Is this the fiftieth post I've written about ~discovering myself~? WHO CARES!

Hmmm. My writing hobby has turned into a weird thing where I close my eyes and work on language until it sits right, fits right - but I don’t write. These little objects in my mind feel like good secrets. Lately (newly, oldly? Oldly isn’t a word but newly is, what GIVES? Sometimes I think I am thinking about something for the first time but it’s just I haven’t been in this part of the thinking cycle long enough that I forgot), I have started to see that I am the most productive (productive, what a terrible word) in the tension between wanting to be known but not wanting to be seen. But here by productive, I may also mean the happiest or at least, the most engaged, or at the very least, not dead to rights. Dead to rights - we loves that phrase. Not irrefutably guilty of being in a too-much-cotton-candy state. The cotton candy is not literal.

On Saturday, I was subbing at a different branch, the central branch, of the library. There my friend who I have worked somewhat closely with this year on an adult reading challenge was also working. It is a fact that I had until the end of this very Saturday presumed the man was gay, because — here we see my bigotry laid bare — he is an active and beloved member of the queer advocacy team at work and also, had recently been on an international trip with another man. All well and good to know one’s parameters - and don’t pretend like you don’t know what I mean. I relayed to him over the course of many slow desk shifts together many things as you might tell a getting-closer friend who was incapable of desiring to fuck you. Not to say a thing about what was actually happening except that it certainly wasn’t what was in my head.

However, I will now relay to you two of these same stories as I unravel why they are not stories I would tell someone who I might know biblically, this pertains to the very tension which I am now concerned with, that between wanting to be known (biblically? TBD) and not wanting to be seen.

Are you following? If you’ve made it this far on the loose tendrils of narrative, then here is the first story - to do with picking coffee mugs in the morning. It began like this, a patron was mad at me for laying out the facts: he did not “pay” $1.50 for 8 color copies two weeks ago (and I say “pay” because the first $5 are free anyway), because color copies are .50 each, and have been for some time, and so if he paid for 8 color copies, he paid $4. I also pointed out to him that there was only color on the first page, so he could have paid less if he only printed the first page in color. But reality is as reality does among the masses and I remarked later to my friend who is not in fact gay that this entire event was probably related to me having picked the bad luck mug that morning for coffee. To which he responded, “why do you keep a bad luck mug?”

The answer is obvious: you can’t simply discard a bad luck object, it must be ritually handled. Furthermore there are mornings which call for the bad luck mug, or rather, mornings in which the bad luck mug calls to me. It goes like this, I examine the mugs as a whole - they hang from hooks above my sink, and I take them all in at once. Slowly using the irrational measurements that emanate from the back of one’s stomach (now you feel them, don’t you), I find the mug that calls to me and I pulled it from its hook. The choice is final; there’s no going back! There is a mug for tedious processes, a good-luck-at-work mug, The Sunday Mug, the bravery mug, the Nothing Substantial Happens Today mug, the pretense of chill mug, the earnest enthusiasm mug, and so on. I pick it and the top tablespoon - the tablespoons are sorted specifically as well but this is done in one go, right out of the dishwasher - and we’re off! Later I texted him a picture of the bad luck mug, because doubling down is my forte. Fantastic, he said.

The second story is much shorter. Central is said to have a staff lounge downstairs, but due to headquarters (the Upstairs, not to be confused with the upstairs, cataloging, HR, and all that) having also been down there once, it’s a haunted place. Empty cubicles and piled up furniture in the dark. It looks like something out of STRANGER THINGS, and for the life of me, I could find no staff lounge. So I sat with whatever spirits of administration past haunt the basement at central for the half hour that I had and then I came upstairs and did what I do quite frequently: a glance around me to ascertain exactly where I am. Witnessing me, he asked me if I was okay and I said, “yes, just catching up on texts and confirming I know where I am, in that order.” To which he jokingly replied, “is that something you do often?” I said quite seriously, “yes, yes it is.” For I, dear reader, am quite capable of getting entirely lost while standing still.

What both of these stories have in common — among the many things we talked about that day, which include the thinkers that we both read, why it is bad form to lead someone around the library to look for books on the shelf instead of just checking the catalog first (I believe in a good walkabout), but weirdly not at all about the project we are working on together for work — is that they became the sort of go-to jokes of the day. We know this form, yes? It is called “flirting.” Yet simultaneously, they are stories that I would not tell a straight man at our first in-person meeting, and only tell at all out of necessity down the line. In fact, I believe it was the first time I have ever told the mug story to anyone at all, such is the security of a gay man.

But it would be wrong to suggest I am ashamed of these stories, not least because I feel no compunction about writing them up here, rather I was mortified to discover how badly I had misread the situation, and not because of the bigotry (set the virtue signals aside, dear reader), but because I had inadvertently entered into an entirely new space, and I was unknowingly witnessed in that space. The new space was created by misunderstanding the parameters and presenting myself according to parameters that were not there. And yes - all things I do are representations of me - but whenever you have a juxtaposition like this, you are privy to new information about yourself and this is far more uncomfortable in the presence of someone else, especially (as Harry argued to Sally) between an Adam and an Eve.

So we can see (or at least by this point I hope you have joined me in seeing) why being seen is mortifying, and here’s the thing. We have assumed until now that this was an extreme case because my gaydar is haywire as fuck, but perhaps every time someone else sees you, there is new information that arises from that interaction, because they are not you, and their perspective illuminates different angles. Yet being conscious, they not only see you, they witness you. Only because I had given some attention to parameters and later found out they were not what I had assumed them to be, did I accidentally uncover this possible truism for myself: it is always a case of two different sets of parameters meeting each other producing a new space, and new information, under conscious observation.

II.

But then to encounter the next thing, this is a very commonplace experience - two people bringing their individual perspectives to bear on each other occurs in literally every interaction between two people. Does everyone find it massively uncomfortable? Does everyone find it at least a little uncomfortable and it’s a spectrum? Is all humiliation at root caused by revelation? Do people find it more uncomfortable as they become more self aware (get older)?

Or is it just me?

III.

To be known is something else, because it is not precisely to be seen as you see yourself, but it is certainly not to be revealed (knowingly or otherwise), it is to return to a known space; it is to go home. By what path does a person become known? Do they have to see and be seen? I think that is what we are given to believe. It feels like a burning away to me, and the sensation of being seen is far less appealing than its sold as, whereas the feeling of being known may be diminishing entirely, among all of us, where “us” is the social technological class. Therefore, unless there is some kind of intentional pause or interruption, to see and be seen is not enough, as these encounters happen millions if not billions of times a day. What is the property that you add to seeing to get knowing?

More importantly, where is the threshold?

Some things I know - a knowing is a like a system, not like a series of facts, not even like a series of connected facts, i.e. a narrative. Like systems, a knowing has rules, but those rules exist regardless of rationale or desire, they are not chosen even when they are created by the people in the knowing, as they most often are. Since they are not chosen, they must be discovered, and in most cases, intuited through information gained unconsciously, the opposite of “witnessing.”

Does a seeing turn into a knowing or does a seeing simply cease when a knowing emerges? How is that line discerned?

It is my belief that a seeing does not turn into a knowing, in fact a seeing is an experience that many people engage in precisely because of the way it avoids a knowing so entirely. How does a knowing emerge? Is a knowing always desirable?

Counterintuitively, I think the answer is yes, because (the biggest claim of all) it is the only justice that exists, has ever existed, or will ever exist, in this universe and any other. It is a multiuniversal truth. I could, and possibly should, depart from personal conjecture to discuss the ways that intentionally walking away from knowing is evil.
But - I got better things to do than lecture other people driving the wrong way down a two way street (BOOM).

But the thing is, it isn’t merely justice, it’s I think as big and as small as everything. knowing is the opposite of suffering. people who turn to rationality to solve the problem of suffering are wrong, because it is alleviated not with reason but by being known.

And that is why despite the fact that there is something very sexy about being SEEN, when the world ends, I want to be surrounded by people who KNOW me. (The world is ending, we all see this, but few of us know it).

Therefore from a deeply personal place, I ask and ask how does knowing come to be?

IV.

I want to go home.