Member-only story
I can’t really write in the mornings anymore; I can only check emails — it’s not until later in the right, really, later in the night, that I can really engage in deep, sustained, prose composition. This is not an accident or a coincidence: my brain is compensating for the sense of incoming digital chatter early in the day, when it is most active; only at night, when digital business slows down, does my cognitive apparatus leave room for less definitive, more creative, activities. This self-analysis is self-shocking: I realize, that in many, morally troubling, existentially dissatisfying ways, I am a prisoner to my own brain — and by extension, the environments my brain moves through. As a writer — if that’s what I am — I feel a bit like an athlete who’s monitoring the soreness or explosiveness of his muscles; I’m obsessed by the thought that what is best about me, and my capacity to observe, analyze, re-create, is perturbed by environmental factors. Looking at all the advertisements — so lovely and appealing — gracing the upper walls of the subway car, now, I can’t help but think that language is a tool that, if we forget how to use it, will inevitably begin to use us.
