Multifarious Threads

Philosophy

Wordsight

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(the word “Wordsight” written on a dusty-blue background)

In a word I see the world.

Written symbols—not just words, but letters, punctuation, essays, books, numerals—have personalities, sounds, histories, friends, enemies, parents, siblings, colours, shapes, moods, textures, and rhythms; they’re not just marks on a page. Eight is smug. Seven is yellowish. The letter M is a mulberry colour. Glamor for glamour is shabby. Esthetic for aesthetic is foul. COVID-19 shouts its name like a metallic-voiced Dalek; Covid-19 merely says it; covid-19 has lost its proper-noun status and is now a commonplace like flu or the common cold. The semicolon is pensive; the comma diligent and dutiful. When double quotation marks encase a full stop or comma, they look like grasping claws.

When I think in language, I think in complete written sentences; this writing usually appears as subtitles, lettering, handwriting, typography, or plain text on a screen, depending on the context. I see every word, punctuation mark, and numeral I hear. I can’t listen to most hip-hop and rap because I see all the lyrics in my head, and I don’t want the words to crowd out my own thoughts. Sometimes the head-text is animated, appearing in sequences like transitions on TV.

I suspect all this is a form of synaesthesia. The Germans have a word for the phenomenon: Sprachgefühl, a visceral sense of the language. For me, the Gefühl, the feeling, is very literal. But Sprachgefühl is a pair of Teutonic plates rubbing against each other. I want an English word to match an English feeling—wordsight.

When words are misspelled, malformed, or misused, I feel it: a punch in the gut, a slap in the face, the beginnings of nausea building up in my throat. Keening voices, bits of metal scraping against each other, dentists’ drills, blaring sirens. “Your not coming too, are you?” Sandpaper and knives pressed into the skin, over and over again. “Save money everyday.” SCREEEEEEECH! Irregardless is rocks tumbling down a cliff. Corona virus feels too loose. Core competencies, stakeholders, impactful, best practices. Thunk, thunk, thunk. The excrescent S in anyways buzzes in my ears. Context weaves itself in, as its derivation suggests: Ugh, wrong word. Did they not know better? Argh! Why don’t they look it up? Do they not care? Where did they go to school? Is this a new trend? They ought to check the style manual. What are they doing? STOP IT! Ouch. Ouch, ouch, OUCH. I see words being mutilated, smashed together, torn apart, hacked to pieces, turned into Frankenstein’s monsters. If I come out strongly against a word or phrase, it’s probably because I can feel its repugnance in my very skin. When I’m especially sensitive, I can’t even look at the word, phrase or sentence without immediately averting my eyes.

The right words, on the other hand, are old friends. “Hello there! Oh, it’s you.” They’re a warm bath, a weighted blanket lying across my lap, a purring cat sitting next to me. To see the right words in the right places, with apologies to Jonathan Swift, is an ineffable delight. I hope always to feel that flutter of familiarity when I’m reading.

I calm myself by looking at friend-words. Seeing all right makes me feel… all right. I trust its sturdiness, the weight of a smooth stone in each of my hands. The space between the words allows for possibilities; it gives me just enough breathing room. Its second cousin, on the other hand, feels artificial, plasticky, like a false sense of security. It’s claustrophobic in there. I don’t feel soothed when I’m told that everything will be “alright.” It feels insincere, even if the writer meant it wholeheartedly. It’s nauseating, like being force-fed Velveeta, high-fructose corn syrup, genetically modified vegetable oil, or some other lab-created concoction with a chemical aftertaste. It’s creepy, gooey, clingy, gloppy, cloying, inconsiderate, insistent. I can imagine a trademark sign after it. “You don’t need that stuffy old All Right any more. Try new Alright™! If you act now, you can get an Alot® and an Aswell® free! That’s right, an Alot® and an Aswell®! What an AMAZING offer! Call 1-888-AL-RIGHT. That’s 1-888-AL-RIGHT. But wait, there’s more! If you call within the next thirty seconds, you can get an Afterall™ too! That’s right, folks, an Afterall™ as well—or should I say Aswell®?” It certainly doesn’t feel all right. Alright—and similar nonwords like alot and irregardless—are also a reliable marker of word-blindness. Those who write them tend to have a more tenuous relationship with words and their structure; although they intend no harm, they have no idea of the pain they inflict.

Symbols, like people, can be known by the company they keep. Some tend to lurk together in murky places, avoiding the light; others are bright and gregarious. Some hang out together in dark corners; others may prefer a smart dinner party. Some are romantics who seek others of their kind; others are technicians who cannot abide the romantics’ woolly imprecision. (I, for my part, try to be a romantic technician, or a technical romantic.)

I feel the difference between words that are similar, but not the same: comprise and compose, lay and lie, all together and altogether. Comprise is lighter than compose. All together is languid; altogether a little hectic. I can sometimes work out the derivation of a word by feeling it. When I think I’ve found a connection, I feel a little warm, but I don’t let myself go warm entirely—what if it’s a false etymology, a mere areal feature rather than a verifiable kinship? When I learn that the words are indeed akin, there’s a frisson down my back: I’ve discovered part of the chain. Anglo-Saxon words are warmer, woodier, more knobbly; French-derived ones are cooler and silkier; Latin ones grandiose and haughty.

I occupy myself with spelling because in English at least, it reflects history, culture, or writers’ tampering, whether inadvertent or deliberate. Our words are palimpsests, leaving traces of the influences that have come before. This is why I object so strongly to American spellings in British books: the written words’ texture, shape and patterns are wrong for the rhythm of the text. To misspell a word is to call it by the wrong name.

With all this sensation, there’s no wonder that I react with horror when someone expresses indifference to how symbols are used or arranged or written. “How can you not tell the difference between these two typefaces?” “And how could you use Arial when Helvetica came installed on the computer too?” “Don’t you want to match the personality of your writing with the way the letters look?” “How could you spell it that way? That looks broken.” “Break those words back up.” “Why did you split this word apart?”

Perhaps the first creators of language knew this, too. This is part of why I look askance at hardline descriptivists; language is too metaphorical, too alive, to exist without human design. After all, language is a system of metaphors that we use to share our thoughts with others. Metaphor means to carry across, as do transfer and translation (from Latin ferre, past tense tuli, past participle latus). We carry across our meanings to one another. But when words are merely data points in a larger pattern of use, it’s hard to appreciate the roles of sensation, emotion, and history. The scientist of language may see words as an object of analysis, but word-blindness will stop her perceiving their sensory effects.

Wordsight is both burdensome and fortunate, but I cannot imagine my life or career without it.

PTSD and the remnants of Cartesianism in psychological practice

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The view of trauma adopted in the DSM-V is a reflection of the Cartesian dualism that still permeates mainstream psychology. The diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, requires that a direct, physical threat to someone’s life occur; emotional abuse doesn’t seem to count, despite research studies indicating that emotional distress can exert the same effects as physical abuse. If emotional abuse results in the same biochemical responses as physical abuse or life-threatening accidents, then it should be included as a criterion for PTSD or other psychiatric disabilities that arise from stress or trauma. Limiting the aetiology to direct physical threats prevents survivors of emotional abuse or other forms of sustained maltreatment from receiving the help they need.

Drawing a bright line between the two seems entirely predicated on the idea that the mind and body are two separate entities. This kind of crude dualism reflected in the DSM is not in keeping with current neuroscientific findings. Rather, the states of the mind and the rest of the body work in concert with one another. For example, anxiety and depression lead to the increased production of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which can ultimately overload the body and lead to a variety of adverse health consequences like stroke and heart disease (McEwen, 2005). The idea of a mind wholly separate from the rest of the body is an epiphenomenon of our cognition, not a tangible reality; while we may feel a separation between our thoughts and the rest of our body, the brain is still inextricable from the rest of our flesh, blood and bones. Our selfhood is immanent within the corporeal; it neither transcends it nor is reducible to it.

Admittedly, this frustration is deeply personal; I myself have PTSD symptoms from surviving years of emotional abuse and neglect, but if diagnosticians adhered strictly to the DSM, I couldn’t even be diagnosed with it. There is no official name for what I’ve gone through, even though the effects of this maltreatment still linger. Some psychologists and psychiatrists have suggested adding complex PTSD, or C-PSTD, to the DSM, but it hasn’t been added as of 2013. Leaving the scars of emotional trauma unnamed creates the potential for gaslighting, denial, and manipulation. While I’m not an unalloyed supporter of the medical model to name and identify trauma, I do think that we need ways to discuss what we’ve gone through as survivors in a systematic way. I hope the DSM-6 actually catches up with the literature and recognises the effects of long-term emotional trauma.

References

McEwen, B (2005). Stressed or stressed out: What is the difference? Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience 2006, 30(5).

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V) (2013).

The slipperiness of “I”: emergent properties, personal mythos, and co-creative development

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I’ve talked before about having psychiatric disabilities and being an abuse survivor. Today, I’m going to go into a bit more detail. This hasn’t been easy to write, but I think it’s a story that needs to be told.

It’s honestly a misnomer to say “I” in the first place; it’s more for your convenience than it is an inner truth. There are a lot of ghosts in this machine. I have a complex, intricate personal mythos; though I am very private about what that entails, it’s still a central component of my experience. I don’t feel comfortable with any of the “official” diagnostic labels that come close to what I experience, but there’s some similarity to Internal Family Systems. I’d say that the experience is more complex than that therapeutic model encourages, but it’s vastly better than anything that immediately evokes thoughts of Sybil and Three Faces of Eve.

I said this when I was 19:

It is difficult to define me in a few words; I see myself as a fissiparous, separate collection of ideas consolidated into one whole, forced to work together because of physical unity. In my mind exist multitudes of plots, characters, turns of phrase, denouements, orchestras with rousing crescendos and subtle diminuendos, the decisions and revisions of daily life, and the constant analysis of information. I’ve likened my brain to a large music-box or production factory; the ideas and influences of this world enter me, and I take them and combine them through my perception and interpretation, and take the universe and make it into [my own].

So many “psychiatric disorders” are extreme responses to a disordered, chaotic, and often mean world. To imply that the person experiencing psychiatric disability is the one who is “disordered” lets abusers, dictators, and warmongers off the hook. Our lives are intricately linked with others’. It’s important to understand individual factors, but it’s also vital to remember that we exist within systems: families, towns and cities, friend groups, countries, Earth at large. My lack of a contiguous “I”-narrator is in part a response to the circumstances in which I was brought up. I don’t—can’t—believe anything with absolute certitude, because I know my entire universe can be ruptured at any moment. It gets even more intense when you add in generational trauma: slavery, the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, and centuries of tilling the land without being able to reap the results of one’s own handiwork. This is not a stable foundation on which to build a singular sense of self, but my brain mitigated this problem by allowing for varied and co-creative senses of self to exist instead. I’m not anti-psychiatry, but I am vehemently against seeing people’s mental health as something extricable from the contexts in which people grow, live, work, and play.

A contiguous sense of self is an epiphenomenal emergent property anyway, not a concrete reality that can be used as an absolute benchmark of sanity or insanity. Because it’s all people know, they act as though it can be used to delineate what is beneficial and what is harmful. That’s not to say that there aren’t consistent tendencies, traits, and behaviours I can label as mine, but they’re the traits of a microcosm. There are plenty of other creative people who “contain multitudes,” pace Walt Whitman.

On a meta-level, it’s already pretty fucking weird that a collection of atoms can perceive itself at all. Thought itself is an intangible process generated by electrical impulses and chemical baths washing over our brains. I could continue the reduction to the sub-atomic levels: quarks, photons, and the like.

If it weren’t for the way my cognition is arranged, I don’t think I’d be alive to be telling you about this today, or if I were still alive, I think my quality of life would be greatly diminished. Having an internal support team has allowed me to pull through difficult traumas and create a better life for myself. This is deeply important to me and I am horrified by narratives that pathologise, flatten, and diminish my interiority or its positive effects on my external presentation. It’s especially galling when those judgements come from other neurodivergent people who seem to think that only some forms of cognitive difference are acceptable. Anxiety, autism, and depression are OK to talk about, but nothing else is. This is not OK. There is no point in trying to win the Oppression Olympics. Some animals are not more equal than others.

I don’t typically talk about it publicly because I have no interest in ontological debates, especially when people drag in the medical model. I’m also profoundly uncomfortable with having people apply inaccurate, minimising, and hurtful narratives to my experiences, turning a complex, multi-dimensional topological space into a two-dimensional figure or stripping it into non-contiguous pieces separate from the context in which they originally existed. It’s particularly painful to see people who know me well do it. I don’t want people to delve into extensive analyses of my personal mereology. I just want them to listen and not try to create their own—ultimately inaccurate—stories that they think supersede my own.

I refuse to allow people to denigrate me for having internal mechanisms that allow me to survive and even thrive after years of abuse, discrimination, marginalisation, and oppression. It’s time to take my power back by telling my story. Our story.

Existential aggression: the connective tissue of bigotry

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Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, disablism and xenophobia are forms of existential aggression. Existential aggression is behaviour that indicates that people don’t deserve to live or must be second-class citizens by virtue of what they are. Note that I said what they are, rather than who they are; this kind of aggression is based entirely on categorical groupings and not on individual traits.

Existential aggression is a term I’ve coined to refer to patterns I’ve seen repeated over and over again, but with no clear, agreed-upon name to describe the interrelationships between these forms of ostracism. Bigotry and prejudice don’t seem to capture the suffocating, annihilating force that is existential aggression. Eliminationism comes close, but not all existential aggressors necessarily want their victims to die. (One could argue, though, that they want their victims’ self-concept to be altered to fit their criteria for being a Real Person, which is possibly a form of death.)

Existential aggression is rooted in essentialist thinking. Essentialism, at least within a social context, is the idea that everyone exhibits transcendent, immutable traits that define their personhood, value and position within society. Authoritarians tend towards essentialist thought to define who should rule and who should serve…or be eliminated, for that matter. These attitudes result in a Manichaean worldview in which the forces of good must defeat the forces of evil, and goodness and evil are defined by people’s existence, rather than by their behaviour. I’ve discussed the relationships between Platonism, essentialism and authoritarianism in “The Problems with Closed Systems.”

Examples of existential aggression on an interpersonal scale include

  • Deliberately refusing to use names, pronouns and forms of address that a trans person has asked others to use
  • Referring to immigrants, especially undocumented ones, as ‘aliens’ or ‘illegal aliens’, in casual speech

Larger-scale versions of this phenomenon include

  • Refusing to grant legal recognition to LGBTQ people’s identities or relationships with other consenting adults
  • Directly allowing employers to fire people because of their race, gender, sexual orientation or disability
  • Xenophobic or disablist immigration laws
  • Eugenics, especially negative eugenics
  • Genocide

Far-rightists and their radical centrist enablers have their particular hobby horses of hate: religious fanatics’ fulmination about gay marriage and trans people using public bathrooms; so-called men’s rights activists’ rants about their inability to assault women with impunity; and white nationalists’ ardent desire to cleanse western countries of non-white people. That said, however, I suspect that the correlation coefficients between one form of existential aggression and another are not zero. Time and time again I see white nationalists expressing misogynistic, disablist, homophobic and transphobic views. Right-wing Christian fundamentalists may focus their ire on anyone who falls outside their idealised gender roles, but it’s not uncommon to see them haranguing about Muslims and undocumented immigrants. When you believe that there are some people who are less human than others, it’s likely that you may extend this reasoning to other groups, too. Websites where alt-righters and other hatemongers congregate are brimming with vitriolic attacks on all manner of people, from feminists to trans people to members of ‘weird’ subcultures.

These tendencies are not limited to the right, though I do think existential aggression is primarily the province of the right. I’ve noticed people on the left acting as though members of traditionally privileged groups are essentially bigoted, regardless of their own personal beliefs. A random white person may or may not be an ideological racist. European ancestry doesn’t make people automatically hateful. Having ancestors from continents other than Europe doesn’t make you automatically more credible or ‘woke’, either. Yes, white people benefit from systemic racism in the west, but it’s important to distinguish between social pressure and individual people’s behaviour and feelings. I’ve seen countless articles, tweets and Facebook statuses that imply that having a marginalised status makes you more enlightened. It doesn’t take much countervailing evidence to show this isn’t true. Ben Carson and Herman Cain wouldn’t be Republicans, anti-feminist women would be complete non-entities, and Milo Yiannopoulos wouldn’t have made a brief career out of terrorising other marginalised people. I’ll even make this personal and say that this applies to my own mother. My mother is a black Trinidadian immigrant who moved to the US in the late 1960s and spent the remainder of her childhood and adolescence in Queens. You would think that these demographic markers would make her an enthusiastic Democrat, right? Wrong: she hasn’t supported the Democrats in twenty years and is a Trump supporter. She likes Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly just as much as any other hardcore conservative Republican does. When my parents became evangelical Christians, they also became Republicans. I don’t think the assumptions made by people on the left about race and ideology are nearly as dangerous as those espoused on the right, but they’re still traps worth avoiding. People’s awareness of systemic oppression is dependent on their self-awareness, curiosity and attention to current affairs. Some people may sense that they’re being treated unfairly, but may not be able to articulate exactly why. Because they don’t have an explicit framework, either self-created, acquired or both, to explain their mistreatment, they may not use the correct ‘woke’ language du jour.

Existential aggression is dangerous because it focusses on people’s presence rather than their treatment of others. Simply existing is not a threat; mistreating others is. Be wary of any belief system that promotes existential aggression over good works.

Bullying in the service of ideology is still bullying

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I am exasperated with people who use their ideology, whether religious or secular or a combination thereof, to justify petty, bullying behaviour in the name of God, enlightenment, science or objectivity. I know some people are unabashed jerks. I’m not talking about them necessarily, since they’ll be rude and verbally hostile regardless of their beliefs. I know people who are entirely on my side ideologically but are still utterly vile people whom I’d avoid at all costs. I’m thinking more of people who cannot treat others with basic respect because their ideology supposedly disallows them to, regardless of what they themselves would think in the absence of ideological pressure. I’m going to use anti-LGBTQ behaviour as an example, but this doesn’t solely apply to attacks on people’s sexuality or gender.

Using homo- and transphobic slurs, pretending LGB relationships don’t exist, deliberate misgendering, and deadnaming are bog-standard, garden-variety meanness. Time and time again, I see people explaining their actions with statements like ‘It’s not God’s plan’ or ‘They’re crazy’ or ‘I won’t support their lifestyle’. Ultimately, though, this is less about belief than it is about behaviour. Like it or not, people will primarily judge you based on your behaviour. Misgendering, deadnaming, refusing to acknowledge queer relationships, and insisting on terms like ‘sodomites’ are examples of jerky behaviour, plain and simple. I agree with Greg Stevens: you can believe whatever you want about the ontological validity of transgender identity, but when it comes to personal interactions, call people what they want to be called1.

To people who aren’t already on board with your ideology, you just look like an asshole. I don’t think everyone who adopts these behaviour patterns is using ideology as a fig-leaf for petty cruelty, but the ringleaders probably are.

You don’t have to believe the same thing as others to treat them with basic decency. I’m not a Muslim, but I don’t use my disbelief in Islam to imply that Muslims don’t deserve to be recognised as Muslims, or that they can’t practise their religion. I am highly doubtful that intelligent, anthropomorphic supernatural beings exist outside human co-creative processes, but that does not preclude me from treating others with basic decency if they’re not using their beliefs as a cheap excuse to be nasty to me. Even if your belief system says that Janet Mock could never really be a woman, it does not mean that it is appropriate to call her ‘he’ or use the name she used before she transitioned. Even if you personally think that homosexuality is a sin, denying that a gay man has a boyfriend or insisting that his boyfriend is just his ‘friend’ is rude.

I know what it feels like to feel you have to be mean, or that you have to believe mean things. This may be especially true for abuse survivors and people who grew up in strict religious environments. I grew up with verbal abuse and religious indoctrination myself. Since I was convinced that my social skills were vastly worse than others’, I internalised the idea that to be socially acceptable, I had to adopt some of my bullies’ traits. I did things as a teenager that I now regret: using the Bible to justify homophobia, snubbing others for not being cool enough, going along with people who were obviously unkind, contorting myself to believe things I would otherwise shun. I felt awful when I was doing them, of course, but I think I felt I had to distrust my conscience and do those things to be ‘normal’. I now know that’s bullshit. Being mean for meanness’ sake is unhealthy. There are people I utterly despise. Not many – it’s very difficult for me to actively hate anyone – but there are some. Even when I’ve had to communicate with people I loathe, though, I haven’t gone out of my way to be petty.

If you legitimately want to express kindness and decency towards people with whom you disagree, then avoid this kind of cruelty. You’re not going to win souls if you sound as though you’re denying the existence of their soul in the first place.

  1. Note that I disagree that using simpler arguments is ‘dumbing down’. I do, though, agree that arguments about identity can be worded more simply. ↩