sunday
self-loathingI woke up about an hour ago and rolled out of bed to head to the local coffee shop; I’m sipping on my cold brew and listening to winding amorphous indie music on this sunlit Sunday. It’s not particularly interesting or anything but I told myself I’d write more and so I’m here, racking my brain for thoughts and slamming the sides of the neural pinball machine hoping to at least increase the score a bit. Taking initiative has been tough, honestly, there’s a lot of social risk and insecurity that can come with it. It’s recipe for pathologizing and idle speculation, which isn’t helpful and contributes to the Cult of Self. Maybe I’ve become weak, unprincipled, flabby — should I be stronger and just suck it up? Have I become too sensitive and unsocialized, too reactive to basic discomforts and uncertainties that people would weather without complaint or thought in the past (or even, that I would’ve weathered in an earlier era)?
I feel like I’m doing my best, but maybe I’m not, maybe there’s more I could be doing; I went to a music meetup type thing and met an eclectic group of people. But, at another level, I almost felt like perishing from embarrassment - it wasn’t exactly the “coolest” crowd of kids, and in some hyper-critical sense it intensified my sense of loserdom. Is it so much easier for everyone else, is this what I get for moving across the country, for not being rich, and/or tall, and/or white, and/or a member of an ethnic group with decent social ties and community? Is the world that shallow, or am I imputing my own fears and anxieties to a transitional period in my life that will get better, eventually? Speaking in positive certainties is another coping mechanism I suppose, but a useful one, the notion of “manifesting” through utterances and thoughts in the hyper-linguistic, almost ontologically linguistic, era is perfectly apt and probably has some metaphysical validity. Hoping and hoping but also suffering in silence, this is my pathetic cross to bear. Or, the worst case scenario is it’s me, and I’m just too neurotic and sick and strange and annoying or uninteresting or unattractive; my rational brain says no, but I’m sure I rub some people the wrong way with my ADHD-esque manchild inclinations. In these weak moments I drudge up specters and failures and hurtful things from the past and point them at myself, sharpening and reopening the wounds, evidence before a jury of one that I’m condemned to live this way and to be disliked and banished and alone and pariah and sad and miserable.
I remember times from my life when people with higher perceived social status would say things in heated moments (close to a fight for one reason or another, where he was trying to do some underhanded thing that he could pull off because his relative status buttressed and in fact enforced the dynamics) like, “nobody likes you”, or floating in high school after switching from the middle school where I’d made all my friends, or seeking approval and admission to perceived “high-value” (read: mostly white) social organizations like fraternities and sports teams, but mostly finding alienation and peripheral participation and attention instead, or even here, in the depths of supposed American hipsterdom and alternative culture, the almost doubly amplified notion of the taboo, Freudian: armed with all the essential tools for social critique and analysis, the draw of the reactionary taboo intensifies and instead conservatism in the private life is fetishized and enacted and secretly upheld. The forward ephemeral movement of language and analytical thought, and the concurrent backward movement of the sub/unconscious, a law of conservation of the psychic structure.
It’s been disappointing to say the least, and my cynicism probably comes across, and finding joy in those old things has been challenging. That being said, beauty and art are still real and wonderful things, so the life of the aesthete has become increasingly tempting; of course, the same political economy exists, but the sublimation and aesthetic product feels less prone to subterfuge — if it’s beautiful, it’s beautiful, and that feels like an objective and almost immutable fact. There is a long and rich history of ideological influences on beauty, colonial and settler and exploitative standards for beauty and art, but people seem to definitively know when something is ugly and when something is beautiful , at an almost instinctual level — a baby recognizes this, and it could just some similarity function to stimuli parents have provided their kids, but it seems deeper than that. Can we be socialized to love ugly things? I don’t think so, I have to believe in human taste and capacity more than that, but maybe that’s just the optimist in me. At the level of aesthetics and art, I think good art’s content and form, while derived in part from the material structure and political economy, cannot be entirely explained by it either — it escapes the level of pure analytical mechanism and flirts with the spiritual, the erotic, the libidinal and primordial, and this complex interaction of elements produces something liberating. Certainly, there is analytical and mechanistic art, but there is also art with passion, and feeling, that isn’t just cheap moralizing, that pulls at threads of some infinite or sublime tapestry that we’re allowed a little peak into from time to time, or some essence of pneuma that becomes reified for a little and blesses us with its presence on some perishable medium, the most concrete proof of the existence of this higher realm of light and beauty. The particular proves the universal, some sort of Platonism, but the highest essence of which is Art in its variegated and multiform incarnations. So, thank you, I guess, for making life a little more bearable, and giving me something to stave off the creeping cynicism and sadness of 30 and new to a city and without clear direction or all the privileges and luxuries that I imagine others might have.
I’m still really enjoying reading Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love …
