conscious/preconscious/unconscious/subconscious

I pulled my first allnighter in grad school. The significance of it goes only that far.  It’s less of a badge than it is a situation I would now want to avoid at all costs. The fact is, I was pathetically un-functional the following day. Which subsequently made me wonder: how in the world did I pull several allnighters in a row back in college? It’s a little difficult to think it even happened to that extent. Did it really? That which took me to the ER was really sleep-deprivation for 4 nights? Inconceivable at this point.

I was so tired (after just one night of no sleep) that I kept myself barely awake just to be conscious enough to walk. That means that the instant I lay my butt anywhere flat, I would immediately fall into dazed mode.

To be more specific:

You know how when you go to bed after a tired day—when your every limb and organ had been crying out the entire day for rest—your body immediately melts into your bed, but somehow the comfort is interrupted by those sporadic moments when you just spaz out? Like when your brain signals to your muscle to contract independent of your willpower? When you’re suddenly awoken by your own delirious spasms?

Let’s say instead of all of that happening within the comfort of your bedroom it happened in the metro, where you rarely have the luxury of having ‘distance’ between you and your fellow early-risers.
Say that the moment you find a seat in the subway your mind slips right out of the grip of your willpower. Your neck is literally folding in half and while you’re fully feeling the pain of it, sleep is still sweeter. You’re minimally “conscious” enough to keep yourself from drooling over everyone. That’s when three things transpire all at once (and the linearity of this prose won’t do justice). First thing, you’re awoken. Awoken by those nervous spasms. Second thing, you just heard someone say, “Yae wae-e-rae (translation: what’s wrong with her).” Third thing, you realize that those involuntary muscle contractions somehow had your left arm fling to slap the right thigh of the lady that was sitting next to you.

Now you have to make a decision: apologize? or just suppress all potential awkwardness and act like you’re still in a state of delirium and have the lady (and everyone else) just admit that you’re a poor grad school kid trying to get some sleep?

I went with the second choice. It just seemed easier. That is, easier according to the logic of the delirious. Who knew that logic works a little differently under delirium (or that there is logic at all).  Right after realizing that I slapped her, my oh so refined intelligence decided to give an additional slap on the book I was holding onto. As if somehow that would suddenly cancel everything and make things normal.  Or as if that would neutralize all social imbalance that was about the erupt in that little section of the train.  It’s just ludicrous the fact that the decision to slap my book came as a result of a still meticulous calculation. And that makes all of this all the more lamentable (or laughable. same thing.)

The romanticism of elegantly sitting in the metro, holding a cappuccino in your right hand while holding Kant on your left and pondering upon the ontology of beauty all lost in a single muscle twitch.

Oh the fluidity.

A petty account on the petty experience of drinking tomato juice.

During her stay in Korea, my sister commented how she never liked tomato juice because it tasted like ketchup. And of course, the moment she dropped the word ketchup, the pouch of tomato juice I was drinking suddenly started tasting like ketchup. I found my perception of the taste violently vacillating between the pleasant territory of ‘juice’ and the more abnormal experience of “drinking” ketchup. The identity of —or the actuality of —whatever I was gulping down was now purely conferred by my mind.  A distorted (really?) perception by association, if you will.

Now, when I drink tomato juice, and in order to enjoy it, an enormous control of mind is demanded for my brain not to slip into thinking that it’s ketchup. (And if this demand possibly starts inflicting a sort of mental masochism, I’ll have to stop drinking tomato juice. )

Thank you, sister.

I am two-legged

Inconsistency in tone has always been a problem with every blog I’ve ever kept, but it’s also always been a normative kind of problem, a kind I regard as a problem more by external prescription than by conviction (as if I am somehow vindicated by this statement).

So to satisfy this self-defensive criticism with enough evidence, some more choppiness:

Finished day 2 of grad school life in Korea. Slightly taken aback by the sudden (although expected) intrusion of isms whose gathering seem cohesive only by way of another set of theories that occupy the infinitesmally parcelled out gaps in between.  Still, a new interest has been highlighted while barely rummaging through all that: the position of language in the interaction of one and one’s thought.

In terms of living in one of the central parts of Seoul, the usual metropolitan craze: a lot of walking, a lot of people, thus, a lot of pushing. The opening scene of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times immediately comes to mind, and the strong resemblance is certainly more comic than tragic. Yes, comic, but only as long as you sustain your position (and point-of-view) as a spectator. I’m probably not available long enough to have the comedy of the situation lead me all the way to the point of laughter, the reason simply being I am, at least physically, also part of the incessant herding, leaving little perspectival(?) distance.

Let other ponderings sit in my head for a while, see if it’s worth another stir.

Jimmy Stewart

The scene in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where the camera pulls back while simultaneously zooming in to create a dizzying effect from the point of view of the acrophobic, seems to represent well, at least literally, what really happens in moments of acrophobic vertigo. You really do feel the abyss is sucking you in, and as shallow as my knowledge is about certain biological or psychological phenomena that happens during vertigo, I’m almost certain that the threat is nothing so external as it is internal.

Kierkegaard discusses the experience of vertigo, convincingly saying that the fear one feels when standing over a cliff is not so much about the falling itself, but the fact that the threshold between my being safe and my jumping off is solely marked by my choice. Desire, contrary to what we might casually think, perhaps plays only a minor role in this process of decision-making – there are far too many incidents where people choose against their desires. What gives rise to that haunting feeling of vertigo is not merely because of the “I might fall” prospective, where possibility is measured by some external variable. (It’s interesting to realize that vertigo still occurs even when there is no external influence that can probably cause me to fall.) Perhaps it’s the acute – but still largely subconscious – realization that the only thing that keeps me from diving into my demise is that fragile thing called choice. There is no physical impediment that can guarantee me from making a certain choice. I just make a choice. And that’s it. I suppose it’s not too outrageous to say that I am alive right now because I chose to be alive. Conversely, I chose against putting an end to my life. After stripping away every factor that explains why I’m alive right now, something close to what we could call essence says that a single choice (or a series of similar choices) is what keeps me alive.

Now, this weight of choice seems to be a lot heavier than what I gathered from Camus or Sartre in college. This seemingly existential sprawl is stemming a lot more from an interaction with real life than with dead people. (I finally get a glimpse of how serious the French existentialists were when they wrote.) It dawned on me, quite unpleasantly, that there is no fundamental difference between ‘me’ and the people we usually consider ‘incarnations of evil’ such as Hitler or Kim Jong-Il. No fundamental dissociation or distance.

The feeling of nearness was a lot more nauseating than terrifying, and while there are still very justifiable reasons that explain the inevitability of one’s making certain choices or becoming a certain person, I can’t help but think that the ‘demonic’ Hitler is perhaps also just a composite of choices, or a result of choices made in series. And this opens up an entire realm that I only thought was irrelevant to me. And when the becoming of being unravels along the axis of choice alone, there is not much that can automatically eliminate me from becoming a being I do not desire. A choice made, and another made, are really the colors that paint the picture of who I am. A single shade of dark color probably would show no difference. You don’t know yet whether it is a shadow of an object, or the color of the object itself. Perhaps an accumulation of choices would gradually but surely lead one to a place where one taps into another set of choices that only seemed outrageous before. If the theory that says the prime-mover behind Hitler becoming Hitler is not an overnight ‘conversion’ to Evil, but a series of seemingly innocuous choices is a cogent argument, then that puts an enormous weight upon the choices that usually belong to the category of the quotidian. And the axiom that speaks of a responsibility for choices one has made multiplies the gravity.

But, it must be wiser not to let the weight overburden me. If anything, the Angelus Novus would be the very last of my last options. As long as my life is defined by the choices that I make, and as long as those choices rightfully determine who I become and who I am, and if choice, by definition, truly is the right and power and opportunity to choose, then ‘proactive’ must be the way to go. It would be dreadful to find out, on my death bed, that all my life I’ve only been swept along in the timeline of human history, stumbling upon chains of events, only by virtue of the passage of time.

The worst would be the inevitable truth that that, too, will have had been a choice. The kind of consequence I must pay for that choice, I refuse to imagine.