Loneliness and identity
3月8日 (月ー火) 12:20 am JST
I was watching SMAP tonight, and the Bistro SMAP guest mentioned that she liked using public transportation, buses and trains and whatnot. At first, the hosts seemed a bit taken aback by this, and he asked her whether she went incognito with a hat and shades. She said she wore a hat but didn’t wear glasses or avoid eye contact, as that just makes you stick out more. All of which made me think, fame sure is anti-social, isn’t it?
Most people, non-befamed though they are, have moments in which they wish for less notoriety. For example, you see someone you know on the other side of the supermarket and decide not to wave to them but instead look the other way and pretend you never saw them. Why do people do this? Well, you’re in a hurry and saying hello to an acquaintance disrupts the flow of one’s isolation. One’s whole mode of being shifts between being alone and being with others, so it’s natural that when comfortably in a particular mode, small steps will be taken to preserve its continuation.
Being a celebrity, then, must be a terror of public spaces for unlike a normal person’s acquaintance in the supermarket, those familiar with a particular celebrity are like tiger traps in the jungle, betraying no glimmer until one steps into the trap. To be a celebrity means to sacrifice the ability to be alone in public, since heretofore unmet acquaintances (and disrupters of the private mode) lurk around every deli and pizzeria. Now, theoretically, all your fans love you, and thus their intrusion is a welcome reminder of your importance and radiance. However, paradoxically, as fame grows past a certain point and you are known not only by your supporters but by your foes, the public as a whole grows less inviting though the raw number of people who love you has increased. I mean how many of us truly love Julia Roberts in the way she deserves to be loved? And yet we all know her and will unquestioning intrude ourselves into her existence.
It is seemingly fortuitous that fortune routinely accompanies fame, for fortune can, of course, buy relief from the need to enter the public world with its many distractions. With sufficient wealth, one can buy a gated home and hire others to do one’s shopping and so on. However, fortune itself only adds to the curse, as it buys one only a more perfect hermitage, cut off from authentic interaction with others.
And so ends the quest for universal love: those who love you disrupt your solitary reflections and those who hate you lie in ambush, you cut yourself off from the world and are left more alone than even the lowliest hobo.
Ironical, huh?
3月9日 (火ー水) 1:03 am JST
I was reading Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, and the main character had to spend some time alone in a cabin. Naturally, this got me to thinkin’— I should spend sometime alone in a cabin.
Bashô once said, “There’s nothing so intruiging as living alone” [1]. My old chemistry teacher, Dr. W—, spent more time living alone in the woods of Iowa than Thoreau did at Walden. In the end, W. was undone by a woman.
I’m living somewhat alone here in old Yamato, but one can always lead a lonelier life. There’s no end to the more isolated one could be. It would be nice to sequester myself in a cabin of some sort, but I’m not really sure when such a thing could be accomplished. I have contractual obligations from now until 2006, a year number so high as to sound fit only for science fiction. Sometimes, I wonder if my present sabishisa isn’t my own doing. People like me, we push others away, then we feel self-righteous when they leave us be. All those kids with Hot Topic shirts, they push away the preps with their black fingernails, then scorn those who have the gall to judge them. We’re all pushing some away and drawing others into our cliques.
“All of my inscrutability, is it a façade? Or worse, is it the real me? Could I be normal, even if I wanted?” These are the sorts of questions which have plagued my identity formation process for years.
The other day, S— stopped by my apartment. She noted the wall of photographs, “Are these your friends?”
I joked that I collect photos of strangers.
“Well, you never know C—, your quite weird.”
I wondered, when had I been weird to her? If I had been so, was it intentionally? It seems that we either have core identities— thus there is a deepest part of ourselves which is out of our control— or we don’t have core identities— thus we are willow the wisps, blown about without reason. We’re in thrall to character cast before our birth or to the tides that wash over us in life. Is it worse to be an ugly rock or an unremarkable cloud?
I want to bypass all these questions of identity, but it seems the only way to do that is to leave society all together.
Hence, the desire for the cabin.
What kind of man am I?
‘’[[http://carlsensei.com/haiku/viewHaiku.php?TextId=173 |Asagao ni / ware wa meshi kû /
otoko kana…]]’‘
3月11日 (木ー金) 12:16 am JST
It’s Thursday, and I still haven’t used an umbrella this week.
Suffice it to say, this has been the greatest week of my life evar.
Walking back from school, the weather was so not unpleasant that I was almost moved to tears. Back at the apartment, I opened the window to the breeze, instead of to avert fears of carbon monoxide poisoning by heating appliances. It was glorious.
Needless to say, snow is predicted for the weekend.
I returned a video and CD (yes, a CD; Japan is like that) to the rental shop, then on the way back became momentarily lost. It was odd, because I basically haven’t been lost in Takaoka for months. Even when I rode my bike out to the river’s confluence and got turned around in the twisting neighborhoods on my way back last summer, I didn’t feel this confused by my surroundings. It was as though by going two blocks in the wrong direction, I had shifted realities. For once, I was surrounded by the unfamiliar and thus, the foreign. That’s all I really want from my imagined Mongol hordes, a return to the unknown.
Anaxagoras had the theory that only like could know like. How our minds work then, he surmised, is our skulls are full to the brim with infinitesimal fragments of every kind of thing. Flesh, wood, stone, fire, metal, clouds, and everything else are all contained in part inside our noggins. When we see tables, it’s because the micro-tables in us light up. When we see ham sandwiches, there’s a ham sandwich inside us that dances in response. His theory is wrong, but his insight is deep. When I see a foreign world, there’s something in my head that responds to it. Suddenly, not only is the world foreign to me, a part of me, the part informing me of my sensation of this world, is foreign to me as well. Thus, the goal in seeking foreign locales is to light up this tiny foreign place inside my brain. We change our location, but what we seek to change is ourselves. That’s why I want my mountain cabin or my Mongolia. By removing everything else in the world, I remove everything else from my brain. Then, I can rebuild myself from scratch without flaws using these new surroundings. The idea is that character isn’t fixed by birth but determined by environment, an environment which can and should be changed.
When we read noble poetry, we feel ourselves more noble. This is because nobleness exists as an essence in the mind. When there is nobleness in poem outside of us, it causes the bit of nobility inside of us to vibrate in harmony with it. We then feel more noble because this new part of us has been dredged to the surface. It may itself only be a reflection of what is outside, but because it is inside, it can change us.
At least, that’s the hope. The hope is man’s nature is malleable for the good. Experience has proven to me beyond doubt that man’s nature can be deformed to the worse by experience of the vulgar. Whether the reverse is true and improvement of one’s identity also possible, remains to be seen.