Strangers to Ourselves (nous meme) - I'm Already a Ghost

More on the past, which has been truly freaking with me lately. Two things have been haunting my mind, troubling my inner senses and larger soul sense, disrupting the self-relfection I often automatically take of myself, the continual process of constructing and deconstructing the character of Me as I exist in my mind, floating what appears to be linearly through the continuum of time, the human actor, the main character starring in the Story of My Life.

Two things that freak: one, I've begun to see myself as a stranger, this person who was me in the past that other people knew but who now is a complete foreigner; and two, the struggle of seeing all ages in a person's face, both them as they were as a child, or, if a child, the haunting image of them as an adult, an older person - which thus makes it nearly impossible to indentify them as a solid individual. And if I can't identify a solid person-self in someone else, how am I supposed to do the same for me? Je suis l'etranger.

Myself as a Stranger

I've been trying to imagine myself as the person I was back when I was a child, to discern who that young kid was who had my name and family. I remember as a kid knowing who I was for the most part, having an indescribable but solid sense of myself, almost an older kind of thought process or knowlege, yet which I was unable to express this self-sense or even utliize or realize it to influence my behavior. Outwardly, I was all ascramble, wild and unruly, sloppy and energetic, mostly unconscious. If I see pictures of myself, either real or in my head, I simply cannot grasp who I was then - this person that other people knew well and remember, and yet who I don't remember or know. Maybe this has to do with seeing a lot of people I went to high school with at my 20th high school reunion, who said so many nice things about the person they remember who was me. They apparently know or knew a different person.

All Ages in a Face

One of the first times I really became aware of aging, the slow march of death of us all, not just thinking about it but really thought about it in the sense of a physical being person actually aging and inching towards death, was in grad school, when I'd take night classes with strangers. I'd see these people coming in after a long day at work, I'd look at their tired, long faces. Most of the time I'd see a face and it would look average, normal, not old really, but certain angles would show the tiredness of that person, the effects of time sagging the skin, gravity pulling down the cheeks and eyes, giving a glimpse into what that person will look like when they are old, perhaps even close to death. They were simulataneously their age then and older, at the same time.

Sometimes I also see this in children: those children who seem to have an older face, a face of an adult, as if the structure of blueprint of their older self is already mapped out, trying to emerge. ("See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,/Some fragment from his dream of human life...) And conversely, I have seen the opposite, which is a little creepy, when I see perhaps a woman in her 30's all round and overweight, thick arms, big cheeks, pretty brown hair and a happy dimply smile as she laughs with her friends, when the small face of a child shows through, looking as though she were 9. The child she was shows through.

My own mother told me she saw this younger to me once, during a Christmas where we all ended up around her piano with songs, along with my holy roller uncle with his violin (he plays classical very well), we all were singing and for a while there, and I had forgot myself - I really just let it go and sang, put away all my horrors and fears and emotions about Christmas (a huge subject), my antipathy and stresses toward and about my family, and just sang and the whole world fell away, and it felt good. Of course, it was short lived. As I looked at my mom she was crying a little during and after the songs, not blubbering or letting herself go, but sniffling with a few tears in her eyes, wiping them, though she was also smiling. Later, I asked her what was wrong and she told me that when I was sitting there on the couch with everyone else, I had this happy look on my face, this genuine and sincere look about me that reminded her of when I was a little kid and was so happy, just smiling and singing. It reminded her of when I was a little boy and how joyful she said I always was, just smiling and grinning and beaming out love. She saw in just a few fugitive moments the happy little me of the past: he came back for that one moment and this phantom flooded her heart with both love and a sadness: love for me now and then, her son, expressing such joy and liveliness, yet sadness too that the young boy is gone, no longer available, except for brief glimpses and visits in the midst of some unplanned rapture.

Acting Old - Because You're Supposed To?

As I grow older these days, and watch the evolving behaviors of those around me at a similar age (I'll be four oh soon), I'm amazed at how people I know are beginning to act "old", or what I would consider to be old person behavior. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with old person behavior, nothing intrinsically bad or weak or immoral with it - if you are old. To me, at our age, some of these behaviors seem false, artificial, caricature-esque, done as if perhaps they think they need to because that's what they think people do at their age. It's a strange and creepy embracing of age and fate that to me smacks of death, or death in life, buckling up and giving in, playing some role of an older person that comes out of a movie or a book.

Two specific behaviors I am noticing:

• More Vitamins, More Public. As a youngster, who ever took vitamins or even thought to take herbal and dietary supplements? True, we need them more as we age, and they are good for general health. But what gets me is, these people take the vitamins and/or medicine publicly. They buy one of those plastic little day of the week containers (the ones with M-T-W-the, etc., on the compartment lids), carry it around and/or leave it out in their house, or at restaurants, they carry this container, or simply hold the vitamins themselves, and as they eat they put the vitamins on the table - ON THE TABLE - and as they eat they slowly take their vitamins, which may include medicine. That's something I'd MAYBE expect out of an 80 year old, but not someone my age. WTF?
• Ranting about Restaurants. True, as we get older we have more money and can afford to eat out a lot. And that's a great thing. But a restaurant is a fucking restaurant, and who the fuck cares if your food is not the best it could be, or if the service is not 100% perfect? I notice that restaurants and the type of food and service you get has become a typical topic of conversation. Couples meet at a party or for drinks, and they talk about their restaurant experiences: how restaurant X had a terrible waiter, and they waited for an hour for their food, and that they will not go back there. Or, they leave and rant about how good restaurant Y is. Or, while at a restaurant, they will be very impatient and expect perfect service, browbeat waiters, send food back, complain about their steak, and so on. This to me is completely unacceptable. Maybe this is understandable for some retirees who has tons of time on their hands and so need something to talk or complain about, but for someone my age to get into this kind of behavior is, again, totally unacceptable.

Some may see in my writings inner projections (whatever the fuck that means) of my own inadequacies, fear of and death, antipathy and misanthropic invective towards humans, blah blah fucking blah. I don't care. This is old person behavior, and for people around my age to be acting this shit is a defeat, a weakness, a giving into fate, to notions that age brings with it certain proscribed behaviors. Once we start act like we think we're supposed to act, we stop growing and we die.

Absolutely Modern, Again

I'm starting to understand why the moderns wanted to be new and do away with the past, that it was utterly essential to be absolutely modern, for relying on the past with longing and nostalgia is a kind of sickness, yet forgetting the past is also a form of sickness - the dangerous amnesia we encounter when we forget the lessons of experience from being alive, and we repeat the same mistakes over and over as if all our actions were controlled through some cosmic instant replay, with a drunk producer half asleep at the controls, pausing and replaying in varying speeds and at random all our mistakes.

This is one of our terrible paradoxes: the longer we live the more intelligence and wisdom we gain and the more we learn how to figure out the struggle of existence; yet, the longer we live the more we also get flooded and pursued by images and memories of our past. They say when you die your life flashes before your eye. Well, it's already flashing before my eyes and I'm still quite alive. All the things I have done, blurry memories of all the scenes of my life, all of them starring me yet also an utter stranger in all these snapshots, images, movie clips, feelings and sensations of another time - a time I cannot now be sure ever really happened.

We cannot escape the past completey, but it's worthwhile to dispose of it, murder it, do away with, destroy all previous characters and personas your have inhabited, dismantle your ego and identity - for when we live there in the past, when we occupy the moments of our waking and dreaming life with all those images of the past, we are as good as dead, walking shadows and memory shades floating and fretting around Hades, wishing for some land where everything seems to have been better, more golden, more special, our lives more interesting and enriched and without pain. All an illusion.

Loss Lolita
(with apologies to Gertrude Stein)

Eventually it all starts to unravel, to be becoming, to be unraveling.
Living in the own living of my life,
Which is also descending like it has from day one.
Living a descended life, this life of all meanings,
Like the feeling of a her living inside my face, in the happiness of my face.
That small momentary feeling of ascension, maybe years, maybe minutes,
That idea once that maybe with little effort
Now my spirits will be lifted, like they are, like climbing
The climb you can make with love, the touch of her love,
The idea that she loves you, that she once loved you, she once loved you,
That she knew you, even if she didn't know you,
This descending life keeps descending, life is a declension, a declining decline,
A yard sale with all the objects no one wants any more,
Nothing new, nothing not for sale
A falling down of rain raining down, down on the yard and all objects for sale,
To not drink, to only drink once, to only look at her, maybe once and then no more.
This is all it takes for the living non-ascension,
The unhappy warm face unsmiling, un-living,
This is all it takes to let it all leave you, a single love left and gone,
The eternal hope for a life ascending, like a child in a book,
Climbing up to a better place, to not touch or drink, to run out of objects for sale,
No more things for sale, to let it all alone, and merely look,
To let it all fall down and not ascend no more nor any more.

Gods, Babies, Devils, and the Sincerity of Expression

There is something fresh and liberating in the desire for sincerity, for me particularly: a person who has struggled long and with much difficulty to mean what he says and say what he means. For me and for those who inhabit these rhetorical modes, irony, and sarcasm, and humor all are basically hiding places, safety zones where committment and true intention and a sincere statemetns can be avoided.

This all came about, or became an issue from visiting my friends Ian and Rachel (and now with their fresh new baby son Eli Grey), as we discussed how different people seem in North Carolina than they do in in my birthplace California, not just the people themselves but namely how these people communicate. What is so remarkable is when meeting and talking to new people in NC, and even the most casual stranger in a store, they all seem to speak directly, without ulterior motive; in other words, when they say something, it seems like they mean it, as if there were no double entendre, no hidden ironic joke, no smug word play or allusions - they simply speak, ask questions, listen, and expect the same from you. Perhaps beter stated: I feel no need to keep my intellectual guard up to combat smugness or pseudo-witty word play and coolness competitions.

This may be regional, given that I (and Ian and Rachel) have lived in California all my life, and so I am very much used to a type of faux sophisticated word play, or joke style, and lack of genuine kindess or interest when dealing with either the general public or when meeting new people. It's a particularly dislikable kind of witty banter, a smart alecky quick witted style or repartee. Or maybe it's just a lack of interest or general sulleness or lack of caring. It's a form of humor wherein a person must be on guard for fear of rejection or criticism, or merely a stance and means to prove oneself superior from the start of any conversation.

But In NC I feel that if people ask if I am OK, or offer to help me in a store, or ask what I do at a party, and they genuinely seem interested and want to know. They mean their statements, and they want to know the answers to a question they ask about you. I'm not used to this. I'm not sute what to do or say or how to react when there is no hidden joke full of critique or criticism. They look you in the eye and they listen. It's very disarming but quite refreshing.

What's worth studying, delving into, digging around in excavating, extracting what has been for so long my modus of communicating, my own severe anarchic sarcasm and ironic sensibility, the forms it has taken and the underlying horror and fear of meaninglesness that ever so slightly covers, barely hiding, what I suspect is a deep fear of meaning - or, stated another way, what I call this deep fear of meaning is actually a desparate desire to have meaning, to really have the faith required to trust and beleve in life, God, the universe, all there is.

But in the midst of all writing and thinking and making and trying to create, the spectre of death creeps into the periphery, lurking like the nasty inevitable that it is, smug and confident, full or high sentence and not a bit obtuse, accountable to neither God nor the devil, beyond all sutblties of communication and thought, waiting like a painting in a museum, still generating all its power whether someone is there to look at it or not. (All the while baby Eli cries every 4 hours to be fed, nothing insincere or ambiguous about his special little wail.)