Between Independence and Slavery

I'm probably too all over the place at the moment to do this, but here we go.

Basically, emotions are dangerous. They're employed by charlatans to make intelligent people believe in silly narratives, exploited workers admire their abusers, good-natured people hate strangers, citizens love Big Brother. They use our open hearts to rape our brain. Essentially, they make us stupid.

A fantastic way to gain independence, then, is eliminating emotions. But emotions continue to exist no matter what you do and there's no such thing as not being dependent on anyone. What you can have, possibly, is not letting your guard down by the wrong people. This is where I seem to have trouble. Dependence.

Dependence, or emotions, or being a human and not a fucking android, means letting yourself be carried away by things even if they don't make perfect intelligent logical sense. In the end, all analytical, critical intelligence can provide is damage control. It never helped anybody enjoy anything, and anybody who claims it has is fucking lying.

Another word describing being a human and not a fucking android is trust. You can have trust in people, just as you can have faith in institutions and enterprises, which you apparently usually do for completely wrong reasons. I have faith, as it happens, in democracy, human rights, individualism, science, and artistic and spiritual pursuits, among others, but actually trust very few actual people any further than I could throw them, which possibly explains why I seem to trust women slightly more.

The question is, could people really be as dangerous as the really shitty institutions? Is there a person out there as bad as Judaism? Could he possibly hide his shittiness as well as she did? Could his shittifying possibly be as insidious? Are there people out there as inside-out disgusting as racism or fascism? But isn't it racists and fascists in the first place that are responsible for spreading (and insinuating) racism and fascism anyway?

Who's actually dangerous?

Reification

Conventional anthropological orientalism establishes modern liberal Western superiority in its preference of "guilt-culture" over the superficial shame-culture of all these other traditionally collectivist, conformist, repressed, and all-round silly non-white nations. The West were the only ones to take justice seriously - to ensure that morality was not just a masquerade but an authentic moral commitment.

I'm not even trying to completely refute this claim, but it's interesting to note that Confucius, for one, spoke of cultivating a sense of inner shame, as it were, by meticulous performance of rituals, that was meant to help internalise one's place in the social order, so that deviation from it feels "unnatural", and be abstained from in itself, rather than just held in check when the wrong people were looking.

Alas, it appears that China was not quite up for it. A very messy history followed, even while the elite ostensibly espoused his views. Social mobility was far more extensive than in the West - two peasants, for an extreme example, a thousand years apart, rose to found their own long-lasting dynasties - religious and ideological movements came and went, reforms and criticism of those in power were significant enough to turn China into a source of inspiration for Enlightenment philosophers, civil unrest and war were frequent, and presumably Chinese people were already as loud then as they are now. The meek bunch of pussies Confucius envisioned never really took form, even in China's mid-20th-century semi-totalitarian phase. My thoroughly researched and bloodcurdlingly erudite analysis attributes this to the fact that Chinese culture was essentially and fundamentally anthropocentric. A god never made sense to them as possibly that important, and neither did fucking self-hating guilt.

Enter bourgeois Europe. Destructive as the new order it created was of previous, feudal and docile values - and probably in response to the shockingly naked avarice and brutal exploitation it embraced - there must have risen the new, and in principle quite paradoxical and almost absurd need, for bourgeois respectability. Table manners were instituted, sexual repression intensified, the hoarding of resources became a mark of prestige, smug anti-spiritualism arrived on the scene, the poor began to be condemned for their poverty, the socially deviant newly hospitalised instead of just being kept apart, and gradually, society finally became fertile enough ground for guilt to take firm root, along with the conspicuous consumption invoked to assuage it, and Confucius' vision was finally realised, albeit by primitive Occidentals.

Yes yes, I know, the modern era wasn't all bad. It did bring the industrial revolution which finally allowed people to live longer than 40 years, and democracy which gave people a chance to escape enslavement even if they weren't born rich, but I do want to insist that there was something fundamentally wrong with the idea of programming people into desired behaviour rather than persuading or even intimidating them into it, and that it constitutes an incredibly dangerous process, or ongoing, seemingly inexorable attempt, that was always  going, in some form or another, to aim at turning us into this:

Or, I suppose, into this:

What I am trying to say, in what is probably the most roundabout way I have ever tried to say anything, is that expecting people to be, as opposed to just act the way you want them to, is to expect them to have the properties of a malleable physical object, to mold them by guilt the same way you smelt metal into a more refined version. But human smelting doesn't work - it just burns. It's an insane situation that is a corollary of the insane value system that sees human labour as a resource like coal, to be harvested to the maximum extent and exploited for all that it's worth.

Rules should be something the violation of which scares us, not something we subordinate our very existence and minds to. It is religious repression at its worst. It is Taliban Afghanistan only without burqas and with women behind the steering wheel. But what's the point of being able to drive a car if all you are is a can of baked beans?

Fear

I am afraid of being ejected from society.

I am afraid of wasting my life on easy empty conformism.

I am afraid of not having the support I need in risking disapproval.

I am afraid of being denied the opportunities that come with "high-functioning".

I am afraid of breaking down and feeling humiliated in public.

I am afraid of there actually being nothing beyond what isn't enough.

I am afraid of not being up to it.

I am afraid of being regarded as fundamentally ridiculous.

I am terrified of rejection.

I am afraid of my surrounding's reaction to fear.

I like Lily.

The War

A long long time ago, in a post far away, I made reference to the war on personality. I was suddenly brought very forcefully back to it by this pretty astonishing account of Captain Picard's (any chance you could just trust me that this is very worth watching?):

(saw this here)

If I had any actual readership on this blog, I would no doubt use this opportunity to poll people on whether they found this uplifting, as I suspect we're meant to, or merely heartbreaking, which is where I'm stuck.

I don't know if it's a question of maturity - of being able to see these little victories as worthwhile without megalomania - or of a different level of expectations and ultimate optimism, but all I can see is the good guys, or humanity, incredibly badly losing. The child can't fight evil, so the adult forgives it.

I feel like bombing this text with hyperboles as I am wont to will not suffice to communicate how blown my mind is by the equivalence made here between the assistance to women and the assistance to their abusers. It feels like there's an incredibly significant life insight here that I am not sufficiently equipped to be capable of fully assimilating.

How can you stop fighting a war that is continuing to be fought against you?

Grownupness and Religion and Masculinity and Sensibleness and Success and All the Rest of That Total Fucking Bullshit

Back in the days of really bloody awful depression, I used to have these fits of startlingly violent and protracted sobbing, like that of a grieving mother or, significantly, of a really frustrated young kid. I've just had an attenuated version of one of these, and one of the most striking things about it was the reminder of how much of a release they used to offer and how immeasurably shittier it was before the explosion. Such a sensation of release might at first glance seem a natural result of the release of emotions - but it fucking well isn't - it's the sensation of release from an empire of bullshit.

My head and heart are swimming with a million different things I've picked up or noticed more for some reason in the past few weeks, all having to do, it seems, with this bullshit and its bullshittiness. Yes, yes I am going to try and address all of them, and to articulate what it is that appears to be at their bottom, which I suppose is as good a place as any to look for bullshit, at least if you're looking at bulls.


For the past year or so, actually - possibly since reading Naked Lunch - I have found myself frequently and almost obsessively preoccupied with the social position of homosexuals. The absence of an accompanying attraction to men - in fact, the alienation from and suppressed animosity towards most men and any and all manifestations of masculinity - appear to suggest that it is something other than sexuality that is here latent and closeted.

I've made the comparison here before between homosexuality and sadness, or depression by extension, but (once more) I think that's only a part of it. A larger part of it, I suspect, has to do with the heroic and inspirational image indelibly etched into my mind, of the men of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert venturing into this same desert in impossibly elaborate and ridiculously awesome get-up I may have no choice but to add to my regular wardrobe.

I'm not even kidding.

Well, I may be kidding a bit, but that truly was an image that stuck in my mind and kept coming up in association with how I'd like my life to be. It has, as it happens, stuck in my mind far more than the rest of the film, which is kind of a blur already (and on the urgent re-see list), but I do distinctly remember the protagonist Elrond being very worried that, homosexuality notwithstanding, this really wasn't an appropriate occupation for a grown man and a father. The inspirational message of the film was that of course it was, stupid.

Which is what I think that story is about, really. It may subvert gender norms and strike a victory for genderqueers and homosexuals in their battle for acceptance, but more importantly it celebrates the right of men and women of all attitudes and orientations to make complete morons out of themselves. Because there was never any fucking reason not to.


Another movie, which I saw today, and is, in all probability, actually too good to be seen by mere humans, nonetheless managed to affect me deeply, and really really surprisingly. Its understated name, Moon, is somewhat thematically appropriate, but is probably partly responsible for the fact that it's not the earth-shattering success that it has every right to be. I'm not sure how deeply I can go into it without spoiling everything, but suffice it to say (hopefully) that it is about humanity and dehumanisation, and that the fact that it doesn't use the major character in it that is a machine as a simplistic crutch to make its statement is indicative of how it actually has something significant to say.

That seems to me to be the neglected alternative purpose of worthwhile life-living effort - significance, truth, meaning, emotion. Whatever you call it, it immediately and self-evidently justifies leaving the bullshit empire behind, and is in fact impossible to attain while within it. Grownups take care that everything obeys time-honoured conventions that are important because they are conventions. Real people save the effort to try and catch as much as possible of what is true.


The other thing this brilliant film made me think and freak out about, is how much I love film when it's done well and how the fuck I could have forgotten about that. The thing is, I know exactly how. My weaning off films was very clearly and directly related to my attempt to leave the lifestyle of depression and settle myself once more among the people of my agegroup, who, incidentally, were suddenly becoming grownups.

Being a grownup is a lot like being religious. Just like how when you're a religious kid, God is associated with everything and turns every transgression against homework, parents, the patience of adults or sexual sterility (not to mention actual religious duties) into a sin against God and powers a massive undercurrent of shame and terror - so when you're an adult, a proper grownup, what isn't useful, ingratiating or impressive, is a fucking sin against society, and in indulging it, you run the risk, whether overt or implied, of entering social hell.

I fucking hate all these fucking superstitions. Fact of the matter is, measuring yourself against any external standard is intrinsically dehumanising, and by definition diametrically opposed to truth. It implies that what and who you are is less important than what you should be. Or, in other words, it is an exercise in pointless self-hatred, not unlike Judaism and its lovechildren.


All of this, if it may be taken together, is paired with the growing realisation - or receding denial - that I CANNOT BE A GROWNUP. I still can't handle a full work-week or get the apartment or even just my important errands under control. Hopefully that will get better, but the point is that I cannot breeze through it. I cannot breeze through anything. Any time I say about anything that it's not incredibly hard I am lying through my teeth. Even when things don't send me into full sobbing, I am regularly and consistently hit hard by life. I am overwhelmed pretty much by default. I feel like a little kid being expected to handle adult responsibilities less because of their scope than because that is who I am. I'm not a tough guy. I'm not a paragon of imperturbability. I don't want to be. I wish I could stop apologising about that.

Beyond Reproach

I seem to be weaning off my customary opening desperately trying to tie in some kind of literary-arty-cultural reference to what I want to say, but I want to go beyond not apologising for its absence to making it (the absence) the point. Just saying what you want to say without justifying it, risks becoming what they call "self-indulgent". Here's a literary quote I just found from Tom Robbins about self-indulgence:

“The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.”

What a complete prat.

Anyway, what intelligence, wit, responsibility, success and conformism have in common, and probably why they more or less equally annoy me, is that they place you above criticism, and as far away as possible from your emotions. It's a handy way of having yourself gradually killed, sacrificed on the altar of preventing people's slight inconveniences.

It's also a kind of twilight zone. You're not exactly removed from people, but you're not really there. You can't feel them and they can't touch you, but you sort of relate to one another through feedback on how well you're following the instructions. It's as compulsive as it is nauseating, and I can never quite figure out if I do it substantially more or less than the people I see around me.

When you do indulge your self you leave yourself open to accusations of being alive (or unhappy). It is the sheer inherent unavoidability of these accusations that I appear to have trouble assimilating. It's just so fucking depressing.

Gateway Expedients

children know what they want

adults have internalised nonsense

know only the means.

children do not know the means

do not know how to avoid dangers

how to look after their medium term interest.

"Grow up" means perfect your proficiency with the means.

children may obey and even need the rules more 

but do not internalise them. 

the rules to the means.

_______________________

I wrote the above sort of by accident, in a slipshod, haphazard brainstorming text-dump attempt to organise my thoughts for the post before writing it. Then it seemed to me, at least in my current sedated state, that converted to free verse of the kind whose existence I'm vaguely aware of, it has some power. So it's as good a place as any to start.

Simply (possibly simplistically but not necessarily) put - I feel under attack by the demands of adulthood. I'm a boringly law-abiding citizen, even generally abiding by the sillier and more easily violable ones, and other people, especially the adults among them, are in fact very nice to me. And yet.

I know it's a very common simile; I feel it pertains to me in a far profounder way than for most; I don't know if it matters - I feel like a boy in a world of men. It's an intimidating situation, but more ambivalent than would be obviously implied. These are kind of macho men, inherently and obliviously ridiculous, yet definitely capable of something of which I am not, and representing, as such, the aforementioned benevolent women as well as the well-meaning men. It's a dynamic that also conjures for me the image of a civilian amongst soldiers. As you can see from these examples, it's not exactly a gender thing, but it kind of is.

My kitchen sink has become something of a symbol of my failure as an adult. Today, after heroically braving the crockery mountain protruding out of it, falling back after having decided that enough dish-washer has been spilt this night, I saw peering at me from out of the sink in a surprisingly colourful array, a quartet of our cups, in blue, green, red and yellow. Though perhaps not an incident likely to make it into the Annals of Jerusalem, I found it genuinely aesthetically noteworthy, and more significantly, it provided a sudden flashback and in any case an association of colourful kindergarten. It said to me, acceptingly rather than accusingly, "This is you."


But adultness grows on you. Not unlike, for instance, a tumour. I don't actually know how tumours grow, but adultnesses grow through protracted exposure to societal expectation, even non-verbal, even non-penalising. The embarrassment of not living up to the standards of performance assumed of your situation, is, in and of itself, sufficient reason, or impetus, in any case, to adopt a world-view and identity centred around and towards and behind and beneath the ultimate aim of managing to GET THINGS DONE. What things? What for? Ha.


Children don't have qualms about the meaning of life, about the nature of the goodness of good things, because they haven't been scheduled yet for the equivocating, falsifying corruption that will prepare them to be constructive members of adult society, in providing them the means for the social lubrication, emotional distance and conforming instinct that will stand them in such wonderful stead as they get on in life and achieve SUCCESS.

Failing has never seemed so sexy.

But the fun of it runs out. You need to have some kind of understanding of money, or of politics, even if you don't intend to be a capitalist or a kleptocrat. But apparently that's not as easy as it sounds.


In summary, I blow my nose at you and fart in your general direction, so-called adult responsibilities. Your mother was a dogma and your father smelled of futility-berries




I would also like to add, since the stats the site gives me suggest that it is actually frequented by people other than my mom (hi mom!), that feedback, of pretty much any kind (don't take that a challenge) would be appreciated. Even if just to say "I'm reading this", because I'm never really sure. Also, especially regarding the latter rage-fests, issues are generally open for discussion even when it might seem implied they're not.