TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

CLIENT: So why did you move?

THERAPIST: A couple of reasons. I live much closer to here, so it's a lot easier for me. It's quieter, actually. It's a lot quieter. The street noises I got from my place I didn't much care for. It's a little quieter over here. It's a little more neighborhood-y. I didn't like that building very much. A big reason is that it cut off about ten minutes of my commute. I'm basically five minutes away. I can walk. [00:02:01]

CLIENT: Who else is on this are there one or two other offices or no offices?

THERAPIST: Just one other office this guy, another psychologist. That's another reason. He and I have gotten to be friendly. I was friendly with the people in my suite but he and I have a lot more professional overlap and (chuckles) personable, too, I guess. The other thing is that this is a bit bigger and so I'm doing more analysis. So the couch, when I get a couch in here the reason why the couch isn't up here is that I couldn't fit it through the door up here. It's too big. You remember it was a pretty long couch. They tried to get it in here and they couldn't do it. [00:03:02] Even hoisting it through that other office wouldn't have done it because they never would have been able to bring it through the hallway. I was going to put the couch right there. I'm going to have to get a new couch, but the old setup wasn't good for handling the couches. I was well, you saw it. You could just do face-to-face with it.

CLIENT: It looks sort of like books are in order. (laugh)

THERAPIST: Yeah, what's it like for you?

CLIENT: I don't know. It's like it's unfamiliar. It's nice to see that, at least in some part, it feels more like a living room of sorts. [00:04:06]

THERAPIST: Yeah, this used to be an apartment building.

CLIENT: It seems it.

THERAPIST: It's all offices now.

CLIENT: Yeah, it does feel like a master bedroom. (pause) [00:04:55] It's weird. It feels like [dimixtry] (ph?), that's how it feels, and I feel like the size of the room, bed here, bookcases, bookcases, bookcases, TV.

THERAPIST: I can totally see that.

CLIENT: Just the structure of the building rather than being a big, brick thing like the previous thing. I feel like I'm taken back to 911, really. I have that sort of [inscendient] (ph)? moment of really identifying everything in the room. I'm looking at the screen and I'm seeing everything is familiar and, yet, the world is different now. (pause) [00:05:57] In a way it also feels like the central core part of me, where being in my neighborhood. feels I'm embedded in this other world. It's almost sort of like less messy, whereas (ph?) felt like I was alone. I wasn't living. I had roommates, but the room was my space. Anyway, now I have a bigger space and I can share it. [00:07:17] Now the little space that I have is it separates the master bedroom by a curtain, there's not a door; whereas then if you shut the door, all of a sudden, there is the world, all of the books and things. It's weird. I wasn't expecting that. Really, (chuckles) I feel like I really have gone back in time to that feeling of living by myself and that sense of the effort it takes to pack up lots and lots and lots of books. Now we're on the basement, and any book that is like those books or those books specifically are in boxes. [00:08:22] Now the books that I have are math and science and some knowledge, but that realm of life where I was doing that is literally in boxes in the basement. (pause)

THERAPIST: What a contrast between it being out in the open in your room and down in the it's in the cellar, right? Boxes. (pause) [00:09:27]

CLIENT: This weekend I don't know, it's weird. I feel so much connected to that time right now that it feels weird to even contemplate the math that I have been doing for the past two days. It feels like I've been having my 2000, my old self, and feeling like this is what's familiar to me and the idea that I would be in that space, but then thinking, "No, I'm going to live in Dorchester and I'm going to be focused on the foundations for math, where I spend a lot of time defining all the properties of integers." [00:10:23] I mean, would that have interested me back then? I don't know. I don't think it would. I don't think it would have at all. It's not me, it's not messy, it's not romantic, it's not inherently meaningful, it's just the pinnacle of abstraction creating mathematical groups doing group theory. It's abstract algebra. It's foundations of math. It's not that. [00:11:19]

THERAPIST: Just being in this room kind of brings that all back, though?

CLIENT: Absolutely.

THERAPIST: What are you noticing? What are you feeling?

CLIENT: It feels like that is kind of the real me. It's sort of like I took leave of that. (pause) I don't know. I'm perhaps consciously saying, "Yeah, I'm not doing it that way." It's not like I evolved from it, perhaps, it's just sort of like it just sort of happened. Seeing that kitchen... [00:12:22]

THERAPIST: The one right here?

CLIENT: Yeah, I mean my kitchen.

THERAPIST: Oh, you're thinking about your kitchen.

CLIENT: Yeah, and it's like how much happened in that kitchen. I don't know. Break-ups and startings and sitting in the kitchen table with Barbara making tea. I never drank tea, but all of a sudden she wanted tea. So us just drinking tea and me feeling at the time... (pause) I'm not sure at the time how "won over" I was by her because I felt like here I am drinking tea with someone who drinks tea and trying to be polite. I don't know what exactly we had in common, and yet somehow we just kept having tea. I don't know. [00:14:19] She wasn't any number of people. And all of a sudden, it's like now I'm there. It's almost like living in the property of a consulate. It's sort of like this [quasi-rich] (ph?) territory. It feels kind of like (pause) I don't know. The image is sort of like I can trace back the direct link to Oregon. I felt like there were fewer degrees of separation and, now that I'm in Dorchester, somehow the breadcrumbs aren't there anymore. [00:15:36] Now I feel like I'm sort of back at that place and I'm feeling whatever I felt, have felt. Damn. All of a sudden memories are sort of rushing back. It's like I can see myself meeting Evelyn and going and seeing her for the first time when she was in painting on this porch at some party, this gay festival sort of thing; her being at my place and me being at her place. That all feels much more real to me now than the fact of me actually, truly living in Dorchester with Barbara. [00:16:38]

THERAPIST: Some way that kind of life and your connection with it, I was thinking, has kind of been boxed up. It's been boxed up and shelved in some way. Yeah. And I have the sense that it has to do with your feeling it's interesting the idea of a consulate, because maybe it's because it feels like you're on foreign soil and you're adapting to the surroundings and you're like can I bring these bags with me? It's almost like, no, books are going to be kept downstairs and boxed up. (pause) [00:21:05] What's going through your mind?

CLIENT: I'm reading titles and... (pause) I don't know. I guess I'm contemplating what happened that I stopped that? It's not a new thing, from the first semester of college all the way through [...] (inaudible at 00:22:27). So I have 15 years of this or something very similar to it theology or philosophy or social theory. (pause) [00:23:00] It's very peculiar to me, I must say. I don't know why. It's like I'm looking at this internal lens now. (pause) This intellectual world that I have surrounded myself by and sort of immersed myself in (pause)... talk about not being able to follow the breadcrumbs back. I'm not sure how it happened. [00:24:10] It feels arbitrary. It feels like I could have immersed myself in a foreign language or whatever. It's math. Right now I feel like I could truly drop it immediately and just immediately be back in this without any hesitation. That's the feeling right now. It really does feel like I'm back in time. (pause) [00:25:08]

THERAPIST: It almost seems like there are these two senses of yourself, that this whole experience is very evocative and you don't know how to fit that into the whole mathematics experience, the experience of the recent years. I mean, obviously, it seems like the office move, too, highlights that in some way. Here we are in this new office. What do you do with the old office? Your experience is there. One day we're there, one day we're here no in between. [00:26:03] I'm almost getting that sense that it's almost like you're describing that difficulty in making it be a straight line, a continuous line between this and your experience at [Dinik] (sp?) and where you're at now. When you're in this now, there's a break, there's a disconnection from that whole side of yourself that you feel. It really felt real and was there last week when we were meeting. Also they can't go quite together. There's no way to link them. (pause) [00:27:14]

CLIENT: I'm wondering, too I feel like (pause) in a way I'll put away many, many math books and just keep a single encyclopedia of mathematics just put it on the shelf and everything else goes in the box. And then I can look at it, like many books on the shelf. I think, "I've got the general idea." [00:28:37] I miss looking at it and studying. I mean how often does one actually get a book off the shelf? Not very often, I suspect; but having the books out is a way to organize one's mind because one sees the images and juxtapositions and they evoke thoughts and maintain thoughts and we see combinations of things as we look at titles, whether they are near each other or far away and we can manage rearranging how books align with each other; but also how thoughts align with each other. And yet, they're always in line because each particular spine refers to a period of time and way of thinking. [00:29:40] We know inside of those books what is underlined and what pages are folded over and what books, perhaps, we thing we should have on there; but we haven't read. But we want to. Books that we should have read well but we haven't and other books that should be on there. But you have no choice because there is limited space, so you have representative [...] (inaudible at 00:30:10). You don't need those [...], and so now my bookshelves are not cluttered. They're very organized if you look at them but I don't look at them because my back is always to them. I face out the windows and my bookshelves are behind me. When I do look at them, it doesn't take me into a world of thinking about who I really am. Instead there are lots of books about things that are just flat-out difficult, even though I get (chuckles) some complicated math. When I see those books my heart rate goes up a little bit because it represents a lot of very slow-paced contemplation and for what? Because that's the thing for what? So you can do things using these sort of analytic skills and now you build up numbers from a single set, and yet what does it point to? Whereas these titles are much more evocative of something that is fundamentally real. [00:32:34]

If you had in your office instead books on real analysis and numerical analysis and functional analysis and axiomatic set theory I would not be happy about it because I would feel like, "Okay, I kind of get it." I get the things, but they're intimidating and they're not fun. (pause) Not the least fun, but somehow they offer some sort of enrichment. They're [...] (inaudible at 00:33:39) efforts to contemplate a new life, whereas that is not... You can pick up a book and read a paragraph and get a general sense at least of tone and argument and time. You can connect to it, whereas when you see math books you can't just pick it up and read it. [00:34:19] Even if you've done it, you can't just pick it up. You have to enter in and think, "Okay, the previous chapter held the definitions and those are the symbols and meaning." Of course, it's in English, hopefully a translation for some book. [00:34:47]

THERAPIST: I often feel, too, that the books convey an interest of a lot of people into their life what's in their minds. I was just thinking about one of the things that we've talked about a lot is a kind of, with Barbara you wonder how much does she really want to know what's inside of me? I was just thinking about your comment about your having tea and I was thinking to myself that there's nothing more civilized than tea, is there? Having tea together. What do you do then with the messiness that's in one's head that it's not at all civilized? (pause) [00:38:10]

CLIENT: I'm tutoring this girl.

THERAPIST: That's what you've said.

CLIENT: Her name is Dana. So I go over there every Thursday night. It's strange because she's beautiful 15 beautiful and she's taking pre-calculus, so I tutor her for calculus. (pause) It's weird because in high school (chuckles) I didn't like calculus the whole realm of trigonometry. [00:39:26] I was using E for these continuous functions, but not ever being told exactly what E is good for and how great it is in calculus. You sort of memorize stuff and you have to be good at algebra. You're circling the definitions and you learn stuff that is not going to be used in calculus. (pause) So it's strange that she had an exam last Friday so I was teaching her and she had this friend that I met before and she wanted to have her there for this study. [00:40:39] So we're on the couch. Dana is across from me, although she usually sits next to me, and her friend is also this delightful, young woman. And in the way that 15-year-olds are, they just absorb information very quick. And, you know, I was prepared, because if you go into something from the classroom, that's fine. That's okay, but that's rarely the case because in the classroom I don't know the answer. But when you're tutoring somebody, you don't have the advantage of presenting all of the material in the course of five days being their math teacher. You're in control, right? You're controlling the flow of information. You're teaching them what they don't know. You know exactly what they should know because what they should know is what you tell them they should know, whereas I'm not their teacher. [00:41:49]

So I show up and I have no idea what sort of things they're going to ask because I don't know. She gives me a general topic so I learn as much as I can, which is good for me to turn my mind to this stuff. One has a question, the other has a question. Back and forth. Back and forth. I'm just telling them how to do things. And it's feeling in juxtaposition to this, like how strange. I am helping them with a math course, yet in high school I was it was something I would never have contemplated. I was the one needing help. [00:42:58] And I'm looking at it thinking that I know the answers, but then having to learn this now especially at the time, feeling a little nervous because you have to count it with your toes because it's not stuff that you use all the time like trigonometric identities. And yet that's what they're being tested on. It's sort of the digging... I don't know. (pause) [00:43:52] The sense of that's one of six or seven courses, however many they were taking. I'm sure they're taking tons of courses and stuff. It's all high-pressure and it's like that's what I'm doing. I'm helping them with what they think is their hardest course. I'm thinking it's sort of false. I know enough math to be helpful, but I'm not the math man.

THERAPIST: So what seems false?

CLIENT: What seems false is that's what I'm being paid to do, be the math guy. (pause) [00:45:01] It's not like I know I'm not an expert, right? But I know more than they do. And just the fact that, for me, I sort of approach mathematics wanting to ruminate on the philosophy of math. That's the context. Whereas for them this is brand new to them and they want to get an A in the course so they can get into the college because they're all smart and of course they want to go the college because all of their classmates are going to apply to the colleges. And that's the scene. That's the game. I feel like I want it to be this sort of genuine thing, and it is with Dana. I think Leila threw me off because she represented to me this sort of classic student who is very smart but who is good at just sort of jumping over hurdles and through hoops and doesn't really sincerely care about much of anything, other than getting a really good grade. [00:46:22] Whereas Dana, I feel like, will genuinely say, "I don't get it," which is honest. Leila will sort of be like next question, next question, next question. This is [alinear] (ph?) philosophy; this is linear philosophy; how do you compare them? I felt sort of like a trained monkey. It's what you do. I didn't know whether I should say this or not, but I conveyed to both of them to keep in mind that you really need to know this because you have a test on it, but don't let yourself get flustered or overwhelmed by the idea that you should look at these things in your book and it should be immediately recognizable and you should know what it is. If you see [...] (inaudible at 00:47:38) that would be, I have to look at it and I don't know. It's not recognizable. You have to unpack it and unpack it and unpack it until you get somewhere with it. [00:47:56] And for calculus you don't need to know much more than sine and cosine, so the games they play is that you're asked to know all of this stuff and you need to to get a good grade and it's really helpful to know all of these things, but oftentimes in prerequisite courses you learn a lot and then the idea is that you can remember about 30 percent of the stuff and if it happens to be the 30 percent that's important, that's what you actually use. It's like you learn all about these things sequence and co-sequence and cotangents and so forth, and that's great. Do that. But really, in calculus you need to understand sine and cosine really well. I thought that would be a helpful thing to say, sort of like you do it and you do the best you can and you want to get a great grade. Learning is also terrific for its own sake, but don't feel overwhelmed with needing to know every single bit forever and you should just recognize it, because it's very difficult. Most people, unless they do trigonometry all of the time, don't look at these things and don't even know what they are, but still just unpack them. And you know that you can do that. [00:49:28]

For Dana, I knew that was helpful. For Leila, it was sort of like whatever. If it's on the test, it's on the test. If it's on the test, I don't care. I'm looking at next year.

THERAPIST: The feeling that you're saying in the different approaches, there are different attitudes towards whether it's learning something, the concrete thing that you're talking about, the actual math, but I think you're talking about something a little bit deeper, too what you feel like when you can kind of detect somebody's attitude and openness about something. [00:50:27] Like Dana being more interested or curious, wanting to engage in a certain kind of way that Leila wasn't. Leila was like just the facts, ma'am. And how different it leaves you feeling. I was thinking in a way it was so much more of a feeling of engagement or connection with somebody like Rose around a mind, what matters, those kinds of things as opposed to a very practical kind of... [00:51:18]

CLIENT: Yeah, that's exactly right, but I also feel like I don't know. Maybe I should advertise editorial teaching as opposed to math. I feel like there's something very pleasurable about crafting something like writing a paper, getting it right, just in terms of style. Going through and really making it good, there's something creative about that. Or the pleasure of just thinking about words and what they evoke, writing of history, whereas math almost is not that way. I mean one can be creative with math, but it's creative in a purely analytical, definitional sense. You have the definitions then you have the tool kits with which you solve the answer and the answer is the answer, nothing is new. [00:52:33] If you are an optician, everything is brand new, but typically... Anyway, my bookshelf I have math, math, math, math, math, except for four books. They aren't math or statistics. I have the complete works of Cheslav Milosh and the poetry of [...] (inaudible at 00:53:08). I have my bible that I got when I was 12, and then I have this book that I bought when Cabot was having a sale. I was going through all the books and it was 50¢. It was some book by [...] (inaudible at 00:53:30) that I haven't read, and I'm thinking that politics or history or whatever aside, it's there. It's the book that I haven't read. I don't know anything about it, but it's sort of like, okay, that's one book that represents the 83 boxes downstairs. [00:54:09] And then everything else on earth and then, I guess, some novels, some breadcrumbs of the road. [00:54:20]

THERAPIST: Some breadcrumbs, huh? Where do you keep them? Where is your bookshelf?

CLIENT: Behind me, next to my wardrobe. It's this big, giant functional thing from Ikea.

THERAPIST: And it's in what room?

CLIENT: It's in my study, which also serves as my I mean everything is back there. I have a rack that I have clothes on and I have my big, built-in wardrobe. I have another desk and printer, so it is an office/wardrobe area, which I love. I can be back there for hours quite happily, so it's where I go to. It's the one place that I can sort of pencil off from Barbara and it can be a mess and she and I have agreed that she can't bug me about it. Although I like [...] (inaudible at 00:55:18)

THERAPIST: But it's your space.

CLIENT: It doesn't have to reach the same standard. It's my space. Exactly, it's my space.

THERAPIST: It's a consulate within a consulate.

CLIENT: That's right. That's funny. That's right. The books are behind me, so I can look at them when I want to because I don't want to be staring at math all day. I just want to be at the ceiling, paging, trying to figure out. It's like you say, it's like this uphill thing because it's like well, there is a long... you can't jump into higher math unless you've done the stuff before. I'm very aware of that. It's not a pleasant feeling looking and thinking, because it's not like you every really master it. There's so much to remember. I guess I was feeling that when being quizzed by... [...] (inaudible at 00:56:39) times the cotangent of one quick. Well, you divide by tangent and when you do, it's one. What does that mean? [...] (inaudible at 00:56:50) what does that mean? It means very little to me or anybody. It's just sort of a fact. A set equals one. [...] (inaudible at 00:57:04) it's not. I don't think (chuckles) Freud would not be as widely read if he was talking about how a tangent and a cotangent equals one, because it doesn't really resonate with most people. [00:57:34]

THERAPIST: That's like this is really a tough thing. There were a lot of significant things that we went through in those four years over there.

CLIENT: Yeah, there was. Four years. Four years. Good lord.

THERAPIST: Including the fact that there was a time there, we were meeting there at that office (sp?) place. There's still a link to that for you. And then he gave up.

CLIENT: Interesting.

THERAPIST: I wrote up a bill for you.

CLIENT: Yeah, because I was just getting settled.

THERAPIST: Oh, by next week.

CLIENT: Well, I'm off to do math. I spent three hours today proving that you can actually add using integers and it's a well-defined operation. I know, it's engaging. Now I'm not.

THERAPIST: That's interesting that you find that somehow when you're here it's not as engaging.

CLIENT: Maybe it's a treat. Maybe it's a way to be completely isolated or because Barbara never fails to mention that the entire time I'm trying to study that's what I'm doing. No, no. In a humorous way, but it's sort of like I don't get it.

THERAPIST: I don't get it.

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