Month: July 2022

“If you did then how would you know you didn’t?”

One reason I decided to study philosophy at an academic level—the reason I suspect Wittgenstein would appreciate most—is that I found I couldn’t stop thinking. There were moments that the Buddhist/Dharmic (and I can’t say a word like that without my raised-in-the-‘90s brain interjecting “yoga flame!”) ideal of clearing my mind was achievable and desirable, such as in moments of crippling self-doubt, but, as much as I wanted those moments to stop, I wanted more that I should continue, that I should not let the venomous thoughts and feelings swallow me whole, that I should think my way through them. Thinking was and remains a useful pastime that I cannot help doing. It only made sense that I should apply whatever talents I had for it to the recorded thoughts of the great minds from the ancient, medieval, or contemporary world. It was through my schooling that I was introduced to the analytic and continental schools of philosophy inquiry. So as not to overwhelm you with digressions, I shall make understanding the difference between the two a sub-topic for another day, but it will suffice and oversimplify to say that the former is more purely scientific and the latter artistic. I have been trained more thoroughly in the former, but my preference by far is the latter.

The portion of my mind trained in the analytic tradition sees this question simply as a kind of absurd paradox. While I am not skilled enough to formulate the question in formal logic, I know the basic structure would be something like, “If x, then how would you know not-x?” The easiest way to answer this is to disregard the human experience of sentences, by which I mean all one need do is to chop off the antecedent in the conditional, as the truth value thereof will be the same even if all that is addressed is the consequent. It is then a simple epistemological question that will be answered differently by rationalists, empiricists, and Kantian lambs who will soon serve as my dinner.

That isn’t very fun, though, is it?

No, indeed, and it’s only half-right.

It is an epistemological question cloaked in an absurd paradox, to be sure, but it is only by taking into consideration the antecedent, the head we chopped off, that the question can be answered thoroughly. Curiously, a thorough answer is quite short:

“If you did then how would you know you didn’t?”

Whatever way you would otherwise know you didn’t.

Now, I’m about as hardcore a skeptic as they come, especially where epistemology is concerned. The senses are not wholly reliable, reason is not wholly reliable, and the two acting in concert can be a death trap. I’m a stickler about certainty, and certainty is a concept relying to whatever degree on objectivity, which I do not believe exists. This is all to say I am in no way the best person to ask. That said, there are certainly rationalists and empiricists and Kantian lambs who will read these words and they will answer according to their methodology, regardless of any epistemology that I might propose. The easiest part is that there is no verb attached to the question, so anything can be supplied.

For example:

“If you made, how would you know you made not?”

Let us expand:

“If you did make, how would you know you did not make?”

Simply:

You probably would not, provided there was no alarm set up to alert you that you had not made.

Back to the original, this time as dialogue:

“If you did then how would you know you didn’t?”

“I would know I didn’t if there were a wire tripped to let me know I didn’t once I hadn’t done, but I did. Relax.”

With care,

~ Grigori

“What do you find most uninspiring?”

Mediocrity, more than anything else, conjures in me a dull, numbing apathy that pounds at me like a brainless headache until I move on and realize the uncaring despair I was feeling while experiencing it. You might reasonably be asking what a brainless headache feels like, as it is typically the brain that feels affected by the headache, and your intuition is exactly right: it feels like nothing at all. A brainless headache is that non-existent ache one wishes to feel, and yet cannot because it is complacent and satisfied where it shouldn’t be.

To encounter mediocrity in art is to bear witness to a kind of death, for mediocre art—aside from being a kind of oxymoron—is little more than an effort by the dead to preserve what isn’t there. It is devoid of nutritious substance, empty, and boring. The point of art, no matter the medium, is to instill life through creative endeavor. That need not require a message or a meaning, but art nevertheless demands some life from the artist so that it can become more than colors swirled together, gestures or notes moving through the air, black lines on a page.

Much the same can be said of the workplace, can it not? The exceptional stand out, the terrible need attention, and no one pays any attention to the mediocre. Never mind what I may or may not find uninspiring. Mediocrity is uninspiring per se.

Besides all this, mediocrity allows the hipsters to feel they have a purpose in life. That is a crime which stands alone, by itself, but I digress.

With care,

~ Grigori

COVID and The Sopranos

Nightmares are a curious fixture of my nightlife. The only good dreams I can remember have happened in the last two years, and I can count them all on one hand. While I grant that probably says something I am not ready to hear about my relative emotional health, that issue is not my focus right now. Besides, this is about a series of good dreams that I had.

Where to start?

The Sopranos was an excellent HBO show that started airing near the turn of the millennium. I wasn’t yet a teenager when the series started, so I saw none of it while it was on the air. I once went through the first season when I was finally old enough to watch it but went no further. If you asked me why, I would probably tell you it had just been rented, but truthfully it is not something I could tell you with any certainty. Whatever the case, here I am now, at long last having gone through the first season again and now continuing into the second season, watching this brilliant show about complex relationships between a mob boss, his families, and healing.

Tony Soprano, the patriarch of the title family, is a violent and dangerous man who has remarkable self-control. That is not to say he exhibits no impulsive behavior, but rather that it is a rarity when the viewer sees him doing something stupid that really could have been avoided. Those same instances are often what lands him back in therapy. When he does get violent, it is a visceral act; while not often gruesome, it is often deeply personal. I as a viewer understand that I am probably supposed to be left with a sense of revulsion, but in truth his violence almost always leaves me feeling satisfied. Soprano’s relatability is one of the most endearing aspects of the show; I can understand and even empathize to a point with him, and so acts that would be difficult for me to stomach become simply… satisfying.

COVID tried to kill me.

There was no segue at all, I know, but there is no connection between COVID and The Sopranos save what went on in my head, and why would I bother talking again about my nightmares? Well, my COVID dreams were not nightmares.

I feel comfortable calling myself a film buff. Drama tends to be my generic specialty, but horror is probably a close second. You might reasonably suspect that horror is responsible for most or even all my nightmares, but the truth is that what goes on in my head at night almost never has anything to do with something I was watching earlier that day. In fact, I have gone to bed afraid that I would have nightmares about whatever it is I watched, and those fears almost always go unrealized. I say “almost” only because I cannot say with any certainty that these films have never affected my nightlife, but I can say that I have no such memory. Both Tony Soprano’s violence and the violence enacted on behalf of his interests are often graphic, but most important for the way I witness violence and the way it interacts with my unconscious while I sleep is that I “get it.” Though I may not always agree with the extent to which the violence is taken, I am very rarely reaching out of myself in some futile attempt to stop it. When I am, it’s not Tony Soprano’s men who are the perpetrators. I bring this up because it is not, as one might expect given my unusually high sensitivity, violence per se that affects me. What affects me, as I alluded to at the beginning of this piece, is what scars my emotions and chips away at my sense of well-being—that which attacks on a visceral level my values in a way that I am powerless to stop.

You will pardon, I am sure, that digression.

After two shots of the Pfizer vaccine and one booster shot, COVID finally stormed its way into me and did its best to destroy me. The real and lasting damage it did was financial—I lost out on nearly $1,000 of work because of that wretched virus—but its physical presence was unpleasant to say the least. For the most part it was effectively a supercold, with congestion becoming a problem such that my sinuses would no longer let me distinguish between two stuffed nostrils, but instead signaled to me that I had no nose at all and what nose had once been there had in fact been replaced by a crater of cartilage that now knew only mucus.

The aches were the worst of it. In the nights I suffered through the symptoms, I woke early in the morning to my arms—first my arms, then my legs a few days later—feeling as if they were sacks of skin in which the muscles I had were melting at a pace that mimicked molasses. The pain was too dull for me to cry out at any point, but the ache grew quickly from dull to agonizing. I can remember feeling my arms, too, in the middle of the night, thinking I couldn’t feel any of the muscle I had built up over the last few months. I was effectively hallucinating, as one is wont to do in both a sick and groggy state in the middle of the night, that my arm had been reduced to skin and bone. Even as I did my best to flex and reassure myself, convincing myself was out of the question. My emotions were enslaved to the virus. My rational mind was just awake enough to know I didn’t need to be freaking out, so at least I had my dormant intellect rescuing me from certain despair.

Now, at last, to the point of my writing all this.

Every night I suffered from this overcongestion, from these aches, was accompanied by a dream featuring the Sopranos. These were good dreams, too, which at this point probably shocks you just as much as it did me. For the life of me, I can remember only two of them now in any detail. The second featured two men who, if they were not Paulie and Silvio, obviously represented them, transporting a bale of “hay” which was very obviously composed of chopped up and shredded corpses to a location that was most convenient for me. You’re probably asking, “Convenient to do what?!” and that is an excellent question for which I have no answer. All I remember was that the general atmosphere was very jovial. The first dream I had was even funnier, though: Tony Soprano instructing my white blood cells like they were his personal henchmen to clear up my nostrils. “Either that side, or that side, or both.” If you can read that in his voice with his pointed, commanding tone, you can hear it exactly the way it sounded in my head. As funny as it would be to say I saw Tony Soprano himself directing large, anthropomorphized cells, the truth is that I saw only him with his determined face and pointed finger as he gave out the orders. That makes it no less funny, as the memory makes me laugh to this day.

I had bad symptoms for four nights and had dreams of the Sopranos every time. Once the symptoms abated enough for me to wake up and go about my life as normal, they stopped. It may have been the one good thing that came from having COVID. I want never to forget the week that the Sopranos were my friends.

With care,

~ Grigori