Does man break stone, or stone break man? What is this hidden essence of stone, this infinite patience? The grey evenings of the mind. It accumulates. It is everywhere.
Better to be an imperfect diamond than a perfect stone.
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Blah. In Late Antiquity everyone lives within themselves, drowsed out, oblivious of the world: Me, myself and I. And at the same time, precisely because one feels so isolated, alienated, one has to expend great energy on talking about oneself and confessing each and every detail of one's rather mundane life, whipping up some sort of a personality from very little material. The introvert dreams of being glamorous, is captivated by other lives, spellbound by a distant light.
Okay, I've never quite understood why people write biographies, diaries, or memoirs. And why people should want to read them is an even greater enigma. But the same holds for blogging! How sad is that!
The New Yorker's three 'theories':
1. The delusional: I am the centre of the world. What I have to say is funny, exciting, and unique (though I secretly know it probably isn't). What I have to say will shape other people's perceptions. Even the day-to-day trivia is worth noting.
2. Writing is neurotic: expressing the lives, desires, I do not live; the 9-5 is a sham. This is the real me, not that dumb clerk with his bourgeois pretensions you see before you.
3. Written a letter to daddy: Recognition. Please notice me, wise and benevolent reader. I'm messed up, messed up bad, but surely that resonates with your own story of human failing? In a gnostic age, this desire for acknowledgement, this search for a witness in a fake world, sounds plausible (Comments?None? Thought so. Damn you!).
For Rinku: lost in space
the commodification of self :
" The movement in self-anchorage as a movement of the 'real self' along a continuum from 'institution'to 'impulse'...a deep, unsocialized inner impulse"... institutions, norms, public spaces, authority, are so many artificial constraints on the authentic self ('self', not being)...a self that is "waiting to be discovered and spontaneously expressed".
But this was old hat, even in the sixties. Perhaps it was even old in the '20's. The Romantic impulse, straining against bourgeois sensibilities, stifling conformity, medieval or feudal ideas of a fixed identity. Norms, goals, public standards, an order of being, 'nature' or essence, are all things lyingly added. What's important is finding one's own unique voice, expressing one's intimate feelings. The rebel without a cause. How city-folk love to imagine themselves as nomads!
And nowhere is it suspected that this freedom to construct oneself or to express oneself is, far from being a sign of our freedom, instead, an indication of our entanglement in liquid modernity.
I am what I am. (I thought only God could say that!). How very convenient that the counterculture should just happen to feed into late capitalism's break from mass production and the growing influence of images and brands..."hip consumerism" (In universities, too, one is indoctrinated into "critical thinking"!). Pleasure without identity.
Is it any wonder, then, that at the theoretical and political level we have such great difficulty in saying 'we'? What else is methodological individualism in the social sciences? (one wonders if the subject even survives in science).
glamour and the end of irony
To imagine oneself without a past, to exist only in the present, to seize the day..isn't that the American dream?
All we really want to do is get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life.
I can't bear all the complications, and long for something that is facades-only.
----Richard Ford, 'The Sportswriter'
4 comments:
One writes also to understand- oneself...one's thoughts and feelings; others and events.
For some, writing is a way to develop a coherent narrative, bring some order to the chaos.
True, rinku. But what about writing blogs, diaries, memoirs, and boigraphies? Isn't it all a bit too self-obsessed?
sure, agree with you. It *can* be a vehicle for what you say. I tend to see it as a product of late capitalism though: we *can* say something, therefore we *must*. More is always better. Except for more silence !
Btw, Ivan Illich has a great (online) paper on the gaze and another on silence as a commons. The proliferation of images and this verbal hyperinflation is , in my opinion, part of the de-politicization that occurs under capitalism.
People are interesting, their dreams, their aspirations, the stories they come up with, the way they use their words to express their thoughts, I like to know them, like to know who/what they think they really are. I guess that is why I read biographies, memoirs and yes blogs as well. May be especially blogs because even though one might be far away, a part of them is accessible. It's something similar to receiving a letter and who does not like that? For instance, everytime I see a post I also see: Hello, how are you? I am fine/not fine and then at the end something like Cider House Rules' Dr. Larch,"Tomorrow same time, same place."
Regards,
Astarte
"People are interesting".
tend to agree with you there..except I would say: increasingly less so. I think this is partly down to globalisation: everyone comes at you from similar perspectives; but i think there really is something to the idea that arc of communicable experience is narrowing.
As a result what we have is blah,blah..whatever:babbling and personal confessions. I think there are fewer and fewer storytellers any more and the art of listening to other people, engaging with them is also on the wane...
I said the art of listening...:)
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