Feedback Loop

I'm surprised and excited by how many links Another has racked up since its official launch two days ago. But I'm also worried that my entries from here on out will suffer from performance anxiety and aim for an "authoratative" voice that, if relied on to express honesty, might fall as flat as an EZ-baked souflée.

Either way, I thought I'd take this opportunity to respond to some comments that I've read about Another on other people's blogs. This is my way of saying yay! thank you for noticing and, also, clarifying what this blog's all about.

• Largehearted boy writes, Nathalie at Cup of Chicha has started a literary mental health blog, Another. The project is filled with insight into the connection between literature and depression, and is one of the brightest stars I've found online in a very long time. Like many others, I have friends and family who deal with mental illness on a daily basis, and I'll be sure to make them aware of this valuable resource.
  That's an amazing compliment. (And, for those of you who read Cup of Chicha: I'm doing my patented karate ninja victory dance right now.) But, I don't want to lead poor depressive souls astray, so I feel obliged to say, I'm not yet sure my blog will be helpful. I want it to be, but my more immediate desire is this: to create a forum for critical thinking about mental health issues that doesn't require either an academic background or a passive acceptance of psychological tenets and practices. For some people, that kind of forum might feel unproductive or useless, either because it's an amateur effort or it encourages what seems like too much over-thinking. But, I do think my sideblog links to enough good sites that, at the very least, Another can act as a portal to more helpful information.
  
• Old Hag, one of my favorite lit & culture blogs, quotes from my post "I Married Language (And Now She Doesn't Want to Fuck Me)," and writes, Nathalie has started another blog, Another, to discuss depression and language … We think that's very brave -- our discussions of same get no more profound than the observation that, since we've gone off our meds, our brain feels like the electrified loading dock of the space station in Alien . Frankly, absorbing that kind of crap is what the BOOG and assorted other FOOG's are for. (Though we do want to submit that if a boyfie ever accuses you of "idealizing and distorting a past self and its abilities," you can totally smack him.)
  Good to know. Sam, are you reading this?
  
• Cheek (aka, Mark Desrosiers) writes, Another is a new blog about depression and literature. The author so far seems to be accepting depression as a mental illness or "disease" (rather than a fundamental human trait) so it should be interesting to see how this position evolves with daily blogging about it.
  To knit-pick for a moment: I'm pretty uncomfortable with the recent, inflated, definition of "disease," so that's not a word I ever use. I do, though, use the word "illness" when I want to specify a range of conditions or experiences that includes more than "depression." Whether or not most of the conditions listed in the DSM-IV should be called "illnesses," I don't know. That's a big question, and if I tried to ask every big question at once, I'd have to either limit my vocabulary so severely that it would take days to write a paragraph, or "I"'d "be" "forced" to use an "unbearable" amount of "quotation marks." But, yes, I'd like to eventually tackle that question. In the meantime, why wouldn't "illness" count as a "fundamental human trait"? Is "fundamental" a way of saying that we all experience depression, just to varying degrees (and so, depression shouldn't be categorized as deviant or abnormal)? If so, my use of "illness" refers to a degree of depression (and of other DSM-IV conditions) that either 1) interferes, for months or years or decades, with the kind of functionality we, individually or culturally, think our lives recquire, or 2) provokes continual anguish, anhedonia, or suicidal ideation.

On another note, a friend just emailed me this question about Another's banner:

I saw your "extension" blog today.  Interesting.  One question/criticism.  The french-"Je est un autre"-- is that a reference with which I'm unfamiliar?  Because grammatically, it doesn't make sense.  It translates to "I is an other."  So shouldn't it be "Je suis un autre"?  And if not, shouldn't it be "J'est un autre", if you wanted to use the improper conjugation?
Just me being nit-picky, I guess.  But it struck me as incorrect.

I should probably put up a sidebar link to a FAQ about my blog's title and the strange French embedded in the index page's banner. "Je est un autre" comes from one of Rimbaud's “Lettres du Voyant” (“Seer Letters”), addressed to his teacher Georges Izambard. It can be translated into English as "I is someone else," or "I is another," the second translation being what my blog title refers to. To lay out the naming process in its entirity, though, I also chose "another" because, in relation to my first and main blog, this one is just another. And, the word another easily splits into two, referencing the split referred to in Rimbaud's quote as well as the current postmodern usage of "Other." Mainly, though, I've always loved the line, "Je est un autre," because my experience of myself feels so deeply split; I watch myself as if I weren't myself but a sentient object with qualities and moods that my "I" doesn't always feel are its own (since an "I" can be the consciousness of a quality and not be the quality itself). This "split," by the way, rarely feels painful, but often feels especially noticeable during periods of depression.

Returning to the original question: I think Rimbaud conjugated Etre improperly to stress the experience of his self's other-ness and the split inherent to self-consciousness / self-documentation. "Je est un autre," as opposed to "Je suis un autre" (I is… as opposed to I am…), treats the "I" as "another" as it states that the "I" is another — so, while it might be grammatically "incorrect," it remains true to its own point. It's the "est" which makes it, in my opinion, a perfect piece of language.

Posted by nchicha at May 13, 2004 02:24 PM