| | New Order - Regret
I trust my own taste only so far. More and more I wonder if it is all that sophisticated as I used to think. Also, do I even care about art or music as long as it is stuff to distract, transport, instruct, delight? As a kid I did not seek out complex and inaccessible things in the least. I had to learn to like pop music because at heart I just liked songs you sing in school. But secretly, I believed that I appreciated these songs - as I do the literature, video games, and so forth which are all their successors - more than average people. But it may just be that I non-appreciated the rest of the world and humanity to an abnormal degree. There is a big and critical difference between imaginative enjoyment and neurosis. Say what you will. I still believe that there is such a thing as healthy and unhealthy culture and the tendency to make yourself in to a kind of rarefied fan is part of the second. It is just like with pedantry, priesthood, mystification, and other forms of elitism that say that the deformed sufferers are the only souls that truly get this or that thing. It is a form of possessiveness I guess. You can't accept that your appreciation of a thing is as per usual because then you would have to say you don't own it, and what then do your little reveries mean?
Anyway this is one of my favorite songs from the last few years (as in, I first heard it in this time frame). For some reason I lost the CD which was in my car. I have no clue how it happened. Before I last moved I lost two CDs. One was taken by the ex and was a more a reappropriation than any kind of heinous accidental loss. But this was just lost.
This year I have gone from the strongest I was as a person in life to the weakest but am on the way up again. I think I know now what thing it is in human beings that frustrates revolutions. When you gain a certain amount of control over your own life you realize that none of the institutions around you, and none of your own habits or preconceptions about how your future will be, actually support your present belief in yourself. You would have to have some revelation to know what to do next, and you end up daring the unknown because you comprehend that there is no valid reason to think that you would know what to do if you just keep a holding pattern. You do not know. But you can still do - whatever. There's a way in which it is always brightest before eclipse, or it seems to be because it's the edge of what you know, or at least what you can decide, that is closest to the reverse. I do not know. I think that I have a big fundamental problem with persisting in a certain attitude. It is incredibly easy to keep with a certain explicit decision in all the thin formal ways, while actually doing something else. It is like how when you're in a committed ("official") relationship it is somehow easier to see why you might go for someone else. When you get form and feeling clearly divorced, even if this is all just symbolism, you can see your own biases easily. This is not to say you get your priorities straight. But you come face to face with your gut preferences. However, even then it is so hard to do the right thing or know what that is. In my experience I can only say that the right move would be to tell the truth without hope of any outcome. I'm not someone who believes that the dearest things in life are, or should be, unspeakable. At times, you have to make a claim. Throw down as it were for what you believe and/or desire. Neither is it necessary or acceptable to wait till you know what to do. I guess then the scary thing is that you wouldn't be able to say anything unless, confidentially, you know already what you would want to do. But how fraught, and unconventional, and possibly self-destructive. You are in such new territory.
Why do I have to be here? I always find myself not that different from people near me. Maybe I just believe in my own specialness to the nth and have taken it on me to damage myself for the sake of authentic dents. However, I am not sure that I did this by anything other than natural stubbornness of self plus the natural stubbornness of external institutions. The only fallacy was to believe I could not change them which in a poetic way is the same as despairing that you couldn't change yourself. However, it is not as if I haven't worked to be a good person. Where change or revolution or regrowth comes into this has eluded me, though. I get scared now even of trying to build myself up into anything again for fear it will be wiped out. For some reason my life is a tragicomic and somewhat miserable one. I fear for my future self. What happens when really bad stuff starts to take place? I think to an extent even incidentals like my penmanship are tragic in their basic styling. Maybe this is how my soul has taken shape, out of all the possibilities of human stylishness. Always final catastrophe gets avoided so far, but the exchange is a permanent-seeming loss of vitality. If my life were a film it would be A Civil Action where the attorneys could have settled for more but then they settle for less and this is a victory. Something about comedy to me seems like the essence of a good enough deal - in marriage, in life - but I've so far been taking inferior bargains for fear of not getting any at all. Am I just a spoiled brat? I would say so, but the thing is that so many people have given back so much less for getting so much more. Haven't I tried to share my happiness with everyone? What more can I do to deserve what I have and have had?
Things tend to be harder the second time and in some ways more artificial, but you also are less clueless. Maybe I am clueless though. I have lots of self-knowledge as one who spent a considerable time by himself but since when is knowledge the same thing as wisdom?
This evening it smells of some woodsmoke like my old house. I am thinking of New Brunswick, where I lived for a year after college as well as of course during. It was never my plan as a kid to go to Rutgers and it was hard for me not to view it as a mistake. Arguably I did a fair job at accepting the good things in it anyway. Really I think that I distanced myself too much. I did not want to be defined by it. This choice OK on its face had the disadvantage of meaning that I spent four years of my life doing something that I did not take all that seriously. When you say you will edit something out of your whole experience what is the point of going?
I felt as if it were a mistake that I went there. Honestly I believed I could get in at better places. In the event only marginal evidence actually suggests that since the schools which were decidedly a cut above Rutgers only waitlisted me and those which were arguably above might not be since they were private schools which got much fewer applicants. But who the fuck cares anymore? But things could have been so different. I have yet to find out something that I couldn't have been taught by more orthodox, painless methods. I am willing to accept that being more motivated as a kid would have only created a more enthusiastic slacker; capable though I am at times of producing good work and smart insights I do wonder whether this brain is best suited to the kinds of career-long grinds which I find myself wishing I'd started it on. I get tired of certain subjects too quickly. Of course QED with motivation. Anyway, this is still a big question since if you do not like grinding it out with a task you'd better scramble to find something that you just like doing.
I need some new semblables. I can't just go buying new clothes. Maybe one or two things though. I need a new home, new life, new era of this life at least. The point at which this phase of my life began feels far away. This is a sign of being old in the heart. It is probably reversible.
I get sick of this screenname as well; maybe my real life name also. IT is all such silly stuff but when you think about it it is still sillier not to pay mind to what it stands for. How much will you blur your own vision to see the big picture? It is not that you can trick yourself into doing things with quasi-Pavlovian associations, like you could teach yourself medical terminology expeditedly by smelling different things while you work - but you have to be aware of what you are seeing in things. IT is frustrating and saddening to realize that had you gone with your intuition, or persisted with the one or two larks that you did go on, then you could have in fact systematically rebuild and refurbished everythign that could use the newness. Why would you not change these little things?
Why would you not? Otherwise is like a hand tied behind your back in life.
I think part of the reason is the person who is offering to untie your hand. Often the way out of a situation is to take what is offered you first of all, even though it sucks - or at any rate, the first good step is somehow cross-listed with a kind of acceding that it was the whole point of your troubles to avoid. It would seem that only hypocrites make a categorical demand then settle for less, like in the book Jonathan Wild where the prince of thieves decides to drown himself rather than starve slowly as his captors want. But of course his first step is to eat the few victuals they have left and then he decides to swim back home. He is a great man, the prince of thieves, but some people's self-regard is less picaresque. Thus the attitude is more than you would not even eat your last meal before doing whatever bombastic thing you have in mind to do, more Samson Agonistes than anything in later lit. It is to an extent the same thing with even publishing your desires. Why would you tell people who seem to be so unworthy? And yet, surely, what you desire is a form of togetherness and the intentions which you would see brought to fruition have an audience somewhere. It is rather awkward to be in such a lot in life for an extended period of time. AT times you've no clue what to do and at other times have nothing to say for those things which you would do. There are small steps, yet even these are half-steps without the wholeness of step plus a reciprocal declaration.
How am I to get these things straight?
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| | Posted 6/26/2009 12:58 AM - 1 View - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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