Perhaps like many, I live my life, in part, through art. Perhaps not “live”, but “interpret”, as part of understanding. Perhaps not art, but story, whether in books, movies, or songs. I need those comparisons to make, or at least have the illusion of making, sense of my experiences.
I just watched a movie which has a certain resonance. It was popular with a certain class or group of people, a kind of self-loathing snobs. High Fidelity. And while the book was better, for many reasons, it was also harder to identify with the protagonist, as it was British, and the movie is American, and while, as a Canadian, I wish I could be more like the British, I’m not. American culture, and especially popular culture, is, by and large, what I’ve been surrounded by.
The movie is about a guy who loves music and goes through a break up and has to consider his life. A common story about the listless urban wandering soul. I’m not so much a music lover, but I have my moments. In truth, art, high or low, popular or obscure, is for me mostly a jumping off point for my own fantasies. My own dreams of how life could be, should be, would be, if only…
Rob Gordon, the hero, through the pain of (almost) losing his best, truest hope for love (there’s that word again), realizes that he’s been sacrificing the joys of real life for the fantasies of his own invention, and that he will stop it, since he’s been given a second chance.
A long, long time ago, I had fantasies about love, but they were without words and without pictures. They were only feelings, and thus can never be shared, but only guessed at. It’s an unknown how much I sacrificed for them. Love was, however, probably a minority theme in my dreams, most of which were driven by anger and a fascination with knowledge, technology and power. I sublimate. Or used to do so. Now, I just channel it into work and study. Or sleep.
Art doesn’t work so well for me any more. The truth is that, usually, I find myself bored and irritable part way through most books and movies, and I tire of albums within weeks that started out fantastic. Because …. I don’t know why. I’m reading the wrong kind of books and watching the wrong kind of movies and listening to the wrong kind of music. (Although Metric’s Live it Out is maybe an exception.) Because, by and large, the books and movies and music are selling a picture of the world, of life, which I cannot stomach, because I know that it is not real. And, for all John Cusack’s cute monologues and Jack Black’s clever wit and the sprinkling of self-satisfied I’m-so-hip profanity, the movie is ultimately bullshit about swallowing the American Dream whole and not choking even for a second. That shit makes me sick to my stomach. It makes me want to puke and rub peoples’ faces in it.
Life is not about getting what you want by admitting you really want what you’re supposed to want, what you’re expected to want. It’s about not getting what you shouldn’t want because if you got it, you’d be a monster. Life is about denying yourself to get along in society and not end up in prison for not having the self control you need. Human beings are animals. But we are also gifted with foresight and the ability to predict what happens when we give in to our natural urges. Humans are influenced more by fear and hatred than any other emotions. Love is just a side effect. Love is how we feel about people and things that help us escape that which we fear and destroy that which we hate. And, being human, and prone to abstract thinking, many of the things which we fear and hate are symbolic, and thus our loves are also, by and large, symbolic. That’s what the mind is: a collection of symbols. Our feelings respond to them, often more strongly than to real physical stimuli.
But so little art, so few people, admit to this essential truth of human experience. We live lives not in touch with reality and real things, but in a murky fog of dream which surrounds and penetrates the banal truths of our lives, and it is the symbolic nature of our dreams, the subtle deformation, the transparent distortion of the mind’s warped lens, which enthralls us. We are tricked, fooled, and bamboozled constantly, by our own minds, and through the encouragement and prodding of others, fraught with their own delusions, and longing for confirmation that they are in fact not deluded at all. Everyone wants someone, or many, who can help to solidify their certainty in their own world view.
Thus, movies like High Fidelity are born and can so readily captivate the minds of even the most hardened cynic.
I am not a cynic. Cynicism is just another kind of bullshit; a pose, usually adopted by ignorant children attempting to appear sophisticated. An attitude of the same ilk as the casually provocative, those types who like to show off their comfort with sex or violence or other socially awkward subjects in an attempt to prove their worldliness and cool.
I am a bullshit detector. And while I was amused by High Fidelity (on the second viewing), it is still a bullshit movie.
What makes me miserable like nothing else in life is the sheer endless mountains of bullshit that fill the landscape and blot out the sky, crowding in on me and cutting me off from the broad vistas of reality which I might otherwise have to enjoy. Bullshit like newspapers are full of, bullshit like advertising is full of, bullshit like culture is full of, bullshit like so many people I used to know are full of, and know it, but won’t admit it. Because they wouldn’t know how to live without it, or wouldn’t want to, because then they’d have to find something else to justify their sad, pointless existence.
All I want is to be rid of it. But the truly sad thing is that I don’t know how to live without it, either. Although, unlike most people, I used to keep it very separate. That’s the way with nerds: bicameral thinking. Real life is stark and cold; the life of the mind is fantastical and completely absurd. But we know the difference. We nurse our admittedly hopeless dreams, secretly or otherwise, ashamedly or proudly, because there has to be someplace to escape the obvious emptiness of the “real” world and the smoke screens blown up by other people.
For myself, though, I’ve outgrown all my old imaginary toy worlds. Their faults and seams are too obvious. The scaffolding reveals itself. The marionettes strings’ reflect too much in the harsh light of experience. I need new fantasies. Only I’m not sure I’m ready for what that means. There is darkness there. I’m talking about deathly darkness. Despairing darkness. Vile darkness. Blind darkness. Bloody darkness.
And there is light in that dark, too, but it is harsh light, burning light, brutal and unkind. It is the light that the universe throws on the pretensions of men and women and burns them and reduces them to ash. It is a power, and it is friendless, heartless, and pitiless. And it whispers. And it promises.
Not magic. But immunity to magic: to tricks and illusions plied by charlatans and actors. It offers a weapon with which to annihilate fools and their foolishness, and bring an end to the disappointment of discovering that all the promises they made were just a dollop of Vaseline on a photographer’s lens.
)0+
A city full of cowards is this
We’d give ‘em just enough rope to commit
But there’s been too much wine under the bridge
And my eyes have become immune
To everything I take from you
You wander around on a crutch
Why don’t you just lay it down and shut up
With thoughts as pure as the driven slush
And a cool insanity
From everything you take from me
