Autonomy

My philosophy (pretty much conclusively, actually) is that if you're not busy doing or saying something important, you should be concentrating your efforts on listening, and learning. So I'm always "learning", even when I'm supposed to be busy doing things. And I say things more or less by accident, except for when I force myself to write, like here.

This is going to be one of those tangential posts I warned you about in the title of this blog and in the introductory post but then never really delivered. I am a total mess, and I would like to now try and explore this mess, in as unmethodical a way as possible.

William Wordsworth wrote a poem once. It was called Ruth, about a six-year-old of the same name, and a stanza from it got me focused for a while the other day on what was upsetting me:


"Beneath her father's roof, alone
She seemed to live; her thoughts her own;
Herself her own delight;
Pleased with herself, nor sad, nor gay;
And, passing thus the live-long day,
She grew to woman's height."


I like the fact her whole childhood is spent in this reclusive independence - that she never recovers from the insult (her mother's just died and been replaced); I like the matter-of-fact way in which it's presented. To me she's a heroic figure, a little reminiscent of Vincent (bottom of page) in terms of her blunt unwillingness to "accept" reality at the price of rejecting parts of herself.

Edgar Allan Poe himself (who features prominently in Vincent) seems a very good example of what I'm talking about. His claim to fame was, apparently, his mastery of the recurring themes of the macabre, mystery, and melancholy in his stories. But, read today, his terror tales are quaint, his whodunnits frankly stupid, and his stories of human misery, though not exactly unaffecting, more noteworthy for their general grandiloquence. Or maybe that's just me.

In any case, he gives the distinct impression of a young boy very excited about his ability to use big words, show off his deductive skills and tell scary stories over the campfire with the flashlight half under his chin. In other words, he gives enthusiastic voice to what most of us adults only secretly want to do, both by what he conveys and by what he occupies his time with, much like Vincent, and Ruth.

These people, more often fictional than not, truly inspire me. And the thing is, it's not so obvious that I shouldn't be one of them. I was a prime example of everything this represents until about the age of 14. I had something of a crisis of identity when I discovered that other people and my effect on them are part of what makes me who I am, and have spent most of my time since trying anxiously to make sure I notice people, and their reactions to me, hence the "listening" I mentioned earlier.

But the truth is I can't do it. I don't particularly care about "people". I'm not talking about misanthropy - or I guess if the previous sentence was misread the way I mean I'd actually be implying sociopathy, so not that either - but about the level of attention and place in my heart for the reactions of the anonymous collective, of strangers, of "the general public", of any group. I couldn't give a flying fuck. It's probably inborn. I can't help not giving two shits about facile appraisals of my character and conduct. That's why it never makes any impact no matter how positive and is so extraordinarily simple to deflect when it isn't. It's all just a mental construct, with no impetus of its own, kept alive purely on my stupidity.

The idea behind writing this blog was to inch in the direction of presenting myself - of introducing myself, really - through what makes me who I am rather than what makes me easy for other people to deal with. I think the mistake was in the decision to go in inches. It's not a question of balance, like people keep telling me. You don't divide your life between being alive and pleasing other people. The situations that require outright fakery are rare and extreme. A lot of the time you'll obscure the truth or embellish it because it seems useful to get a certain reaction out of people, but it's almost never something you owe them. You do and say what you want and refrain from doing or saying that which you don't.

Basically, fuck everybody.

The Importance of Being Self-Important

This summer, 11 years ago, awesome had a new name:

Max Fischer.




I'm a little giddy. This movie's made me happy. Made me smile inanely as only a movie can.

I'm not going to pretend too hard to be reviewing this movie. It's about a 15 year old painfully precocious kid whose life revolves completely around his attendance (by scholarship) of his elitist private school - not actually the studies, but all the politics and clubs and school plays - and his relentless pursuit after the unattainable affections of a 1st grade teacher there, and this ridiculously long sentence doesn't come even remotely close to describing what this movie is actually about.

Let's see if I can. First off, drop everything and rush off to see it. Not even my earth-shattering sagacity is reason enough to have this film (or even its themes) spoiled. Plus the following frothing gibberings would make even less sense than they otherwise might.

Oh well.

It's curious how whenever I'm beginning to consider an idea, some work of art comes along and highlights and emphasizes the point out of any doubt.
The magnificently, flabbergastingly awesome thing about Max Fischer is how unabashedly head-over-heels in love he is with himself.

Realistically, he's probably an arsehole. He actually destroys a guy's car brakes at one point in the movie, so realistically he's an attempted-murderer. This isn't a realistic kind of movie.

Max realizes that if something's important to him, then it's important. The word "pretentious" does not feature in his considerable, wildly over-elaborate vocabulary. That's a good thing. I realize I just had a go at whoever translated The Count of Monte Cristo for pretty much the exact same thing, but I guess this is the flipside. Hell, I myself am the flipside. If "pretension" serves not to cultivate our feelings of superiority over others but instead to allow us to plunge head-first into whatever gets us excited, fuck what people think - then instead of disgusting it becomes something closer to heroic (in continuation of my My Left Foot thesis).

It's not just Max. This whole movie is saturated with this. Max's young protégé Dirk being a prime example. These guys have no sense of humour whatsoever, and this enables them to not observe how ridiculous they look. How ridiculous they are, I suppose. Nothing would be easier than ridiculing these dudes. But they're amazing. They are forces of life. They put us all to shame. They realize fully the importance of being who they are.


This is a little long (6 minutes), but it's too on-topic and astonishingly brilliant to not be posted: