My Excluded Middle

<blockquote>In logic, the law of the excluded middle states that the propositional calculus formula “P ∨ ¬P” (“P or not-P”) can be deduced from the calculus under investigation. It is one of the defining properties of classical systems of logic. However, some systems of logic have different but analogous laws, while others reject the law of excluded middle entirely.

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Where I seem, to myself, squeamishly non-committal, is how I flee from P or ¬P. I do equivocate, P, but also, you know, from another point of view, ¬P. I have a weakness for reconciliation. It is this, I think. Not-P grows monstrously, refuses to stay the mere negation. P is a single small thing, fragile, and not P is the entire rest of the universe, with its crushing magnitude. P or not-P taunt me, mother or not-mother, writer or not-writer. Non-logically, somehow, there’s conflation and writer is among those things that not-mother includes; not-writer is implied by mother. There’s a fallacy, the artificial dilemma, and I keep getting squeezed into it.

I had this liberating moment with Virginia Postrel’s Substance of Style, which is a lot of pages to mostly make the point that we’re aesthetic creatures, and should make peace with the fact that we find aesthetics appealing instead of trying to always dismiss the frills as contrasting with quality and substance and meaning; that given adequacy of two options, we’re going to then choose the one that has an aesthetic appeal, not because we’re superficial and shallow, but because that’s what aesthetics is. And this may have been obvious to everyone else, but it drove home for me the sort of shame I can feel at liking the pretty, the fact that I have bought, somehow, into this false dilemma “smart versus pretty.”

And of course there was the epiphany about the epiphany: the epi-epiphany? That I have a habit of regularly conflating qualities that are on independent axes. That what intrinsic value or utility something has can land on the X-axis somewhere, and the aesthetic appeal can be somewhere on the Y-axis, and happiness lies in the upper right quadrant. But we do this all the time, with all sorts of things, finding we have to choose between the inexpensive and the environmentally friendly, or between safe/stable and interesting/exciting, writing that is literary or writing that is popular.

I recognize, of course, P is supposed to be a proposition, one to which we can assign definite truth value: Mara is a writer. Mara is a mother. Propositions P and Q where there is no implicit relationship between P’s truth value and Q’s. It’s just that my propositions are prone to conflationary thinking, the sort that used to drive me crazy, where you assume because I am a feminist I am going to have this position on the environment, on labor, on NAFTA. Which, I may in fact, but only as correlation. I have truths that don’t fit into neat propositions and propositions to which I can assign no truth values.

Maybe this is another manifestation of polarizing thinking, an inward version of the interpersonal dance, that we form twos because we are alike, we complement one another, only we inevitably proceed to divide the world between us, the final differences have a weight beyond the preceding million similarities.

The first polarity of my life, the younger sister, so much like me, and yet we were both shaped by all of the years we spent trying to prove how different we are. Only now we understand each other, that sometimes the differences that would appear most crucial seem like superficial ones, different expressions of the same impulse. You step back and look and we have lives with the same elements, the smaller people, the instruments, the books, the husbands.

The polarity that arises in friendship, as if to stem competition: I’ll be the happy homemaker and you be the ambitious and career-minded. Only, it turns out, you have a commitment to your family, and I need more than mine.

The polarity that creates the sparks in the marriage, when gratitude for the things he provides that I couldn’t, a spontaneity, a willingness to live in the moment gives way, splintering, into resentment that I must always worry about the bedtimes, the homework, the practicing, the vegetables, the chores, the character, the punctuality and I cannot find my way back to the whole I was before we divided the world between us.

I think time is the proposition that doesn’t yield a middle, time spent grocery shopping is time not spent reading and writing. I become divided feeling. Time is where I feel squeezed out, wrung out, must make the sacrificial choices, spend the evening regretting the blog entry instead of the violin practice.

New propositions, then, that time has not ended yet, that it is what will be, what has been, what is being in abundance, and that nothing is being sacrificed, that the tension I feel of wanting to be in two places, two roles, two lives at once is merely that of a limited perspective.