes, maybe an hour, and then get so overwhelmed i need to lie still and flat for a while. but when i try to nap my eyelids pop back open within seconds, either with some new idea or from the horrible empty crawling sensation of MUST HAVE STIMULUS! WANT DO SOMETHING NOW

it’s That Thing you get when you start to feel better after days of acute illness, except, on repeat? with no guarantee of improvement to motivate me to stay still. someone come be the cottard to my mme verdurin

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CHRIST

A moment in Swann’s Way by Proust.

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i got new headphones for my birthday--thanks, mom and dad--and they’re wireless, which means they require less constant attention than my old ones. in consequence, and especially because i tend to play music very quietly for sensory reasons, i find i sometimes... do the thing i think neurotypical people mean when they say, forget i’m wearing them?--in the sense that i’ll hear an unexpected sound and attribute it to the tv playing in the other room. and then remember seconds later that it’s part of the song i’m listening to.

it’s weird though, because they hurt slightly, and i’ll still feel that. like: in general, NTs will often talk about ceasing to notice a stimulus if they’re subjected to it for long enough (e.g., sitting on a pen). this does sometimes happen to me. at night i often have to check to make sure i took off my watch, for example, because i don’t feel it unless the pressure of it on my wrist changes in some way. and, like proust,* i usually don’t hear the clock ticking in my room. autistic people, on the other hand, often talk about conspicuously lacking that?--about their brain never turning off the noise of cars passing in the background, or the itchy feeling on the back of their neck from a tag on their shirt. and i have some of that too,** though less when medicated.

but mostly i have a third thing--like with the headphones. where i don’t stop feeling the stimulus, but do stop remarking it as unnatural? sometimes literally forgetting that my ears and jaw feel weird because a foreign thing is pressing on them, rather than just Because That Happens Sometimes. i’ve never heard anyone else describe this variant though? it could be a side effect of chronic illness, since i’ve had to learn to dismiss a lot of phenomena i can’t quite literally ignore; but i’m more inclined to think of it as a kind of alexithymia, and as having predated the illness.

mostly though i’m just curious whether/how much it actually differs from the NT experience vs. just being a more autistic way of perceiving it. but usually when i ask people i know about this kind of thing, they have as much trouble trying to isolate the details that to me seem vital as i do trying to reconcile them with the blurry pictures other people describe. it’s like when proust--never mind; i can’t paraphrase. here:

Before very long I was able to show a few sketches. No one understood anything of them. Even those who commended my perception of the truths which I wanted eventually to engrave within the temple, congratulated me on having discovered them “with a microscope,” when on the contrary it was a telescope that I had used to observe things which were indeed very small to the naked eye, but only because they were situated at a great distance, and which were each one of them in itself a world. Those passages in which I was trying to arrive at general laws were described as so much pedantic investigation of detail. (6.520)

it’s like that, though less Grand and Important. but the contrast is like that.

*whom i read as having had adhd, but who doesn’t seem autistic to me. could be wrong though; i’m less confident of that than i am that he wasn’t NT

**i don’t stop hearing cars when near a busy street--and they’ll interfere w/ my auditory processing. tags, on the other hand, used to bother me, but now i think i notice them even less than most NT people? if the sales tag is attached on the inside of the garment i have to force myself to cut it out rather than letting the bit of cardboard go through the wash and get nasty.

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one extremely foggy evening the narrator and his friend go to a restaurant. everyone who enters after him, the narrator notices, tells the proprietor (who stands by the door) substantially the same story about getting lost in the fog. one customer, the prince de foix, says,

“Losing your way isn’t so bad; the trouble is finding it again.” The wisdom of this aphorism impressed the proprietor, for he had already heard it several times in the course of the evening. He was, indeed, in the habit of always comparing what he heard or read with an already familiar canon, and felt his admiration quicken if he could detect no difference. This state of mind is by no means to be ignored, for, applied to political conversations, to the reading of newspapers, it forms public opinion and thereby makes possible the greatest events in history. ... In politics the proprietor of this particular café had for some time now applied his recitation-teacher’s mentality to a certain number of set-pieces on the Dreyfus case. If he did not find the terms that were familiar to him in the remarks of a customer or the column of a newspaper he would pronounce the article boring or the speaker insincere. The Prince de Foix, however, impressed him so forcibly that he barely gave him time to finish his sentence. “Well said, Prince, well said” (which meant, more or less, “faultlessly recited”), “that’s it, that’s exactly it” (3.556-7)

if i never get linked to another list of “5 things i don’t tell people about what it’s like to be ____” it’ll be too soon

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the narrator arrives at a hotel.

I should have liked at least to lie down for a little while on the bed, but to what purpose, since I should not have been able to procure any rest for that mass of sensations which is for each of us his conscious if not his physical body, and since the unfamiliar objects which encircled that body, forcing it to place its perceptions on the permanent footing of a vigilant defensive, would have kept my sight, my hearing, all my senses in a position as cramped and uncomfortable (even if I had stretched out my legs) as that of Cardinal La Balue in the cage in which he could neither stand nor sit? It is our noticing them that puts things in a room, our growing used to them that takes them away again and clears a space for us. Space there was none for me in my bedroom (mine in name only) at Balbec; it was full of things which did not know me, which flung back at me the distrustful glance I cast at them, and, without taking any heed of my existence, showed that I was interrupting the humdrum course of theirs. The clock--whereas at home I heard mine tick only a few seconds in a week, when I was coming out of some profound meditation--continued without a moment’s interruption to utter, in an unknown tongue, a series of observations which must have been most uncomplimentary to myself, for the violet curtains listened to them without replying, but in an attitude such as people adopt who shrug their shoulders to indicate that the sight of a third person irritates them. They gave to this room with its lofty ceiling a quasi-historical character which might have made it a suitable place for the assassination of the Duc de Guise, and afterwards for parties of tourists personally conducted by one of Thomas Cook’s guides, but for me to sleep in--no. (2.333)

no one gets me like you do, baby

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proust’s narrator also contrasts the conversation of bergotte (the writer friend his description of whom i quoted in the last post) with that of his dad’s friend norpois:

I let myself go in telling him what my impressions [of a recent performance of Phèdre] had been. Often Bergotte disagreed, but he allowed me to go on talking. I told him that I had liked the green light which was turned on when Phèdre raised her arm. “Ah! the designer will be glad to hear that; he’s a real artist, and I shall tell him you liked it, because he is very proud of that effect. I must say, myself, that I don’t care for it much, it bathes everything in a sort of sea-green glow, little Phèdre standing there looks too much like a branch of coral on the floor of an aquarium. ... [A]fter all Racine isn’t telling us a story about love among the sea-urchins. Still, it’s what my friend wanted, and it’s very well done, right or wrong, and really quite pretty.” ... And when Bergotte’s opinion was thus contrary to mine, he in no way reduced me to silence, to the impossibility of framing any reply, as M. de Norpois would have done. This does not prove that Bergotte’s opinions were less valid than the Ambassador’s; far from it. ... It is to ideas which are not, strictly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, based on nothing, can find no foothold, no fraternal echo in the mind of the adversary, that the latter, grappling as it were with thin air, can find no word to say in answer. The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of art) were unanswerable simply because they were devoid of reality. (2.185-6)

norpois is a career diplomat; the narrator’s other big implicit criticism of him is that he talks about everything the way he talks about politics--namely, like this:

M. de Norpois entertained us with a number of the stories with which he was in the habit of regaling his diplomatic colleagues, quoting now some ludicrous period uttered by a politician notorious for long sentences packed with incoherent images, now some lapidary epigram of a diplomat sparkling with Attic salt. But, to tell the truth, the criterion which for him set the two kinds of sentence apart in no way resembled that which I was in the habit of applying to literature. Most of the finer shades escaped me; the words which he recited with derision seemed to me not to differ very greatly from those which he found remarkable. ... All that I grasped was that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind. (40)

so basically the reverse of how bergotte talks. Good Politics Talk rephrases a familiar maxim or demand in a persuasive way; Good Art Talk shows us reality from a new angle. when i put it that way these seem really similar? but i think this is behind the difference the narrator perceives btwn disagreeing with bergotte and disagreeing with norpois. like: the goal of political argument is either a. for your opponent to endorse your view instead of the one they held previously and/or b. to show those on your own side that you agree with and understand their opinion. so, unanswerable is good; making all other ways of seeing the issue look stupid is kind of the goal. (is this why slogans often posit oughts as ises? “gay rights are civil rights”--not “should be considered.” or like, “black lives matter,” instead of, “american cops need to stop killing black civilians.” stating an obvious fact in order to imply an imperative.) whereas bergotte wants to enable his interlocutors to understand and acknowledge the validity of his view also--not instead.

i think this is why i feel uncomfortable around people who talk about politics a lot. ime, the habit bleeds into how they talk about other things too. like the way norpois talks about bergotte’s work. he begins by saying to the narrator’s parents, “I do not share your son’s point of view”--meaning his admiration of bergotte. but the I statement is... kinda fake? he goes on,

“Bergotte is what I call a flute-player: one must admit that he plays very agreeably, although with a great deal of mannerism, of affectation. But when all is said, there’s no more to it than that, and that is not much. ... At a time like the present, ... you will allow me to suggest that one is entitled to ask that a writer should be something more than a clever fellow who lulls us into forgetting, amid otiose and byzantine discussions of the merits of pure form, that we may be overwhelmed at any moment by a double tide of barbarians, those from without and those from within our borders. I am aware that this is to blaspheme against the sacrosanct school of what these gentlemen term ‘Art for Art’s sake,’ but at this period of history there are tasks more urgent than the manipulation of words in a harmonious manner.” (61)

notice the passive tense, the pleas of objectivity, the way he has to turn his personal dislike into an argument as to why we should disapprove. you can’t frame an effective counterargument to this? all you can say is “yeah well i like art for art’s sake,” or, worse, “actually bergotte has an important social message about x.” either you agree to disagree (which ends the conversation) or you’re reduced to arguing that the thing you like is important, quite possibly for reasons that have little to do with what you like about it. (n.b. the narrator, who at this point knows bergotte only from his books, originally brought him up in hopes of learning more about him from someone who’s met him in person--not of learning merely norpois’ opinion of him.)

...of course i’m not saying art shouldn’t be political, lmao--and neither is proust, who, for example, goes on a lot of long digressions later in these books about why anti-semitism and homophobia are bad. i just really like his argument that art-motivated eloquence and politics-motivated eloquence have different interests, and different effects on conversation. it helps me understand why i get so frustrated in classes when people spend the whole discussion time trying to persuade each other that x character is or isn’t evil

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

the narrator (i’m prousting again) describes the conversation of one of his favorite authors, whom he has now met in person

Moreover the quality, always rare and new, of what he wrote was expressed in his conversation by so subtle a manner of approaching a question, ignoring every aspect of it that was already familiar, that he appeared to be seizing hold of an unimportant detail, to be off the point, to be indulging in paradox, so that his ideas seemed as often as not to be confused, for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own. Besides, as all novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotyped attitude to which we had grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself, any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar, the speaker appears to us to be talking entirely in metaphors; and this wearies us, and gives us the impression of a want of truth. (After all, the old forms of speech must also in their time have been images difficult to follow, when the listener was not yet cognisant of the universe which they depicted. But for a long time it has been taken to be the real universe, and is instinctively relied upon.) So when Bergotte--and his figures appear simple enough today--said of Cottard that he was a mannikin in a bottle, trying to find his balance, and of Brichot that “for him even more than for Mme Swann the arrangement of his hair was a matter for anxious deliberation, because, in his twofold preoccupation with his profile and his reputation, he had always to make sure that it was so brushed as to give him the air at once of a lion and a philosopher,” people immediately felt the strain, and sought a foothold upon something which they called more concrete, meaning by that more usual. (2.171-2)

so, “it’s not like real life” often just means “i don’t recognize it”! god do i ever need to internalize this. i’d put it in sparkletext if i didn’t think that would make it harder to read

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Swann had now only to enter the concert-room, the doors of which were thrown open to him by an usher loaded with chains, who bowed low before him as though tendering to him the keys of a conquered city. But he thought of the house in which at that very moment he might have been if Odette had only permitted it, and the remembered glimpse of an empty milk-can upon a door-mat wrung his heart. Swann speedily recovered his sense of the general ugliness of the human male when, on the other side of the curtain, the spectacle of the servants gave place to that of the guests. (1.463)

PROUST....

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a thing i’ve been thinking about lately: i loooove proust (as i’m sure you’ve all figured out by now) and have learned. so so much from him. about how the social world works, but, a lot of his contentions about Human Nature are either a. untrue for (or otherwise inapplicable to) me, and/or b. so appallingly bleak and pessimistic that i can’t found habits on them without defeating myself. like?

i was so sure he was right that friendship is a mediocre pleasure. turns out it’s only true if you and your friends don’t understand each other

proust equates love with infatuation?? his depiction of it helped me understand a lot about my past relationships that didn’t make sense to me at the time, but he does not seem to account for the existence of emotionally intimate relationships not founded in jealousy and possessiveness. i don’t know if he’s right that once those fade you’re left with only either affection or indifference; my experience leaves me w/ no way to comment on that. but this is not a helpful thing to believe when you’re 25, and if you’re ace it doesn’t even account for your existence

he maintains that most people most of the time do not say what they mean. no idea if he’s right; i just know my attempts to adapt myself to this principle made me unhappy. it’s not his fault that his thought encouraged me to try to talk more like normal people talk, and therefore sucked almost all possible joy out of conversation for me for a while--or that i didn’t know to miss it since proust also says that conversation isn’t very fun or useful, and i couldn’t remember the last time it had been for me. but like,

turns out that was because i didn’t know anyone i trusted well enough to talk to about things that matter!! proust made this look normal and ok and inevitable and like no more than i should expect; i’m rly glad he was wrong

proust calls basically everything a bad habit. really did not need this encouragement to internalize my control locus even further??--i felt way better as soon as i started working to unravel that bad habit lmao. fix your environment, not yourself

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ugh proust can you please just not

It was known that he had been ill for a long time past. Not, of course, with the illness from which he had suffered originally and which was natural. Nature scarcely seems capable of giving us any but quite short illnesses. But medicine has developed the art of prolonging them.

JUST IN CASE YOU THOUGHT this mentality was new!--nope. not new now, not new then. probably not even new when molière said it (in le malade imaginaire).

Remedies, the respite that they procure, the relapses that a temporary cessation of them provokes, produce a simulacrum of illness to which the patient grows so accustomed that he ends by stabilising it, stylising it, just as children have regular fits of coughing long after they have been cured of the whooping cough. Then the remedies begin to have less effect, the doses are increased, they cease to do any good, but they have begun to do harm thanks to this lasting indisposition. (5.238)

i’m not saying that’s not a thing lmao that does happen. just today i went to my psychiatrist and asked for an increased dose of one med; came away with another new one instead. annnnddd i do hate that! but i wish i hadn’t once been naive enough to believe (as proust suggests here) that i’d get better faster if i didn’t bother to treat the original illness. on the strength of this belief i spent a whole year suffering through a depression it turns out i could reduce to a tolerable level w/ one tiny pill. and what would you say to my ten years of untreated dysautonomia? they don’t just either go away or kill you if you don’t change their form w/ medication, bud. they morph either way. turns out, chronic illness still exists. i can’t fucking believe you didn’t know better than that

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ok so saniette is almost definitely autistic?? (i’m making this post for my own reference mostly, but if you’re curious, here’s some infodumping about it--under a thing because length but also for discussion of the verdurins’ cruelty to him)

trouble recognizing faces of people he knows

idiosyncratic diction (tho admittedly i’ve only read it in translation):

Just as we were entering the courtyard we were overtaken by Saniette, who had not at first recognised us. “And yet I contemplated you for some time,” he told us breathlessly. “Is not it curious that I should have hesitated?” To say “Is it not curious” would have seemed to him wrong, and he had acquired a familiarity with obsolete forms of speech that was becoming exasperating. “Albeit you are people whom one may acknowledge as friends.” (5.298)

apparently he has some kind of disability accent, tho marcel’s description varies enough from mention to mention of it that i can’t say much more specific about it. (...at least, not without hunting for each one in turn in volumes one thru four, which i may do later, knowing me, but. not right now.)

other communication difficulties. he has trouble arranging what he has to say so that people will see the point.

n.b. this is partly from under-confidence, since m. verdurin makes fun of him when his stories are “boring” i.e. when he doesn’t understand them. saniette’s afraid to hog The Floor too long, but also feels guilty when he doesn’t at least try to say something entertaining, so he tries to get thru his stories and jokes quickly but doesn’t know what to and not to shave off, so their abbreviated forms don’t always make sense

he also misses cues about, like. how to abbreviate titles. there’s a scene where m. verdurin makes fun of him for shortening chercheuse d’esprit to just “the chercheuse,” after which the narrator points out to us how arbitrary this is since the verdurins will also pinpoint as Not One Of Their Own anyone who refers to a molière play and doesn’t leave the final adjective off the end of the title. notice they mock saniette for applying this rule too thoroughly, i.e., in places it would make no less sense to apply it but where one just socially Doesn’t.

probably lots of other things i’ve forgotten rn haha stay tuned for more

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

can’t sleep (maybe hungry? not sure yet); readin proust. boy oh boy i forgot about this gem:

I had recently read in a book by a great specialist that perspiration was injurious to the kidneys by discharging through the skin something whose proper outlet was elsewhere. I thought with regret of those dog-days at the time of my grandmother’s death, and was inclined to blame them for it. I did not mention this to Dr E——, but of his own accord he said to me: “The advantage of this very hot weather in which perspiration is abundant is that the kidney is correspondingly relieved.” Medicine is not an exact science. (4.56-7)

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despair and illness as forms of depravity bad posture and mildly inconsiderate habits (“carelessness” hh if madame chauchat isn’t ND i don’t know what) as unfitness for life the emotions of a feverish person as a kind of Unnatural Vice, as different from and inferior to normal-person emotions as infatuation is from committed love, jesus, the magic mountain is amazing but when i read it i feel like saniette at the verdurins’.* constantly begging it not to hurt me. i just?? what are even my options here. i can insist my thoughts and emotions are just as real and good as a healthy person’s; or, i can accept the traditional view that they’re not, and go back to trying to cultivate sobriety? which made me MISERABLE it made me HATE my self and life i... noooooo hell no i’m not going back to 2017. but isn’t there some middle ground or third option i can land on? ok so my life my thoughts and feelings and habits are notional, impulsive, depraved, not real—ok, but. there must be something else???

*in proust. “Saniette was delighted to see the conversation take so animated a turn. Since Brichot was talking all the time, he himself could preserve a silence which would save him from being the butt of M. and Mme Verdurin’s wit. And growing even more sensitive in his joy and relief, he had been touched when he heard M. Verdurin ... tell the butler to put a jug of water in front of him since he never drank anything else. ... Moreover, Mme Verdurin had actually smiled at him once. Decidedly they were kind people. He was not going to be tortured any more.” (4.446)

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proust-prompted icee straw kazoos

“We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten” (5.186). ok but?? you have also referred (at 1.125) to “the age in which one believes that one gives a thing real existence by giving it a name.” what if you have to give the truth a name? does its makeshift nature mean it resembles a lie? in my experience, yeah--it often does work like that, sometimes even if i’m not the one who makes up the name. can’t tell you how many times i’ve had to remind myself or re-evaluate my understanding of what “executive function” means. 

but what does that shiftiness of meaning even leave us?? if there is no objectively-perceivable or -communicable truth then. what about all your musings on the difference between truth and plausibility (at 5.233). like--if, rationally speaking, a plausible spin is the closest you can get to the truth, then... does that put “truth qua sensation” back on top after all? since it produces a purer conviction (even if shortlived) than can rational/ized attempts at accuracy? even tho statements that feel true when you make them tend in retrospect to seem exaggerated?

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p...roust, i, wh,

Besides, love is an incurable malady, like those diathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches. (5.105)

proust you know i love your “it’s like when you’re sick and x happens” thing, but. this one sounds like a parody of both of us

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proust old buddy old pal thank you for reminding me that accidental rudeness in people who mean to be nice is a real thing that matters!

ok so the verdurins are the cambremers’ tenants, and have invited their landlords to spend an evening at la raspelière for the first time since they (the verdurins) came to live there. they’ve made a lot of changes to the place, which disappoints the cambremers but which the dowager mme de cambremer (not pictured in this scene) and her son (m. de cambremer, “cancan”) tolerate out of politeness. cancan’s wife (mme de cambremer-legrandin), however, wishes her husband and mother-in-law had the spines to let the verdurins know they don’t approve. anyway,

“What’s that thing up there with the sticks?” asked Mme Verdurin, drawing M. de Cambremer’s attention to a superb escutcheon carved over the mantelpiece, “Are they your arms?” she added with sarcastic scorn.

“No, they’re not ours,” replied M. de Cambremer. (4.492)

(notice he either does not notice or at least does not respond to her sarcasm, but answers the question literally and ingenuously.)

“No, those are the arms of the Arrachepels, who were not of our stock, but from whom we inherited the house, and nobody of our line has ever made any changes here.” (”That’s one in the eye for her,” muttered Mme de Cambremer.) ... “My great-grandmother was a d’Arrachepel or de Rachepel, whichever you like, for both forms are found in the old charters,” continued M. de Cambremer, blushing deeply, for only then did the idea for which his wife had given him credit occur to him, and he was afraid that Mme Verdurin might have applied to herself words which had in no way been aimed at her. (4.492-3)

this phenomenon! proust talks about it a lot in this scene, and i love that he does, because it happens to me a lot. especially in class?--sometimes, i’ll say something and be credited with making a joke i don’t realize my words implied until a few seconds (or days) later; other times, i suspect what happens is that i’ll say something which my classmates don’t understand, but can tell is supposed to be clever. they’ll laugh, figuring it must be a joke, and i (who intended a fairly subtle observation, yes, but not a joke) will blush real hard, worrying i must have said something either rude or ridiculous by mistake. it’s my worst nightmare!!--and, also, favorite joke. 

...i know i can’t rly objectify why this feels so important to me, but, one last try. basically, i have lately realized that in my attempts to get better at communicating i spend a lot of time in this mindset where what you’re likely to be taken to mean>what you actually mean?? it’s horrible i do not recommend it. thanks proust for reminding me that neither side is Objectively Real