Know thyself. Seize the day. Damn the man. The anthems of the young are salient, meant to carry them into a more serene age wherein they may find themselves at peace with the world around them. They are illusions, noble lies told to inspire. But what happens when they become more believable than the reality they were meant to drive you towards?
Carpe diem – that was such a big thing when I was in high school. The Dead Poets were what we wanted to be… passionate, deep, introspective, Bono-esque young men surrounded by the likes of Laura Flynn Boyle, Winonna Ryder, and Samantha Mathis. We could flip the world the finger, get the girl, and exceed the moderated expectations of the world for Gen-X slackers and if it didn’t work out, well then we’d fail with majesty and gravitas. Noble death, in fact or metaphor, feeding the legacy of young men, well, of all times, I suppose. We twitted around the world looking for our chance to mount the school desk and salute our Captain, and if, by chance, we got to meet and bed the Eat-me, Beat-me Girl, all the better.
There isn’t a lot of room in that fable for loosing faith. There is no accounting for having the Eat-me, Beat-me Girl turn into your wife who then leaves you, or for seeing the truth about the Captain de jour, and experiencing the gradual erosion of your own ideals and beliefs in the face of rent and career. Know thyself is a viral commandment, because once the scales of ignorance have been peeled from your eyes, you are confronted with the necessity to act to change the things about yourself that you do not like. That is the real fuel behind the Dead Poets… look, feel, learn, then deal with it because you won’t like what you find. Not a lot of that going on at Applebee’s or Wal-Mart the last time I checked. But then again, there isn’t a lot of that going on anywhere at all. We have a global culture of ignorance perpetuated by a bunch of Marxist capitalists and Straussian shepherds. Where are Tolstoy and Cervantes and Homer when you really need them??
I’m in the Denver Airport, fighting back tears as I write this, wild noisy children cavorting about making a menace of themselves in what was a quiet isolated part of the terminal before their overweight absentee shadow-parents brought them into it. I drown them out with Metallica. This is so not part of the dream.
I quit my job last week. I quit all my jobs, not that there have been many. I can’t do Dilbert. I don’t want to be a clone, like so many of the cloudy-eyed half-waking that scurry by with their identical black roller bags and standard issue just-different-enough-to-be-the-same earth and blue toned InfoAge brain-slave uniforms. I have trouble taking the Soma and buying the doublespeak. I want the deed to aspire to the hype, not the other way around. I want the marrow and the meaning and the purpose to be the for-the-sake-of-which, not some thing as shallow as paper or digital tokens of faith fluctuating on the ebb and flow the the collective delusion that is regulated markets. Which is to really say, “if I’m neither a factor in the market’s pulse nor a beneficiary of the ideals hyped for the sake of it, then why must I sacrifice my happiness for the gain of others?”
Why is it so difficult to be flexible and long-viewed? Why can’t anyone see the world in something close to the way I do? Is being a Picean, Rat, INTP just too fucking much to expect of at least one or two others? Is being and Idealist too much to ask of humanity? Is being a citizen too much to ask of Americans? Is there simply no way to get the expectations raised now that we have all been so insulated by cynicism? These aren’t rhetorical questions – I really don’t know the answers and I really do want to know them. And I’m not finding the answers. I didn’t find them in the Marines, I didn’t find them in the Great Books, I didn’t find them working at St. John’s. (Actually, I probably did find them, but those experiences are all so full of me not being able to be satisfied in my search for my own place and my own inner calm, that they won’t become evident until later). So now I’m off again, to find something to believe in that makes me feel connected to the world or humanity and nature in a positive way and makes the man in the mirror seem not so sad. I don’t know if that is possible, but I believe that it is because without that belief there doesn’t seem much to lift up as good.
If there aren’t those things worth fighting to protect, fighting to save, if all the fights are simply fought to destroy and empower, then the world is too bleak, too damning, and too awful to be the world that produced the majesty of sunset, the glory of snow-capped peaks, the bliss of afterglow, and the intensity of love breaking through all your defenses. I don’t believe that is the world we live in, and i don’t believe anyone should have to live in a world like that.