March 25, 2022
There are points in our lives in which we have sudden, unavoidable realizations. Cognitive dissonance and false beliefs only go so far, and when they fail, we come down. The tower collapses. Can we rebuild?
An unnecessarily revered Nazi, Martin Heidegger, discusses the concept of “present-at-hand”, the quality of observing something (usually a tool) as itself, a collection of parts, rather than “equipment” or “das Zeug”, an object in relation to ourselves and other objects. When you are hammering a nail into wood, it is in the equipment-state; when the hammer breaks, the wood splintering in your hand, it is no longer equipment but rather “present-at-hand” - you are considering the tool in isolation; its shattered wood, the iron head of the hammer lying on the ground, the leather grip in your hand. It no longer has any association with what it once was, the nail, nor the wood it was hammering the nail into.
In the same way, there are moments where we find ourselves in the world, unrelated to the world around us. Our environment is alien to us as is our relationships, unmoored in the world; this stands - I believe - in opposition to panic attacks, in which the world and everything in it seems too strongly connected. The “present-at-hand” disconnect felt places one alone, and they are left to restring the cables and repair themselves to return to a state of connection. A reader more versed in psychology may call this disassociation; if this rings true with you, I won’t dispute it, but I have felt this quality to be different. This feeling is more akin to waking up and realizing that you’re unable to read. You recognize the letters, and gaps between groups of them, but the groupings are alien to you. They’re supposed to form words - you know they are - you’ve seen words before, but each letter stubbornly refuses to deal with the other. A “q” and a “u” share no more connection than a “j” following a “b”. And even if the letters were to form into words, these in turn don’t connect; upon reading “apple”, you can visualize it, but the proceeding “bite” holds no relation.
This deconstruction of the mental map is caused by various factors: two beliefs coming into conflict, an event, a belief coming to surface, etc., though the cause does not matter much once it has happened. You climb the tower, and as you reach the top, it is struck by lightning, and it comes falling down, taking you with it.
Upon waking in the ruins of the tower, you find that it was not built to spec. Some bricks were misshapen, surely making it more unstable; upon the roof of the tower, you could not see each brick. In this state, you can consider each brick as independent of the other. Was that rooftop beam, now scorched by lightning, always rotting? You couldn’t see it when it was tens of feet above your head. This time, you can build a better tower. After all, one can only gaze upon bricks for so long before realizing that they still need shelter.
On February 27, 2022, I thought it would be a great idea to create some sort of content - writing, art, coding, etc. - every day of the next month. Luckily, the alliteration worked out. This should be the twenty-fifth post in the series.