I failed AP calculus in 2018. There is almost nothing I can recall from that class. Given how chronically unpleasant that year was for me, in addition to the likely irreversible effects of fake Supreme-branded Miami carts containing some concoction of fentanyl, glycerine, and cat piss, it is a miracle that I have a single memory retained from it at all.
I was sitting in a row towards the back, my head resting on my bent arm, when Ms. Lemes casually altered my consciousness. She drew a regular x-y graph, and then, magically, she added a dotted line. This was to be called a z-axis and it allowed for an entire new dimension to be expressed on a two-dimensional Smartboard screen. Now, she explained, we’ll learn how to calculate the area of three dimensional shapes.
I realize this is an abundantly obvious observation from an equally banal lecture. We live in a three dimensional plane. Flatness is a newer concept in art history than faithful three-dimensional representation. But still, this was the first time I realized: there was a secret third thing, and it existed the whole time.
My psychoanalyst* tells me that I have a tendency for black and white, all or nothing thinking. If you were to check in on me on any given week, there is a split chance that I am either overindulging or repenting for something. He does a good job at catching these flips while they seem completely natural to me. I may or may not be in love with him. I can’t decide and it depends on how well my session went that week.
I vaguely remember the first time I learned about the clear pill. Again, it came to me in a wholly unremarkable context— this time a Based Retard Gang Instagram reel. The content of the video was probably something along the lines of an omnipotent AI girl voice commentating on how she’s no longer a redpilled NEET and has instead transcended into a based clearpilled angel. Ok. Anyway, I was dumbfounded once again. Not that I was considering either option seriously, or was asked to make the choice even metaphorically at any point in my life, but on some level I still subconsciously subscribed to the idea that you either exist in a state of blissful ignorance or cynical awareness. Perhaps the choice of absence— or balance— doesn’t seem intuitive to people who get BRG in their reels. Media is probably the least precarious of their consumption.
I wonder if the liminal nature of the internet makes for particularly ripe mentions of the secret third thing; the way its simultaneous ubiquity and physical absence breeds ironic yet self-serious performances that reveal different pockets of our character than everyday encounters. It amuses me that so much of the discourse around third spaces (i.e. places outside home and work to hang out) has transpired on social media. Do they not realize that not only are they in a space that provides them free access to community, but are communicating in the in-between of real and nonexistent space too?
There’s also something to be said about separating real life from online, organic from artificial. In God, Human, Animal, Machine, Megan O’Gieblyn describes how the metaphor likening the human mind to a computer usually implies that mankind is somehow robotic in nature, and that this collapse of the human spirit with inanimate code is ultimately disenchanting. At face value, this metaphor reinforces and laments the binary, ignoring the possibility of a common spirit, perhaps some cosmic intelligence or consciousness, that manifests in both the analog and digital.
Art has a way of capturing yet destabilizing our at once feeble yet staunch experience of reality. I recently read an essay by Julian de Medeiros about Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych (ha), The Garden of Earthly Delights. He pays particular attention to the middle panel, sandwiched between the scenes of the Garden of Paradise and Hell, depicting a surreal landscape of humans and animals intermingling in splendor and sin. He writes: “… there is something revolutionary about Bosch’s unbridled garden, which might as well be a depiction of u-topia, a non-place, neither here nor there. It is a mesmerizing depiction of this possibility that makes the Garden of Earthly Delights such a riveting example of the way in which Art can help us reshape the possibilities of human life and its depiction as we know it. Or perhaps precisely as we do not yet know it.”
Personally, I’m not sure if my fascination with the elusive third thing comes from a desire for objectivity, a frustration with convention and language’s shortcomings, or an impulse to resolve all the contradictions that plague me.
Maybe that elusive third thing is the key to life, or maybe it’s a denial of that reality. Maybe it’s a secret third thing.
* or should I say my therapist— I’ve been told that mentioning one’s “analyst” comes off as pretentious and annoying, but it also sounds way less lame than a regular therapist. I’ve removed his name but if you are curious about him, the only thing you’d uncover is his marvel wiki page and a YouTube video of him getting a stick and poke by Jemima Kirk in 2015.
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