I was an energetic child, both physically and mentally; enthralled for hours with jumping and flipping on the bed or building elaborate Lego houses (and the stories to go with them), or developing the complex interpersonal relationships of my brother's Hot Wheels cars, or singing for five hours straight (this is true) into a miniature tape player. I certainly read and drew for
hours, and the copious amount of time on the computer in my childhood years was spent typing up my complicated (and princess-infused) novel about the future implications of advanced human adaptation (I had no idea this was called evolution) and a race of people who grew small enough to live underwater unaffected by the pressure (the dearth of light attentuation and the actual seabed conditions were not concerns of mine, no). I was intense and focused: when finally forced to clean my room, I would spend days doing so—down to scouring the carpets and rearranging every shelf and every box of toys, even to arranging books by height.
As children we have apparently infinite sources of energy.
In my latter teenage to early adult years (if you can count this as "early adult;" I won't quibble on terminology), I have spent the majority of my time passed out at home online, either on a blog or a social networking site, indulging my mind and its need to communicate, produce and engage at the most shallow possible level. I download mindless shows like The Office and How I Met Your Mother that don't necessarily cause me social or personal embarrassment (see: Gossip Girl, America's Next Top Model) or personal self-loathing (The Hills, which (thank God) I've never seen)...but which certainly aren't encouraging me to think any deeper than required to catch a pop-cultural reference or giggle at mild wit. I've gobbled relational porn in the form of "cute" sitcom couples and the two-day "true love" flings hawked in chick flicks like the junk food I always somehow find more handy than real food. I moved into my new apartment, but the farthest I came to decorating was painting the kitchen and putting up a Kandinsky poster. My room and closets are still full of boxes. My entire college career, in fact, has been characterized by existential lethargy, inexplicable stress and the inability to raise a finger to do any work, or even pry myself from the computer in order to procrastinate creatively. I haven't sung but a handful of times since high school choir, and for my own sake even less. Somehow, the active, happy, creative child became so burdened she's gotten to the point where writing in her blog—the most inane and least productive catalyst for expression she retained—has become too large an endeavor. The fact that I've engulfed myself in Twitter says more, I fear, than I even want to face right now, at my most self-deprecatingly self-searching. Even here I hope to end optimistically, after all.
The question here is one of expulsion of energy. Somehow, I have become inefficient in energy production and usage; somewhere, there is a leak. It used to be I thought too much, burdening myself with over-empathy for the victims of the horrific side of this world, overwhelming myself with the extent of evil, ugliness, and bigotry in existence. This is still partly true, but recently it has changed again: a slightly paradoxical over-obsession with both myself and others. I became entrenched in the mires of pretension, more concerned with avoiding that which might possibly be deemed classless or bad than with actively seeking out what I may find to be good.
It's a constant struggle for me, the dual question of standards and relativity. On the one hand, there is most certainly a qualitative stratum: Stradivarius is absolutely and necessarily better than a plastic Toys R' Us violin; Radiohead is quantitatively more technically masterful than Coldplay, and the Pixies will always have more pure innovation and musical balls than Green Day. These are facts that are irrefutable, irrespective of one's personal opinions. However, there are those who prefer Coldplay to Radiohead, Green Day to the Pixies, and plastic violins to Stradivarius (see: ironic hipsters). Here is where I balk. I absolutely am personally repulsed at the idea someone could possibly prefer Green Day to the Pixies (and I realize the problem existing in using actual bands, as inevitably the vast ocean of the internet will wash me up someone—even many someones—who truly due prefer the one to the other; lets move past personal preferences to the core point)...as will be many of my readers. I've built up something of a reputation, not only here but in my day to day circles for being an aesthetic snob. I absolutely believe in the recognition of caliber, in being educated and informed; but we do reach a point where one thing over the other becomes a gray area, becomes subjective. Musical taste, of course, is one of the most subjective and yet impassioned topics one can encounter.
Because—this is the point I have had the most trouble swallowing, and of course also the most trouble spitting up—there is absolutely something to be said for the unadulterated enjoyment of something. We are extraordinary creatures in which we can recognize beauty in such varied forms: just look at the vast spectrum of musical genres and the rabid fans of each. And though I would say my musical tastes today are better than they were in the 8th grade, in the 8th grade music
meant something to me, struck chords deep in my responsive heart—even if that music was Coldplay and Matchbox 20. Where do we draw the line between adoring and dancing to Tainted Love and Whip It (admittedly awesome songs) and appreciating the brilliant somberness of Johnny Greenwood's score to There Will Be Blood? If the critic finds a mild intellectual amusement in the technical brilliance of a composition while a teenager swirls euphorically to a well-chorded pop song, who is the better? Are they equal? I have deep problems with the relativity inherent here, and yet, I don't want to hold on so tight to the rein on my high horse—that's not where I want to be. I want to lose the pretension without losing artistic discernment; or should I give up on both, and concern myself with epicurean appreciations?
Perhaps it's time to let go my judgment and snobbery, live and let live. So much energy is spent gauging others, setting myself up favorably or unfavorably and adjusting my opinions of the other accordingly. Acute self-awareness is both a blessing and a curse; perhaps it truly is time for a return to a simple, child-like unconcern for standards in favor of a virgin appreciation of the world I live in, to simply exist in the pulse of what fulfills and excites me and to throw away any needless concern with the opinions of those around me, to lose even the awareness of the aforementioned qualitative stratum, both in art and in humanity. So what if I'm enthralled with eclectic music and you're enthralled with Nascar? Why is it any of my business—or my place—to judge you? I imagine it would be good for me, but while I want to regain child-like qualities, I don't want to return to being a child. After all, isn't it important to know the difference between good and bad? Or should I just recognize that (while my distaste for a prick because he hates Blacks and Jews is perhaps justified because of the ugliness of bigotry,) the hatred in my heart—and bestowed on him—do neither of us any good? The question becomes fuzzier and fuzzier when it leaves the realm of relatively unimportant things (music) to heavier considerations (ethics, racism).
Could this possibly be a question of
stasis? There are two considerations: "Is it excellent?" and, on another plane entirely, "Is it enjoyable?" Perhaps it's a Venn diagram, and can sometimes—but not always—interact.
As usual, I am finding myself erring on the plane of finding a balance and engaging in needless over-analyzation. Bottom line is, really, that I'm sick of being a lethargic creature in a den of boredom, and I want to be
David Byrne—or rather, jesting aside, I want to be the kid I used to be, the young adult I could be right now had I lived up to my potential; I want to be who I was meant to be, to use a largely-unfounded but still irresistibly drawing cliche.
Comments (8)
This is chilling and triumphant, this manifesto. The title itself is a gem, and the introspection and 'head-above-the-water' reflections which appear in virtually every sentence give me goose-bumps to read. Jeez, I'm jealous; just hope it took you at least a day or so to compose. Recommended, so, let's hope, every one of my subs will read it.
Hey, hey...you leave the Office and Green Day outta this, or I swear to fuck, I'll re-incarnate Dwight Schrute right now and send him to your house to elaborate on the number of ways that a black bear is the best bear according to the Daoist school of thought, and I'll send Billie Joe to serenade you - and you know what he says about the ones at the end of the serenade...
Seriously, though, self-introspection is never a terrible thing, except when we see ourselves not as ourselves, but through the eyes of an external observer - hopefully, the person we see doesn't fill us with embarassment or shame or humiliation or guilt or terror or fear or self-loathing, but too often (at least for me), there's certainly no prohibition on doubting the person we've become - all children are pure balls of light and all adults are without question sullied by the mere virtue of existing in an indecent world, colored and tainted by the terrors that reign in the hearts of men and women everywhere - so how does it happen? We develop our biases and prejudices by virtue of existing as cognizant (and self-cognizant) animals with a strong sense of self-preservation, in tandem with the fears and prejudices instilled into us by our parents (or other caregivers). A racist child? Doesn't exist. A Catholic child, a Muslim child, a christian or jewish child does not exist - it is only with the indoctrination of societal dogma, the unrestrained vitriol of others fed to us via our parents that we learn our fears, loathesome enemies, and our beliefs about how this universe functions, and our place in it.
Self-reflection isn't gazing in an empty pool, Narcissus - it's looking around while others are splashing in the pool, for there are, as noted, as many social selves as audiences we encounter...the concept that there is an "I", a "me," a thinker of my thoughts - or that you are the thinker of yours, is at best a tenuous proposition. We are a stream of self-cognizant neuro-electrical impulses in negatively-charged bio-matter within a shell of a trillion cells - and yet we transcend these seemingly barbaric limits with achievements...music, art, architecture, weaponry, protection, defense...computers: complex systems of metal and flowing electrons and plastic bits which interpret physical energy, convert it to electrical which is converted into an abstraction of the flipping of binary zeros and ones into letters which we understand to be language, which flow onto an abstracted "page."
It's all so complex you'd think we would have done more to progress as a society, as a people, as a species, as a mere animal. What are you - but an animal? What are we all but animals? This notion that we are the thinker of these thoughts, these electrical impulses, has no more substance than a robot looking in the mirror realizing that it is the doer of its actions and completer of its tasks. But that doesn't seem to cover it, these experiences we have as self-aware beings...in fact, given the resulting rise of our egos, of these personalities that invariably and completely develop, it seems almost insulting somehow to not acknowledge our own personal achievements, or to reduce the wonderful symphonies to their mathematic and acoustic basics, to shatter the development of the mind as aberration or abstraction of a baser physicality...but with some very limited hyperbole, isn't it true? What is the nature of our being? Regardless of what our role in this place might be, and whether objectivity jumps out of the fucking window when discussions of substantive reality pop up, I - whomever this "I" happens to be, is not going to rely on the foregone conclusions of other animals, no matter how correct or incorrect those assumptions may be...."I" will give the theories of gravity and electromagnetism a pass, but pretty much everything else is - and must be - subject to intense scrutiny... no opinion is valid without evidentiary support, without some basis in objective, observable reality...without a solid frame in which we may reference our world, about the state of truth or falsehood represented by a statement, we have little basis to judge the truth or falsehood of the "self"... this doesn't diminish the aesthetic value of seahorses, but it does limit our ability to make factual statements about seahorses.
How now to throw away the many days and nights and revolutions-about-the-sun's worth of experiences and memories, to return to a blank state of unquestioning appreciation? And whither the return to bliss?
this looks good. i must read this. unfortunately i gotta go atm. but i'll do my best to get back here.
Maybe chasing after the child you left behind is what's holding you back. As for having taste, it's alright to hold yourself to a higher standard but frustrating to expect taste/discernment out of anyone. Recognizing talent/value in art is important. Some media is swallowed by the masses because it's entertaining but ultimately it's empty of any true/lasting value. Artists who create things with true value need to receive praise and recognition. Music is both entertainment and art so the question raised is "Would you rather be popular or good?"
Introspective, to say the least. I think it's easier to strike a "balance" in appreciation of art or lack thereof if you are attentive to context and audience. Is Lil Wayne's music designed for you? Probably not. As is the case with most rappers, it's all about him. I used to get annoyed by the boasts of hip-hop music, but now I think: I'd rather have a song with some swagger than an incredibly white guy whining about a girl and ripping off The Cure.
The key for me to approach things with a critic's eye. Going back to music (sorry, it's sort of a passion), I can analyze the structure of a song, if the level of intensity of the singer's voice is appropriate, etc. A particular tune may not be great, but if it strays from overuse of a chorus, I can appreciate that.
At the very least, at least you're conscious of these things. I kind of think the point of college is to fuck around, but some people not only fail to make it that far, they never grow up past high school. Certainly, you are a lot smarter than that.
maybe a better question is, "is it sincere?"
It is not the quest that tires us, it is not finding anything of value in the journey. I read this from beginning to end and thought of our (human nature) tendency to strive for something more, something better, something true. To me, you are not a snob although I can see why you may come across as one. I have read posts of yours to know that you are seeking an understanding of things, people, situations...people who label you as a snob have either not taken the time to read your posts or are quick to judge. Part of the college experience, at least from my experience, is to have these seemingly lethargic moments because in the end, they will lead somewhere.
And although this could have been written in far fewer sentences, it was a beautifully crafted post. :)