Marissa Lingen (mrissa) wrote,
Marissa Lingen
mrissa

Dualism

My back is not the back of a dualist -- nor, in all likelihood, the back of a duelist, but that's not particularly important right now. My back, from the outside, is a fascinating map of mental triggers. (From the inside, it's awfully inconvenient.) For example, there is a spot one can press that will make me briefly but thoroughly convinced that I am a rotten excuse for a human being. There is also a spot one can press that will make me believe that I am moderately all right, that other people can see that I try to be a good person, that said efforts are not entirely in vain. This simply from applying a moderate pressure to a particular point -- and if you move that point slightly, the effect is totally different, and in some cases nonexistent. I have an "incessant need to apologize" spot, but if you move your finger even a quarter inch to the right, it will be a "why are you poking me in the back?" spot. With all that, it's a bit difficult to believe that the body and the mind are utterly different entities with largely coincidental connection, and I don't really try.

And those who know me well may now be thinking, ah, yes, she must have gotten her back fixed today. And this is the case, and it is good, and perhaps now I will be able to write a bit more of this book rather than kicking petulantly at the already-written bits and growling, "That never happened." It's not that I'm wrong when I come up with stuff like that; usually the thing I'm growling at really did never happen. (That's exactly how it feels in my head: apparently there are distinctions in the way things never happened. Some of them never happened in the sense of being fictional, which is not a lot of handicap. But some never happened in the sense of being wrong, untrue, and a book can sink under that weight.) No, it's not that I'm wrong in this mood. It's that I'm so unpleasant about it. It's not a good deal more fun to be unpleasant to myself than to be unpleasant to other people, so I'm glad to stop, and to get on with the midwinter frenzy of Making Things. Books and short stories and polenta experiments and possibly truffles, depending on how the night goes. Things! Where before there were merely bits of things! This is very fine.
Tags: full of theories, shoulders like nixon
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