The BSG era has come to a close. There might be subsequent spin-offs, but BSG in its essence has ended.
I only started getting into the series last September or so. For a long time I was inclined to lump Battlestar Galactica in with the rest of the drek on the Sci-Fi channel (or the SyFy channel as it is soon to be known, which goes to show how very little the channel's executives actually care about science fiction). Oh, a remake of that sucky Star-Wars-coattail-riding Battlestar Galactica show I saw as a kid? Yeah, let me get right on that. It can't be any worse than the Stargate spinoffs. I'll definitely schedule my Friday evenings around the watching of such a show.
Hell, I thought the original BSG was stupid when I was five. And I was a lot more forgiving of stupidity when I was five, as long as it was stupidity with space ships and robots and lasers.
But last fall, after hearing good things about it from people whose opinion I respect, I began looking more into the show. I noticed that it had scored emmys for writing; for *writing*, of all things. That's not something I'd expect from a show that was of the caliber of the Star Gates or any of the more recent Star Treks.
You see, gentle reader, when science fiction and fantasy and horror are at their best, they are some of the best fictions we have. People with small imaginations--the kind of people who use phrases like "truth is stranger than fiction" or "you can't make this stuff up" or "I was disappointed to find out that it didn't actually happen like it did in the movie" or "with so much interesting stuff going on in the world, why would you want to make anything up?"--refuse the validity of that which strays too far from their perceived reality. If it doesn't speak to their own particular reality--that of being a liberal middle-class caucasian around thirty years of age and living in 21st centurty Southern California or WHATEVER--it has no meaning for them.
And you know, I think those people are not entirely unjustified in dismissing speculative fiction. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror *does not* speak to any kind of reality. Certainly, there are the fantastic elements, but more critically, these forms usually do not speak to the realities of personal experience and personality and psychology. The speculative fictions indulge in a fetishistic worship of the conventions of genre, forgetting that stories--in whatever form--are supposed to be about people. Not about gods or emotionless monsters or sword fights or giant ships crusing between the stars. If the people in a story are not interesting and conflicted and complicated and complex, then the rest of the story is not interesting, no matter how much you cram it full of laser-spears or seven-foot tall bald dudes with weird tattoos or bad-ass mutant zombies or what have you. And that is why, even speaking from the point of relative ignorance whereby I have only seen scattershot clips or single episodes of the Star Gates and the post-TNG Star Treks and Babylon 5 and any number of other fantastic shows I can say, with confidence, that they all fucking suck.
But when science fiction or fantasy or horror *are* good and *do* have interesting characters, then they can serve to show us our own reality in a new light. They can explore possibilities, both psychological and scientific, in a way that straight fiction simply can't. Just as dreams can show us things about ourselves that literal, expository dialogue never could. The trick is to bring it back from that dislocated reality and socket it back into place with our own literal realities. The trick is to wake up from that dream (or vision or nightmare) of raw imagination and put it into context with experience. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror never bothers to do so. Maybe horror is justified in getting away with it sometimes, as horror is about the exploration of what happens when reality breaks down, but I'd still posit that horror is most interesting when its characters have a psychological reality--R.J. MacReady or Kirsty, instead of an utterly fungible twenty-four year old breast-augmented and already-faded starlet.
So when I went to watch BSG, I was watching it for the characters. I wanted the special effects to be good, of course--and they are. The CG space battles are as good as anything I've seen, and the CG cylons are honestly terrifying (at least in the first season). More telling, though, was the fact that all the enemies *weren't* CG; the pilot introduces cylons who look exactly like humans. It also shows a city with trees and fountains and streets. People aren't decked out in silly silver spacesuits or heavy robes or body paint, but wear clothing that wouldn't look out of place in any contemporary city. When the soldiers pull their guns, they have pistols and assault rifles, not laser weapons that fire beams of animated light (that perversely travel far slower than projectiles, such that you can actually see them go across the screen; go figure). It's as if the science fiction elements--the robots, the spaceships--were dropped directly into a contemporary or very-near-future society, and nothing else is changed. There's no Trek-like utopia. There's still racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, economic strife. The better to allow the characters to be real. And the conflict between the humans and cylons is ultimately a metaphor for such things as racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, and economic strife. It's not an easy battle between good and evil. Very soon, it becomes clear that these cylons are not your daddy's (and certainly my own father's) easy-to-hate Others who have no conscience and no identity outside of being evil.
Still, I wasn't sold on the show. At the outset, the characters were more interesting than those of most science fiction shows. But I didn't know if they were interesting enough. Commander William Adama, as played by Edward James Olmos, is a father figure who sometimes struggles to balance his personal feelings with the responsibilities of his post. He strives to keep control over his ship and the remnants of the human race, and that control often slips. It's an interesting character, and certainly more interesting than the kind of benevolent paternal authority figure who is always right about everything (see Lorne Greene in the original BSG), but it is one that I felt I had seen often enough before. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, as played by Katee Sackhoff, is a rebellious hotshot who has trouble with authority. I *knew* I had seen *that* character before. But Colonel Saul Tigh, as played by Michael Hogan, is an alcoholic who experiences no miraculous recovery in the course of his character arc. He is abusive, both with himself and with others. And yet he is utterly dedicated to his job and gives as much as he can to the honor of his office, and he is lost without his uniform and his position to define him. Now this was something I had not quite seen before.
I was still dubious about BSG for the first half of the season. I appreciated the changes between the pilot and the first actual episode: the ship got darker, tighter, and the shots were more close-ups shot at cramped angles. The show was becoming more intimate, and more intense. But I didn't yet know if it really had characters--and so stories--that would keep me interested.
I wasn't completely sold on BSG until episode 1-8, entitled "Flesh and Bone." In it, Starbuck goes to interview a Cylon prisoner about a bomb threat. And by interview, it is understood that she is planning to torture him for information. When this was starting out, I was expecting something along the lines of 24, wherein the bad guy is put through excessive and gratuitous pain before he caves and tells everything he knows, and then the good guys rush off to save the day. I was thinking this was where BSG was going to lose me, even as 24 has lost me.
And that is how things start. But the Cylon is not spiteful or defiant. He doesn't condemn Starbuck or humankind, indulge in racial epithets, or do anything that would invalidate him or justify the torture. Instead, he questions Starbuck on her own morality and spirituality. Starbuck is unnerved by this intimate contact with the hated machine enemy, and ceases to be an effective torturer.
The episode resolves with the President of the surviving humans, who had up until that point been an almost too-sympathetic character, lying to the cylon and promising him his safety if he reveals the location of the bomb. The cylon reveals that there is no bomb, and the President has him blasted out of an airlock.
Now this was something I definitely hadn't seen before at all.
The characters are further made interesting by their struggles to define their own humanity. Some of the "humans" are revealed to be cylons, and have to reconcile themselves to this knowledge in some way. Others come to love cylons, or at least think cylons have some claim to be free from persecution.
In the end, there is no difference between man and machine. The creator is not divorced from his creation. What we do is who we are. Our essence is not divisble from our actions.
Good and evil--human and cylon--are labels applied after the fact to try to simplify beings with limited capabilities who are compelled to make choices in a complex world. And these labels are ultimately shown to be bereft of real meaning.
Having spent most of my life feeling excluded from humanity, it's natural for me to sympathize with the monsters in a piece of fiction, and so this kind of thing is right up my alley. My own personal issues aside, I do believe that the exploration and examination of what makes us human is a worthy one. I think it's too easy to assume that "personhood" is restricted to only living, organic humans. Or, better yet, that it's restricted to people of a certain race or creed, and that everybody who is not a member of a certain in-group has no right to life. I think speculative fiction, when it is at its best, challenges our narrow definitions of what it is to be "human." BSG certainly does that.
Maybe the reversals are too facile in some cases, especially in the last season. I felt like a lot of the shows towards the end, after the false duality of cylon and human has largely been deconstructed, try too hard to show that cylons have feelings, too, and are sad when they have miscarriages or when they lose a loved one or when they are unloved. But I'm still glad that those reversals exist at all. Again, good speculative fiction challenges the assumptions of its characters. Immature and fetishstic speculative fiction (and most video games, and most fan fiction) doesn't ever challenge the characters' beliefs in any serious way. And while I don't always like the way BSG handles these developments, and there were times when I felt like I was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy in Space for all of the overwrought drama, I would say that BSG does hit the mark at least as often as not in creating meaningful and defining moments for its characters.
So I am going to miss BSG. It is the kind of sophisticated, intelligent speculative fiction that I always want and so rarely get.
Unless I write it myself. Which I try to do.
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
On Johnny Cash, Existentialism, and Self Esteem
Today I was reading a text concerning co-dependence and self-defeating behavior. In it, the author says that people with low self-esteem rely on what she calls other-esteem; that is, that they define themselves in terms of how others see them. They evaluate themselves based upon their actions and the reception of those actions, rather than believing that a person has inherent worth and value, as imbued by a creator (a "Higher Power," as she calls it). She makes a distinction between "human beings" who have a sense of self-worth independent of their actions and "human doings" whose self-worth is dependent upon their interactions with others.
I am not a "human being" in accordance with this definition. Indeed, there have been many times in the past when I thought about membership in a species, including homo sapiens sapiens, as being conditional. One scientific definition of a species is that its members are capable of true reproduction--that is, mating and producing viable offspring of the same species as the parents. In the many years in which I had no access to sexual intercourse I questioned my own validity as a member of the human race. I wondered many times whether this lack of access was biological or psychological or social...but in the end, I concluded it didn't matter. If I couldn't mate with another human being, for whatever reason, I wasn't fully human.
I struggle, really seriously struggle, with the idea that people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Quakerism posits that all people have access to the divine, and that all life is worthy. This leads to the Quaker prohibition against violence (how can one person use force on another when all are equally worthy?), and the Quaker tendency away from absolute doctorines and towards Testimonies that have their root in human experience and not abstracted ideals.
It's not that I cannot see the value in such an approach. But it's difficult for me to accept and believe.
I think people are defined by their actions, not some innate quality of being. Or at least, that's how I define people. When I have to summarize somebody, I think of him in terms of profession: he is an engineer, a soldier, a singer. I think of him as doing these things well or poorly: he is a competent engineer, a poor soldier, an excellent singer. Maybe I think of him as being a good person or a bad person, as expressed by his actions that tend to be either towards a general good or towards a destructive selfishness. I might think of him as a friendly person, or a rude person, a giving person or a cruel person, but again these evaluations are based on expressions of these qualities. I rail against that easy conceit whereby somebody is said to have a "stern mouth" or "intelligent eyes" or "kind hands," and all that can or needs to be known about him is expressed in his innate physiology.
I am obligated to be re-reading Tess of the D'urbervilles, and Thomas Hardy does this kind of thing a lot. You can tell all you need to know about a person just by looking at him; Alex D'urberville has sensuous lips and a long moustache which he tends to twirl; only Tess can recognize the cruelty and crudity of him, but that's because the other characters in the novel are simple and stupid people with broad cheeks and big hands, while Tess has the delicate and transcendent beauty of Innocence and Intelligence Wronged. So fuck *that* shit.
I am a writer, an ethical person, a boyfriend. I am a friend, and a member of my family. If I fail at these things--if I write poorly, if I have a lapse in ethics, if I am a disappointing boyfriend or friend--what am I? Do I have some value outside of my failures? If I do, I cannot see it.
I don't pay much attention in any serious way to defining myself in terms of nationality, sex, or race. I don't think of such definitions as being valid. I am an American...but what is that? Either it is expressed in my actions and in my way of thinking about reality, or it doesn't matter. A person is a competent engineer or an excellent singer; does it matter if he is black or she is Indian? Not really; not to me. I know these definitions are very important to others. But I only think of them as being important in their act of expression, in their capacity for shaping choices, not in their "beingness."
I don't even like to think of people in terms of names. I forget names; I never pay attention to them in the first place. Titles have meaning; they are indications of achievement. Quakers are against titles. But I am against names. Especially American names, which are a mish-mash of Hebrew and European traditions and which are usually chosen for their sound or popularity and so evacuated of their true meaning. My first name means "Beloved;" beloved of whom? Of God? Of my parents? If so, then my name is more of a lie than a truth. Is it a reference to the Biblical King David, that singer and sinner and giant-killer? Did I express some analogous qualities in utero that caused my parents to pick that name for me? Or do I just have that name because my father had it, and his father before him, and should I believe that there's some kind of inherent "Davidness" in me?
Another thing I rail against is someone saying "You're such a David" or "I never met a Tim that I didn't like." What the fuck is this essential "Davidness" or "Timness" by which the individual is being compared? It cannot be anything more than the comparer's composite experience with Davids and Tims, and thus is an expression of experiential qualities, not essential ones.
My middle name is Michael. Michael is a question: "Who is like God?" in the Hebrew. It's the battle-cry of the right angels as they go to fight against the fallen. I've been thinking a lot about this question of late. There's no answer to it. No one is like God; no one can do what God can do. Anyone who is like God would be spared the angel's wrath. But no one is like God. And so anyone would deserve to be spit upon an angel's flaming sword.
What is physical beauty, but an admiration for the potence and potential in a person? Muscularity is beautiful in men, fertility is beautiful in women. Men are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as providers and defenders, women are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as lovers and mothers. Why do you think it is that men are drawn to a woman's breasts, if not as an implied promise that she will be a good provider for children? We admire youth and health--the capability to act, and express one's will upon the world. We do not admire sickness and impotence. We exalt athletes. Capability is attractive. Confidence is attractive. Ineffectuality is ugly. I am ugly, because my body is largely ineffectual, and reflects years of poorly chosen actions.
Wisdom is beautiful in those who are older, but even that has a relative quality; would wisdom have worth if it could not guide the young? Wisdom is beautiful, but senility is awful. Or, at best, tragic.
Does a person whose actions have no value to others have worth outside of those actions? Does a serial rapist have worth? I don't know. I wouldn't think so. Does a person who is bound to a wheelchair and who exhibits no brain function have worth? I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't think of such a person as much of a "person" at all. Maybe the serial rapist or the invalid have value to their families or friends, if such are available, but would that value be the valuation of some inherent quality in the loved one, or a projection and creation of value on the part of the loving one, and so an action and a subjective assertion of value?
I would think any person would have the right to be free from inflicted pain and suffering. But this isn't really an estimation of a person's value. It wouldn't be right for me to stab you with a knife or steal from you or poison your dog, whether you were an average person or a great humanitarian or a serial rapist. The prohibition to not cause pain to people does not show that people have worth. It just shows that pain is terrible in the infliction and in the receipt. I am not obligated to go around preventing other people from being stabbed or robbed or having their dogs poisoned because all people should be free from these things. I am only obliged to not do it myself, because the power in the action of inflicting pain on a person is overwhelming and negative and can cancel out whatever else that person has done. Simple acts of cruelty can destroy whatever worth a person has. Else why the tremendous prohibitions against violence? It is action used unfairly and unconscionably.
I can act to prevent other people from being stabbed or robbed, but that is a choice I can make--an action I can take--and isn't required or expected of me in the way that not stabbing and not robbing and not caniciding are expected and required.
We exalt the fireman who rushes into the crumbling tower to try to save a life, and so taking action. He is a hero. We don't exalt somebody who stands on the sidelines, and is merely being there. He does not matter.
History remembers Alexander, the conqueror of the world. History even remembers Alexander's horse, Bucephalus, so essential to that conquest. Does history remember the soldier who was assigned the ignominious duty of sweeping the shit out of Bucephalus' stall? It does not. His actions did not matter. Now he does not matter.
How do we assign value to non-human organisms? We value those which are useful to us--apples, cats which at first killed rats around Egyptian granaries and were only later seen as pets or gods, aesthetically-pleasing trees. We do not value weeds or parasites. The biologist might, because she can see things that the rest of us can't, but often that is a respect for the capabilities of these organisms and their success in their respective fields or the value of their genes, not because something just "is." If there was something inherently valuable in life, we would value Rhinovirus cells as much as we would value the life of a beloved pet, or the President of the United States. But we don't. At least, I don't see many people boycotting anti-biotics because we believe that the billions of cold virus cells have as much claim to life as their human host.
Increasingly, people put a value on animal life in accordance with its intelligence--its capability to understand, and to act upon that understanding. Certainly most of us would think it abhorrent to kill a gorilla that could speak in sign language, or a parrot that could speak in complete sentences. I think back on a National Geographic article from some months back in which it was described how a family of gorillas had been killed by guerillas (the verbal irony was quite funny to me) in the Congo. When rangers found the "murdered" gorillas, the rangers carried the great apes out of the jungle on biers and gave something akin to a funeral. Villagers *mourned* the loss of these animals. We would feel no such compunctions about jellyfish or tapeworms. When was the last time you saw a funeral for a maggot? There are those among us--many among us now--who extend the valuation of awareness and capability far beyond its traditional limits, but even then it is largely circumscribed by a recognition of human-like intelligence in the animals so valued, now that intelligence is evaluated in differences of degree, rather than absolute differences of kind. One of the commonest arguments I hear from people decrying the consumption of meat is that pigs are intelligent animals, as intelligent as dogs, and suffer under their living conditions and experience terror when they know they are to die. I hear no such arguments about plants, which are assumed to be immune to feeling and fear. So it is intelligence, then--the capability to assess, and to act upon that assessment--which is valued. Being, in itself, has little meaning or worth.
All this is to say that I see every interaction with another person as a performative interaction by which I will be judged. If I am praised, then I feel validated. If I perform poorly, earning scorn or even ambivalence or disinterest, then I question where my worth as a person might be found. I do not believe, as the author of this psychiatry book does, that existence preceeds essence and that I have value outside of my actions and interactions.
The concept of unconditional love is so surreal to me. I've often thought of unconditional love in terms of being that which is given freely, and hence that which has no worth. I don't think I had much of that in my own experience. Even now, among the people who care about me most, I am just one or two offenses away from alienating them utterly. I am ever only one or two offenses away.
The concept of a God who loves unconditionally is perverse to me. A God who evaluates and hates his creation, finding it wanting, hating humans for not being able to live up to impossible standards even as He created them to be inadequate, a God that banishes people to the darkness beyond the wall where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth--that God is also perverse, and yet He seems more real to me. More believable. I reject Him now; I hate Him. I reject that Father so like my own father, who would punish His creation for His own inadequacies. I reject that God who would hold sinners in his angry hands just barely out of the reach of a destroying fire. And I cannot believe in a universe that would have such a cruel organizing principle. Or I refuse to, anyway, even if I suspect all the while that it might in fact be actual. At the very least, I can refuse to adore and validate such a God, even as all the while I scramble to please him and dread the utter anihilation that will come with His pleasure as I writhe in fire forever and ever after I am dead.
But a God who would love and forgive me for my failures--even unto such things as rape and murder--does that God make any more sense? A God who blindly loves, rather than blindly hates, is still absurd, even as the person who tries to hug everyone is as mad as the person who lashes out and bites anyone who comes close. Or maybe divine love is just beyond human reckoning, in which case I am an idiot to try to fathom it, and I should spend no more of my effort on it. Certainly I find no evidence of divine love in my life--or divine anything--nothing I can touch or taste or see or hear or feel or measure and objectively know. I interpret this emptiness as an absence most times, when I do not interpret it as contempt or as that dreadful anticipatory silence in which the cop need only wait for the criminal to fuck himself over with his babbled lies and contradictions and so prove himself the guilty party (See the ending of Til We Have Faces for exactly this). I cannot accept, then, as the author of this book asserts, that I have worth inherent in my being created by a Higher Power.
She says that forming a healthy sense of self-esteem is contingent upon believing that I have inherent worth. Certainly, I can see that my tendency to constantly question my own worth in so many things and to rely almost entirely on feedback from others to be able to guage the efficacy of my being is extremely hazardous. But I will have a great deal of difficulty in accepting that I somehow am worthy and even loveable simply by being.
I was thinking about all this in the lonely hours of last night after a writing workshop that had exposed flaws in my work to which I had been oblivious, and left me feeling as though I had little worth as a writer, and hence as a person. I turned to probably my greatest spiritual guide in life, Johnny Cash. In his songs, he posits that people have value and dignity independent of their actions. The first song that came to mind was "The Man Who Couldn't Cry." The protagonist of the song fucks *everything* up.
To wit:
"The Man Who Couldn't Cry"
There once was a man who just couldn't cry
He hadn't cried for years and for years
Napalmed babies and the movie love story
For instance could not produce tears
As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts ran dry
He grew to be a man, the feces hit the fan
Things got bad, but he couldn't cry
His dog was run over, his wife up and left him
And after that he got sacked from his job
Lost his arm in the war, was laughed at by a whore
Ah, but sill not a sniffle or sob
His novel was refused, his movie was panned
And his big Broadway show was a flop
He got sent off to jail; you guessed it, no bail
Oh, but still not a dribble or drop
In jail he was beaten, bullied and buggered
And made to make license plates
Water and bread was all he was fed
But not once did a tear stain his face
Doctors were called in, scientists, too
Theologians were last and practically least
They all agreed sure enough; this was sure no cream puff
But in fact an insensitive beast
He was removed from jail and placed in a place
For the insensitive and the insane
He played lots of chess and made lots of friends
And he wept every time it would rain
Once it rained forty days and it rained forty nights
And he cried and he cried and he cried and he cried
On the forty-first day, he passed away
He just dehydrated and died
Well, he went up to heaven, located his dog
Not only that, but he rejoined his arm
Down below, all the critics, they loot it all back
Cancer robbed the whore of her charm
His ex-wife died of stretch marks, his ex-employer went broke
The theologians were finally found out
Right down to the ground, that old jail house burned down
The earth suffered perpetual drought
See, the protagonist is forgiven all his sins and errors. Note that he gets his dog back before he bothers to retrieve his arm. His worth is not in what he has done--all of which has failed--but is inherent in his being. Johnny Cash songs are full of such forgiven failures--indeed, if anybody could actually make me believe in a Jesus who forgives people for their errors and finds worth in human beings independent of their actions, it would probably be Johnny Cash. I think he sincerely and seriously believed in such redemption.
But can I believe in such things? It might be healthy--or effective--for me to do so. And yet it is such anathema to me.
The writing of this blog entry was a performative action. I don't think anybody reads this blog; therefore, the action will fail. Funny, that. Or not funny. Tragic, maybe; tragedy is about an actor going beyond his capabilities, and that actor being brought to task and punished for his transgressions. But even in that punishment, does not the actor prove his worth in trying to
do what other men do not dare to do? Yes, he must be blinded and exiled and murdered, but what wonderful and terrible things he has done. If Oedipus had never been king and taken up that forbidden bed and tried to cure the plague, Oedipus would not matter. If Achilles had never raged against Hector and the sons of Atreus, Achilles would not matter.
My God, I love tragedy.
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."--Philippians 4:8
Arete.
If I am not excellent, I am not anything.
I am not a "human being" in accordance with this definition. Indeed, there have been many times in the past when I thought about membership in a species, including homo sapiens sapiens, as being conditional. One scientific definition of a species is that its members are capable of true reproduction--that is, mating and producing viable offspring of the same species as the parents. In the many years in which I had no access to sexual intercourse I questioned my own validity as a member of the human race. I wondered many times whether this lack of access was biological or psychological or social...but in the end, I concluded it didn't matter. If I couldn't mate with another human being, for whatever reason, I wasn't fully human.
I struggle, really seriously struggle, with the idea that people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Quakerism posits that all people have access to the divine, and that all life is worthy. This leads to the Quaker prohibition against violence (how can one person use force on another when all are equally worthy?), and the Quaker tendency away from absolute doctorines and towards Testimonies that have their root in human experience and not abstracted ideals.
It's not that I cannot see the value in such an approach. But it's difficult for me to accept and believe.
I think people are defined by their actions, not some innate quality of being. Or at least, that's how I define people. When I have to summarize somebody, I think of him in terms of profession: he is an engineer, a soldier, a singer. I think of him as doing these things well or poorly: he is a competent engineer, a poor soldier, an excellent singer. Maybe I think of him as being a good person or a bad person, as expressed by his actions that tend to be either towards a general good or towards a destructive selfishness. I might think of him as a friendly person, or a rude person, a giving person or a cruel person, but again these evaluations are based on expressions of these qualities. I rail against that easy conceit whereby somebody is said to have a "stern mouth" or "intelligent eyes" or "kind hands," and all that can or needs to be known about him is expressed in his innate physiology.
I am obligated to be re-reading Tess of the D'urbervilles, and Thomas Hardy does this kind of thing a lot. You can tell all you need to know about a person just by looking at him; Alex D'urberville has sensuous lips and a long moustache which he tends to twirl; only Tess can recognize the cruelty and crudity of him, but that's because the other characters in the novel are simple and stupid people with broad cheeks and big hands, while Tess has the delicate and transcendent beauty of Innocence and Intelligence Wronged. So fuck *that* shit.
I am a writer, an ethical person, a boyfriend. I am a friend, and a member of my family. If I fail at these things--if I write poorly, if I have a lapse in ethics, if I am a disappointing boyfriend or friend--what am I? Do I have some value outside of my failures? If I do, I cannot see it.
I don't pay much attention in any serious way to defining myself in terms of nationality, sex, or race. I don't think of such definitions as being valid. I am an American...but what is that? Either it is expressed in my actions and in my way of thinking about reality, or it doesn't matter. A person is a competent engineer or an excellent singer; does it matter if he is black or she is Indian? Not really; not to me. I know these definitions are very important to others. But I only think of them as being important in their act of expression, in their capacity for shaping choices, not in their "beingness."
I don't even like to think of people in terms of names. I forget names; I never pay attention to them in the first place. Titles have meaning; they are indications of achievement. Quakers are against titles. But I am against names. Especially American names, which are a mish-mash of Hebrew and European traditions and which are usually chosen for their sound or popularity and so evacuated of their true meaning. My first name means "Beloved;" beloved of whom? Of God? Of my parents? If so, then my name is more of a lie than a truth. Is it a reference to the Biblical King David, that singer and sinner and giant-killer? Did I express some analogous qualities in utero that caused my parents to pick that name for me? Or do I just have that name because my father had it, and his father before him, and should I believe that there's some kind of inherent "Davidness" in me?
Another thing I rail against is someone saying "You're such a David" or "I never met a Tim that I didn't like." What the fuck is this essential "Davidness" or "Timness" by which the individual is being compared? It cannot be anything more than the comparer's composite experience with Davids and Tims, and thus is an expression of experiential qualities, not essential ones.
My middle name is Michael. Michael is a question: "Who is like God?" in the Hebrew. It's the battle-cry of the right angels as they go to fight against the fallen. I've been thinking a lot about this question of late. There's no answer to it. No one is like God; no one can do what God can do. Anyone who is like God would be spared the angel's wrath. But no one is like God. And so anyone would deserve to be spit upon an angel's flaming sword.
What is physical beauty, but an admiration for the potence and potential in a person? Muscularity is beautiful in men, fertility is beautiful in women. Men are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as providers and defenders, women are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as lovers and mothers. Why do you think it is that men are drawn to a woman's breasts, if not as an implied promise that she will be a good provider for children? We admire youth and health--the capability to act, and express one's will upon the world. We do not admire sickness and impotence. We exalt athletes. Capability is attractive. Confidence is attractive. Ineffectuality is ugly. I am ugly, because my body is largely ineffectual, and reflects years of poorly chosen actions.
Wisdom is beautiful in those who are older, but even that has a relative quality; would wisdom have worth if it could not guide the young? Wisdom is beautiful, but senility is awful. Or, at best, tragic.
Does a person whose actions have no value to others have worth outside of those actions? Does a serial rapist have worth? I don't know. I wouldn't think so. Does a person who is bound to a wheelchair and who exhibits no brain function have worth? I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't think of such a person as much of a "person" at all. Maybe the serial rapist or the invalid have value to their families or friends, if such are available, but would that value be the valuation of some inherent quality in the loved one, or a projection and creation of value on the part of the loving one, and so an action and a subjective assertion of value?
I would think any person would have the right to be free from inflicted pain and suffering. But this isn't really an estimation of a person's value. It wouldn't be right for me to stab you with a knife or steal from you or poison your dog, whether you were an average person or a great humanitarian or a serial rapist. The prohibition to not cause pain to people does not show that people have worth. It just shows that pain is terrible in the infliction and in the receipt. I am not obligated to go around preventing other people from being stabbed or robbed or having their dogs poisoned because all people should be free from these things. I am only obliged to not do it myself, because the power in the action of inflicting pain on a person is overwhelming and negative and can cancel out whatever else that person has done. Simple acts of cruelty can destroy whatever worth a person has. Else why the tremendous prohibitions against violence? It is action used unfairly and unconscionably.
I can act to prevent other people from being stabbed or robbed, but that is a choice I can make--an action I can take--and isn't required or expected of me in the way that not stabbing and not robbing and not caniciding are expected and required.
We exalt the fireman who rushes into the crumbling tower to try to save a life, and so taking action. He is a hero. We don't exalt somebody who stands on the sidelines, and is merely being there. He does not matter.
History remembers Alexander, the conqueror of the world. History even remembers Alexander's horse, Bucephalus, so essential to that conquest. Does history remember the soldier who was assigned the ignominious duty of sweeping the shit out of Bucephalus' stall? It does not. His actions did not matter. Now he does not matter.
How do we assign value to non-human organisms? We value those which are useful to us--apples, cats which at first killed rats around Egyptian granaries and were only later seen as pets or gods, aesthetically-pleasing trees. We do not value weeds or parasites. The biologist might, because she can see things that the rest of us can't, but often that is a respect for the capabilities of these organisms and their success in their respective fields or the value of their genes, not because something just "is." If there was something inherently valuable in life, we would value Rhinovirus cells as much as we would value the life of a beloved pet, or the President of the United States. But we don't. At least, I don't see many people boycotting anti-biotics because we believe that the billions of cold virus cells have as much claim to life as their human host.
Increasingly, people put a value on animal life in accordance with its intelligence--its capability to understand, and to act upon that understanding. Certainly most of us would think it abhorrent to kill a gorilla that could speak in sign language, or a parrot that could speak in complete sentences. I think back on a National Geographic article from some months back in which it was described how a family of gorillas had been killed by guerillas (the verbal irony was quite funny to me) in the Congo. When rangers found the "murdered" gorillas, the rangers carried the great apes out of the jungle on biers and gave something akin to a funeral. Villagers *mourned* the loss of these animals. We would feel no such compunctions about jellyfish or tapeworms. When was the last time you saw a funeral for a maggot? There are those among us--many among us now--who extend the valuation of awareness and capability far beyond its traditional limits, but even then it is largely circumscribed by a recognition of human-like intelligence in the animals so valued, now that intelligence is evaluated in differences of degree, rather than absolute differences of kind. One of the commonest arguments I hear from people decrying the consumption of meat is that pigs are intelligent animals, as intelligent as dogs, and suffer under their living conditions and experience terror when they know they are to die. I hear no such arguments about plants, which are assumed to be immune to feeling and fear. So it is intelligence, then--the capability to assess, and to act upon that assessment--which is valued. Being, in itself, has little meaning or worth.
All this is to say that I see every interaction with another person as a performative interaction by which I will be judged. If I am praised, then I feel validated. If I perform poorly, earning scorn or even ambivalence or disinterest, then I question where my worth as a person might be found. I do not believe, as the author of this psychiatry book does, that existence preceeds essence and that I have value outside of my actions and interactions.
The concept of unconditional love is so surreal to me. I've often thought of unconditional love in terms of being that which is given freely, and hence that which has no worth. I don't think I had much of that in my own experience. Even now, among the people who care about me most, I am just one or two offenses away from alienating them utterly. I am ever only one or two offenses away.
The concept of a God who loves unconditionally is perverse to me. A God who evaluates and hates his creation, finding it wanting, hating humans for not being able to live up to impossible standards even as He created them to be inadequate, a God that banishes people to the darkness beyond the wall where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth--that God is also perverse, and yet He seems more real to me. More believable. I reject Him now; I hate Him. I reject that Father so like my own father, who would punish His creation for His own inadequacies. I reject that God who would hold sinners in his angry hands just barely out of the reach of a destroying fire. And I cannot believe in a universe that would have such a cruel organizing principle. Or I refuse to, anyway, even if I suspect all the while that it might in fact be actual. At the very least, I can refuse to adore and validate such a God, even as all the while I scramble to please him and dread the utter anihilation that will come with His pleasure as I writhe in fire forever and ever after I am dead.
But a God who would love and forgive me for my failures--even unto such things as rape and murder--does that God make any more sense? A God who blindly loves, rather than blindly hates, is still absurd, even as the person who tries to hug everyone is as mad as the person who lashes out and bites anyone who comes close. Or maybe divine love is just beyond human reckoning, in which case I am an idiot to try to fathom it, and I should spend no more of my effort on it. Certainly I find no evidence of divine love in my life--or divine anything--nothing I can touch or taste or see or hear or feel or measure and objectively know. I interpret this emptiness as an absence most times, when I do not interpret it as contempt or as that dreadful anticipatory silence in which the cop need only wait for the criminal to fuck himself over with his babbled lies and contradictions and so prove himself the guilty party (See the ending of Til We Have Faces for exactly this). I cannot accept, then, as the author of this book asserts, that I have worth inherent in my being created by a Higher Power.
She says that forming a healthy sense of self-esteem is contingent upon believing that I have inherent worth. Certainly, I can see that my tendency to constantly question my own worth in so many things and to rely almost entirely on feedback from others to be able to guage the efficacy of my being is extremely hazardous. But I will have a great deal of difficulty in accepting that I somehow am worthy and even loveable simply by being.
I was thinking about all this in the lonely hours of last night after a writing workshop that had exposed flaws in my work to which I had been oblivious, and left me feeling as though I had little worth as a writer, and hence as a person. I turned to probably my greatest spiritual guide in life, Johnny Cash. In his songs, he posits that people have value and dignity independent of their actions. The first song that came to mind was "The Man Who Couldn't Cry." The protagonist of the song fucks *everything* up.
To wit:
"The Man Who Couldn't Cry"
There once was a man who just couldn't cry
He hadn't cried for years and for years
Napalmed babies and the movie love story
For instance could not produce tears
As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts ran dry
He grew to be a man, the feces hit the fan
Things got bad, but he couldn't cry
His dog was run over, his wife up and left him
And after that he got sacked from his job
Lost his arm in the war, was laughed at by a whore
Ah, but sill not a sniffle or sob
His novel was refused, his movie was panned
And his big Broadway show was a flop
He got sent off to jail; you guessed it, no bail
Oh, but still not a dribble or drop
In jail he was beaten, bullied and buggered
And made to make license plates
Water and bread was all he was fed
But not once did a tear stain his face
Doctors were called in, scientists, too
Theologians were last and practically least
They all agreed sure enough; this was sure no cream puff
But in fact an insensitive beast
He was removed from jail and placed in a place
For the insensitive and the insane
He played lots of chess and made lots of friends
And he wept every time it would rain
Once it rained forty days and it rained forty nights
And he cried and he cried and he cried and he cried
On the forty-first day, he passed away
He just dehydrated and died
Well, he went up to heaven, located his dog
Not only that, but he rejoined his arm
Down below, all the critics, they loot it all back
Cancer robbed the whore of her charm
His ex-wife died of stretch marks, his ex-employer went broke
The theologians were finally found out
Right down to the ground, that old jail house burned down
The earth suffered perpetual drought
See, the protagonist is forgiven all his sins and errors. Note that he gets his dog back before he bothers to retrieve his arm. His worth is not in what he has done--all of which has failed--but is inherent in his being. Johnny Cash songs are full of such forgiven failures--indeed, if anybody could actually make me believe in a Jesus who forgives people for their errors and finds worth in human beings independent of their actions, it would probably be Johnny Cash. I think he sincerely and seriously believed in such redemption.
But can I believe in such things? It might be healthy--or effective--for me to do so. And yet it is such anathema to me.
The writing of this blog entry was a performative action. I don't think anybody reads this blog; therefore, the action will fail. Funny, that. Or not funny. Tragic, maybe; tragedy is about an actor going beyond his capabilities, and that actor being brought to task and punished for his transgressions. But even in that punishment, does not the actor prove his worth in trying to
do what other men do not dare to do? Yes, he must be blinded and exiled and murdered, but what wonderful and terrible things he has done. If Oedipus had never been king and taken up that forbidden bed and tried to cure the plague, Oedipus would not matter. If Achilles had never raged against Hector and the sons of Atreus, Achilles would not matter.
My God, I love tragedy.
"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."--Philippians 4:8
Arete.
If I am not excellent, I am not anything.
San Diego Radio is the suck
Imagine my excitement, gentle reader, that first time I was driving down to San Diego and was cycling through the FM frequencies and discovered a hard rock station. This is not to disparage the rock radio stations in Orange County, except that KROQ mostly plays music that appeals to seventeen year olds (adolescents, forgive me!) whose musical appreciation does not reach back past Nirvana's Nevermind and, thus, whose opinions of music have been entirely informed by the popular products of the past ten years which are, I can say without reservation, pretty crappy. So I do mean to disparage KROQ. KLOS is not bad, but after listening to that station (and KRTH before it) for years, every single song of the limited setlist was so burned into my brain that I could conjure up a memory of that song from beginning to finish, lyrics and melody and guitar solo and drum line and bass line and all. At some point, even such classics as "Interstate Love Song" and "Sweet Home Alabama" grow tedious for want of a leavening of new material. So, when I stumbled upon KIOZ and heard "Closer" on the radio--"Closer," gentle reader, "Closer!," with half the song being modified into scratchy sounds where all the f-words are supposed to be!--you can imagine my delight. You can also imagine my delight when I found, only .4 up the dial, San Diego's XLNC 1 classical station. Synergy! When I grew tired of the hard rock, I could listen to the Beethoven and Mendelssohn that I have been coming to love, which are not unlike metal in their own rights.
I maintained this enthusiasm for a week. Then went through a phase of pleased acceptance. That gave way to disinterest, which ultimately degenerated into out-and-out disgust.
KIOZ friggin' sucks. As little as I like Korn or the Offspring, I find myself longing for a song by these bands to save me from a spare of uninspired "new" garbage (Saving Abel, Disturbed, Puddle of Mudd, Papa Roach, et cetera). It's a sad day when I actually think that a Slipknot or Linkin park song is the best song I've heard all day, or when I can at least concede that Disturbed has a good sense of rythm even if their melodies are trite and their lyrics are stupid and David Draiman still sounds like a grunting chimpanzee to me ("Ooooh wa-ah-ah-ah! Get up, come on get down with the sickness!"). Every so often, there'll be this weird inclusion of a "L.A. Woman" or "Castles Made of Sand" or "Paranoid," which just serves to highlight how rock has degraded in the present age, weak as men are now. Even the music from the mid 1990s has merit; I enjoy bands like Pearl Jam, Sublime, Alice in Chains, and Rage Against the Machine. But if you are trying to tell me, as KIOZ does, that these songs with lyrics like "I'm so addicted to / All the things you do / When you roll around with me / Inbetween [sic] the sheets" that play over boring acoustic riffs and then play over hyped-up crunchy power chords are real *music*, then dammit, I will call you out. How dare KIOZ play Jimi Hendrix in conjuction with such crap.
That, and the little tags they play between songs are offensively stupid and unfunny. "Sex is like bridge: if you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand (squishing noises)." What, are we all in sixth grade again (no offense to real pre-adolescents intended!)? "Now for a long block of uninterrupted--(cell phone ringing) Hey, dude, I'm going to have to call you back, I'm busy--a long block of uninterrupted rock." "Now for a big stankin' nugget of your music, bud." Does KIOZ think these puerile antics help to sell their station in any way? Ugh.
There are times when I grow disgusted with KIOZ and turn on the local classical station, XLNC 1, but I find it to be very much inferior to Orange County/LA's KUSC. The station seems to be completely automated during the day, such that there's no knowledgeable DJ giving an introduction and context for each piece as there is on KUSC. That, and XLNC 1's selection tends towards the kind of breezy, inoffensive classical music that made me hate classical music for so long and that I've only in the past year been able to overlook in order to find music that has power and depth and drama. I mean, "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" is cute and all, but can we get some Beethoven's Third or Fifth or some Spanish guitar or some Stravinsky or some Gustav Holst all up in here? No? Alright, fine.
O San Diego radio, how you have let me down. I had such high hopes. Our relationship started off so well.
I maintained this enthusiasm for a week. Then went through a phase of pleased acceptance. That gave way to disinterest, which ultimately degenerated into out-and-out disgust.
KIOZ friggin' sucks. As little as I like Korn or the Offspring, I find myself longing for a song by these bands to save me from a spare of uninspired "new" garbage (Saving Abel, Disturbed, Puddle of Mudd, Papa Roach, et cetera). It's a sad day when I actually think that a Slipknot or Linkin park song is the best song I've heard all day, or when I can at least concede that Disturbed has a good sense of rythm even if their melodies are trite and their lyrics are stupid and David Draiman still sounds like a grunting chimpanzee to me ("Ooooh wa-ah-ah-ah! Get up, come on get down with the sickness!"). Every so often, there'll be this weird inclusion of a "L.A. Woman" or "Castles Made of Sand" or "Paranoid," which just serves to highlight how rock has degraded in the present age, weak as men are now. Even the music from the mid 1990s has merit; I enjoy bands like Pearl Jam, Sublime, Alice in Chains, and Rage Against the Machine. But if you are trying to tell me, as KIOZ does, that these songs with lyrics like "I'm so addicted to / All the things you do / When you roll around with me / Inbetween [sic] the sheets" that play over boring acoustic riffs and then play over hyped-up crunchy power chords are real *music*, then dammit, I will call you out. How dare KIOZ play Jimi Hendrix in conjuction with such crap.
That, and the little tags they play between songs are offensively stupid and unfunny. "Sex is like bridge: if you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand (squishing noises)." What, are we all in sixth grade again (no offense to real pre-adolescents intended!)? "Now for a long block of uninterrupted--(cell phone ringing) Hey, dude, I'm going to have to call you back, I'm busy--a long block of uninterrupted rock." "Now for a big stankin' nugget of your music, bud." Does KIOZ think these puerile antics help to sell their station in any way? Ugh.
There are times when I grow disgusted with KIOZ and turn on the local classical station, XLNC 1, but I find it to be very much inferior to Orange County/LA's KUSC. The station seems to be completely automated during the day, such that there's no knowledgeable DJ giving an introduction and context for each piece as there is on KUSC. That, and XLNC 1's selection tends towards the kind of breezy, inoffensive classical music that made me hate classical music for so long and that I've only in the past year been able to overlook in order to find music that has power and depth and drama. I mean, "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" is cute and all, but can we get some Beethoven's Third or Fifth or some Spanish guitar or some Stravinsky or some Gustav Holst all up in here? No? Alright, fine.
O San Diego radio, how you have let me down. I had such high hopes. Our relationship started off so well.
Friday, March 20, 2009
Entreaty
Want my blog to link back to yours? You can achieve instant Internet celebrity...or something. Let me know if so. We can originate an entire community of like-minded free spirits...a *social network*, if you will. Wouldn't that be something? And then I'll read your blog, too, and you'll read mine, and Barney the Dinosaur will sing a song to the effect that we are a happy family.
Necromancy
So now I am forcing life back into this stillborn blog. Fitting, I suppose, in a way, given my interests. The forcing of life part is fitting, I mean. Not the blogging part. That's never jived with my interests, weirdly enough.
The gentle reader who has at least a passing familiarity with my person will know that my mind is surfeit with literary pretense. "Whence and wherefore then this dearth of a consistent Anima Umbrae web journal?" the gentle reader may well ask. "Blogging is living literature on the Internet, a forum whereby you could share your words with the faceless millions--or at least with an interested few, which at times is more audience than you have and mayhap more than you deserve. One might think that web logs would hold a profound allure for you." And if you were to ask this question and make these observations, gentle reader, you would be most astute! But the gentle reader is always astute, and needs not my assertions by way of affirmation.
The real crux of it is that I developed a severe hatred for blogs and bloggers and all things bloggish shortly after their debut. Back then, they were called online journals, and they were just that--personal journals. And not journals that chronicled cool things like people dying of the black death in London in the year 1665, but journals that described such noteworthy subjects as a kewlio new haircut or that boy in sixth period intro to bio who had the most soulful brown eyes or how Justine was such a biatch last week when she said that I said that she said that she was a biatch, and such other hyper-emotional adolescent garbage. I remember running across a number of journals of this caliber and thinking that the online journal, as a form, was doomed to failure, and that it would never ascend above the level of "journalism" that goes on in a fourteen year old girl's diary (the kinds bestuck with stickers and locked with tiny little heart-shaped locks that are a totally impotent barrier to any kind of serious effort to open the book, as if anybody had a desperate need to read the thoughts of the average fourteen year old girl).
And if it seems like I'm being misogynist or ageist here, let me be the first to say that I don't think I had very much to offer the world in the way of insightful or beautifully-crafted prose when I was fourteen, either. I'm glad I wasn't on the cutting edge of blogging, come to think of it; if I had been, I'd have to look back at that material now and be reckoned by it, and I expect that'd be a damn painful procedure.
Ah, Hell. I'm being too hard on adolescents. I'm just exaggerating for effect--creating a straw young adult. No real disrespect to adolescents intended. One of the coolest people I know is an adolescent. I have friends who are adolescents.
ANYWAY, what I mean to say is that I had considered blogging to be the realm of teenagers with ADD. And right wing extremists. I'm still amazed at the number of pro-military, pro-survivalist, pro-race war polemical blogs I stumble over when doing research on bulletproof vests or Biblical archaeology.
I didn't see the blog as being a proper venue for actual writing done by professional writers, as ironic as that might seem. Here was writing that could be distributed to an audience without the possibility of editorial rejection or the cost and humiliation of self-publishing or any of the hundred other things that keep me and writers like me from actually getting our work out to the people who might actually give a crap about it, and I wouldn't touch it. I think this is in part because of the disdain I've felt for those authors who sink to the level of vanity publication just to have something in print, and I viewed blogs in much the same way. I also, of course, turned a blind eye to my own anti-vanity in insisting that only work that had been validated by means of official and professional commercial publication was worthy of attention. I don't think that now. But more on these fantasies of official infallibility at some other time.
Then there is that issue of vanity. I would wonder that anyone would want to read anything that I had written. It's battle enough to get people interested my fiction, which is (in my estimation), the best of my work, and the best justification for my continued existence here on this planet. The person that produces the fiction, I would have thought, would necessarily be a lot less interesting than the product. I would think that people would care about me in the same proportion that they might care about the delivery person who brought a birthday present or a longed-for letter to the doorstep. You may love what is within the parcel, but that doesn't enkindle a love for the UPS dude in your heart. I didn't think *I* mattered, only that the work mattered. I didn't feel that the events of my life were interesting, and I didn't want to be like that solipsistic chit who felt that the whole world should compliment her on her kewlio new haircut. Again, these attitudes are changing, and we shall speak more on this at another time.
But I am taking these prejudices, whether outlashing or ingrown, and I am setting them aside. I am giving blogging another chance. I'm trying to keep my expectations in line. I'm not trying to be the high-handed morally superior voice howling in the wilderness, nor am I trying to convince the world of the worth of my thoughts and my words. I am not trying to disparage my own experience. I am trying to talk about things I find interesting--most of which will probably be related to art, and thinking. I am trying to be a better friend and be more communicative and read other people's blogs in turn. I am trying to write about the things around the writing, which ultimately serve to inform the writing itself. I am trying to get more actual writing done in whatever iteration rather than think about writing all the time without actually doing any writing.
So there. With this lopsided manifesto out of the way, the gentle reader can rest assured that the next post will be more concrete, topical, and accessible.
Which is to say that I intend to carp about how damn distracting it is to see so much cleavage at SDSU in a given day.
The gentle reader who has at least a passing familiarity with my person will know that my mind is surfeit with literary pretense. "Whence and wherefore then this dearth of a consistent Anima Umbrae web journal?" the gentle reader may well ask. "Blogging is living literature on the Internet, a forum whereby you could share your words with the faceless millions--or at least with an interested few, which at times is more audience than you have and mayhap more than you deserve. One might think that web logs would hold a profound allure for you." And if you were to ask this question and make these observations, gentle reader, you would be most astute! But the gentle reader is always astute, and needs not my assertions by way of affirmation.
The real crux of it is that I developed a severe hatred for blogs and bloggers and all things bloggish shortly after their debut. Back then, they were called online journals, and they were just that--personal journals. And not journals that chronicled cool things like people dying of the black death in London in the year 1665, but journals that described such noteworthy subjects as a kewlio new haircut or that boy in sixth period intro to bio who had the most soulful brown eyes or how Justine was such a biatch last week when she said that I said that she said that she was a biatch, and such other hyper-emotional adolescent garbage. I remember running across a number of journals of this caliber and thinking that the online journal, as a form, was doomed to failure, and that it would never ascend above the level of "journalism" that goes on in a fourteen year old girl's diary (the kinds bestuck with stickers and locked with tiny little heart-shaped locks that are a totally impotent barrier to any kind of serious effort to open the book, as if anybody had a desperate need to read the thoughts of the average fourteen year old girl).
And if it seems like I'm being misogynist or ageist here, let me be the first to say that I don't think I had very much to offer the world in the way of insightful or beautifully-crafted prose when I was fourteen, either. I'm glad I wasn't on the cutting edge of blogging, come to think of it; if I had been, I'd have to look back at that material now and be reckoned by it, and I expect that'd be a damn painful procedure.
Ah, Hell. I'm being too hard on adolescents. I'm just exaggerating for effect--creating a straw young adult. No real disrespect to adolescents intended. One of the coolest people I know is an adolescent. I have friends who are adolescents.
ANYWAY, what I mean to say is that I had considered blogging to be the realm of teenagers with ADD. And right wing extremists. I'm still amazed at the number of pro-military, pro-survivalist, pro-race war polemical blogs I stumble over when doing research on bulletproof vests or Biblical archaeology.
I didn't see the blog as being a proper venue for actual writing done by professional writers, as ironic as that might seem. Here was writing that could be distributed to an audience without the possibility of editorial rejection or the cost and humiliation of self-publishing or any of the hundred other things that keep me and writers like me from actually getting our work out to the people who might actually give a crap about it, and I wouldn't touch it. I think this is in part because of the disdain I've felt for those authors who sink to the level of vanity publication just to have something in print, and I viewed blogs in much the same way. I also, of course, turned a blind eye to my own anti-vanity in insisting that only work that had been validated by means of official and professional commercial publication was worthy of attention. I don't think that now. But more on these fantasies of official infallibility at some other time.
Then there is that issue of vanity. I would wonder that anyone would want to read anything that I had written. It's battle enough to get people interested my fiction, which is (in my estimation), the best of my work, and the best justification for my continued existence here on this planet. The person that produces the fiction, I would have thought, would necessarily be a lot less interesting than the product. I would think that people would care about me in the same proportion that they might care about the delivery person who brought a birthday present or a longed-for letter to the doorstep. You may love what is within the parcel, but that doesn't enkindle a love for the UPS dude in your heart. I didn't think *I* mattered, only that the work mattered. I didn't feel that the events of my life were interesting, and I didn't want to be like that solipsistic chit who felt that the whole world should compliment her on her kewlio new haircut. Again, these attitudes are changing, and we shall speak more on this at another time.
But I am taking these prejudices, whether outlashing or ingrown, and I am setting them aside. I am giving blogging another chance. I'm trying to keep my expectations in line. I'm not trying to be the high-handed morally superior voice howling in the wilderness, nor am I trying to convince the world of the worth of my thoughts and my words. I am not trying to disparage my own experience. I am trying to talk about things I find interesting--most of which will probably be related to art, and thinking. I am trying to be a better friend and be more communicative and read other people's blogs in turn. I am trying to write about the things around the writing, which ultimately serve to inform the writing itself. I am trying to get more actual writing done in whatever iteration rather than think about writing all the time without actually doing any writing.
So there. With this lopsided manifesto out of the way, the gentle reader can rest assured that the next post will be more concrete, topical, and accessible.
Which is to say that I intend to carp about how damn distracting it is to see so much cleavage at SDSU in a given day.
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