Still, Again

Photo: The Hart Crane Memorial, Cleveland, Ohio. Financed by Peter Putnam.

Peter Putnam believed the mind’s fundamental goal wasn’t to solve problems or pursue pleasure, but simply to repeat itself. Not in the mechanical sense, but existentially—to restore its own pattern after disruption. In his unpublished theory of mind, he imagined a system that, when perturbed by the environment, learns to act on that environment in such a way that it gets perturbed back into its original state. Repetition wasn’t just survival—it was identity maintenance. It was being.

Seen in light of his life, this idea becomes something more than metaphysics.

Putnam was a queer man born into a prominent, powerful family. His mother, Mildred, was extremely wealthy, and his father, George Palmer Putnam, was a famous publisher and the widower of Amelia Earhart. But the family home was cold, controlling, and shaped by status. Peter never fit. His theories were too abstract, his language too dense, his identity too far outside what his family—and later academia—could accept. Estranged from institutions and increasingly isolated, he withdrew. Eventually, he was working as a janitor in Louisiana—still writing, still thinking, filling file drawers with the theory he could never quite publish.

And yet, he kept returning. He kept repeating.

In this sense, repetition becomes a queer practice—not conformity, but insistence. For someone whose self was never affirmed by the world, repetition is how the self returns. I am here again. Still. The goal isn’t recognition. The goal is recurrence. And if the environment can’t support that directly, the system—the self—learns how to reshape it just enough to survive.

Late in life, Putnam stopped seeking approval. He chose joy. He danced. He lived with his partner, Claude. And in an act that feels almost miraculous, he chose care.

His mother, who had never really accepted who he was, moved in with him when she became ill. She had all the money in the world, but in the end, it was Peter who gave her what she needed. For the last three years of her life, Peter and Claude cared for her in their small apartment, giving her their bed and sleeping on a pull-out couch. They managed her daily needs—not for closure, not for redemption, not to rewrite the past, but because they could. Because joy, once chosen, made room for grace.

Putnam’s theory didn’t need to be published to be true. He lived it. He made joy his feedback loop. He repeated, not by circling back to who he was told to be, but by reasserting who he had become—again and again.

In remembering him now, in drawing his thought back into light, we participate in that loop. Not as repetition of content, but as fidelity to presence. A mind returning. Still, again.

Tags: #PeterPutnam #QueerTheory #PhilosophyOfMind #ObscureThinkers #Care #Repetition #Survival #LGBTQHistory #Forgiveness #HiddenGenius