POLITICS OF SELF-DISCLOSURE

For Ana

The rainbow over the top of the mountain leaves me with the feeling that my lips are red and lush. Sounds come out of my mouth, as I take in the green, the purple, and the black. The words are those of my dead mother: “it’s not the end of the world that you can’t figure out what two plus two is.” I’m not good at counting. She was. This is her speaking as a mathematician. As the logician that she also was, she would say: “enlightenment while walking the path to the top is possible if and only if you wear good boots.” As the physicist that she was too, she would say: “create atmosphere!” I read my lips in the lake. Oh, they are so beautiful! They are still red. But whose language do they speak? I disclose myself to create a private language that is not my mother’s. Self-disclosure creates private knowledge. I like the knowledge that a private language affords me: my mother only read one novel in her life. She liked it so much that she was convinced that another novel would ruin her first experience. Hence she never read another. She was a trained logician, did I say? I think the thoughts of the mountain. High on the plateau I’m always sorry. Morbidity grasps me and my mother is not there to save me. Philosophy does. Even though it’s stupid. “Death is the only intellectual property we have exclusive rights to,” I instruct myself. But in the strangeness of being, I cry.

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