Sunday, July 12, 2009

Lenore (sr.)

Last night, I visited the nursing home where my grandmother receives care. I'm really the only person in my family who visits her and I'm not even sure if she appreciates that. She's 93 and some part of her internal thermometer is busted, so her room as kept at 98.6 degrees which makes any visit rather uncomfortable.

Adding to the discomfort, Lenore (sr.) used to be a student of Wittgenstein and she frequently lectures me on everything from semantics to ontology (those fields are not very distant for Wittgenstein). I'm fairly certain that she is attempting to make me believe that my existence is no different from a character's in a novel. Dr. Jay does not have much to say on this point, electing instead to interrogate me about my sexual inclinations (an awfully boring subject I can assure you).

What if all we are consists in the words spoken and written by/about us?

She makes my head hurt, but the thought of her lying there in her sweltering jungle of a room without any visitors is too depressing - I have to visit.