E9: Essence or Consequence; S13: Is Identity Really Delusion? What if it's contextual? Mira Costa High School's Mascot is Hung Like a Horse. Gross!

There is an enormous amount of delusion in the world, but not necessarily where we most comfortably put that word.Money is a collective delusion. Borders are collective delusions. Nations are collective delusions. A corporation is a collective delusion with lawyers. We agree that it means something, and then the agreement becomes powerful enough to decide whether you eat.That does not make money unreal. That is part of the problem.Different cultures have understood what we now call psychosis in very different ways. The experience happens; then culture arrives with a vocabulary and starts arranging it.Which may be what we do with almost everything.We are each trapped inside a body, but barely notice because language has been laid over the whole operation.Before there is a category, there is sensation. Something wants. Something fears. Something recoils. The body does something, and language arrives late with a clipboard.Homosexual. Heterosexual. Male. Female. White. Black. Canadian. American.Useful words. Sometimes indispensable. Still words.“Homosexuality” is strange if you stare at it too long. It sounds as though somebody is attracted to a homogeneous category called MEN, when most gay men are not attracted to most men at all. A particular person evokes something in the body. Another does not. Then we compress a lifetime of reactions into an identity category so we can talk.And we do need language.It helped us coordinate the killing of mammoths. Then dodo birds. Eventually we became sophisticated enough to invent neonicotinoids and remove staggering numbers of insects from the world.So clearly the system is working beautifully.The problem isn’t that we invented categories. It’s how easily we forget they are tools and begin treating them as essences.Medicine has participated too. AIDS followed GRID: gay-related immune deficiency. Even “acquired” is an odd little word—as though somebody went shopping. We don’t say “acquired syphilis.” Language can smuggle interpretation inside description.But that isn’t really what this episode is about either.This episode is an experiment.What if identity is not essence? What if it is not delusion either? What if identity is contextual? What if a category can be arbitrary and still have consequences? What if something can be socially constructed and still hurt? What if the map isn’t the territory, but the map determines where the water goes? What if the body knew something before language arrived? And what if language is still the only way I have to tell you about it?Hello, by the way, to anyone from Mira Costa who has wandered in here.I think about high school reunions. I would actually like to go to one.The problem is that I would probably have to say something, and a high school reunion is a terrible place to have to say something.People are there to have fun. I want you to have fun. I want to have fun. And I’ll have more fun elsewhere than sitting at a table thinking: How am I going to say this?Most of you were silent.You were nice people. Some of you were kind. You certainly didn’t want to seem like assholes. But that wasn’t much comfort to me at the time, when I was dealing with all that shit.I know some of you were gay too. Maybe you just hadn’t gotten around to realizing it yet.I was precocious. I always have been. And I imagine some of you probably thought that about me.Maybe the kindest thing you could do was let me be the weird kid who got there first.So thanks for that.I don’t remember much happening after what I describe in this episode. Maybe some of you came up to me.What I remember is the auditorium. What happened in it. What didn’t happen in it. And what I eventually had to do because of that.You may remember the aftermath differently. I probably would too, if I had been you.By the end of the episode, I think you’ll understand why my memory of that moment has some missing pieces.Memory is contextual too.Apparently everything is.Gross.