Modernists such as Woolf developed the position that T.S. Eliot calledimpersonality“, designed to free their mental lives from the habits they unconsciously followed. The philosopher Raymond Geuss has a story that perfectly captures this idea. Geuss remembers how a mentor – his school teacher – gave advice on how to become a visual artist. “Take half an hour or forty-five minutes a day,” the mentor said, and then draw, while ignoring “all the exercises, principles and things that could be learned.” After that, instead of evaluating your drawing, look at it and say to yourself: “So, this that’s what I do on a day like this.” “It’s not much different from seeing what a river looks like after a heavy rain,” Geuss explains. You might say: This what the Hudson looks like on a rainy day. And you may notice that this are the kind of drawings you draw when you're sad, or elated, or anxious, or when money is low, or when you've just played with your kids, called your mom, gone for a run, or watched “One battle after another“
Impersonality is one of those great ideas that scientists can explain forever. This sounds abstract, but on some level it has a simple meaning: see yourself less as a fixed point and more as a container. In his book “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed Worldwriter Anne-Laure Le Canf defines the “fallacy of self-consistency” as “the assumption that “I have always acted in a certain way; so I must continue to act this way.” “She suggests making adventurous 'pacts' with yourself and seeing where they lead. You're not a musician, but you can still decide to write a song every week for six weeks; you're not a poet, but you can still try writing a poem every day for ten days; you've never started a business, but you can still sell something on Etsy. You might find out that you actually 'are' a musician, a writer, or an entrepreneur. But why bother? focus on who you “are”? Perhaps this is enough to find that for a few minutes here and there, your mind can contain music, poetry and ambition. Something new can happen in that quiet room.
Truman Capote called his first novel “Other voices, other rooms” The book is about a teenage boy who, after a family tragedy, moves to live in a distant house with relatives he barely knows. The title recalls the discovery in adolescence that the world is full of strangers with their own worries; the knowledge that life is full of secret stories and languages; and the understanding that in society the voices we know would be silenced if we could hear those that remain unheard. It also reflects a sense of possible transformation. Of his protagonist, Capote writes: “A flower blossomed within him, and soon, when all the thick leaves had unfurled, when the afternoon of youth burned white, he turned and, like the others, sought the opening of another door.”
If, like me, you've gone through decades of adolescence, you may find it difficult to remember the frightening thrill of hearing other voices in other rooms. You may not want to hear them anymore: there's something to be said for laying down carpets, hanging curtains, and paying close attention to what's going on in the particular room you're living in. However, feeling too well isolated, I put my ear to the wall. I eavesdropped on my friend J., who had mastered a new art form, and W., a musician I know whose unconscious, intuitive creativity I have long admired, among others. Psychologists and counselors talk about role models, but that's not exactly what I need. In an essay entitled “The good of friendshipIn 2010, philosopher Alexander Nehamas notes that our friends do not necessarily act in ways that inspire us; in fact, interactions with them often involve activities that are “trivial, banal and boring.” However, our friendships offer us “opportunities to try different ways of being.” It's closer.
What does it really mean to be the master of your mind? In many aspects of life, it is easier to say what we don't want than to say what we do. We don't want to be drugged by screens, nervous apocalypses, unable to read for more than a quarter of an hour at a time – that's fair enough. But who do we want to be? Maybe we just want to be people for whom this is a living issue. Reclaiming your mind may come down to reaffirming your right to question what it's for. ♦
