on a scale of one to ten, how much do you believe in God?
Caveat: cynicism can be analagous to kryptonite.
There are people and there are People. Without burying myself in semantics, I would submit that the individuals we see in the audience of a late night television show are people. The host of the show, and the guests around whom that night's festivities are organized, are not neatly encapsulated in my awkward dichotomy of people/People. Their televisual selves somehow crowd out their actual selves, the ones who eat shit sleep screw and occasionally flaggelate. Fame is like the projector that takes a tiny little slide and throws up onto the wall - it fucks with dimensions to an extent that makes categorization unbearably clumsy. If this becomes clearer as I go on, all is well and good. If it remains obscure, it shall remain obscure (how's that for a tautological clarification?).
Lower-case "p" people are those with whom you brush elbows when walking off the bus, or exchange glances with while testing the firmness of an orange you might purchase. They are cops directing traffic, waiters taking your order, drivers of big and little cars, etc. Especially in a city, we are surrounded by people the names of whom we do not and never will know. Small towns, on the other hand, make it difficult on someone who simply wants to live out their life as a person. Simple, lower-case personhood rubs against the confined, interpenetrating claustrophobia of small towns. Cities forgive you your mistakes; they offer, in some sense, a new group of people to cultivate as friends to replace the ones who knew what you did on the night you wish you could forget. Small towns make for long memories, and the repeated visits to the grocery store, or the ease with which onlookers attach your person to the kind of car you drive, individuates you in a way beyond your immediate control. You become someone, and in the process shed anonymity and concomitantly you have a personal history that others remember and hold you to.
It is always astounding, if somewhat painful, to be part of the transformation in which a person becomes a Person. A person becomes a Person to you as the observer when you know and acknowledge them as individuals, when they no longer are merely the dispensable window dressing of a new scene in the drama that is your life. The uptick from person to Person is a reflection of the intrusion they've made on your fantasy that the universe has taken special notice of your life and you the person living it, and everything outside of you and the movie of your life is marginal in comparison. People break you out of that fantasy, and it is not always enjoyble to shatter the two-dimensional screen your self-absorbed self has adopted as a perspective. Sociopaths, narcissists and - at least in the moment of their watching - television-watchers/movie goers see a world full of people; saints, I assume, see a world full of People.
Ahem. This is going off the deep end, perhaps, and is of course a very clumsy attempt to capture something i've been noticing in the net of sloppily constructed dichotomy that cannot subject itself to its subject and is thus a leaky vessel indeed. But nonetheless . . .
Ruminating on moving back to where I recently lived, staying here where I've lived for so long, or venturing out to somewhere new has got me thinking. It is so strange to reconnect with someone for whom you care, and notice in various ways that they have been living in the same time you have: a time that elapses and smooths over once prominent contours to distill and sometimes dismember what came before it. You forget that those beyond your immediate life boundaries are out there somewhere doing things, and you are the absent one, from their perspective. They are reduced in your consciousness, even if memories periodically avail themselves to you, even if you have pictures or are blessed with the gift of video footage. I learned today from something I was reading that "psychophobia" means both a fear of one's inner life and a fear of ghosts. I find the coupling of inner life and ghosts metaphorically interesting,but I also find the literal juxtaposition of inner life and ghosts obnoxious such that the fear of self leads one to phantasize it e.g. "the 'I' I am is a ghost" or Baudelaire declaiming: "The I is another." Hypocrite lecteur, indeed. But I do not discount the validity of the idea that as one ages one becomes more cognizant, and perhaps more fearful, of becoming ghost-like in the inner lives of others.(deep breath). I guess this is like the fear of impending death: what will remain of me when I'm gone, and so on. But at this point in my life I associate it more with a gradual diminishment of presence, a failure to summons acknowledgment from others - the spark of recognition alluded to above in distinguishing persons (cops, waiters, studio audience members) from People (relatives, neighbors, lovers, selves with whom seemingly insoluble connections are formed).
I'm obviously working this out line by line, so your patience is appreciated beforehand, but I think it is a symptom of age to have a heightened sense of the slippages that begin to separate you from others you once considered your naturalized appendages and start to pin you to your solitude. I don't think this is bad. I think a function of age is obviously forming a better self-acquaintance, a more fully realized sense of what works and what doesn't, and the pursuit of whatever path you take to that end may lead you away from others with whom you've shared your life and its irregular contours, or it may lead you directly to them. You may sail off into an apprenticeship in which you are the subject and object of study, or you may find out who you are by saying vows and making babies and giving wholly of yourself to someone else, or you may give yourself over to a group of like-minded individuals, like organized religion or intramural softball, or postmodern fiction, or etc. etc. etc.
What is inherent in you may be anathema to me. Each to their own; everybody's different. Everyone's a Person. But isn't that strange? isn't it fucking astonishing? It seems impossible to imagine what was lost when those 150,000 died in the tsunami; just as impossible to endow them with Personhood, as opposed to thinking of them as dead people. God may be the name of that impossibility, or it may be as nameless as the guy at the Get N Go who sold me this Coke and told me to have a good night.
There are people and there are People. Without burying myself in semantics, I would submit that the individuals we see in the audience of a late night television show are people. The host of the show, and the guests around whom that night's festivities are organized, are not neatly encapsulated in my awkward dichotomy of people/People. Their televisual selves somehow crowd out their actual selves, the ones who eat shit sleep screw and occasionally flaggelate. Fame is like the projector that takes a tiny little slide and throws up onto the wall - it fucks with dimensions to an extent that makes categorization unbearably clumsy. If this becomes clearer as I go on, all is well and good. If it remains obscure, it shall remain obscure (how's that for a tautological clarification?).
Lower-case "p" people are those with whom you brush elbows when walking off the bus, or exchange glances with while testing the firmness of an orange you might purchase. They are cops directing traffic, waiters taking your order, drivers of big and little cars, etc. Especially in a city, we are surrounded by people the names of whom we do not and never will know. Small towns, on the other hand, make it difficult on someone who simply wants to live out their life as a person. Simple, lower-case personhood rubs against the confined, interpenetrating claustrophobia of small towns. Cities forgive you your mistakes; they offer, in some sense, a new group of people to cultivate as friends to replace the ones who knew what you did on the night you wish you could forget. Small towns make for long memories, and the repeated visits to the grocery store, or the ease with which onlookers attach your person to the kind of car you drive, individuates you in a way beyond your immediate control. You become someone, and in the process shed anonymity and concomitantly you have a personal history that others remember and hold you to.
It is always astounding, if somewhat painful, to be part of the transformation in which a person becomes a Person. A person becomes a Person to you as the observer when you know and acknowledge them as individuals, when they no longer are merely the dispensable window dressing of a new scene in the drama that is your life. The uptick from person to Person is a reflection of the intrusion they've made on your fantasy that the universe has taken special notice of your life and you the person living it, and everything outside of you and the movie of your life is marginal in comparison. People break you out of that fantasy, and it is not always enjoyble to shatter the two-dimensional screen your self-absorbed self has adopted as a perspective. Sociopaths, narcissists and - at least in the moment of their watching - television-watchers/movie goers see a world full of people; saints, I assume, see a world full of People.
Ahem. This is going off the deep end, perhaps, and is of course a very clumsy attempt to capture something i've been noticing in the net of sloppily constructed dichotomy that cannot subject itself to its subject and is thus a leaky vessel indeed. But nonetheless . . .
Ruminating on moving back to where I recently lived, staying here where I've lived for so long, or venturing out to somewhere new has got me thinking. It is so strange to reconnect with someone for whom you care, and notice in various ways that they have been living in the same time you have: a time that elapses and smooths over once prominent contours to distill and sometimes dismember what came before it. You forget that those beyond your immediate life boundaries are out there somewhere doing things, and you are the absent one, from their perspective. They are reduced in your consciousness, even if memories periodically avail themselves to you, even if you have pictures or are blessed with the gift of video footage. I learned today from something I was reading that "psychophobia" means both a fear of one's inner life and a fear of ghosts. I find the coupling of inner life and ghosts metaphorically interesting,but I also find the literal juxtaposition of inner life and ghosts obnoxious such that the fear of self leads one to phantasize it e.g. "the 'I' I am is a ghost" or Baudelaire declaiming: "The I is another." Hypocrite lecteur, indeed. But I do not discount the validity of the idea that as one ages one becomes more cognizant, and perhaps more fearful, of becoming ghost-like in the inner lives of others.(deep breath). I guess this is like the fear of impending death: what will remain of me when I'm gone, and so on. But at this point in my life I associate it more with a gradual diminishment of presence, a failure to summons acknowledgment from others - the spark of recognition alluded to above in distinguishing persons (cops, waiters, studio audience members) from People (relatives, neighbors, lovers, selves with whom seemingly insoluble connections are formed).
I'm obviously working this out line by line, so your patience is appreciated beforehand, but I think it is a symptom of age to have a heightened sense of the slippages that begin to separate you from others you once considered your naturalized appendages and start to pin you to your solitude. I don't think this is bad. I think a function of age is obviously forming a better self-acquaintance, a more fully realized sense of what works and what doesn't, and the pursuit of whatever path you take to that end may lead you away from others with whom you've shared your life and its irregular contours, or it may lead you directly to them. You may sail off into an apprenticeship in which you are the subject and object of study, or you may find out who you are by saying vows and making babies and giving wholly of yourself to someone else, or you may give yourself over to a group of like-minded individuals, like organized religion or intramural softball, or postmodern fiction, or etc. etc. etc.
What is inherent in you may be anathema to me. Each to their own; everybody's different. Everyone's a Person. But isn't that strange? isn't it fucking astonishing? It seems impossible to imagine what was lost when those 150,000 died in the tsunami; just as impossible to endow them with Personhood, as opposed to thinking of them as dead people. God may be the name of that impossibility, or it may be as nameless as the guy at the Get N Go who sold me this Coke and told me to have a good night.
posted by am at
9:31 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home