Fifteen minutes ago I liked the name "Honda Civic" almost as little as "Honda Fit." Civic is such a stuffy word. It makes you think of the drab buildings where they hold traffic court. Or paying your taxes. It is not a good name for a car.
But then -- soaking in the spa and staring at the moon, which cliched as it sounds is when I get all my craziest ideas -- I thought about the root of the word. Civic is from civilization. Civilization is just a bunch of people and the relationships between them. My journey is about one particular type of those relationships, so my journey is intimately tied to civilization.
And that in turn got me thinking about Freud. That son of a bitch wrote a little book called "Civilization and Its Discontents" decades ago. I read it last year. Part of his idea, this half-crazy genius of the psyche, is that what's most basic in us are the creative and destructive impulses, and that part of the creative impulse is the libido. So we all want to go out there and find someone to focus our libido on. The problem is that we need food and water and other stuff, and if we try to take care of all of that on our own we don't have much time left for sex/cuddling. We form civilizations to help make it easier to satisfy our biological needs so we can devote the remainder of our time to our libidinal ones. But now there's a new problem: civilization requires upkeep (we go to work), which requires time, which again is time we're not spending having sex/cuddling. What's more, that damn destructive impulse keeps threatening to tear everything down. So civilization requires us to restrain our destructive impulse, which is where Freud got the idea of the superego. And that superego polices all kinds of things, including our attitudes towards our own relationships.
The point is that civilization, for Freud, is all about relationships. Civilization is why we can devote time to our relationships, and it's also the principal reason relationships are so complicated. Which touches me, in spite of Freud's pedantry about the whole thing. And I bet a lot of the stories I hear on this trip will have as much to do with the civilization their characters live in as with the characters themselves.
So now I am thrilled that I may be making my journey in a Honda Civic and hope my own superego agrees that it's the right car for the trip.
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Hoorah for moving forward on the car decision! I like reading these before the project posts. :>
ReplyDeleteYou've got a while to wait before the project starts, sadly :) I expect I'll leave in late June or thereabouts. What should I do with the blog in the meantime, I wonder? I can only fill so many days with stories of car hunting and laptop hunting and literary exegesis. And yet it feels wrong to just let it sit here.
ReplyDeleteI'm all for being provided with content on a daily basis, but you're not responsible for updating everyday-- keep that in mind!
ReplyDeleteIt's early, like you said, so tentativeness with regard to your plans is totally cool. But I suggest writing about those as you make them (pretty much what you're doing now :> ). I'm sure your readers would appreciate those details. We're interested! Tell us where you're thinking about going, anything you might take a detour to see on your trip, what music you might listen to. Potentially the writing it out will establish some direction for the project and boost your confidence. And all of the above would be groovy. :>