The social life I wanted when I moved to NYC is slowly forming. It’s full of people who are interested in literature, poetry, philosophy, and getting more out of life. They are kind and smart people who I am sometimes intimidated by due to their seriousness, or at least my perception of it. How little I know—about life and everything else—shows readily in their presence. Regardless I’m having a great time, even if I am forcing myself on the G or L to another event. We’re all playing catch up in some form. We’re all exploring something at our personal edge, together. I’m not quite close to anyone in particular yet, though I can feel the thread of certain friendships thickening through the Partiful invitations, texts to meet offline, and Turkish coffee.

Most of this has been mediated through The Strother School for Radical Attention (SoRA). They host “attention labs” and “sidewalk studies”, with the aim to explore collective attention and its discontents under the “attention economy.” I’m starting to develop my own critiques of how radical it all truly is as a form of activism (the question of what is worth paying attention to is more important than the observation that our attention is being fracked), but I’ll save that for another time. Overall I like what they are doing, and the people have been great. With the friends I’ve made I’m organizing a book club (starting with Kafka’s The Trial) and am attempting to run a joint sidewalk study soon.

I feel like a total imposter doing any of this (I know nothing about Kafka and have zero experience running a book club or facilitating group experiences), but that may also be my greatest strength, if I can lean into it. What I mean is: I’m not so afraid anymore to ask someone to clarify the most simple of things, to throw out my unintelligible utterances if they are inspired by intuitions that have yet to become comprehensible in language, and so on. As a result others are more free to do so too. The norm of not knowing (and consequently our unified attempt to understand) is thus a precedent that enables our learning. We will learn to love learning again in our joint (mis)handling of the absurd.

Being disagreeable still frightens me, but it’s coming more naturally. It’s a more authentic way of relating (it is authentically relating), and I have good examples. When someone disagrees with me I know that they are truly considering what I’m saying, even if I start to feel uncomfortable. This allows me to do so in return, which leads to better relationships and conversations. On the whole things are going well.

Once in awhile though I’ll still have conversations like this in my head:

Mr. Emptiness: Hey! Hey! Now that you’re making new friends you think you’re cool and all that, yeah? Well let me remind you that I am your dearest friend! I will fill you when you are tired, when you have been heady for too long, when you’ve forgotten to touch base with the personal and emotional, to the body and how you really feel. In the particular there is always something missing, and I will find it. That’s why you wandered this weekend, teary-eyed, to Poets House, alone, didn’t you? To where “the expanse of the water meets the vastness of the sky” you recently wrote, eh? How poetic.

P: Yeah, it’s my little refuge. What about it?

Mr. Emptiness: Sorry for the snark. You know how I am. Don’t forget me! (Not that you can!)

P: It’s hard not to. But yeah, I did feel pretty tired by the end of the week, even though things have been going well. I suppose this is when I tend to yearn for distance, for the expanse of water and sky, as you (I) say. Walking to Poets House I had the random thought that I might not want to raise my future kids in the city, partially because of its lack of primordial wildness. It feels inescapable at times. As my friend Aly once said: it’s all human-centric activity. Which, yeah—it’s a city! The wildness is in the people! But maybe I’m just feeling a need for re-wilding. For you, in some sense.

Mr. Emptiness: Aw, that’s sweet. I’m flattered.

P: Aly also once said that I have a wanderer ethos and perspective. I guess I’m still discovering what that means. And I’m still trying to figure out where my passions and interests intersect. What I do can feel disconnected from a sense of deeper motivation, even though some of the right pieces are there. Isn’t that why you brought me out to Poets House?

Mr. Emptiness: Hm, you really do know me better than before. Yeah, you were in the inner wilds for so long man, lost in worlds of your own making. Now you’re getting entangled in a particular set of weeds. Which is also to say that you’re growing inside a garden! I see that your social life is starting to bloom. You’re doing all the things you said you would do, which has been great for you. You look engaged and interested in what you’re doing. And I sense that a quiet longing continues to linger.

P: Maybe it’s all the Rilke I’m reading again. But yes, a sense of longing remains. Maybe it always will. It’s what drives me, to an extent. I don’t relate to it as a problem anymore, but it is interesting to me. I consistently have images of waking up in the morning somewhere quieter and more lush than the city some days. I imagine myself on a porch, sipping on coffee I just brewed, looking out onto a treeline. I picture something simple, more earthly, to contrast with what I’ve been doing recently.

What most of these people don’t know is that I’m sensitive to and moved by things like subtle shifts in the energy of a given environment, the sound of a person’s voice, the form of things like the shape of trees and buildings. I can be less thrilled by pure intellectual activity than I am by the pure smile on a child’s face. You’ve seen and felt it all, the strange connections our mind sometimes makes when walking, the pitfalls and moments of reverie, the contentment that washes over me when I’m truly relaxed.

Mr. Emptiness: Ofc. Tell your readers about sitting by the water.

P: Poets House wasn’t open yet. So I was sitting in a nearby cafe, waiting in a somewhat disoriented state, feeling tired and teary-eyed. This is usually a sign that I need to reconnect to myself (whatever that means to you), that some part of me had been operating in the red for too long. I stared out into the Hudson, whose waters were being carved out by strong winds. Runners were running by, determined only to do the thing they had set out to do. This was all a blur until certain emotions began to emerge, which was good: movement! Energy!

It then struck me that no one was looking at the water, and that this was the perfect metaphor for how I was relating to myself. In all the recent social and intellectual activity I was like the busy-bodied runners. I’d been fixated on connecting, analyzing, and discussing poems and ideas while the waters within went unnoticed. Slowly, as I gazed beyond the constant footfalls, the waves caught my attention and touched something deep. As the waves stirred and moved so did I. I began to come back to life in a kind of parallel dance of water. I understood why people from the dawn of civilization to now are drawn to vistas and horizons, to coastlines and mountain tops. There’s something in the expanse that helps us remember what we’ve forgotten. Literal perspective helps us feel alive, which is sometimes physically blocked by human design. Perhaps that’s why I was called to the edge of the city, to see beyond it, to go beyond myself in order to reconnect.

Mr. Emptiness: And all of this was a sort of pre-verbal, pre-cognitive knowing, right?

P: Yeah. It wasn’t long before words and images were formed. More emotions like anger and loneliness spilled out, as did a feeling of appreciation and light-heartedness. It felt like a visit from inspiration itself, like a kind of disorientation that reoriented me.

Mr. Emptiness: I saw that you scratched out some lines in your notebook for a poem afterwards?

P: Yeah but they aren’t good, ha. Also my attempt to poeticize everything sort of takes away from what I’m really trying to say. I’d rather just share the internal movements rather than a poem I’m not satisfied with. Hence, this blog post.

Emptiness: Fine. Have it your way.

P: Oh c’mon. Stop pouting. <3