sanpaku agonistes
Aug. 28th, 2008 06:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupWhen I was in college and it seemed important to think about these kinds of things, my advisor once memorably described how, when you went to sleep at night, you'd realize you were making little points, little rejoinders to what you'd encountered that day, most specifically to the people who had said something to you. That the significance you found in your day consisted of reacting to the things that others had thrown at you. At the end of the day, your consciousness, your history, the "I" that you can't escape, is inevitably and perhaps entirely responsive in nature to what's been said to you.
The point then for budding historians was to be less concerned with reconstructing the past as the experience of "I." There's no such thing as a disembodied thought and no act or idea independent of context (in general) and someone else (in particular). Intelligent existence is agonistic: it struggles with an other.
So, often I wake up, as I did today, feeling that I had something urgent to tell someone. Someone in particular. These little vignettes I've been having here lately about culture, art, and life -- they're both content and metacontent. The content is, why can't I generate creative ideas out of my own head? Where's the spark of disembodied genius? And the metacontent is that the writing is proof in itself; it's one side of a conversation. There's no creation in a void, without being, in the end, a rejoinder.
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flw has, as always, beaten me to the punch of late by writing monologue as dialogue, which is sort of what I'm saying here. But at least for me, the rejoinder isn't abstract at all. I'm not writing these thoughts as messages, as letters, just for the other side of my brain. There's a discursive purpose here, everyone. Because that other side, of late? Has thrown some things down. Pushed back. Not that I've been accused, exactly. But prodded, perhaps. I need to justify myself.
One of the pieces of content is about the nature of love, and love disconnected. One could say that it's a cruel thing here, to reduce the people one loved to their significant utterances and use them as straw men for your philosophical jousting. To objectify them and put them into context is to drain them of life. I respond that to me it's just the opposite -- that they still have life to me, all these years later, by virtue of what they said. How many times has someone said something to you that cuts you to the core, that echoes down the years, haunting your dreams? And when someone repeats something that you once said to them, that had that kind of echoing-meaning to them... do you even remember saying it? I usually don't.
Another piece of content is about the nature of creativity. I should be able to create, but I can't. I'm too (to use an ironic term) self-conscious. Just like in this post, I'm more comfortable with presenting you with a Greatest Hits of genius and insight and beauty than trying to make one of my own. Weaving others' thoughts, massaging them, until they somehow feel mine. When really, it could be said much more beautifully and honestly in a poem.
I'm honestly undecided on the main point here. Is there a generative "me" at the end of all this? Or am I just a collection of responses? The stakes seem pretty high. If the answer really is the latter, then I don't know that I'm going to create anything of lasting value, and the effort will end before it can start. And yes, I know that the point of what I said above is that even great art is contextual so that nothing was created by a generative "me." But something seems different about that nevertheless.
And the risk of being wrong on this point feels awful. You can only do this shtick for so long before your audience moves on in search of something more interesting. In the personal sense, that's really what love ending is about -- the feeling we've all had, on both the giving and receiving end, that we're tired with the other's concerns. What once seemed interesting and playful now seems like a sticky black tar. A problem to be solved. And, in the end, evaded.
And you? At the end, you're left with speaking your rejoinders into the void. You can't score your points. You can't let go.
The most terrible feeling in the world is to have someone else no longer interested in you. And yet we lose interest in everyone else all the time. And think nothing of it.
The point then for budding historians was to be less concerned with reconstructing the past as the experience of "I." There's no such thing as a disembodied thought and no act or idea independent of context (in general) and someone else (in particular). Intelligent existence is agonistic: it struggles with an other.
So, often I wake up, as I did today, feeling that I had something urgent to tell someone. Someone in particular. These little vignettes I've been having here lately about culture, art, and life -- they're both content and metacontent. The content is, why can't I generate creative ideas out of my own head? Where's the spark of disembodied genius? And the metacontent is that the writing is proof in itself; it's one side of a conversation. There's no creation in a void, without being, in the end, a rejoinder.
flw has, as always, beaten me to the punch of late by writing monologue as dialogue, which is sort of what I'm saying here. But at least for me, the rejoinder isn't abstract at all. I'm not writing these thoughts as messages, as letters, just for the other side of my brain. There's a discursive purpose here, everyone. Because that other side, of late? Has thrown some things down. Pushed back. Not that I've been accused, exactly. But prodded, perhaps. I need to justify myself.One of the pieces of content is about the nature of love, and love disconnected. One could say that it's a cruel thing here, to reduce the people one loved to their significant utterances and use them as straw men for your philosophical jousting. To objectify them and put them into context is to drain them of life. I respond that to me it's just the opposite -- that they still have life to me, all these years later, by virtue of what they said. How many times has someone said something to you that cuts you to the core, that echoes down the years, haunting your dreams? And when someone repeats something that you once said to them, that had that kind of echoing-meaning to them... do you even remember saying it? I usually don't.
Another piece of content is about the nature of creativity. I should be able to create, but I can't. I'm too (to use an ironic term) self-conscious. Just like in this post, I'm more comfortable with presenting you with a Greatest Hits of genius and insight and beauty than trying to make one of my own. Weaving others' thoughts, massaging them, until they somehow feel mine. When really, it could be said much more beautifully and honestly in a poem.
I'm honestly undecided on the main point here. Is there a generative "me" at the end of all this? Or am I just a collection of responses? The stakes seem pretty high. If the answer really is the latter, then I don't know that I'm going to create anything of lasting value, and the effort will end before it can start. And yes, I know that the point of what I said above is that even great art is contextual so that nothing was created by a generative "me." But something seems different about that nevertheless.
And the risk of being wrong on this point feels awful. You can only do this shtick for so long before your audience moves on in search of something more interesting. In the personal sense, that's really what love ending is about -- the feeling we've all had, on both the giving and receiving end, that we're tired with the other's concerns. What once seemed interesting and playful now seems like a sticky black tar. A problem to be solved. And, in the end, evaded.
And you? At the end, you're left with speaking your rejoinders into the void. You can't score your points. You can't let go.
The most terrible feeling in the world is to have someone else no longer interested in you. And yet we lose interest in everyone else all the time. And think nothing of it.
