dictation
Today I saw the writer Jia Tolentino give a talk at an event in a residential college, where undergraduates live. Most of the residential colleges here are designed to look like old castles. The one where I’ve spent the most time, where a sociology professor is the resident Head of House, has a wall-to-wall Persian carpet, a grand piano, giant bookshelves, couches that look like they were lifted from some 1800s European nobles. The living room where Jia gave this talk was one of the modern ones, less opulent. The residential college was designed by Eero Saarinen, who also designed the Dulles Airport and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
As I biked home in the fog shrouding this hamlet, unseasonably warm for late October, I reflected on one of the things that she had said, which was about freedom, how she experienced freedom as the dissolution of the boundaries of the self.
She’s hardly the first person to say this, hardly the first person to take psychedelics and say this, but what she characterized as freedom — in contrast to cold individualism — has been on my mind as I think about care. What we owe to each other, how we fail. I’ve been a bit sick for a couple days and I’m recovering now. I think that when I’m sick, I really retreat into myself, and don’t accept very much from other people unless they’re sort of persistent and specific (thanks, JE, for the Ziploc-bagged care package in the pouring rain). Today I felt particularly self-reliant and sad about it.
I wrote in a postcard to a friend that I felt a resentment at being sick, of course, but also a kind of perverse joy, that this is the rare time I give myself permission to sit still. To skip class, skip a sociology workshop, skip a lunch with my advisor and skip scheduling a meeting to check in on my second-year paper (for now). I spent a lot of time in bed. I probably slept for about 12 hours last night, having all these incredibly vivid dreams that were ultimately frightening and familiar because they all — at least the ones I remembered — featured people I loved, but in frightening ways. I had a dream that my parents’ home in Northern California had burnt down, but they didn’t tell me for a couple days and then when they did it was in this extremely casual way. I asked them if they stayed in a hotel and they said oh no, we couldn’t afford that. So I woke up with profound uneasiness. I’m not sure exactly what this has to do with the dissolution of the boundaries of the self except that maybe dreams are sites of ego-shattering and greater plasticity: you can be someone other than the person you think you are when you’re awake.
The reason this is titled “dictation” is because I narrated some of it into my iPhone while walking down the foggy sidewalk. If it seems very disorganized and stream-of-consciousness that may be part of why: I had to go in and clean up a lot of misspellings. “Frightening ways” in the previous paragraph was transcribed as “hurry up Waze.” One of the ways we dissolve the boundaries of the self a little bit is the process of conversation, interlocution, thinking out loud in partnership. (Or is it an act of individuation? Someone more confident about their understanding of Hegel would reference him here.)
I used to take dictation from my boss for her emails a lot, in my first job after college. I was a glorified secretary who did occasional ghostwriting. Technology is quickly making the act of taking down dictation obsolete, but if my iPhone experience tonight is any indicator, humans are still a lot better than the bots. Still, the act of taking down dictation feels retro — evoking images of the 50s, female secretaries clacking away on typewriters or writing in shorthand. It’s subservient to make your body a vessel of transmission for someone else’s thought, but it’s also a powerful position: you can fuck it up really bad, and not only change the meaning of writing ascribed to them, but potentially lose the thought for good. Sometimes, speaking out loud has the quality of a dream: blink awake and it’s gone.
image credit: A Man in a Kneeling Posture Bending Forward and Listening to an Oiran who is Playing the Shamisenca. 1705–7. Okumura Masanobu
an article I have open to read in my 100+ tabs on Chrome in mobile (I know it’s 100+ because Chrome gives up after 99 and just puts :) in the box where the number would otherwise go) - Ethnic Studies by Vikrant Dadawala