There will be a place for you

I’ve been sleeping on couches this last week. As I draft this, I am between couches. I’m in one of those liminal, limbo, time-spans during which mild derealization is the baseline.

In this season of my existence adrift, I have been meditating on a phrase: There will be a place for you. I’m quoting a comment from Ben Sims left on my flash-in-the-pan post from last month and while I feel the sentiment is clear, the words themselves seem to allow endless interpretations.

There are a lot of little places set aside for me in this country. My childhood room (now a hobby room with a bed stuck in the corner) and a room at my grandparents’ house. I have a spot at the wobbly lunch-table (it hosts a pile of cryptic crosswords beyond my comprehension) in my old department’s common room. Some beds and couches in Auckland; a city overburdened with memories shared. Actual, physical places for me to sleep and rest and eat and bond with friends, family, colleagues. Good. Most of those places aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And if they do, they are like to be replaced right away. If my best friend D moves flats, I’ll lose one couch and gain a new one. D’s couch is dead, long live D’s couch.

Safe. There will always be physical places in NZ set aside for me to exist within comfortably. More than I could even visit in a month. I didn’t get to stay with my friend C. He is probably hard at work right now and I think he enjoys it; a true spongebobian hero.

There will always be a place in my heart for you. People say this. When they do, I reckon they are saying that they think about you or have feelings for you despite something, probably just time or distance. Again, no problem for me. Many hearts and minds. I am loved and I am lucky—I was never in doubt about that.

I’ll stop beating around the bush now. There is, of course, a reading of this phrase that strikes some insecurity of mine. There is a reading of this phrase under which I am not at all safe. Otherwise, Ben’s comment wouldn’t read so reassuring.

Do I have a place in society? Do I have a place in human meaning-making and among occupations of purpose? Do I have a place in this world? The coming world. Do I really? I need some assurance. I have some, I need more. Who or what am I to bet on? I am standing looking out over the water, I am looking in the mirror, I am all the time thinking: What the fuck am I doing?

I’d rather not even attempt to address these questions. Can I please instead throw out some fun distractions?

My friend Ari is a rare talent in the art of mathematical visualizations and exposition. He has a blog, and within is an article about measuring the “circularity” of a shape.

Beautiful math is a first-rate palette-cleanse if you are steeped in existential angst—although I should warn that Ari makes use of AI from time to time. Even so, I know some of you are math and software dabblers and I do believe you’ll enjoy the post.

Maybe we just talk some more about math and forget the rest? I was thinking on the bus that we should try to endow mathematics from particular eras with the nostalgic aesthetics now associated with those eras. Like, 90’s math should feel like the 90’s. I reckon we should induct this retro re-stylized math into our growing corpus of nostalgic, hauntological myth-art. I got the idea from a note that floated down my feed here, depicting a grid of textbooks with very midcentury technical covers, which I have lost.

Let me pose it to you: How do we combine this

with this

I am running out of ways to distract us from all those dreadful questions. How about something I wrote feverishly during this short strangeness in a supermarket:

You can believe it. I make myself believe it. Anything useful. I believe anything that makes me do it. I believe myself better. Bigger. Even bigger. I believe myself bigger than the moon. Better than the moon. I am better than the moon. Even better than...

Ok. While you were distracted I came up with something. Something about trust.

If there is a place for me, it will not just be. Someone must ensoul it. The kind of place Ben’s comment is getting at is a peopled place. If there is to be a place for me, I must trust others.

Who shall I trust to grant me a place in the sense I desire—a meaningful role where I am providing value and enjoying (at least in part!) the process. For now, I will trust, a little bit—as lame as it sounds—my institution. I will trust, completely, my immediate community: Friends, family, collaborators. Who am I doing anything for if not them? I will trust God, in a way. I am an agnostic (leaning yes) with Catholic characteristics. All the same, I will half-trust that there is something wholly good and immanent going along with me. And I suppose I will trust myself to roughly the same extent—by half. If my own crisis of meaning is all in my head then I’m the bastard who got me into this mess to begin with. Pessimism, neuroticism: Yes, unavoidably. Doomerism, defeatism: I trust that I won’t.

I will continue despite. I will proceed playfully. I will endeavor to be the spongebobian hero like C. I encourage you all to continue likewise. There will be a place for you. Thanks for the comment Ben; Godspeed indeed.

I’ve just begun. Much more on the way:

This is probably because Ben is very good at writing. Exhibit A: https://simsben.substack.com/p/liza-minnelli-in-the-bedroom

For fun, please help me workshop this term and variations on the archetype. I thought of “Squidwardian grump", my friend C cooked up “Patrickian buffoon”. Perhaps each is really an aspect which the individual mediates.

If his blog does not convince you, try this on for size: https://github.com/ariymarkowitz/Bruhat-Tits-Tree-Visualiser

I am not truly convinced that this resolves all my concerns, but I think it is more fun to be bold and make proposals.