on the hunt for grandparents

recently i came across a series of video lectures by Robert Paul Wolff on immanuel kant's critique of pure reason. 8 videos, 1 hour each, 2016 youtube uploads. I was immediately charmed by Wolff's alternating balance of theory and anecdote. I also found myself shamed by his Lecture-4 admonishment that I should be reading The Critique of Pure Reason alongside watching the lectures, and not just listening to the lectures contextlessly. ehehe... guilty. but this guy is just so captivating to listen to. I had to learn more.

I searched Wolff's name to find his age, alongside his other works. well, he passed away in january of this year. he was 91. I just missed him. and I mean... i REALLY just missed him. it turns out this guy kept a super active blog. https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/ Comments are on, and he even read and responded to them sometimes. he checked his email. I mean, wow. if i had found out about him a year or two earlier, i could have reached out to this guy. i mean, i dont know id have much in particular to say... but his life overlapped with mine.

his last blog post is from Nov 24 of last year, reminding commenters that the new president hasnt been sworn in YET. the comments are full of obituaries, tributes, and condolences, from jan 7th onward. from his colleagues, friends, students, longtime followers of the blog. someone copy-pasted the obituary his son Tobias wrote for him. (Wolff co-authored two of his books with herbert marcuse... pretty cool.) shortly after that, the comments section descends into trolling and other wildly inappropriate commentary to put in a virtual grieving space, because of course it did. internet. lets just brush past that part.

he did a lot of obituary-worthy things in his life... Wolff organized against South African apartheid in the 80s and 90s, pushing Harvard to divest. after that, he set up a scholarship fund for Black South African students, letting neither defeat nor victory sway him from his mission and principles. he wrote several books i want to read this summer. he also, as I mentioned, kept a well-maintained blog for the last almost-two-decades of his life.

listen, i gotta disclose something, but there's no regular way for me to say it: I'm on the hunt for grandparents. and parents. older role models. my life feels lopsided and incomplete when I'm only interacting with people my age. and, well...my last surviving grandparent died in march 2020. she was 96 years old, the youngest. (my grandparents were in their 70s-80s when i was born.) my relationships with my remaining family members have been, uh... hit or miss. that tends to happen when you, uh, come out as a transsexual, i guess. my grandmothers were probably too old to understand or really care. cannot say the same of my aunts and cousins. all that is to say... i dont really have older people I can call to talk about my problems and receive general advice from. (although, even if my grandparents were alive, I'm not sure they'd offer me the kind of advice I need.)

I feel this grief every day. it's lonely. I have all these family stories and nowhere to put them. while being white, I also have two meaningful ethnicities, one from each side of my family. maybe i'll talk about them more some time. but my parents didn't bother teaching me their other languages. (my mom had apparently forgotten hers by the time I was born, anyway.) so...what can these identities mean to me now? what am I supposed to do with my grandparents' World War 2 stories, which feel so vivid to me this year in particular, but have no relevance to anyone else?

and who am i supposed to go to for advice about when i should get married, how many kids i'm going to have, and where i should live? MASH? am i supposed to draw a big spiral on a piece of paper and draw tiny tick marks to narrow shit down? am i supposed to fold one of those four-corner paper fortune-tellers and just see what comes up? man, i folded enough of those in 4th grade to last a lifetime. and i dont need em to tell others' fortunes anymore. i know how to read tarot now.

so, I get a lot out of listening to older people I happen to encounter in real life. and I especially get a lot out of reading what's been written by trans people and philosophers more than, say, 20 years older than me. my friends have family to turn to for passed-on wisdom; I do too, in theory, but in practice, I have strangers.

in his last few years, Wolff wrote about the frustrations and pains of his worsening condition/Parkinson's. it's refreshing to read someone write about how being disabled sucks, losing capacities you used to have sucks, without needing a theme or lesson or bright side to sweep away the pain. sometimes it's just pain.

he wrote about being so stressed out by politics, but unable to turn away from the TV.

on june 14th, 2024, a little less than 6 months before he died, he made a post asking if anyone who knows Noam Chomsky can update him (Wolff) on how he (Chomsky) is doing since his (Chomsky's) stroke. (we need more pronouns, and/or widespread neopronoun usage, stat.) Wolff talks about Chomsky like he's a friend, which he probably was, because of course he was. Wolff knew (or at least met) everybody.

In this june 14th 2024 post, Wolff wrote, "Norm is five years older than I and I suppose it is hardly surprising that he is having serious health problems, but if anybody wants further proof of the nonexistence of a good God one can simply reflect that Henry Kissinger lived to be 100."

what kind of advice would a man like this give? for small stuff, big stuff, whatever. what changed for him, and what stayed the same? and, importantly, what kind of music did he like? he was born in 1933--how did he feel about rock music? if i'm lucky, maybe i'll get some ideas as I slowly comb through his writings.

because i really couldn't help myself, and no one was watching, I searched his blog for "trans." I just needed to know if he ever said anything about us. there were, i think, 3 posts, all from 2023, where Wolff mentions trans people. he wrote that his heart wept for "trans children and adults," "at the sheer pointless cruelty being visited on" us. ive seen enough empty virtue-signaling of "trans rights" to know this is genuine. I really believe he felt this (our) pain, too.

I don't know how to articulate the feelings that came with my realization: I was grieving a man I hadn't met, who had grieved for me, a man he hadn't met, while he was still alive.

I'm so tired of running away from pain. I'm so tired of being told to hide it. the idea that emotions should be private-only, that it is somehow shameful to visibly display our signs of life, is so unholy to me. it doesnt make much difference whether it's someone telling me my feelings are "PC" and cringe, or that Confrontation in our Safe Space TM is too stressful and should therefore Disappear forever (? as if avoidance, famously, makes everyone feel suuuper Comfortable, very Destressed.) ive had people tell me that emotions are bad and should be as hidden as possible in the language of morality, politeness, transphobia, homophobia, progressivism, feminism, trauma-informed-ness, power, anarchism/radicalism, misogyny, therapy/psychology, religion, policy, pragmatism, stoicism, and a hundred other ways. setting a boundary with someone who expects you to be their emotional dumping ground is genuinely great. distancing yourself from high-stress situations at times when you genuinely have other shit to deal with is also a good idea. but you can't opt out of feeling emotions. neither can anyone else. telling people to filter out this thing that makes us human for as long as we are around you, or around anyone, is evil. it's an evil practice. and it makes people feel more helpless than they are; direct, difficult conversations with people you have an issue with is a learned skill.

in any case-- this moment contrasted this idea that pain should be avoided. he grieved my pain. he felt pain of his own. he didn't hide those things. he wrote about them. these things happen, and we can share them and talk about them together. I'm grateful he did. if suppression is unholy, maybe shared grief is holy.

[Note: I wrote this with the assumption that nobody who has known Robert Paul Wolff will see it. If you knew him, I'm sorry for your loss. I hope this post was adequately respectful and honorable towards his memory. Find a way to reach out to me if you'd like for me to take this down, and I will absolutely oblige.]