Beliefs

Jacques Derrida believed in ghosts. He believed in conceptual excesses that haunt us when we speak. Some might say this is just an ideological ghost, not a real one, but to him, ideas are real, and reality is just an idea. The kind of ghost he hears in his basement late at night is the kind that emerges from the supplementary structure of language.

Halfway through my college career, I reached a threshold where I believed so strongly in nothing, I believed everything. I had to go through a lot to get there, including an existential crisis of the “If everything is relative, why believe anything?” variation. I put this problem to rest after learning the difference between ontology and epistemology. I gave up on searching for ontological truth because I decided it was more productive to think about what is known than to think about what is.

My therapist told me I was intellectualizing. I told her that the conceptual and the concrete are not as dichotomous as they might appear. She told me this was all very heady. I told her that she shouldn’t buy into the opposition of head and heart and proceeded to give her a lesson in mind-body metaphysics. She told me this was all a waste of time.

I left and started seeing a satanist (romantically, not therapeutically). I sort of believed him. But at this juncture, I treated beliefs as thought experiments, not convictions. I tried them on like clothes; a new outfit each day, and when I got undressed for bed, I’d assess how being a nihilist for a day worked out, or which social situations may warrant my poststructuralist hat.

And as for this guy, I entertained his claim that the cat behind my dorm was an intelligence agent sent by God to spy on His adversaries, but after we broke up, it was all quite ridiculous. Not because I doubt the supernatural, but because I dislike the racially coded, anthropocentric symbolism of black cats. Even experimental beliefs have their limits. For some, belief stops at the supernatural. For me, belief ceases when it holds the potential for violence.

Sentences like seeds

I am ten, away at sleep away camp, my cabin-mates staging a late-night pow wow. My bunkmate complains there’s nobody for her to talk to. Someone points out my presence; she says I don’t speak so it makes no difference.

I am thirteen on my porch, listening to my dad lecture me about loneliness. He tells me when a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, it still falls. I say sound requires matter to travel through. He says that’s irrelevant. Air is everywhere, even places without ears.

I am twenty-one in my dorm room, crying over a breakup. The affection that begs to be expressed runs up against the inside of my skin. I contemplate writing love notes with no expectation for a response, just to get it out of me. The fruit ripens and rots.

I am twenty-three in a cosmetics store, wasting time trying on samples. When I arrive home with no evening plans, I panic and take pictures so my face doesn’t go to waste.

I am twenty-four in a meeting, trying to focus on next year’s marketing plan as a perfect sentence slips through the cracks of my brain. I jot it down when I get back to my desk, but the sequence and lexicon are lost.

The mind of a writer is a forest full of trees. They often fall in front of deaf ears, or toward readers turning blind eyes. Their fruits ripen and rot.

A forest is a self-contained ecosystem. Trees fell before they fell before people. They made sound waves before ears. They had chlorophyll before green.

But changes in air pressure are not sound, and meanings are in the mind of the beholder. Reading creates meanings. Writing creates words. Speaking creates sounds.

I am twenty-four and keep diaries from since I was nine. I don’t read them – I’d be too embarrassed – but it helps to know they’re there. It helps to hoard ideas. But my breath catches when I think of them locked in a desk drawer, a diary coffin.

Writing reminds me of death. An idea stops being dynamic once it’s put to rest on paper, resolved, no longer in flux.

But not writing reminds me of death, or of never being born. Sentences either fester in my brain like seeds underground or rot like fruits that fall and also end up underground. Underground, they birth more plants, which end up underground themselves.

Asking why I write is asking why roots grow branches. Trees fall and make sounds whether I hear them or not. The sounds propagate between me and the trees; the trees and I simply scatter the seeds that don’t wonder why they grow and the sounds that never wonder if anyone hears.