Emotional Maximalism: The Art of Living in Spatial Polyphony
Try naming what you feel right now in one word. You can't. Nobody can. At any given second, you're carrying low-grade worry about a deadline, leftover warmth from a conversation two days back, mild irritation at a noise outside, some old thing you haven't named since you were nine, and hunger. Whitman got there in 1855. "I am large, I contain multitudes." Now look at how we're told to decorate. Pick a palette. Choose a style. Commit to a mood. The whole working vocabulary of interior design assumes a self that's singular, consistent, and resolvable into three complementary colors. That's not just narrow. As far as the psychology goes, it's inaccurate. The self was never one voice. Mikhail Bakhtin, writing about Dostoevsky in the 1920s, gave us the polyphonic novel. What made Dostoevsky revolutionary, in his reading, was the refusal to subordinate characters to a single authorial view. What you get instead is "a plurality of independent and unm...
