humanity. I’ve been studying a lot lately, and one of my favorite textbooks is humanity. Pages and pages of text are flung at me daily, from all directions: the subway crazy, the lovers lost in their interlocked hands, the emotional shopper, and children with no social filter are all pages in the big book of humanity.
But what of the book itself? I think there are a lot of people who would imagine that the big book of humanity is gilded and under glass somewhere, being viewed by a stream of reverent onlookers, forever preserved for future generations to gaze at in awe. To be sure, it seems to me that this is the most common view currently circulating among the human element of the planet. And it’s true, to some extent. Humanity ought to be held in reverence, if only because the gift of an emotional spectrum and the gift of ambulation afford us constantly new and almost inconceivable experiences.
Movement—the movement that occurs along the emotional spectrum and the movement that occurs in the physical plane—makes me think of the big book of humanity as a little more careworn. When I visualize it, the first thing I see is a paperback book with a cover that has been torn a little bit in the corner, folded at another, and dimpled as if it had been shot with a BB gun. My book is a pirated copy I picked up from other people and their notes are in the margins, their bookmarks are strewn about the inside, and their hand turned down corners where particularly moving passages could be found. How I came into possession of it remains a mystery, but it is one of my dearest possessions.
Some of the pages fall out, you know. Some fall, and as I reach to recollect them, I read over them and am reminded of history, of emotions I once felt, and of the people I have learned from. (Yes, that is a dangling preposition, but in the book of humanity the grammar rules are suspended in the interest of individual expression.) Some fall and get lost in the river of life my skiff is floating on, never to be seen again—and there is page after page of highly uninteresting material…it isn’t all fascinating…and some of it can be dismissed without a further thought. Laundry day is a good example. All, or at least most, of the pages involved in collecting all the dirty clothes you have, throwing them into a pile, going to the Laundromat (or the laundry room) and running the washer are fairly unimportant—no offense to people who love their laundry rituals. Those pages can be largely dismissed, but the page where a person is introduced into the story that is five foot tall, portly, and elbowing you in the solar plexus to get at the next dryer is nearly indispensable because the big book of humanity is about (duh!) people.
I don’t know how it is with most people, but I do not read about most of the people I care about every day. Sorry, I just calls ‘em like I sees ‘em, and I don’t see a lot of the people I care about every day, so I don’t read about them. I’m reminded when one of their pages falls into my lap to call them and recall all they’ve done for me because I do genuinely care for them and love them (and would do anything for them), but I don’t read about them daily.
The human condition is, at its most basic: survive and reproduce. These are the two processes that are hardwired into us. Thus, the two most common characters in the book are the self and the significant other. Significantly passionate pages are almost supple, as if the pages are freshly pressed. Others are stained with tears or sweat or blood. What is most important to me, however, is that they are consecutive and consistently stimulating. I read of her daily, and she teaches me something in the smallest of her movements.
And then sometimes I look down as I’m reading and see the ink is still wet. So I step back and I suddenly feel the weight of a pen in my hand. Don’t get me wrong: we are not the authors of our own books because of most of what’s written therein is plagiarized; however, what we glean from people is ours, like notes in the margin.
And every once in a great while an original idea crops up from nowhere, and that’s what the blank pages at the back of the book are for.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Monday, July 23, 2007
Precisely what you think
it’s not. I labored under the delusion, for a long time, that things were precisely as I perceived them to be. At some basic level it seems like this is an all too human response; the things I see, feel touch, and hear have to be as I perceive them because I am the center of my own universe. (And let’s be Real here for a second, and say that all humans are built with two basic mechanisms: survive and reproduce, and that the survival mechanism makes us inherently the centers of our own universe. It cannot be otherwise.) Something happened along my way that forced me to begin understanding the idea that things are generally misconstrued in our heads until they become a completely different argument.
Slavoj Zizek’s explanation of the Freudian Joke “The Borrowed Kettle”:
“The title refers to another kettle – the one in the joke evoked by the Freud to illustrate the strange logic of dreams: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms per negationem what it endeavours to deny – that I returned a broken kettle to you” (Zizek 1).
As consciousnesses we WANT to believe any of the first three, if only because they are the most ego-stroking in this particularly heinous situation: the blame is placed on the circumstances in other words. What we fail to realize in this turnaround is that while we are investigating the circumstances, the circumstances are busy revealing the truth, and the truth is rarely what you thought it was.
For an example:
Last night, as he left work, feeling awful about the extremely long day he’d had (meeting at 7:30 am—which meant I had to get up 5am—for two hours, followed by actual work work for the next 10 hours) and the summer cold he was developing. As per usual, he called his girlfriend who had gone to a friend’s birthday party. One thing was inordinately clear right away: she was preposterously drunk. They had decided earlier that he was just going to go home to his house and they would meet up the next day. Now she was begging him to come to her neck of the woods. He is resistant, but in the end as most men do, he acquiesces.
Five minutes after his arrival on the scene, it becomes shockingly apparent how drunk his girlfriend is when she vomits into her friend’s toilet.
Everybody there was sympathetic to the scene of a boyfriend coming home from a long day of work to a staggeringly drunk girlfriend that he must now care for. He even thinks to himself for a while, “Why the hell am I here? I should be home right now,” very egocentrically.
If only he could see the real meaning of his being there: without him there, she would have to walk home in that state (forty-five minutes of cute, drunk, white girl walking home by herself). Perhaps the world looked all around and said, “Him. He is the only one who can ensure that this girl gets home safely.” Perhaps his girlfriend knew, at some level, what she was really looking for in his coming over. And perhaps he even wanted to go over and party a little bit himself. What all of these circumstances are endeavoring to deny is that a potentially very bad situation was completely avoided with a simple gesture.
To those who would say, “She could’ve just slept at her friends house.” Well, yes and no. Yes, because she could’ve passed out right there on the futon and been fine; however, no, because she had to get up and be at work at 9 in the morning (on Monday). How many people want to get up an extra forty-five minutes earlier on Monday, probably with a blinding hangover, walk—in the extremely hungover state—forty-five minutes uphill in order to get home so you can start getting ready for work? I can’t imagine anybody WANTING to do that when you could stagger home drunk, barely remember the walk, SET YOUR ALARM, wake up thirty minutes before you go, do the quick-ready, and be out the door before you can say “Robert’s your father’s brother.”
Then again, I could be simply justifying her actions to myself in a vain attempt to justify to slight discomfort I endured (and it was truly only slight: I did get two jameson’s on ice in me in the few minutes I was at the party). Perhaps it’s precisely what I think it’s not.
At any rate, I think the idea that things are exactly what we think they aren’t keeps things all fluxed up, and that’s what keep my existence enjoyable.
Slavoj Zizek’s explanation of the Freudian Joke “The Borrowed Kettle”:
“The title refers to another kettle – the one in the joke evoked by the Freud to illustrate the strange logic of dreams: (1) I never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle was already broken when I got it from you. Such an enumeration of inconsistent arguments, of course, confirms per negationem what it endeavours to deny – that I returned a broken kettle to you” (Zizek 1).
As consciousnesses we WANT to believe any of the first three, if only because they are the most ego-stroking in this particularly heinous situation: the blame is placed on the circumstances in other words. What we fail to realize in this turnaround is that while we are investigating the circumstances, the circumstances are busy revealing the truth, and the truth is rarely what you thought it was.
For an example:
Last night, as he left work, feeling awful about the extremely long day he’d had (meeting at 7:30 am—which meant I had to get up 5am—for two hours, followed by actual work work for the next 10 hours) and the summer cold he was developing. As per usual, he called his girlfriend who had gone to a friend’s birthday party. One thing was inordinately clear right away: she was preposterously drunk. They had decided earlier that he was just going to go home to his house and they would meet up the next day. Now she was begging him to come to her neck of the woods. He is resistant, but in the end as most men do, he acquiesces.
Five minutes after his arrival on the scene, it becomes shockingly apparent how drunk his girlfriend is when she vomits into her friend’s toilet.
Everybody there was sympathetic to the scene of a boyfriend coming home from a long day of work to a staggeringly drunk girlfriend that he must now care for. He even thinks to himself for a while, “Why the hell am I here? I should be home right now,” very egocentrically.
If only he could see the real meaning of his being there: without him there, she would have to walk home in that state (forty-five minutes of cute, drunk, white girl walking home by herself). Perhaps the world looked all around and said, “Him. He is the only one who can ensure that this girl gets home safely.” Perhaps his girlfriend knew, at some level, what she was really looking for in his coming over. And perhaps he even wanted to go over and party a little bit himself. What all of these circumstances are endeavoring to deny is that a potentially very bad situation was completely avoided with a simple gesture.
To those who would say, “She could’ve just slept at her friends house.” Well, yes and no. Yes, because she could’ve passed out right there on the futon and been fine; however, no, because she had to get up and be at work at 9 in the morning (on Monday). How many people want to get up an extra forty-five minutes earlier on Monday, probably with a blinding hangover, walk—in the extremely hungover state—forty-five minutes uphill in order to get home so you can start getting ready for work? I can’t imagine anybody WANTING to do that when you could stagger home drunk, barely remember the walk, SET YOUR ALARM, wake up thirty minutes before you go, do the quick-ready, and be out the door before you can say “Robert’s your father’s brother.”
Then again, I could be simply justifying her actions to myself in a vain attempt to justify to slight discomfort I endured (and it was truly only slight: I did get two jameson’s on ice in me in the few minutes I was at the party). Perhaps it’s precisely what I think it’s not.
At any rate, I think the idea that things are exactly what we think they aren’t keeps things all fluxed up, and that’s what keep my existence enjoyable.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
And I remain...
unbroken. It has been well established that words and I have a sort of tenuous understanding with each other: I use them to attempt to make meaning and they do their best to convey it—though my meanings are generally all over the place and theirs are as well. They are my favorite bother. But when a specific word begins to haunt me, I have to ask myself, “Why?”
A specific work that has plagued me for quite some time now is a simple one: unbroken. I’ve found it crop up in song lyrics, poems and short stories that I have written. “Unbroken, he lay on his bed in a heap.”
“Don’t you worry about me,
my heart remains unbroken.”
“Time’s unbroken tail swings gently
in the wind while makeshift
ladders are built to touch the
sky”
Sublime: painful beauty: two seemingly contradictory ideas. Unbroken has much of the same duality in that I see it as a celebration of proximity to brokenness without actually submitting. Essentially, the idea is that being unbroken is a good thing: the vase in her boudoir remains unbroken. Hooray! But it lives in the perilous state of being so delicate it could become broken at any time. Perhaps it is best described as being a fearful celebration.
Perhaps an example:
I have to go to work tonight. This is nothing unusual. Almost everybody has to go to work. Something slightly unusual about my particular situation is that I work overnight. It’s not incredibly unusual, but I feel pretty comfortable far fewer people work between 9pm and 6am than between 6am and 9pm. Further complications to my situation: this will be my ninth straight day of being at my place of employment. To be fair, there are those who work constantly, but once again I feel like somewhere between 5 and 6 days of work in a row is “the norm.” Another complication: the life of an overnight manager is a difficult one on regular human sleep patterns (read: 16 hours of sleep in the last 120 hours of wakefulness). Fairness must once again intercede and I must admit that I normally get around four hours of sleep in any 24-hour period, but this last run has been especially hectic and afforded me even less opportunity for repose and I choose to use it as my best example. Finally, my shifts are often 12 hours or longer of physical, manual labor.
I’m tired, I’m sore, my head hurts most of the time, and I’m losing weight because I don’t usually have time to eat—the worst possible reason for losing weight is one where it’s not because you don’t want to eat, but because you can’t eat.
And yet, through the worst of it, I come home, pour myself a stiff drink of bottom shelf vodka (the one that’s between 6 and 8 dollars…you know the one I mean…), sink into the creases of my couch, and strum the guitar and wail away like a coyote until the neighbors and my roommates hate me. I wail away because I sit there an unbroken man: celebrating my teetering position on the precipice—if only because I haven’t fallen in yet.
A specific work that has plagued me for quite some time now is a simple one: unbroken. I’ve found it crop up in song lyrics, poems and short stories that I have written. “Unbroken, he lay on his bed in a heap.”
“Don’t you worry about me,
my heart remains unbroken.”
“Time’s unbroken tail swings gently
in the wind while makeshift
ladders are built to touch the
sky”
Sublime: painful beauty: two seemingly contradictory ideas. Unbroken has much of the same duality in that I see it as a celebration of proximity to brokenness without actually submitting. Essentially, the idea is that being unbroken is a good thing: the vase in her boudoir remains unbroken. Hooray! But it lives in the perilous state of being so delicate it could become broken at any time. Perhaps it is best described as being a fearful celebration.
Perhaps an example:
I have to go to work tonight. This is nothing unusual. Almost everybody has to go to work. Something slightly unusual about my particular situation is that I work overnight. It’s not incredibly unusual, but I feel pretty comfortable far fewer people work between 9pm and 6am than between 6am and 9pm. Further complications to my situation: this will be my ninth straight day of being at my place of employment. To be fair, there are those who work constantly, but once again I feel like somewhere between 5 and 6 days of work in a row is “the norm.” Another complication: the life of an overnight manager is a difficult one on regular human sleep patterns (read: 16 hours of sleep in the last 120 hours of wakefulness). Fairness must once again intercede and I must admit that I normally get around four hours of sleep in any 24-hour period, but this last run has been especially hectic and afforded me even less opportunity for repose and I choose to use it as my best example. Finally, my shifts are often 12 hours or longer of physical, manual labor.
I’m tired, I’m sore, my head hurts most of the time, and I’m losing weight because I don’t usually have time to eat—the worst possible reason for losing weight is one where it’s not because you don’t want to eat, but because you can’t eat.
And yet, through the worst of it, I come home, pour myself a stiff drink of bottom shelf vodka (the one that’s between 6 and 8 dollars…you know the one I mean…), sink into the creases of my couch, and strum the guitar and wail away like a coyote until the neighbors and my roommates hate me. I wail away because I sit there an unbroken man: celebrating my teetering position on the precipice—if only because I haven’t fallen in yet.
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