Prosopopoeia |prəˌsōpəˈpēə; ˌpräsə-|
noun
1 a figure of speech in which an abstract thing is personified.
2 a figure of speech in which an imagined or absent person or thing is represented as speaking.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: via Latin from Greek prosōpopoiia, from prosōpon ‘person’ + poiein ‘to make.’
I wrote something about this the other night and then deleted it. I do that a lot. Anyway, I’ll just leave the description of the event as it stands: a couple of days ago, in a place I didn’t expect, I found a look, a look in the eye in fact, that was once secretly left for me, and it made me happy. In the spirit of that, consider what was left not in reciprocation (because I hadn’t yet found the look when I left it), a retroactive form of reciprocation, a “back at ya,” if you will.
Once, on a night a long time ago, maybe like two years now and some change, somebody said something to me, something which for various reasons I deflected, despite deep down not wanting to. I did it out of a kind of over-inflated sense of duty, of loyalty, of such things that my anachronistic self tends to value, much to the confusion of others, and to the chagrin, often enough, of my own better judgment. Since that night a long time ago and since that moment, I have regretted the choice I made not to respond to the statement that was made to me in a different way; I’ve born the sucker’s torch, I’ve replayed the tape how many times. Look, despite what’s good for me or you or anyone we know, I have complicated relationships to both regret and guilt, and have often known that those relationships should and maybe even could be minimized. Well, whatever, so it goes. Sometimes, you hold em too long, and sometimes you just make a bad call. I made a bad call, and I’ve “felt it” in the form of a dull and nagging sensation somewhere in the back of my something ever since. Tonight, however, along with a whole flood of other things, that regret, the singular awareness of simply having made the wrong choice strikes me like a dart, a stake in the gullet, a precise point which parallels the acute awareness, the precision of the knowledge of the wrongness, the cowardice, the mis-placed-ness of the choice that was made. It is an uncanny thing to be able to zero in with such visceral clarity to a moment like that. A moment where you can see the probability matrices present themselves, the alternating paths that life could have taken lay themselves out clearly, like two green lines departing from either side of your face (perhaps one comes from one eye and the other from the other) and to know that you picked wrong. It’s like those dominos they toppled the other night in Berlin: the events at the end of the line are connected with those at the beginning.
I wonder if it’s ever a good idea to talk about shit like this on the internet. Who knows. Just do yourself a favor and think about the long term, think about the teleological suspension of the ethical, think about Abraham. Now there was a guy who knew what he had to do.
This question is directed at a single and specific individual that I do not currently have the guts to ask it to directly, and as such and because it’s a kind of good general question anyway, I’m putting it here: Do you think that there are such things in our lives and levers or keys that if, once discovered or completely unknown, when pulled or turned will unlock either one or an entire series of problems, effectively allowing various things to “fall into place.” Now, first of all, this doesn’t mean that I’m talking about any kind of “quick fix at all;” hell, doing all the necessary work in order to be able to identify such a key is not exactly easy, let alone actually turning it. Secondly, it’s not like such a turning would simply erase all problems, it may even generate new ones or allow you to notice some that had been hidden; but what it would do would allow certain extant issues to fall away, these specific ones to be no more.
Who knows if such things exist anyway. They’d obviously be different in different cases, lives, places, days, nights, weeks, years, cars, jobs, buildings, cities, countries, travels, studies, books, loves, and so on. I think they might, but that might also be wishful thinking.
Foucault a dit:
“S’il y en a parmi vous qui s’intéressent à ce problème [de la vrai vie], eh bien qu’ils l’étudient de plus près. -La Courage de la Vérité, 151 (29 Février 1984)
I can’t help but wonder who in the audience, hearing this, knowing that Foucault was sick (and only a few months later learning of his death), knew then or resolved themselves to take up just this question. Who, hearing this, decided to, and truly did, devote their lives, academic or otherwise, to understanding, knowing, perhaps even enacting la vrai vie. To do it in the academic context alone, the personal one aside, is an enormous challenge (Hadot–and James for that matter–said don’t even bother), and I hope those of us who care enough about it to make that attempt, even if that attempt is buried beneath layers and layers of academic cover-stories and game-playing, can succeed even in the smallest measure.