Posted on Thursday, 11/28/24.

On being touch-starved

Last week I scheduled a haircut with a man I’d been introduced to by a stranger at a small funk-focused club (Drink and Mood mou in 下北) that also served natural wine. The stranger had sort of a densely curled longer late-seventies shaggy cut and appeared to know many of the people at the club including the DJ, the haircutter, and many of the huddles of people dancing to the funk. She sort of made rounds most of the night, and leaned in to speak conspiratorially with the DJs as they changed in and out with the audience. The bar-cum-club must not have been more than fifteen square meters—was decorated with a smattering of funk-records, dried flowers and colored glass, shelves and tables of raw-plywood against raw concrete. It was comparatively well-lit with warm oblique lamps here and there, and gave out onto a small balcony to which people could steal and smoke while looking down to the street three floors below. I in turn had led two other strangers to the club from a local bar I more often go to, knowing nothing about the funk bar until we arrived, as it was across from another spot whose windows I’d seen from far away often during night-walks, and so had developed some curiosity for (though on inspection the originally intended place had been too quiet and patchouli-scented to entice us).

The crowd in mou had looked cool enough and skewed old enough that we worried it might have been a private gathering, and so ascended and descended the three flights to its door twice, one of the strangers I was leading (a black American in a bucket hat) adding after the second ascent that he had spied the stranger and that this alone convinced him to attend. The other stranger, a Dutch software engineer for gambling machines and online poker, spoke neither one way or the other. In the middle of this we ran across a group of Japanese people on the ground floor and I’d asked about the place, which they’d said was high-quality enough to justify its ￥1000 cover charge, further pushing us toward consensus. I’ll add here that the stranger was indeed basically preternaturally beautiful and French and wearing a sort of under-stated dress with small flowers, which in the context of standard Japanese going-out attire comes across as sort of charmingly continental and paradoxically edgy in its conservatism (this further bolstered by the stranger’s familiarity with most members of the club, high language ability, choice of anachronistic haircut, and general demeanor of mild subversion and social ease).

The night ended up being pleasant, though I left before the two strangers I had brought there, both of whom desired to get far more intoxicated than I, and who were very actively trying to hit on most women there. I guess I found this amusing, if only because I am so rarely close to the process. Despite certain morbid undertones, I am impressed by the sort of quiet nakedness of desirous men. In such circumstances attempt at tryst merely slide off each-other if unsuccessful. I translated for the bucket-hat man (an English teacher, maybe a little younger than me) when a women asked if it would be alright to touch his hair, which immediately took the light out of his eyes, and made me sad for the relatively undeveloped race-relations here, his explaining to me a little later how often such requests were the extent of his interactions with women (his way in the moment of trying to get this across being to ask me to ask her if, in exchange for her touching his hair, he could touch her chest, which I did not do, and for which he eventually found the words in his limited Japanese, getting the message across).

The gambling software engineer, the French woman, and I found ourselves on the balcony for a while and shared our respective raisons d’être w.r.t Japon, etc., which was comparatively calm and pleasant if distant-feeling, this being toward the end of summer when the air was merciful after dark. This cycle of outside and inside continued for a couple hours, and I was made to do a shot of tequila by both bucket-hat and gambling-software, though on top of this I had only had a glass of strange orange wine and so was comparatively sober. The music was never overpowering, and the club managed to avoid the dark cloisterous aspects of the worst of its species, coming across more as a lively standing bar sometimes. The haircutter friend of the French woman had at some point been introduced to me as such—he had quite tightly kinked (though apparently un-permed) hair and a wispy mustache that spoke to some sort of light counterculturalism. He seemed quite proud when the woman tossed her hair around and said it was his work, and I mentioned I had been looking for a place to get mine done, at which we exchanged Instagrams. Before leaving (paying my part of the bill, including for the shot, as by this point the strangers I had brought had probably racked up four or five times my total and I wished to avoid splitting evenly), I tapped the woman on the shoulder and asked for further local recommendations, as she lived in the neighborhood, and we exchanged Line contacts, which made me feel very adult and of course distantly sad because so much money and time had been spent towards the still basically inconceivably distant goal of knowing anybody here beyond drunk adjacency.

This section is about being touch-starved because the term is funny, and because when I eventually did schedule the haircut, almost two months later, I was reminded that I have not had a professional haircut in perhaps five years or more, as either I or my brother had unpracticedly chopped off my ponytail every couple years or so since early grad-school, and a haircut is disproportionately sensual. The man was excited when I finally reached out to schedule, and the other employees when I arrived said various things in the corners of the room, either about me, or the haircutter himself, who I gauged as the comparatively free-living one among them. The haircutting place offered wine and coffee depending on the time of day, and was built into an older, wood-beamed house, though done fresh with white walls and the sort of US-millenial fern-and-blond-wood theming of a converted loft. Ultimately he was very professional and conversational, and massaged my scalp to within an inch of its life after shampooing and conditioning the living bejeezus out of my hair (probably overcoated in oil from mild neglect). He was surprised at its length when I let it out at the beginning, remarking that it was all almost exactly the same length (as opposed to most hair which has been recently cut and variegated in length to reduce bulk and encourage shape). The cut included a face and shoulder massage, and various warm towels like poultices draped here and there. I am usually embarrassed when my back is massaged as its stress-induced knottiness is obvious, and this time wasn’t different. Explaining my job is basically an exercise in mystery here, though its anomalous stress is understood.

This is all to say that the haircutter now stands as the person to most thoroughly touch me in the last four months; I don’t know that this is sad per se, as I have not seriously tried to have it be otherwise—I guess I am just surprised that I forget certain pliable aspects of the body seem to need to be beaten in by other people. That there must be something nutritive in the oppositional, symmetric process of pressing on and being pressed on by someone. Unlike hugging a plush, or doing push-ups against the floor, there is no sense in which either one of the two parties in question is fundamentally more impervious than the other. I should find more ways to be reminded of my weaknesses and strengths.

On some basic suspicion about psychoanalysis

My guess is that anyone actually involved in the subject would, on learning the slim, popular sources I’ve read on psychoanalysis, basically judge that I’ve not understood anything essential or meaningful, and so have little standing to pass judgement. And I think this is probably true—I’ve certainly never taken a course, or read any more than the barest of primary sources on certain late-night whims, but part of my discomfort about this hypothetical response seems to be tied more to the field’s apparent or even willing esotericism, and the easy allowances this makes for people to generally be haughty or weird about it.

Rather than explain this outright I guess I’ll give some examples from the time when I was living with a group of more-or-less five former MIT frat members, the older subset of which spent a good deal of their time discussing a mix of psychoanalytic, meditative, and Talmudic topics. They did this in part against the various emotional and career-related crises each were going through, and beyond more focused discussion folded various shibboleths regularly into daily conversation. One of them, a friend of the longest-residing member (a sixth or seventh-year graduate student in the study of complex systems A sub-field of physics, at least as classically considered, but about as broad as it sounds. Think of the friends of Cormac McCarthy and the Santa Fe Institute, which has been its de-facto hub.) had moved back from the Bay Area to live more simply, and was a recovering Princeton mathematics graduate student and Google Brain employee who had decided to devote himself to the pursuit of mastery of various childhood interests (mainly guitar playing) he felt he had been basically robbed of when growing up relatively impoverished with distant parents who took him to the US from the former Soviet Union during the years of its collapse. This roommate started off with a sour view of me because I had sent a strong message to the group-chat that we should keep the sink clear of dishes, as the five of us would rapidly fill it and things would quickly fester otherwise. In hindsight I was not always punctual in this task easier, but as I sent it so strongly and directly so soon after the new roommate arrived, it was interpreted in its indirectness as a sort of cowardly move by him, I think (despite the relatively fraternally disparaging tone of the group-chat usually), and I heard the new roommate and the longest-residing one discuss confronting me about it outside my door, though they never did. And while questions of tone are important in any communal living situation, and I am supportive of apologies and a more meek living style, it felt as if the two people discussing confronting me had missed an essential truth also present in the situation—namely that the presence of the dirty dishes in the sink was a real, earthly, and ultimately soluble problem which constituted in fact a large corporeal part, and not merely some metonym, of the problem at hand. The problem being actually in this case the dish, and not some strange futile desire for dominion over the home.

The new roommate and the long-residing one (who was at this time facing down the increasing necessity of his graduation and the sort of staggering length of his residence in Cambridge, having gone to undergrad at MIT as well and thus hitting a decade in the same neighborhood) more specifically devoted themselves to the meditative practices espoused by some sort of Bay Area tech-adjacent guru named Mark who had a discord and a dizzyingly long website with numerous warnings and meta-warnings in its preamble that meditation could basically ruin your life, and that people not ready for it could psychically one-shot themselves and make it impossible for anyone to live with them, etc. And while these warnings and the sort of prolix, gwern-esque website which preëmptively answered all sorts of tech-bro-skeptic questions aligned with what felt like the definition-lemma-theorem structure mathematical monographs which were certainly only and exactly what certain over-educated under-confident men in tech could allow themselves to submit to and discuss fervently, I had trouble (and continue to have trouble) disambiguating whatever sort of misanthropy arises from trying to drastically change one’s life with meditation, and the sort of more garden-variety of assholery that adheres to rhetorically-strong people who believe they’re doing something immaculate, and are surrounded by people with basically the same background and mental reflexes. People who use the terms steel- and straw-man regularly, and motte-and-bailey, and ‘frame’, and all sorts of generally Bayesian-adjacent statistical terms while also not really recognizing the shape of their own rhetoric, etc.

I don’t even think that the basic truth of the meditation site’s warnings are in question—of course deep self-focus could lead to instabilities and knee-weakening shatterings of illusions etc. People quit their email jobs and break up with their spouses. It’s just that I never really felt compassion and persistent empathy from these roommates, despite their literally spending hours a day as basic Luddites devoted only to texts, religious discourse, and the attendance of expensive workshops and retreats literally devoted to making friends and reducing recidivism among former pickup-artists, etc. Maybe I am ungenerous as one of the roommates was clinically autistic, and the other had indeed suffered real hardship and basically tough environments for anyone not literally groomed to float among the most abstract and inhospitable of academic circles. It just felt, consistently, as if their community and its sub-field were used primarily for their proposed end-goal in a sort of perverse way. That the Discord and their long conversations were the friendship and the ‘play’ they so often bemoaned never experiencing any-more, and the actual dense, considered, and/or historical texts in all of this were only accessory and were being selectively disrespected or ignored when it suited the otherwise modern and consumption-driven lives of the people involved. Like that they spent all of their time looking for girlfriends with dates of the precise same structure, and then once they had girlfriends they spent all their time shit-talking their girlfriends, and the whole thing was just sort of nauseating to be around given the apparent adherence to self-reflection and ‘texts’. This is of course the oft-levied and unhelpful criticism that the ‘movement’, whatever it is, is ‘fake,’ which I can’t fully make in good faith, save that it felt at the end of the three years living with these people that they were not especially happier or in a different place than when I met them. The one still refused to break up with his long distance partner despite shit-talking her constantly. The other, upon his partner finally revealing that she, too, had some rich internal thoughts on religion etc., actually went so far as to break up with her for a few months just because she had not told him about this sooner and so on. And what worries me is that if I squint, I sort of got it. I too was frustrated that for all my focus and ‘achievement’ nothing was simple or inherently good for it. I also was alone sometimes and felt I was smarter than I came across as, despite there being no reason to believe that. There are basic instincts and moods they held which felt comparatively simple and pleasant and arguable, and I wondered if when I was thirty I would be exactly where they were, proverbially banging my head against a wall with how obvious it could have been if I’d only truly empathized with them, and how then I could have seen, under the false sincerity, and under that latent apparently real insincerity, some further even more latent and fragily beautiful true, nuclear sincerity that’d have made me feel better about it all. I guess there’s still time.

I guess this section is not really about psychoanalysis, as Jung and Freud and so on only entered into the conversations I heard infrequently, and because the people I’ve known close to these fields, like R or D, perhaps find no pleasure in discussing these things with me, as I’ve not got the basic vocabulary that’d make it feel nice for them. Or else I am some clean specimen who, unlike who they know, does not do everything in knowledge of such texts and thus constitutes some purer, and thus more interesting preserve of what they’re really describing. I just have some persistent feeling that, just as that cliché about war spoken by returned soldiers that ‘all of the real heroes are dead,’ it can seem as though all of the actively social psychoanalysts or meditators or mathematicians are not living their lives or happy, and instead showing just how well they’re able to basically live-commentate their relations to others and espouse just how horrible and prolix life could be. This is a sin I am pretty much also currently committing, though here if nowhere else my amateurishness sort of bolsters my point. In less charitable ways it’s that it feels like people are selecting whom they’re going to sleep with based on whether or not they’ve read Lacan—and not even that it’s important for them to have read Lacan, just that the truth, one way or the other, needs to be known, as it suddenly collapses their apparent knowledge of that person into one among many definite forms, against which action becomes possible. The same with meditations, or the Talmud, or Mishima, or McCarthy, etc. This raises the question of why we are all so rushed. It’s not as if I don’t feel it, too. That I am up against some milestone after which relationships become even more sad, distended, protracted, and basically abortive. That I’ve need for these signs of trust and submission to screen those I meet. I could tell with my roommates that they also held this fear, and I could see how much worse it made the fear (fear being something that ought to be temporary and reflexive, but which we’ve somehow learned to make enduring and front-brained) to have devoted oneself to detailed study of some ideology, which then to give up after so much study (and thus maybe be able to accept a different, more psychically beautiful person into your life) would essentially amount to admitting you had been incredibly wrong and narrow-minded in the past, which left the possibility of the same in the future wide open, and thus was untenable, etc. And I get this, I do. I hugely fear being seen as an idiot. Many things, it feels, like love, or a balanced diet, or pop music, must be for idiots because, if not, then what do we do?

This means that this section is pretty much about that same, DFW-coded and tired double-bind that understanding one’s problems basically requires hard thinking, and that hard thinking is basically the fertilest loam from which legitimately hard problems manifest. One answer is that I just begin to study the special interests of anyone who’s ever been close to me, if not to ‘understand them’ then at least to commune with those past versions of those people again, as is comfortable and constitutes a large part of our interactions with people anyway I.e., when we think of them, or write messages to them, or buy things for them, etc. This sort of displaced attention underlying what I have to think love is about, as else I’ve been doing it so wrong, etc.. Another answer is that I try to convince these people, or new people, to frankly discuss with me most of what they think about and are obsessed by, beyond the sort of basic openness I’ve held before, such that I can constitute more of the essential joy and motivation of such people to continue their search and study. A third, more doomed-feeling effort, though not exclusive of the others, is that I more closely examine just past interactions and memories themselves, and so outline and raise those areas where my wrongness or imperfect conclusions are most obvious, and thus gain a little more of a toolkit to prevent these things going forward. And the problem is that a whole lot of this has the shape of what things like meditation or psychoanalysis or ‘circling’ meet-ups profess to have been built for, and so the kool-aid has been poured into the cup, and I’ve got comparatively easier, if imperfect options to choose from if I were really serious about fixing this whole ‘me’ thing, though in view of my own memories of those people for whom such things seemed to simply make everything worse. This raises other thoughts, like that the problem is essentially having money to be idle, or youth-derived health in which to abstractly waffle, and that the comfort some people derive in their forties is basically a forgone conclusion and not because of great effort on our part, but instead some hormonal process, or simple neural atrophy. In the meantime I guess I just attempt focus—there are so many obvious wrong ideas to excise first.

On caffeine’s essential relation to anorgasmia

TBD

On literary aspirations and the Santa Fe Institute

TBD

On supporting ingénues in one’s thirties

TBD