Firsts

It's well more than a year since I started jotting some of these confessions, or organizing them into something with a menu, when it occurs to me that there are some "firsts" I don't believe I've told. By "first" I mean first experience: and I emphasize: awareness is a necessary ingredient of experience. The hospital changes babies in the presence of other babies: the infant with its ass in the air is not regarded as requiring privacy whatever its gender: 'cause nothing is registering on its neighbors: it has no neighbors: no "one" is there: the nurses, orderlies, doctors, etc. Don't count: they're "above it" all. At home your parents can blow each other right in front of you without having to explain anything away. So when I say the first time I saw an adult pussy, I mean the first time the sight registered.

(I'm reminding myself here of Wittgenstein, who asks questions like: if you say you've never been to the moon, how do you know whether or not it's so? Do you imagine your "consciousness" is continuous? Were you never asleep? could you not have been taken there while you were unconscious? sick? drugged? You don't know of anyone capable of taking anyone to the moon? Irrelevant: you think you know everything? You mean "God" couldn't have taken you? You're the authority on possibility?)

Note: Registered: Distinctions with regard to "consciousness" are endless. Once I'd bought a Peterson's Guide for bird watching and noticed the place to keep a life time's check list, I had to avoid the temptation to run down the list checking things that looked familiar: sea gulls, terns, ducks, sparrows ...? No: start from scratch. I'd never seen any bird prior to having the Guide: where I was confident I'd identified both genus and species. Once you've got genus and species, you can start looking for "races." Then you can worry about individuals. Then you can worry about how well you "know" the individual.

Even peas might not "look alike" if you lived in the pod with them.