A Kaleidoscopic Collage of Fragments, Moments, Impressions, Personas

A few fragments:

• According to a recent poll about the Age of Monsters, half the world's testable population believes it has definitely ended, while the other half believes it has just begun.
• If you start a conversation, others will surprise you.
• Sometimes you have no idea what to think about yourself, feeling somehow better than everybody but not good enough for anybody.
• Who hasn't ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?
• Who knows what an ordinary person should be expected to handle?
• You think over your life and realize how much of it is mythology, stories you tell yourself.
• Exiles and insomniacs share this feeling: that each is the only one.
• The twists and turns of your life feel new and profound but are not unique.
• It’s a story that changes in the telling, evolving over time.
• Failure to communicate is inherently hostile.
• The monster is monstrous only insofar as it enables the monstrous act.
• Try to tell a good story about yourself that captures something true, whether or not the facts agree.
• Conversation is the natural way that humans think together.
• Her heart bore a pair of claws that were useful for nothing but scratching at itself.
• You’re a shifting collage of many different personas, each as authentic as the next. A kaleidoscope of ever-moving fragments, reflecting a thousand little impressions of the world around you, with flashes of different moods and vibrant clusters of quirks.

Failure to communicate is inherently hostile.

Recently my wife and I decided our boys, 8 and 10, are old enough that we should start watching Star Trek: The Next Generation as a show that everyone in the family can enjoy (as the younger still finds Doctor Who too scary). We're gradually working through the first season. The other night, this statement jumped out at me when a character said it to Picard, and I rewound to get a picture after we finished watching. It's one of those things I've always believed without knowing or articulating it.

We all share this time and space, so we must learn to communicate with each other to negotiate and facilitate that sharing. Refusing to communicate indicates you don't want to coexist.

Speaking of fragments . . . 

A while back I made a rare impulse purchase during one of my rare visits to our local game store. I'd never heard of the game before, but liked the look and feel so much that I decided to get it. So far we've given it one try, and I think it has good potential.

Fragments is a cooperative storytelling game, a bit like D&D and other RPGs, but much more minimal and spontaneous. Players create fragments of stories together in either a superhero or post-apocalyptic setting.

All of those elements appeal to me, but I think it was the name that really won me over. Fragments.

I have a few more entries to share from my intentionally sporadic and leisurely reading of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Anoscetia

The Anxiety of Not Knowing “The Real You”

Maybe there is no single self to speak of. Maybe you’re a shifting collage of many different personas, each as authentic as the next. A kaleidoscope of ever-moving fragments, reflecting a thousand little impressions of the world around you, with flashes of different moods and vibrant clusters of quirks—but no broader pattern. . . . 

You’re not some finished painting, signed and sealed in varnish. If there is a “real you,” surely it’s the mess of paint on the palette: colors swirling and mixing and playing together, perpetually unfinished, searching and striving to make something new.

-----

Kudoclasm

A Cascading Crisis of Self-Doubt

A warning to Icarus, as he stretched out his wings for the first time: “Don’t fly too near the sun, nor the sea. One will melt the wax, and the other weigh down the feathers. Keep to the middle course.”

Most of the time your confidence carries on something like that, in a kind of self-correcting balance. Some days you wake up with your head in the clouds and you have to remind yourself to stay grounded. Other days you’re just barely slogging through, hoping something can lift your spirits. But it’s not always that simple. Sometimes you have no idea what to think about yourself, feeling somehow better than everybody but not good enough for anybody. Which is actually when you’re at your most precarious, feeling overdue for a correction. Something throws you off- balance, and you slip into a spiraling self-doubt—picking apart your wings, trying to figure out if your feathers are still attached.

You think over your life and realize how much of it is mythology, stories you tell yourself. How many half-hearted compliments have you taken to heart, how many of your friendships are kept together by little more than circumstance? You may love your partner but start to doubt how well that comes across. You may love your job but begin to question if it’s worth all the time it has cost you, knowing how easily your role could be refilled, your legacy tossed in a box. You wonder if you’re really any good at it, or have been ignoring warning signs that it’s time to try something else.

But what else could you try? How much do you really know about your interests? Do you actually like the things you like? What makes you happy? Surely it should be enough to sit by a pond in the park, watching the ducks, living in the moment. But what does that do for anybody? Where is the line between self-actualization and self-indulgence? How much of your time could be better spent trying to make a difference? Then again, what difference could you realistically hope to make? Perhaps you tell yourself it doesn’t matter as long as you do something—but wouldn’t that only prove you were doing it just for yourself, not for some greater cause? So where does that leave you?

You begin to wonder if you’ve spent your entire life buoyed by airy delusions, coasting along on unearned confidence. But if it’s possible to carry on that way indefinitely and not even notice, does it even matter whether any of it is real?

Maybe your self-mythology is no different than any other mythology. It’s a story that changes in the telling, evolving over time. Whatever resonates will stay, and what doesn’t will fall away. To pick away at the literal truth is to miss the point of it, miss the joy of it. So go ahead and build your myth. Try to tell a good story about yourself that captures something true, whether or not the facts agree.

Keep to the middle course. Steal bits of wax and feathers discarded by other, better fliers. Let the sun rise and fall. Let the waves pound themselves to mist, again and again. Your task is not to be flawless. Your task is to fly.

Ancient Greek κῦδος (kûdos), glory, praise + κλάω, (kláō), to break down. Pronounced “koo-doh- klaz-uhm.”

-----

insoucism

n. the inability to decide how much sympathy your situation really deserves, knowing that so many people have it far worse and others far better, that some people would need years of therapy to overcome what you have, while others would barely think to mention it in their diary that day.

French soucis, worries + insouciance, indifference. Who knows what an ordinary person should be expected to handle? Perhaps human life is so tough that we all deserve some sympathy. Or perhaps it’s such a privilege to be alive at all that none of us has the right to complain. Pronounced “in-soo-siz-uhm.”

-----

the standard blues

n. the dispiriting awareness that the twists and turns of your life feel new and profound but are not unique—marked by the same coming-of-age struggles as millions of others, the same career setbacks, the same family strife, the same learning curve of parenting—which makes even your toughest challenges feel harmless and predictable, just another remake of the same old story.

A riff on blues standards, the catalog of the most popular songs in the blues genre, which is itself famous for chord progressions that cycle through variations on a theme.

As I quoted before from the book's introduction, "It's a calming thing, to learn there's a word for something you've felt all your life but didn't know was shared by anyone else." So much of it resonates.

Of the book Monster Portraits by Sofia Samatar and Del Samatar

I feel myself in the clan of immigrants and hyphens.

This is a unique book. In her brief introduction, Samatar writes that one day she messaged her brother to say "we should tell our lives through monsters."

Late that night he texted me back: "Sounds dope." I was encouraged by this, as dope suggests both a hallucinatory, pleasurable experience and crucial information, as in give me the straight dope. It didn't occur to me then that it also means a fool.

And here it is. A brief field guide describing their travels through the world of monsters, with words by Sofia and illustrations by Del. Hallucinatory, pleasurable, critical, and crucial.

The Samatars' mother is a white Mennonite, their father a converted Somali Muslim; they began their lives in Somalia before moving to a Mennonite community in the U.S. I feel myself in the clan of immigrants and hyphens. Their book conveys a veiled sense of this experience, of being seen by almost everyone as not quite normal, as not fully belonging, something outside and other, a type of monster. And what it feels like to be treated as such. A veiled sense, intertwined with the descriptions of the travel and the monsters.

From "The Abyss"

First, it was necessary to see them as monsters. . . .

I fear it is wrong to posit an opposition between monster and monstrous, yet I cannot escape the feeling that their relationship is special. It is not like the relationship between, for example, disaster and disastrous, which arrive together like rocks crashing down a hill. Disaster comes with disastrous to assist it in its work. But monstrous comes upon the monster while the monster is asleep. Think of the radio broadcasts in Rwanda, which, before the monstrous act, described the Tutsis, who were to be massacred, as cockroaches.

The gap between being and doing. Impossible to tell how deep. . . .

The monster is monstrous only insofar as it enables the monstrous act.

The language is a mix of personal, poetic, and academic, hyphenated and not fully belonging to any category itself; and the images are evocative. It's an experience for both the mind and the emotions, hazy and intuitive and precise all at the same time.

"The Clan of the Claw"

In Vlost, where I met the Miuliu, I felt it was necessary to start over. I must move, I thought, so simply and slowly as to be almost stupid.

Here, then: monsters combine things that ought not to go together. They are sites at which objects come into contact wrongly. To create a monster, collect pieces of different corpses and sew them together. Draw a human with long fangs or a pair of horns. Break down the line between humans and beasts. Revoke God's contract with Adam. Blend racial categories, mix genetic codes. This cross-breeding is fatal to the best qualities whether of the white man, the black, or the Indian, and produces an indescribable type whose physical and mental energy suffers.

Like Aristotle, Aquinas believed that all women were caused by error: weak semen, unsuitable materials, or accidents such as "winds from the south." I tried to explain to the Miuliu that as a female and a Miuliu she would be considered, in my country, a monster twice over.

She had a whinnying voice. It made her sound happy. She was trying to get the restaurant staff to make me a cup of coffee. She explained that they kept a small supply of coffee in the the back, especially for visitors of my clan.

Something must have appeared in my face at the sound of the word "clan." My mixed blood roared like an April thaw. The Miuliu expressed concern. "Is it scratching you?" she asked. She suggested a few hard thumps to the chest, "to cool the edge."

I struck my fist against my chest and shouted about my clan. The children looked up in surprise from weaving their moth baskets. What is the truth of feeling? Without wishing to conflate or appropriate, I feel myself in the clan of Alan Turing dying of cyanide poisoning.

Indescribable type. The monster destroys the integrity of the body. The coffee arrived; it was certainly not coffee. In the euphoria it induced, I explained to the Miuliu that, without wishing to conflate or appropriate, I feel myself in the clan of Sarah Baartman.

The monster destroys the integrity of the (social) body. Without wishing to conflate or appropriate, I feel myself in the clan of Mariam Yahia Ibrahim. The monster destroys the integrity of the body (politic). I feel myself in the clan of immigrants and hyphens.

(An elderly white woman approaches me in the park. "Your hair, it must be naturally curly. What's your nationality?" She reaches to touch my hair. I flinch. She is taken aback, hurt. The monster destroys all innocence, all fellow feeling.)

The children were weaving baskets to catch the moths. It was almost dark. I wept for my clan, whose members fail each other constantly. How could it be otherwise, when we are so hounded and beleaguered? "Forgive me," I wept, as the air filled up with small green lights.

"Forgive me. Forgive me. This isn't even an interview . . . "

(And the work. A plodding motion without dignity or romance. Walter Benamin walking for several minutes, then taking a moment to rest. I can go on until the end using this method.)

An indescribable type. Whose physical and mental energy suffers. The Miuliu gave me a basket to light my way back to the hotel. She said she had claws on the inside too. Her heart bore a pair of claws that were useful for nothing, she told me, but scratching at itself.

Unique, fascinating, and wonderful.

A few additional quotes:

According to a recent poll about the Age of Monsters, half the world's testable population believes it has definitely ended, while the other half believes it has just begun.

-----

It will be clear that monsters have been rejected but really they are our friends.

-----

Exiles and insomniacs share this feeling: that each is the only one.

-----

Who hasn't ever wondered: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?

Fascinating, wonderful, and surprisingly resonant.

See also: I only became aware of this book because I sought other writings by Sofia Samatar after enjoying The White Mosque, which I wrote about in Memoir-ish Thoughts in Response to a Memoir.

This popped into my head recently, and its been a sporadic earworm since.

People are strange when you're a stranger. Faces look ugly when you're alone. Women seem wicked when you're unwanted. Streets are uneven when you're down.

 ~ from People Are Strange by The Doors

Seek resonance.

An article that just came across my feed.

An Animal Myself

When we imagine ourselves as another creature, we become more attuned to the world around us – and better at being human

I think it’s worth considering what we are getting when we garb ourselves in the skin of the ‘rat’ or the ‘bear’, whether linguistically, virtually, or in costume. Not because these performances are accurate animal representations, but because the ways in which we make ourselves nonhuman have always reflected back our own yearnings and repulsions. We are as much running towards one cultural narrative – what the animal we are embodying ‘means’ – as we are running away from another: our sense of what the human ‘I’ means. . . . 

On the one hand, we live in an anthropocentric society where human life is privileged to devastating ecological effect. On the other, as we play out increasingly online existences – lubricated by instant deliveries or the way we work and stream at home, alone – misanthropic solitude has also become increasingly normalised (just look at the memes). Not only are we failing to consider other species, we are flailing in our connection with one another. Recently, I asked a room of university students why an author might try to step inside an animal’s head. ‘Because animals are more likeable than humans,’ said one student. The whole room nodded. Popular discourse tends to silo these two issues, imagining that the breakdown in intra-species connection has nothing to do with the inter-species one, and vice versa. Looking at the moments where we visualise ourselves as nonhuman, though, suggests that in examining our own experiences of ‘being animal’ we can learn to live and connect better in our human bodies, too.

Does "monster" count as "nonhuman?"

A while back, in Sacred Is Nothing Special, I wrote about Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future by Margaret J. Wheatley, sharing generously. In a recent work meeting, our facilitator gave us a few photocopied pages from the start of the chapter "The Courage of Conversation" and instructed us to underline passages that resonated with us. Here are the bits I selected:

Change doesn't happen from a leader announcing the plan. Change begins from deep inside a system, when a few people notice something they will no longer tolerate, or respond to a dream of what's possible.

-----

As we learn from each other's experiences and interpretations, we see the issue in richer detail. We understand more of the dynamics that have created it.

-----

Conversation is the natural way that humans think together.

-----

If you start a conversation, others will surprise you with their talent and generosity, with how their courage grows.

Failure to communicate is inherently hostile.

Communication connects us, helps us see ourselves in others, makes us see ourselves and others less as monsters and more as humans.

Try to tell a good story about yourself that captures something true. Even though that will mean you have to, as I've exhorted many times before, embrace contradiction and paradox. In fact, I think it's time to share again what I originally quoted in 2009, with the same introduction.

Life doesn't make sense. Human consciousness and the human condition don't allow for us to grasp perfect logic and order. More than any of the particular statements that follow--although there are some that speak to me--this quote is important for its basic stance. And I believe that if more people could adopt this kind of attitude--instead of seeking religions and belief systems that provide "the answer"--the world would be a happier, healthier place. From American Gods by Neil Gaiman:

"It's not easy to believe."

"I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe."

"Really?"

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen--I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.

I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state to state.

I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.

I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds.

I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.

I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.

I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know

that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise and sheer blind luck.

I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.

I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.

I believe that life is a game, life is a cruel joke and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." 

(I added some paragraph breaks for easier reading, thought the original is one long, continuous rant.)

You are a kaleidoscopic collage of fragments, moments, impressions, and personas.