Here's what I will never be trapped by again:
1) The "soulmate" crap. That's about control, guilt and the pretence of tender-heartedness. If someone says it to you, ignore it. Falling for it is irredeemably beta.
2) The relationship shit-tests like "were you looking at her?" to which all possible answers are wrong. The best thing to do is to respond in kind, ie: "Well, of course: she's as hot as fuck".
3) The absence of communication. If she doesn't text you, that's her fucking problem. *Never* get trapped into sending loads of texts to a silent woman. She will loathe you for your spinelessness.
4) Sexual intimacy. There ain't no such thing. You are just number n. So, to some extent is she. We don't communicate souls in sex, however much hand-wringing Christian clergyman think we do. We just fuck like animals. At last we're learning how to do it properly. Remember that kissing is absolutely nothing at all.
5) Rows are good. If she gets cross with you, get cross back. Never, ever appease a woman's anger. Women hate craven, cringing men.
6) Never believe what a woman says about the type of man she finds sexy. All that stuff about kindness, intelligence, etc is all crap. Women are as sexually predictable as we are, and we find big tits and slim hips sexy, and they find big, dominating men sexy. Believe me, your reading of Heidegger will be utterly irrelevant to whether she likes your cock, and she will, whatever she says, not be turned on by your claim to be a poet.
Well, that's it. As you can guess, some of this is inspired by reading less savoury stuff about "game", but my experiences over the last two years (of steadily being battered into the ground like the beta I am) suggest that there is a lot of truth in it.
Women are not hard-wired to be caring, or loving, or care-givers or whatever. They, like men, are animals, and their desires and preferences are far more animalistic than we often think.
The title of this post is inspired by the extremely cool track Bulletproof by La Roux, which is 80s synth pop for 2009, with a video whose visual imagery is what many 80s groups would have made, had the technology allowed it. It shows that this kind of music really does have meaning: archetypal grid patterns, geometric solids, splintered images, too much lighting, asexual or androgynous characters (she's a mixture of Toyah, Hazel O Connor and Flock of Seagulls). I wonder if the grid patterns, reminiscent of laboratories and prisons, are trying to say something in particular...
And not a single whoremark arse tattoo in sight. No lingering cunt-shot either.
Even crap 80s synth pop had more to say about real life and real personalities than Lily Allen, whose failure to reach an orgasm is not really inspiring me. Nor am I rendered speechless by Black Eyed Peas' prediction of a great night's clubbing and sex. I'm also unprepossessed by Lady Gaga's somewhat tired attempt at edginess. Equally, Evacuating the Dance Floor could have had intriguing cold-war psychological subtones - but it doesn't. It's just shit.
Yeah, ok. I'm spending 2 hours a day in the gym right now. So I know my music. Thanks to TMF.
Showing posts with label self mockery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self mockery. Show all posts
Thursday, 20 August 2009
Monday, 25 May 2009
Sorrow, Shame and Regret
Frequently I've heard the argument that the point of blogging is, ultimately, about giving the one who feels powerless and unloved the ability to reach across the world and pretend, for a moment, that people actually care. After all, there must be a reason why bloggers commit their thoughts to the public space instead of a sealed diary.
In other words, blogging is for sad people.
I don't agree. I think there are political and philosophical bloggers who blog because they really do have something to say: they say it and people learn by reading it.
In my case, I blog when I feel like it, because I feel like it. Over at the other place I write more rationally and keep it sensible. Here I give free rein to things I would never write in a diary. Not because no-one would read it, but because if I know I am writing for myself only, I cannot write. I feel pretentious and sententious and my style goes to pot (stop laughing at the back there).
I can only put finger to keyboard if I think there is point: setting down thoughts does not count as point, since they exist in my head anyway and aren't going anywhere. So I need the sense that it will be read, if only by a robot, to make me write. And I need to write or I go mad.
So tonight I want to set down a few thoughts. Everything I am now suffering I deserve: I asked for it all, I made it all happen, I suffer through my freely chosen actions. I live in a cloud of sadness. I do regret things, even blogposts I could take down if I wanted but won't.
Not all of it is my fault, to be fair. But everything I feel I feel because I created it all. And there I was worrying I wasn't creative enough. Actually I am very creative. I take a good, strong, working body, a brain with enough energy to hold down two good jobs - and exceed all targets there - and to do an A Level in maths, a soul that tangles itself every day with the (non) existence of God and purpose, a heart that holds a woman, another one, and a third, all in love; this is a working personality.
Yet - it doesn't work. It just doesn't work, never has.
But here I come to set down exactly what I feel, and why I feel it, and why you should care, and nothing comes but lines of deleted text. I was all ready to write masses of self-justifying whining, paragraphs of explanations, pleas into the endless silence to reclaim what I have lost; and nothing comes. I cannot say it, despite the promise of an audience and despite the wish to lay down my sadnesses. With everything I have I want to write it all, and make it permanent, and give it to someone else. Somehow this will take it outside of me, or broadcast it to the right ears.
But they are turned away, and rightly so. And the world has its own problems. This is why some writers encode these things in "semi-autobiographical" novels, or those awful poems about the narrator, who is always the same as the poet.
Others stay silent, as they should, and as the world demands.
And the sadness dies with them, and is gone.
In other words, blogging is for sad people.
I don't agree. I think there are political and philosophical bloggers who blog because they really do have something to say: they say it and people learn by reading it.
In my case, I blog when I feel like it, because I feel like it. Over at the other place I write more rationally and keep it sensible. Here I give free rein to things I would never write in a diary. Not because no-one would read it, but because if I know I am writing for myself only, I cannot write. I feel pretentious and sententious and my style goes to pot (stop laughing at the back there).
I can only put finger to keyboard if I think there is point: setting down thoughts does not count as point, since they exist in my head anyway and aren't going anywhere. So I need the sense that it will be read, if only by a robot, to make me write. And I need to write or I go mad.
So tonight I want to set down a few thoughts. Everything I am now suffering I deserve: I asked for it all, I made it all happen, I suffer through my freely chosen actions. I live in a cloud of sadness. I do regret things, even blogposts I could take down if I wanted but won't.
Not all of it is my fault, to be fair. But everything I feel I feel because I created it all. And there I was worrying I wasn't creative enough. Actually I am very creative. I take a good, strong, working body, a brain with enough energy to hold down two good jobs - and exceed all targets there - and to do an A Level in maths, a soul that tangles itself every day with the (non) existence of God and purpose, a heart that holds a woman, another one, and a third, all in love; this is a working personality.
Yet - it doesn't work. It just doesn't work, never has.
But here I come to set down exactly what I feel, and why I feel it, and why you should care, and nothing comes but lines of deleted text. I was all ready to write masses of self-justifying whining, paragraphs of explanations, pleas into the endless silence to reclaim what I have lost; and nothing comes. I cannot say it, despite the promise of an audience and despite the wish to lay down my sadnesses. With everything I have I want to write it all, and make it permanent, and give it to someone else. Somehow this will take it outside of me, or broadcast it to the right ears.
But they are turned away, and rightly so. And the world has its own problems. This is why some writers encode these things in "semi-autobiographical" novels, or those awful poems about the narrator, who is always the same as the poet.
Others stay silent, as they should, and as the world demands.
And the sadness dies with them, and is gone.
Thursday, 22 January 2009
New Year, Etc....
I wonder if the thing is not so much to renew yourself, through resolutions, or by some arbitrary action to appear to be changing - but to recognise yourself anew. By which I mean, see what it was that had been holding you back, and see what you were before that happened.
Very few of us can look back at ourselves with honesty. For one thing, we genuinely forget what we were like. Through the difficult patch, we come, as through all kinds of memory, to see ourselves as perfect before. This "memory cheats" thing must be some kind of survival device.
You are what you are: you will probably not succeed in changing that significantly, unless something happens to you - shocks you, in some way. But how do you know that what you think you are is what you are? In the muddle, the wave of relationships, the power games they need, the way that they grow around you like your most comfortable clothes, in all this, it is hardly a surprise that you look in the mirror and you don't quite see yourself, but instead see yourself looking a certain way (good or bad) "in that". Your perception is coloured by something that is not, in fact, you.
So what are you, then? How do you recover or recognise what it is that you are and what you can do with it?
I think this is where New Year's Resolutions come in, and the psychology of hope- especially the kind of vicarious hope that we have seen lately. But these are more likely to represent what we want to be, not what we are.
To be honest, I have no idea. I look for the answer in words, in alcohol, in staring at the mirror, even in -yuk- work (which is usually the way of blocking self off altogether): but no answers are forthcoming.
Is it possible, after all, that it is very difficult to know how to recognise yourself? Or is it me?
Very few of us can look back at ourselves with honesty. For one thing, we genuinely forget what we were like. Through the difficult patch, we come, as through all kinds of memory, to see ourselves as perfect before. This "memory cheats" thing must be some kind of survival device.
You are what you are: you will probably not succeed in changing that significantly, unless something happens to you - shocks you, in some way. But how do you know that what you think you are is what you are? In the muddle, the wave of relationships, the power games they need, the way that they grow around you like your most comfortable clothes, in all this, it is hardly a surprise that you look in the mirror and you don't quite see yourself, but instead see yourself looking a certain way (good or bad) "in that". Your perception is coloured by something that is not, in fact, you.
So what are you, then? How do you recover or recognise what it is that you are and what you can do with it?
I think this is where New Year's Resolutions come in, and the psychology of hope- especially the kind of vicarious hope that we have seen lately. But these are more likely to represent what we want to be, not what we are.
To be honest, I have no idea. I look for the answer in words, in alcohol, in staring at the mirror, even in -yuk- work (which is usually the way of blocking self off altogether): but no answers are forthcoming.
Is it possible, after all, that it is very difficult to know how to recognise yourself? Or is it me?
Tuesday, 17 June 2008
My Four Leafed Clover - Redux
Bloody hell I don't even know how to spell this: I thought I could do it on google hits: "four leafed" gives 49000 hits, "four leaved" 36000 so I thought I'd take the majority view, being a freedom loving democrat.
My reader will by now be accustomed to reading no updates of TTD at this stage of the week - too busy is the pathetic excuse. However today is an exception - for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment.
So I thought I'd post on one of my favourite subjects: the psychology of embarrassment. In particular how it can be desired as a pathway to annihilation and (maybe) therefore renewal.
I've made all this up, btw. This is more homespun than a jumper your nan made for you when you were two and were too embarrassed to wear it even at that age.
So. It is possible to desire, even actively plot, a situation wherein you are humiliated, with the full knowledge of this outcome, and still to desire it. The reason is this. Let us assume there is issue x, about which you are to embarrass yourself. Issue x needs to be plausible, even real, but not, on the face of it, desperately important. However, there is also issue y, which really is bugging you, and which is probably only tangentially related to issue x, such as occurring in the same place of work (to take a random example).
Issue x can be used to bring issue y to a head, by facilitating a total humiliation related only to issue x (on the face of it) - thus allowing issue y to be solved without its own humiliations, though admittedly using the humiliations of issue x. But it might just be that x allows you a more noble, or pure, solution than tackling the, say, political issues of y.
Choose your humiliations, is my advice, I suppose: choose them well and decide how you wish to be remembered.
My reader will by now be accustomed to reading no updates of TTD at this stage of the week - too busy is the pathetic excuse. However today is an exception - for reasons which are unlikely to become clear at the moment.
So I thought I'd post on one of my favourite subjects: the psychology of embarrassment. In particular how it can be desired as a pathway to annihilation and (maybe) therefore renewal.
I've made all this up, btw. This is more homespun than a jumper your nan made for you when you were two and were too embarrassed to wear it even at that age.
So. It is possible to desire, even actively plot, a situation wherein you are humiliated, with the full knowledge of this outcome, and still to desire it. The reason is this. Let us assume there is issue x, about which you are to embarrass yourself. Issue x needs to be plausible, even real, but not, on the face of it, desperately important. However, there is also issue y, which really is bugging you, and which is probably only tangentially related to issue x, such as occurring in the same place of work (to take a random example).
Issue x can be used to bring issue y to a head, by facilitating a total humiliation related only to issue x (on the face of it) - thus allowing issue y to be solved without its own humiliations, though admittedly using the humiliations of issue x. But it might just be that x allows you a more noble, or pure, solution than tackling the, say, political issues of y.
Choose your humiliations, is my advice, I suppose: choose them well and decide how you wish to be remembered.
Monday, 2 June 2008
Excellent Effort
I think this is a marvellous defence.
In fact I can speak from some experience on this subject, for, when I was arrested at the weekend, drunk, swearing and shouting, throwing bottles and threatening people, it was entirely because I was doing it as a publicity stunt, to draw attention to the terrible plight of those suffering alcohol addiction.
My protest did in fact garner attention from local police, local media (though they sensationalised it somewhat) and fellow sufferers, who threw bottles and engaged in sympathetic obscene shouting and what is quaintly known as "threatening behaviour". We even had a "fight" to try to show the desperate physical strains of alcohol abuse on the human body.
It was so successful I intend to repeat it this weekend!
In fact I can speak from some experience on this subject, for, when I was arrested at the weekend, drunk, swearing and shouting, throwing bottles and threatening people, it was entirely because I was doing it as a publicity stunt, to draw attention to the terrible plight of those suffering alcohol addiction.
My protest did in fact garner attention from local police, local media (though they sensationalised it somewhat) and fellow sufferers, who threw bottles and engaged in sympathetic obscene shouting and what is quaintly known as "threatening behaviour". We even had a "fight" to try to show the desperate physical strains of alcohol abuse on the human body.
It was so successful I intend to repeat it this weekend!
Friday, 23 May 2008
A Seventeen Point Six Percent Swing
Obviously I'm delighted by the Tories' victory in Crewe and Nantwich, unlike the bizarrely titled "Telegraph Columnist" Mary Riddell, who is already giving herself nightmares about what terrible things may come to pass under a Tory government utterly in hoc to a fundamentalist Christian worldview; such as (cover your ears, or eyes) another vote on abortion. Given that her side won all this week's debates convincingly, and that, accordingly, children are wholly viewed as the playthings of already existing beings in law and morals*, it's hard to escape the view that her fear is based upon the existence of dissent itself; the cognitive dissonance currently being felt by self-righteous lefties with a massive sense of entitlement up and down this benighted isle of ours. It was the debate itself that frightened her, the actual reality of people who don't see life as she does; hence all the God-bothering bogey men lurking just around the next general election. She is right to worry. It will be awful. We'll all have to go to church every week. Pre-marital sex will become a crime, except for Catholic priests, and women who have abortions will be executed. That bad? It'll be worse. For, lurking under Cameron's friendly facade lurks an extremist Etonian who'll actually criminalise poverty and, even worse, might just seek another reduction in the abortion time limit, possibly to as low as 22 weeks. Fucking hell.
Anyway.
Here are some more things TD would like to see a 17.6% swing to:
1) His knob.
2) His bollocks.
3) His brain.
4) Doctor Who.
5) England cricket.
6) His bank balance.
7) The actual size of his knob, in inches.
8) His alcohol intake.
9) Ditto.
10) And again. That makes, er, 52.8% overall in favour of alcohol.
Incidentally, why do NuLabour think that what you eat and drink must be the legitimate subject of public policy but that what you fuck must not be? Have they not heard of STIs or of abortion (er...)? Is it really ok for the likes of Dawn Primarolo to tell us, effectively, that any number of abortions is alright but that people having a few jars must stop, fucking well stop now?
Well, bollocks to that. I'll defy our collapsing autocrats with another tin of crap, cheap lager. And fuck any politician who cares deeply about what I put in my mouth unless it happens to be part of someone else's body (in which case it's a positive choice).
As if that were actually *realistic* anyway. I should stick to being pissed and not really venture into sexuality. Frankly, I would make an asexual plant look like a slut. The fucker would be out in the pub with his mates, knocking back the Stellas, and he'd go "oh look there's TD!!!!" and all his bastard dandelion mates would laugh and raise their glasses. Fucking twats. There's even bloody daisies laughing at me, the fuckwits. While snogging their girlfriends and copping a feel of her tits. I can hear the wanker pansy telling me I am a "fucking virgin, fucking virgin"** and giving his girlfriend a smack on the arse for good measure while I try to sneak up to the bar under my huge collar, almost silently ordering a pint.
*Sooner or later I'll need a liver...
** No conclusion is to be drawn on TTD's sexual experience from this piece of semi-sober whimsy.
Anyway.
Here are some more things TD would like to see a 17.6% swing to:
1) His knob.
2) His bollocks.
3) His brain.
4) Doctor Who.
5) England cricket.
6) His bank balance.
7) The actual size of his knob, in inches.
8) His alcohol intake.
9) Ditto.
10) And again. That makes, er, 52.8% overall in favour of alcohol.
Incidentally, why do NuLabour think that what you eat and drink must be the legitimate subject of public policy but that what you fuck must not be? Have they not heard of STIs or of abortion (er...)? Is it really ok for the likes of Dawn Primarolo to tell us, effectively, that any number of abortions is alright but that people having a few jars must stop, fucking well stop now?
Well, bollocks to that. I'll defy our collapsing autocrats with another tin of crap, cheap lager. And fuck any politician who cares deeply about what I put in my mouth unless it happens to be part of someone else's body (in which case it's a positive choice).
As if that were actually *realistic* anyway. I should stick to being pissed and not really venture into sexuality. Frankly, I would make an asexual plant look like a slut. The fucker would be out in the pub with his mates, knocking back the Stellas, and he'd go "oh look there's TD!!!!" and all his bastard dandelion mates would laugh and raise their glasses. Fucking twats. There's even bloody daisies laughing at me, the fuckwits. While snogging their girlfriends and copping a feel of her tits. I can hear the wanker pansy telling me I am a "fucking virgin, fucking virgin"** and giving his girlfriend a smack on the arse for good measure while I try to sneak up to the bar under my huge collar, almost silently ordering a pint.
*Sooner or later I'll need a liver...
** No conclusion is to be drawn on TTD's sexual experience from this piece of semi-sober whimsy.
Saturday, 10 May 2008
I Don't Want To Stay Here On My Own
It might be nice sometimes, but other times it is dark, cold and there is noone to love; it bleeds concern and sucks adoration through a straw. This time is an illusion which entices you into living; at other times you know, for certain, that life means nothing but a progress towards soil, even a race. You know that your greatest end is as part of a beautiful tree, even though you know that this is environmentally unfriendly. But if you let yourself stay, and rot, you will be such a tiny part of so many lovely plants: your brain might even be part of the trunk of a giant oak, surveying the degredation year by year. How magnificent - for one's body and self to become part of a more permanent England than even New Labour had in mind when they set about fucking it up as the home of racists and fuckwits, the worst of all places - where they came from.
I like the idea that I'll become a leaf and that I'll blow underneath a car, the car of a twat teenager spouting all the fuckwittery of his own day, as I always wished I could do of mine but never believed any of it. How we claim the satisfaction of desire as the end of ethics, how we sweep, always sweep, we love to sweep.
What an awful instrument, the brush. It simply hides, in the soft summer breezes, in the winter we hide from, in the end of days. When we end, when the clouds rise up on all sides from the tumult on the horizon, and the heat, and the oak leaves dissipate into nowhere, then we will love winter and all its hatreds, until we feel it stronger than before, and darker, darker.
Our best and brightest are the most determined that we hide in the blazes of desire and strength. That we destroy what we think is weak. It has to go.
Fever breathe your love on me.
I am happy to be a tenth rate mind, at least I think there might have been something to live for apart from strength and sexuality. I can accept being an idiot if it means thinking there might have at one time been more to life than I can see now.
Tenth rate music and tenth rate alcohol will do for my inspirations. And this is why I carry on. For the best is the most brutal and I really, really do not want to know.
I like the idea that I'll become a leaf and that I'll blow underneath a car, the car of a twat teenager spouting all the fuckwittery of his own day, as I always wished I could do of mine but never believed any of it. How we claim the satisfaction of desire as the end of ethics, how we sweep, always sweep, we love to sweep.
What an awful instrument, the brush. It simply hides, in the soft summer breezes, in the winter we hide from, in the end of days. When we end, when the clouds rise up on all sides from the tumult on the horizon, and the heat, and the oak leaves dissipate into nowhere, then we will love winter and all its hatreds, until we feel it stronger than before, and darker, darker.
Our best and brightest are the most determined that we hide in the blazes of desire and strength. That we destroy what we think is weak. It has to go.
Fever breathe your love on me.
I am happy to be a tenth rate mind, at least I think there might have been something to live for apart from strength and sexuality. I can accept being an idiot if it means thinking there might have at one time been more to life than I can see now.
Tenth rate music and tenth rate alcohol will do for my inspirations. And this is why I carry on. For the best is the most brutal and I really, really do not want to know.
Friday, 9 May 2008
The Girls They Love to See You Shoot
Sometimes...if it is the right time; if it is too soon, they don't. Obviously. Easier said than, er, well, you know what I, er...
I wonder if the great Gang of Four realised this application when they penned the title lyric of this post. It seems to ironize the entire song, the entire surface meaning of an otherwise easily comprehendable track. What's the point?
I wonder why I am hinting at my sexual failings over the internet. It is that truly odd mixture, that bizarre conflation of the intimate and the professional that one gets with the internet generally and email and blogging generally. Why do we find this space which is at once private and at once so utterly, tantalisingly, public? It is the day by day equivalent of the party you used to go to where you'd occasionally find someone who didn't even know your name, or who couldn't even see you, but was still interested in you, and the feeling, if it was that, was mutual.
Oh, well, it is the way it is. My arms ache, my tummy aches, all the bits of my body with no muscles ache, I am weak and stupid and in pain.
Exercise kills.
Kids - just say no to the gym!! Have a pie instead!
I wonder if the great Gang of Four realised this application when they penned the title lyric of this post. It seems to ironize the entire song, the entire surface meaning of an otherwise easily comprehendable track. What's the point?
I wonder why I am hinting at my sexual failings over the internet. It is that truly odd mixture, that bizarre conflation of the intimate and the professional that one gets with the internet generally and email and blogging generally. Why do we find this space which is at once private and at once so utterly, tantalisingly, public? It is the day by day equivalent of the party you used to go to where you'd occasionally find someone who didn't even know your name, or who couldn't even see you, but was still interested in you, and the feeling, if it was that, was mutual.
Oh, well, it is the way it is. My arms ache, my tummy aches, all the bits of my body with no muscles ache, I am weak and stupid and in pain.
Exercise kills.
Kids - just say no to the gym!! Have a pie instead!
Thursday, 8 May 2008
TTD: An Apology
Over the past few weeks this blog may have inadvertently given the impression that TTD was a fit and strong man. Posts which contained statements such as "I am as fit as fuck" and "TTD is a hunk of human steel" may, perhaps, have inappropriately contributed to readers thinking of TTD as a juggernaut of muscle and a 747 of the rower.
I would like to make it clear that if I have given any such impressions then I have erred; but I would also like to make it clear that is my readers who have been on trial here, not me( c Steve Richards, Indescribablyshite) - references to alcohol, crisps and lying around on my arse should have given intelligent readers enough clues as to the truth.
Which is this. I am a tub of lard.
I say this is in the light of new research evidence, which emerged tonight in the course of TTD attempting to use a new machine in the gym using tricep and abdominal muscles. The research suggests, I am led to believe, that TTD has fuck all muscles above his thighs (even his knob barely functions) and hence is a booze-fuelled fantasist, not an athlete.
If any readers have formed the wrong impression, then I apologise from the depths of my liver.
I would like to make it clear that if I have given any such impressions then I have erred; but I would also like to make it clear that is my readers who have been on trial here, not me( c Steve Richards, Indescribablyshite) - references to alcohol, crisps and lying around on my arse should have given intelligent readers enough clues as to the truth.
Which is this. I am a tub of lard.
I say this is in the light of new research evidence, which emerged tonight in the course of TTD attempting to use a new machine in the gym using tricep and abdominal muscles. The research suggests, I am led to believe, that TTD has fuck all muscles above his thighs (even his knob barely functions) and hence is a booze-fuelled fantasist, not an athlete.
If any readers have formed the wrong impression, then I apologise from the depths of my liver.
Thursday, 24 April 2008
Narcissism
The excellent David Thompson has this post about the pathology of self-criticism. He means it geopolitically, of course (the kind of drivel-question to which every answer is "it's the West's fault" - the ideological equivalent of the Friday night "Are you looking at my bird" to which every possible answer is wrong, and results in a beating).
Of interest to me is the way in which modesty, or fragile self confidence, call it what you will, slips easily into a kind of self-regarding masochism. You start off, reasonably, by refusing to arrogate too much praise to yourself: there are, after all, many factors including luck in your success. Then you begin to wonder whether or not what you have done is successful or not and once you are absorbed in this train of thought all sorts of possibilities open up: how does one really assess any given criteria, how can one be certain that a seemingly obvious criterion (ie publishing a poem) actually involves success; and so on. It is a short and fatal step from there to an utterly disproportionate but enfolding and comforting sense that, as nothing you have done can be counted as good, you cannot possibly survive or undertake any kind of challenge. Hence you must sit at home and, er, blog. Or something.
A side effect, much desired, of this kind of self-criticism is that well meaning persons continually try to reassure one. This is now slimy and nasty: not the persons, but the masochistic individual, who becomes accustomed to hearing people say nice things and wants more of it, but in order to do that needs to keep, simultaneously, doing things well and believing that they are doing them badly. The regression into early childhood becomes complete at the point at which the individual realises what he likes most is having nice women put their arms round him.
In other words, it is all too easy, especially in a society which values and esteems victimhood, to make oneself a victim - of oneself. To be, in a sense, the tortured individual whose own blindness to his success is in fact a symptom of the most ghastly self-love - a kind of psychological masturbation.
It is extremely difficult to break out of this: its corrosive effects soon begin to affect relationships and then really begin to affect work, and then you are left with little to show for years of self-regard but a permanent sense of worthlessness that is, in reality, a fault of too much self rather than too little.
This post, of course, in a recursive way, being a symptom in itself.
Of interest to me is the way in which modesty, or fragile self confidence, call it what you will, slips easily into a kind of self-regarding masochism. You start off, reasonably, by refusing to arrogate too much praise to yourself: there are, after all, many factors including luck in your success. Then you begin to wonder whether or not what you have done is successful or not and once you are absorbed in this train of thought all sorts of possibilities open up: how does one really assess any given criteria, how can one be certain that a seemingly obvious criterion (ie publishing a poem) actually involves success; and so on. It is a short and fatal step from there to an utterly disproportionate but enfolding and comforting sense that, as nothing you have done can be counted as good, you cannot possibly survive or undertake any kind of challenge. Hence you must sit at home and, er, blog. Or something.
A side effect, much desired, of this kind of self-criticism is that well meaning persons continually try to reassure one. This is now slimy and nasty: not the persons, but the masochistic individual, who becomes accustomed to hearing people say nice things and wants more of it, but in order to do that needs to keep, simultaneously, doing things well and believing that they are doing them badly. The regression into early childhood becomes complete at the point at which the individual realises what he likes most is having nice women put their arms round him.
In other words, it is all too easy, especially in a society which values and esteems victimhood, to make oneself a victim - of oneself. To be, in a sense, the tortured individual whose own blindness to his success is in fact a symptom of the most ghastly self-love - a kind of psychological masturbation.
It is extremely difficult to break out of this: its corrosive effects soon begin to affect relationships and then really begin to affect work, and then you are left with little to show for years of self-regard but a permanent sense of worthlessness that is, in reality, a fault of too much self rather than too little.
This post, of course, in a recursive way, being a symptom in itself.
Saturday, 29 March 2008
Forty-What?
Many years ago I co-edited a piss-poor school rag called, in breach of every copyright law in the land, "42". It was a lot crapper than I had previously thought, as I realised when I re-read it last night. Still, at least I now know that I am a twat and have always been a twat. There has never been a time when I haven't been a smug old cunt, even if there were times when I had more hair than now, or less pounds around the middle. I have also always looked like a cunt, as I saw on some recent photos. Some of us have been cursed with this affliction: we could be 7, 14, 18, 21, or 31 and we still look like utter fucking twats. That's because we are. I've also always sounded like a cunt, as my few radio appearances prove. And as all of my acquaintances have always said. Let us modify Orwell and Amis's dictum for the fast moving twenty-first century: At twenty-five, everyone has the face he deserves.
Fucking hell, there really is no hope. None at all.
Fucking hell, there really is no hope. None at all.
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