(stuff I just found mixed in with notes associated with some short fiction I was trying to write, from January 17 2004)
I am really frustrated how much I don't feel any connection to [...],
but find her really attractive. If attraction is heat — I can't disagree
with the applicability of Lakoff's metaphors, just their exhaustivity —
then she is not a raging fire, but a warm cup of tea, just after it
has cooled enough to not burn your lips, just warm enough to sink
into your hands and your belly. The warmth of her face is slow and
surprising. She isn't strikingly, scaldingily attractive. But she's
too self-possessed to be merely cute. She is skinny, but not small,
somehow. She doesn't look old, but somehow more woman and less girl.
I am coming to terms with the impotencies that inhere in all vocabularies.
I lack any good argument against calling personality air, earth, water,
fire, except that it sounds corny to me. I use metaphors in that domain,
but I don't claim that there are four. It's that system that seems
strange, that one should put blinders on and say, I am considering these
four. It's numerology, mysticism to see a four somewhere else and say,
aha, I should match these up. It's such a... something thing to do.
I want a word, there, for the man-monkey boundary. I want a handle
on that thrilling, terrifying dream of being back on the african savannah,
or int the trees, or wherever our brains grew up, what we think we're
still doing, counting things and building things and praying to sun
gods, casting spells, for words are still new to us, and magical.
Tools are still new to us, confusing. We have no stories to tell our
children about how it has always been like this. We have no history.
We have no state. We make it up. I want a word for that old time, that
old us. We were that, once, we feel confident in the science that has
told us this. No, no, that's not right. We are that. We haven't changed.
We're a bunch of [...] monkeys. We're astrologers. We're magicians.
We're gossips. We're rapists. We're power-mad kings and courtiers. We're
envious peasants. We look down and up at the same time, [...]
jealous and elitist, angry and dismissive. I am not alpha, I want to
be alpha. I say I love monogamy, but do I? Do I not just want them to
be loyal to me? The all-to-human in me just wants sex, and wants control
over it, wants her faithfulness, wants me to be the only significance
in her life. The human sitting on top has to fudge one way or the other
to make things make sense, and they must make sense, musn't they?
Either I give up demanding monogamy for her, or demand it for myself.
Or I give up symmetry! But being too attached to symmetry, and to
the desire to feel unique in her eyes, for any "her" at all, I
am forced to impose faithfulness on myself. I want her to respect me,
so I must respect her. I want her to find me interesting, so I must
be interested in her. I want her to find me attractive, so I must
so find her.
So much introspection and so little impetus to making a decision.
I must at least realize that [...] I like thinking. I
like building systems that work. I have a notion that things that are
work are not fun. No matter how often this is true, I must fight against
the lazy temptation to give into it being causal. Being work does not
steal the joy from things! It only means the universe has been tricked
into rewarding me for my happiness.