Now, Against Private/Public

I miss feeling the presence of women. I don't even think I mean sexually. I mean being able to form myself in response to them.

(Blogging makes you write too fast, so I am amending this sentence).

The thing about this nearly visible, literally written (but also tacit) distinction between public/private is that it forces you to organize your life into two categories. It is tempting, this sort of dualism, I said I liked it earlier, and I do, but thinking about it this way makes it a problem. Given the choice of public or private, the tendency, I think, is to err on the side of privacy. So while the public sphere is demure, simply sophisticated, somehow peaceful even in the wildness of the souks, say, the private sphere becomes--I imagine--a Pinter play not even Pinter would write, in which everything is kept...and in which, since it really isn't possible to be a Public Person and a Private person, the rules of the Public are brought into the private, such that all that is kept in the Private goes unsaid. What hell, no? Just my imagination; self-authorized theorizing (is there any other kind?). But I can feel it, e.g. with regards to the presence of women in my life. I don't know about the existence of complementariness anywhere in the world; another too-tempting dualism, I think. But I know that it is also a concept that is deeply satisfying when people--men and women, brothers, co-students, whatever--buy into the concept (of complementarity), even knowing that the only reason it means anything is because they're buying into it...that is, they aren't buying into it because they are actually complementary but because the purchase makes it worth it, or something.

What I mean is, flirting serves a very deontological function, and thoug it definitely gets watered-down and mocked in a too-public society, and though it is (while I am still new here) amplified by a set of eyes set one amidst a crowd, I am missing the women who make choices that seem to be made more in the face of absolute freedom.

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