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shadowkatCame home today to an interesting and rather profound article in Newsweek forwarded to my attention by Wales. Or at least I found it interesting and profound. It was one of those pieces that managed to somehow put into words how I have been feeling lately. And express why I write - which more often than not is to get out of my own head. My political rants posts such as they are - are my way of dealing with the noise that has accumulated inside my head. Writing for me at least is a means of achieving some aspect of silence. And reading, an ability to pull myself outside of my own head into someone elses at least for a minute, doesn't last long and it may well be an illusion.
Feeling rather humble and vulnerable today, uncertain about myself and the world around me. And this article about the late David Foster Wallace, who I knew of, but alas never found the time or interest in actually reading, touched me in a way, I'm not quite sure how to express but will attempt to anyhow:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/158935
The passages that particularly hit me were these:
"I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose," he [David Foster Wallace] said in a 1993 interview, "is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves."
Wallace found both artistic and moral value in simply registering his dread: "Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience . . . We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside." He once argued that the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—one of the most terrifying thinkers who ever lived—was an artist because "he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."
I've seen a few scattered posts recently on Buffy - everything from why the writer no longer identified or liked the series to analyzing the story and expressing why fans liked certain characters - mostly from sociological/political or largely romantic perspective. I find these posts informative about the poster while at the same time incredibly frustrating, because they leave out people like myself -who well fell in love with the show for the reason Wallace states above. I simply identified with all the characters pain and hopes. With their sense of longing, isolation, fear, and uncertainity. Each character hitting a different chord. While also simultaneously demonstrating that sense of alienation, how it is different for everyone yet also the same. That we are alone, yet also together. Like that line from the Once More With Feeling, the musical episode: "We will fight hand in hand, I know, but walk forever alone" or something like that, can't quite remember.
It seems to me that the only constant is we are hunting for a character or thread in which we can identify with, that echoes our own experience of life, the randome and painful thoughts inside our heads and takes us if but for a blessed moment outside of them. That character or plotline is individual to us. If we can share it to some extent, then it makes the experience nourishing. If we cannot, we feel isolated, and wonder if we were wrong, that maybe we misinterpreted, and perhaps the show or book that we found that gave us this relief is but a mirage, meaningless. And, I probably should stop using the word we, when in truth, I only know about myself being neither gifted with ESP or the ability to really know for certain how others think. I assume others think as I do, based on such relatively little information that I begin to question the assumption. So for me - what I fear is the isolation.
Is there anyone out there who thinks as I do, or comes close? Anyone who can understand? Am I alone, trapped here, inside my own mind? And is there any way I can find to communicate my thoughts...to find however slight a true and lasting connection, to really "know" a person and to feel really "known" myself. I remember going on fanboards hunting it, here even, and yet it still eludes me. The closest I've come and I may very well be lucky in this regard, is my pal Wales who has known me for over 20 years.
True, Wallace was a head case, but in the sense that we're all head cases: encased in our skulls, and sealed off from our fellow humans, we have worlds upon worlds of teeming, unruly sensations, emotions, attitudes, opinions and—that chillingly neutral word—information. "What goes on inside," Wallace wrote in "Good Old Neon," is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at a given instant."
Self-awareness - I think - is a bit of curse. As is intelligence. I envy the people who are blissfully unself-aware, who do not think TOO much, who do contemplate themselves or anyone else, who are busy, and physically active, and just think - today I'm tired and want ice cream.
There's nothing worse than being trapped inside your own head with your thoughts, buzzing about, I think. It's lonely. For a while it is cool, but then...not so much. It's why I write, I think. And why I desire yet at the same time dread responses - I so desperately want someone to say yes, I get it. I totally understand. Not in those words of course. I want to understand others, how they think. Because if I do, if I can, maybe I can find a way to connect with them that does not involve changing myself. To grok, as Robert Heinlein writes, in Stranger in a Strange Land, which I always confuse for some odd reason with Huxley's Brave New World, which haunts me more, even though or perhaps because it is far more tragic.
I think that tv, film, books, culture, even lj posts provides us or me at least with a way of getting outside ourselves for just a little bit, to see another perspective, perhaps feel empathy or identify or maybe even rail and denounce it. But at least we can choose to try and go outside ourselves. Just talking to a person or more accurately listening, accomplishes this. The listening is hard - because to do it, you have to quiet your head. Reading is the same thing - you have to quiet your head and hear them. I'm not always very good at this. I'm not sure anyone is, and oddly I get comfort from that.
Sorry for the vastly long and in retrospect somewhat introspective post. I'd cut-tag but it feels wrong somehow. Like, I don't know cutting off a limb. And, I seem to be writing a lot of long posts lately. Compulsively. Not quite sure why. As if I'm trying to dislodge something. Or connect by babbling. My apologies for any inconvience or annoyance that they may cause. I do not mean to offend.
Feeling rather humble and vulnerable today, uncertain about myself and the world around me. And this article about the late David Foster Wallace, who I knew of, but alas never found the time or interest in actually reading, touched me in a way, I'm not quite sure how to express but will attempt to anyhow:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/158935
The passages that particularly hit me were these:
"I guess a big part of serious fiction's purpose," he [David Foster Wallace] said in a 1993 interview, "is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves."
Wallace found both artistic and moral value in simply registering his dread: "Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience . . . We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside." He once argued that the linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein—one of the most terrifying thinkers who ever lived—was an artist because "he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism."
I've seen a few scattered posts recently on Buffy - everything from why the writer no longer identified or liked the series to analyzing the story and expressing why fans liked certain characters - mostly from sociological/political or largely romantic perspective. I find these posts informative about the poster while at the same time incredibly frustrating, because they leave out people like myself -who well fell in love with the show for the reason Wallace states above. I simply identified with all the characters pain and hopes. With their sense of longing, isolation, fear, and uncertainity. Each character hitting a different chord. While also simultaneously demonstrating that sense of alienation, how it is different for everyone yet also the same. That we are alone, yet also together. Like that line from the Once More With Feeling, the musical episode: "We will fight hand in hand, I know, but walk forever alone" or something like that, can't quite remember.
It seems to me that the only constant is we are hunting for a character or thread in which we can identify with, that echoes our own experience of life, the randome and painful thoughts inside our heads and takes us if but for a blessed moment outside of them. That character or plotline is individual to us. If we can share it to some extent, then it makes the experience nourishing. If we cannot, we feel isolated, and wonder if we were wrong, that maybe we misinterpreted, and perhaps the show or book that we found that gave us this relief is but a mirage, meaningless. And, I probably should stop using the word we, when in truth, I only know about myself being neither gifted with ESP or the ability to really know for certain how others think. I assume others think as I do, based on such relatively little information that I begin to question the assumption. So for me - what I fear is the isolation.
Is there anyone out there who thinks as I do, or comes close? Anyone who can understand? Am I alone, trapped here, inside my own mind? And is there any way I can find to communicate my thoughts...to find however slight a true and lasting connection, to really "know" a person and to feel really "known" myself. I remember going on fanboards hunting it, here even, and yet it still eludes me. The closest I've come and I may very well be lucky in this regard, is my pal Wales who has known me for over 20 years.
True, Wallace was a head case, but in the sense that we're all head cases: encased in our skulls, and sealed off from our fellow humans, we have worlds upon worlds of teeming, unruly sensations, emotions, attitudes, opinions and—that chillingly neutral word—information. "What goes on inside," Wallace wrote in "Good Old Neon," is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at a given instant."
Self-awareness - I think - is a bit of curse. As is intelligence. I envy the people who are blissfully unself-aware, who do not think TOO much, who do contemplate themselves or anyone else, who are busy, and physically active, and just think - today I'm tired and want ice cream.
There's nothing worse than being trapped inside your own head with your thoughts, buzzing about, I think. It's lonely. For a while it is cool, but then...not so much. It's why I write, I think. And why I desire yet at the same time dread responses - I so desperately want someone to say yes, I get it. I totally understand. Not in those words of course. I want to understand others, how they think. Because if I do, if I can, maybe I can find a way to connect with them that does not involve changing myself. To grok, as Robert Heinlein writes, in Stranger in a Strange Land, which I always confuse for some odd reason with Huxley's Brave New World, which haunts me more, even though or perhaps because it is far more tragic.
I think that tv, film, books, culture, even lj posts provides us or me at least with a way of getting outside ourselves for just a little bit, to see another perspective, perhaps feel empathy or identify or maybe even rail and denounce it. But at least we can choose to try and go outside ourselves. Just talking to a person or more accurately listening, accomplishes this. The listening is hard - because to do it, you have to quiet your head. Reading is the same thing - you have to quiet your head and hear them. I'm not always very good at this. I'm not sure anyone is, and oddly I get comfort from that.
Sorry for the vastly long and in retrospect somewhat introspective post. I'd cut-tag but it feels wrong somehow. Like, I don't know cutting off a limb. And, I seem to be writing a lot of long posts lately. Compulsively. Not quite sure why. As if I'm trying to dislodge something. Or connect by babbling. My apologies for any inconvience or annoyance that they may cause. I do not mean to offend.
