*Updated.
Disoriented. That is maybe the best word to describe my reaction. I didn't realize the similarities in the incidents when I wrote the Rorty post. Never made the slightest connection.
I was alone in my apartment when I wrote both posts. The Rorty post was written about noon; didn't go back to it until about midnight. At that time I read over the days' posts and thought the Rorty post needed to be broken down into more paragraphs. So I opened it back up just to make those stylistic changes. It was in reading it over as I was doing that that I first noticed the similarities.
That was also similar to what I did with the dad post. The incident, if it ever happened, was on a Saturday. I didn't write about it until the next morning.
After being stunned--"Stunned," that is an excellent word here.-- by the similarities I think I went back to the dad post to recall exactly what I had written and how I had written it. I remember briefly google-imaging "surprised face" and "shocked face" but I was feeling a little frantic and couldn't be light-hearted.
I got up from the desk. I walked in my apartment. I walked a few steps, paused and stood.
Repeat.
At one point I remember walking into the bedroom and standing leaning against the wall, slightly bent at the shoulders. I put my hand up to my forehead. I rubbed my face. I muttered to myself, "How could this be?"
There is no one mot juste, frantic, despair, stunned are also juste but disoriented captures more.
Disoriented references reality, right? Like you're someplace real but you don't know where and you can't figure it out. In this case everything physical was familiar but I felt that the larger reality was obscured. Something had happened, twice now, in the close, small confines of my apartment. They both seemed real as a rock but over time I convinced myself that the first rock, the dad note, had not been there in reality.
That is difficult to do. It is difficult to convince yourself that that rock you stubbed your toe on was not really there, and that you hadn't stubbed your toe at all! It is difficult to do and it is embarrassing to do. It is particularly embarrassing to relate an incident to others and to publicly declare it, and then have to say privately and publicly that it never happened. You know?
If the dad note was a dream, what else am I so real-as-rock certain about that I could pass a polygraph test that it was real and still be wrong? It made me question reality, in other words. My answer to the reality question was that the dad note incident was not real. So, I altered reality, I erased the dad note incident from the real. I conformed a new reality, one that didn't include the dad note.
Now, the Rorty monograph incident occurs. Identical to the dad note incident. Except that I could physically prove the Rorty monograph was real. Like Dr. Johnson proving the physicality of matter by kicking a rock. I cannot refute the non-existence of the dad note by producing it. Ergo, the dad note was not real.
How many fucking things can you prove with physical evidence? Can you prove your name? How do you know what your name is? "Because my mum and dad told me!" That's testimony, that's not physical evidence like Dr. Johnson's rock. "Because it says so on my birth certificate!" That's written testimony. Somebody at the frigging bureau of vital statistics got your name from another document and put it on your birth certificate. Physical evidence of your name of the same rock-solid kind as Dr. Johnson's would mean something like you came out of your mother's womb with your frigging name tattooed on your forehead.
If you had to prove the real by physical evidence there is not much that would get proved. The law does not require physical evidence to prove--"beyond a reasonable doubt," too!--a criminal case in court. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is a maxim. But in the case of dad's note I altered reality by adopting the standard of proof of material non-existence that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence."
I did that after a year and a half. I looked for the rock on several occasions. I thought about the incident, talked about it with a couple of people, wrote about it: Under the particular facts and circumstances of the dad note incident it was reasonable to conclude that I had dreamt in and to banish it from reality.
And, of course, applying the same standard to the Rorty monograph incident I refute its non-existence as Dr. Johnson did Bishop Berkeley.
So HELD. I have to move on. In whatever reality I am in, and that there is, I have to move on.
...
Wrote an additional something on this longhand this morning at breakfast, also. Will probably post that as an updated update later.
How to describe my reaction to this: Beyond surprised but shocked would be too much. Frantic...I was a little frantic. Thoughts kept rushing into my head and disappearing just as quickly, like soap bubbles that appear for an instant and then pop, replaced by others. I couldn't organize my thoughts, they were just getting away from me and I was at their mercy. So if frantic describes in a word that, then frantic.
Despair. I had put the incident of the note from my dad to rest. It bothered me for a long time and it bothered me a lot. But I massaged it in a way that put it away. Like scar tissue that encapsulates an old wound, it was still there but the body isolated it and protected the rest from it and I was at peace with it, whatever it was.
Then to have an identical incident recur two years later and this one to be provably true, not dreamt, the protective covering around the earlier incident, well, that was gone now. And, yes, that caused despair! That movie, that Woody Allen movie with that blonde, exceptional actress, that I watched a couple of years ago. I forget her name now, famous, famous actress, married to a goofy-looking guy. Famous movie, maybe Woody Allen's best. Won an Academy Award. Caused Dylan Farrow to go batshit. I don't remember the movie now. But I felt as "unmoored," Friedman's word, as that character, played by that exceptional actress in that great movie, was, like reality was something I could no longer count on as real.
Like I was an unwitting part of, a pawn in, some larger reality of which I had only this indirect evidence even existed, like it was some "game."
"Was it not real?" the title to so many posts in the last few years. I have doubted some aspects of reality in the last few years. Really, have you ever doubted reality? WELL, I FUCKING HAVE! And it BLOWS to doubt reality, really. Some post about reality is what I started to write this morning.
It's time for bed again. Good night, again.
...
Smaller story, I am just freaked the fuck out, but maybe you will be interested. The beginning to yesterday's post, "Meandering Thinking" was this:
Yesterday evening I scanned my bookshelves to pull something to read, selected Pilgrim's Way and the KJV, and noticed wedged between two books a monograph-looking thing, I didn't know what it was, it appeared to be old, it was yellowed although printed on sturdy stock. I removed it and noticed that its two staples were rusty.
"Wtf," to self. I put the two books down and flipped through the monograph to see wtf.
"Rorty signed," someone had written in pencil on the inside of the cover on the first page at top.
"Where?"
I flipped to the end, no signature, and then took all three and put them on my kang bed for reading Mao-style but then became engrossed in the ominous east wind blowing from Eighth Avenue Manhattan. I didn't peruse the Rorty monograph until this morning.
An eerily, neerily identical thing happened to me a couple of years ago.
I picked an old book off my bookshelf; I would have gotten the book in 1977 or 1978. I was leafing through the book and there was what appeared to be a bookmark. It was a small letter, folded. Had no idea what it was. I took the small letter out and unfolded it and saw the blue of my father's business letterhead at top. I was astonished. The letter was undated and typewritten and I read:
Ben,
When you get down, pray a little to God. It really does help.
-Dad
Dad was a good man. I have no memory of this letter, no idea why I was "down" in 1977-78, the happiest year of my life, but I must have been home on break from graduate school, something obviously was troubling me and when I left my father would have gone back to work and typed out that note at the office and mailed it to me. My dad was a good man.
I NEVER DID FIND THAT NOTE FROM MY FATHER. And it freaked me the fuck out until a few months ago. I concluded that there was no note, that the entire incident NEVER HAPPENED, that I had dreamt it.
Now I don't the fuck KNOW! BECAUSE I DID NOT DREAM THE RORTY MONOGRAPH! And if I LOSE the Rorty monograph at some future date this will serve as documentation that I HAD IT AND DID NOT DREAM IT!:
I am FREAKED the fuck out.
And I'm going to sleep now, too. God knows what the fuck I will dream. Wish me dreams that I don't remember. Good night.
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