compulsions

they exist!

My interests tend to wax and wane in cycles. I imagine this is probably quite normal for most people in the general sense, though I suspect that for me the swings might be more intense. I can get hyperfixated on something for a short-to-moderate period of time, and then lose all interest in it for quite a long time afterwards. this pattern-matches with what people describe as adhd. I don’t, however, believe that this is a ‘bad’ thing. I think it’s just a particular style, and the challenge for each individual is to understand their own style, and to design a life for themselves that suits their style.

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When I started this Substack– or to be precise, when I figured out the ‘Frame Studies’ angle for it, i was kinda obsessed with wanting to write something about the movie Inception (2010), and about Scheherazade of Thousand and One Nights, and I did a lot of reading and drafting and note-taking. It’s all still lying around, but I don’t currently feel compelled to do anything about those drafts. It feels like the moment has passed. Those bits no longer have animating spirit for me. But I do keep those notes around, because I have faith that my interest in them will be rekindled at some point.

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in 2020 I wrote a twitter thread about how I’d been vaguely interested in Miles Davis for years prior, but never quite got around to doing a proper deep dive on him. I’d been listening to Kind of Blue (1959) for years, which I loved, but not quite enough to want to sit through a 2 hour documentary (Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, 2019). Until I think I had a conversation with someone about scenes, which got me to wondering about the scene that Miles operated in, which led me to reading his Wikipedia page… and that’s what got me intrigued enough to want to watch the documentary. What’s interesting to me looking back is always how little of say I seem to have in this process. I can’t directly will myself into watching something I don’t feel like watching. I almost have to try and seduce myself indirectly. Even that seldom works as well as I’d like. (There’s probably a selection/survivor bias effect here– if I’m able to get myself to do something, I do it, and it no longer lingers in my mind as a thing that I haven’t been able to get myself to do.)

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The Departure of Hector hits different once you have a kid of your own

I’ve always been vaguely interested in Homer’s Iliad (c. 800 BC). After all, it’s a foundational text of Western Civilization¹, isn’t it? I knew the broad strokes– it’s about Achilles and Hector and Paris and Helen of Troy– but I didn’t really know the specifics. I figured, correctly, that I’d always be able to look it up someday if I really needed or wanted to. My interest in it increased somewhat when I heard that Julian Jaynes cited it as evidence for his argument that ancient humans didn’t experience consciousness the way modern humans do… but still not enough to get me to actually read a proper text, by which I mean an English translation (there’s a nice analysis of the various versions in this reddit post). My interest in questions about consciousness continued to increase once my son was born, and once he started speaking. At 19 months of age, he now knows lots of words, but hasn’t quite begun stringing them together in sentences (probably the most complex sentence he knows is “hat fall down!”, which is adorable.) When I brought him to the library recently, however, I encountered a graphic novel form of it by Gareth Hinds– it got me hooked from a few pages, I borrowed it and read the whole thing in one sitting earlier today, and now I feel like I’m quite ready to read a full translation, maybe Peter Green’s or Emily Wilson’s as recommended by /u/Naugrith.

Shall I say more about the consciousness thing? I’ve always been interested in people, and how we tick, how we think, how we experience ourselves, our reality, and everything in between. Why are we the way we are? How and why do we do what we do, or not-do what we don’t do? It seems clear to me that the ways we think, and the ways we process and narrativize our experience, are things that are substantially informed by our culture, our upbringing, our education. And yet it’s seldom really examined or questioned– and when it is, it’s usually done in a somewhat ‘containerized’ way (and ‘containerized’ thinking, in my view, is itself a symptom of a very particular, even peculiar strain of atomistic western thinking, which is something I really want to dig into with Frame Studies) – containerized in a way that effectively limits any real impact. At least, that’s how it seems to me. I can’t shake the feeling that, if somebody did a good enough job of really revealing the idiosyncrasies of the way we think, it could be a tremendous gift to the world along multiple dimensions.

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Having and raising a child is a wonderful, transcendent thing. And it’s also tiresome in a way unlike anything else. It can be difficult to really take in the subtleties and nuances of the profundity of it all when you’re sleep deprived, cleaning up messes over and over again. The phrase “looking after” is really apt– young children especially need to be watched, because they’re extremely vigorous about finding every possible way they can to get into any sort of trouble. Many of these ways are inconceivable to first-time parents, who have typically spent a couple of decades being socialized in the ways of mainstream normalcy, internalizing un-childlike ideas like “don’t stick your tongue and fingers into random things of questionable provenance”. Maintaining a constant watchfulness over a young child will wear you out psychologically unlike anything else. Having a child that needs looking after will test the limits of your watchfulness. You start to compromise. “Sure, he’s making a mess but at least he’s quiet for now and not actively hurting anybody. I’ll take that as a win for now.”

Thing is, there are moments amidst all of this where you catch glimpses of the presocialized human consciousness that’s aflame in every young child. I’ve half-jokingly described that it’s like looking at the Higgs-Boson of social reality, the fundamental building blocks at the heart of everything. Children are who people are before they’re taught how to be like everyone else. And so, observing children extensively is one of the most powerful windows into ourselves there is. (If your parents are still around, witnessing your parents interact with your child is an incredibly, shockingly illuminating experience.)

Here’s one of the most fascinating things I’ve observed in my 19-month-old son. i’ll try and describe it without making assumptions about what he “knows” or “believes”. When he drops something, say a spoon from the table, one of his parents might say “uh-oh!” – and he will say the phrase himself right after deliberately picking up an object to throw it to the ground. He will also say “No! Stop it!” while throwing objects. It seems to me that he does have some idea of what ‘stop” means, because he knows to freeze when moving along to a song that goes “hop, hop, hop and stop!”. We use phrases like “all done” and “finish” when he’s finished his food, and he’ll say it himself, too. And he knows to use those phrases in other contexts– he’ll independently say “all done” and “finish” in response to say, one of us wiping his face, before we are done. Describing all of this in words is a little tedious, but it seems evident to me that he’s communicating his wish for the activity to be over. There’s a book titled “Little Dinos Don’t Yell”, and he’ll say “don’t yell!” before and after yelling.

There’s a lot to piece together, and I think one ought to be careful with one’s assumptions about what a young child really knows, or intends. But it seems to me that his mind is quite a lively, active and conflicted place already. He knows the names of many objects and will happily say them out, and he likes it when I confirm them. He seems to take pleasure in developing an increasingly accurate collection of names for the things in his life. Bus! Moon! Taxi! Door! Fridge! Cat! Dog! Apple! Grape! He enjoys playing varying forms of peekaboo and hide-and-seek, but not always and not indefinitely. He likes to bring me books to read them to him, and he likes finishing the sentences. He knows some words better than others, and says them more confidently.

I have friends with older kids, and I’m always fascinated to hear the specific details of how they acquire language and how they express themselves and their thoughts. One friend told me a story of how her kid would talk to herself with her mom’s words, saying “No, <name>, you shouldn’t do that!” while doing the thing. (I think it was something involving her socks, I forget the specifics.) I’ve heard so many stories like this and it makes me wonder about how surely we adults just do more complicated versions of the same thing, internalizing other people’s criticisms and disapproval, without necessarily really understanding them.

In a way, maybe we’re all conflicted toddlers, and we just get better at hiding or stage-managing that conflict out of sight. There’s something interesting here about how the awareness of a rule or an expectation does not automatically correlate with a reduction in the compulsion to violate that rule or expectation. I don’t know, I’m still figuring out what I think about all of this. If you have any stories or anecdotes that come to mind, I’d love to hear them!

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I circled back to the start of the post and was amused to see that I started by talking about my cyclical interests– which we could call compulsions. I don’t feel like I’m any closer to understanding why I do what I do, than I am to understanding why my toddler does what he does. But I do think that… in both cases, it’s probably healthy to appreciate that compulsions exist, and they don’t go away just because we wish they did, and they don’t arise just because we wish they did, either. I think that’s the source of a lot of stress and strife in the world: wishing that things were different, other than what they are. And it really does seem true to me that… if we do want things to be different, we should probably always first begin with an acknowledgement of what they are. Probably.

1. One thing that’s striking to me about the Iliad is how ~Hindu it feels. I guess it’s the polytheism. The interesting question to me there is how monotheism vs polytheism inform people’s models of reality, relationships, their very ontology. I wonder if the Iliad and the Mahabharata have common ancestors in Indo-European mythology and storytelling?