Day 21
When I was a kid, I read the way other kids breathe or blink. I read incessantly, constantly, compulsively.
I remember being a kid and getting so lost in these other worlds. I was so in love with the stories, with the places they took me, the things they showed me. Sometimes I could get so lost in a book world that I would just put the book down and go on my own adventure.
I used to look at the inside back cover of the books, at the author bios. Sometimes there were pictures. I would read the bios of these authors, usually women, who had created these fantastic stories. Teachers, mothers, writers. They always lived either in Houston, Texas, or in New York City, and they always lived with "her husband and her dog/cat." I would imagine meeting these authors one day, showing them things I had written. They had kind faces, most of the time. I imagined them saying encouraging things to me.
Sometimes, the authors I loved were dead; then I imagined their spirits visiting me, drawn to the well of imagination flowing from my young brain. It wasn't in line with my religious beliefs, but I wasn't a child who concerned myself much with consistency. As a kid, I had a large vocabulary and a decent grasp of basic logic and philosophy; in groups of adults, I could talk about the basis of existence and the problem of objective truth, but by myself, I spent most of my time staring at trees, trying to make fairies appear by believing hard enough. I prayed fervently to Jesus that the fairies would come live in our cherry-plum tree; I saw no contradiction between these things. God was magic, right?
Everything used to be magic, back then. Electricity, technology, the ability of words on a page to make me someone else, feeling things I'd never felt before. Everything mattered. I used to look at a sunset, at lavender and peach streaks across the sky on a late summer evening, and I felt it so intensely. I didn't have a word for what I was feeling, back then, but now that I'm older, I know what it's called. Heartbreak, and joy. I never seemed to be able to experience any happy emotion, as a child, without the sharp edge of sadness behind it. I have always been acutely aware of the impermanence of life.
Look at this sunset, eleven-year-old-Emily would think. I will never, ever see this sunset again. And it broke my heart.
Books, though, were not impermanent. In a book, I could return to a perfect moment over and over again, as many times as I wanted. I could even almost make myself forget, so I could get close to feeling the same surprise I did the first time.
Sometimes, I wish I could catch the world the way it is and hold it in book form, forever, so that it can't be lost. But then I look around and I realize that you can't capture the world without capturing the way it's always changing. Transience is the very essence of existence, and without constant movement forward we become stagnated in time, tepid pools of water where we should be cool, crisp, flowing rivers. And anyway, I'm not nearly as interested in the world the way it is as I am in the way it could be, or could have been, or seems, or should be.
There's this concept in psychology called "Freudian Joke Theory," or something like that. (And no, it's not this joke:
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Freud.
Freud who?
PENIS!)
The Freudian Joke Theory (if it's even called that) has to do with subjectification vs. objectification. Basically, it's like if you go out in your day, you consider yourself to be you; you're a person, and you go around noticing things, observing things, and making judgement calls, like whether your should give money to this homeless guy, and whether to get a mocha or a hot cocoa. So say someone comes along, during your day, and goes, "Hey, watch where you're putting your giant feet, Bigfoot! Sheesh!"
Suddenly, you don't feel like an observer, a "subject," going through the world. You feel like an "object," the person or thing being observed and judged by others. Now instead of wondering if hot cocoa or mocha would taste better, you're wondering whether the guy behind the counter thinks you're taking too long, and whether or not he's noticed your gigantic stompers yet. This feels bad. Nobody likes this.
So the role of the joke, in this scenario, is that you go find a third party, and you tell them the story of what happened. You re-instate yourself as the observer, the object, because you're telling the story from your point of view. The next part is crucial, though: if the third party laughs with you, or gives you some other form of support, then they have supported your right to be the one making the observations and judgements; they have affirmed your subjectivity. If they laugh at you, though, or go, "Wow, you really do have big feet!" then they support your status as an object to be judged, and reinforce your need to go find another person and tell the story again. This cycle repeats itself until enough listeners have affirmed your subjectivity that you feel secure again--or until all of your friends are sick of hearing the story about that one time that creep called you "Bigfoot."
Storytelling is like that, but on this much bigger scale. In my life, some not-so-awesome things have happened to me. I lost someone very close to me, early in my life, in a pretty traumatic way, which probably explains why I was such a weird, morbid child. Then some other stuff happened--also not great. But later, really good stuff happened, as well as more suck. So basically, a series of random events occurred. It feels meaningless. It feels empty. And it feels depressing, because every sunset is the last time the sun will ever set in that particular way, and every day we march closer to death (it's just true!) and I have so little control over any of it!
BUT.
If I can make this into a story--like, say, the story of how I became a better, deeper, more compassionate person--if I can sculpt the narrative, then it suddenly doesn't feel meaningless at all. Of course, it may still be meaningless--the big dogs in Philosophy, as well as the bible, agree that there is no objective meaning behind life (and if you don't believe me on the bible front, go check out a little book called "Ecclesiastes"). But again, as long as my ego is established in the position of subject, it really doesn't matter whether you observe my meaning as significant, or even in existence. Case in point, that really sad sunset when I was eleven? Not gone forever, not wasted, because it became an anecdote in a blog post. There was meaning to it, because I gave it some meaning.
My point behind this unforgivably long post? I have no idea. I just got all nostalgic, and remembering my childhood makes me existential. I don't know what it all means. You're the subject of your own experiences. You get to decide what the experience of reading this means.
I remember being a kid and getting so lost in these other worlds. I was so in love with the stories, with the places they took me, the things they showed me. Sometimes I could get so lost in a book world that I would just put the book down and go on my own adventure.
I used to look at the inside back cover of the books, at the author bios. Sometimes there were pictures. I would read the bios of these authors, usually women, who had created these fantastic stories. Teachers, mothers, writers. They always lived either in Houston, Texas, or in New York City, and they always lived with "her husband and her dog/cat." I would imagine meeting these authors one day, showing them things I had written. They had kind faces, most of the time. I imagined them saying encouraging things to me.
Sometimes, the authors I loved were dead; then I imagined their spirits visiting me, drawn to the well of imagination flowing from my young brain. It wasn't in line with my religious beliefs, but I wasn't a child who concerned myself much with consistency. As a kid, I had a large vocabulary and a decent grasp of basic logic and philosophy; in groups of adults, I could talk about the basis of existence and the problem of objective truth, but by myself, I spent most of my time staring at trees, trying to make fairies appear by believing hard enough. I prayed fervently to Jesus that the fairies would come live in our cherry-plum tree; I saw no contradiction between these things. God was magic, right?
Everything used to be magic, back then. Electricity, technology, the ability of words on a page to make me someone else, feeling things I'd never felt before. Everything mattered. I used to look at a sunset, at lavender and peach streaks across the sky on a late summer evening, and I felt it so intensely. I didn't have a word for what I was feeling, back then, but now that I'm older, I know what it's called. Heartbreak, and joy. I never seemed to be able to experience any happy emotion, as a child, without the sharp edge of sadness behind it. I have always been acutely aware of the impermanence of life.
Look at this sunset, eleven-year-old-Emily would think. I will never, ever see this sunset again. And it broke my heart.
Books, though, were not impermanent. In a book, I could return to a perfect moment over and over again, as many times as I wanted. I could even almost make myself forget, so I could get close to feeling the same surprise I did the first time.
Sometimes, I wish I could catch the world the way it is and hold it in book form, forever, so that it can't be lost. But then I look around and I realize that you can't capture the world without capturing the way it's always changing. Transience is the very essence of existence, and without constant movement forward we become stagnated in time, tepid pools of water where we should be cool, crisp, flowing rivers. And anyway, I'm not nearly as interested in the world the way it is as I am in the way it could be, or could have been, or seems, or should be.
There's this concept in psychology called "Freudian Joke Theory," or something like that. (And no, it's not this joke:
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Freud.
Freud who?
PENIS!)
The Freudian Joke Theory (if it's even called that) has to do with subjectification vs. objectification. Basically, it's like if you go out in your day, you consider yourself to be you; you're a person, and you go around noticing things, observing things, and making judgement calls, like whether your should give money to this homeless guy, and whether to get a mocha or a hot cocoa. So say someone comes along, during your day, and goes, "Hey, watch where you're putting your giant feet, Bigfoot! Sheesh!"
Suddenly, you don't feel like an observer, a "subject," going through the world. You feel like an "object," the person or thing being observed and judged by others. Now instead of wondering if hot cocoa or mocha would taste better, you're wondering whether the guy behind the counter thinks you're taking too long, and whether or not he's noticed your gigantic stompers yet. This feels bad. Nobody likes this.
So the role of the joke, in this scenario, is that you go find a third party, and you tell them the story of what happened. You re-instate yourself as the observer, the object, because you're telling the story from your point of view. The next part is crucial, though: if the third party laughs with you, or gives you some other form of support, then they have supported your right to be the one making the observations and judgements; they have affirmed your subjectivity. If they laugh at you, though, or go, "Wow, you really do have big feet!" then they support your status as an object to be judged, and reinforce your need to go find another person and tell the story again. This cycle repeats itself until enough listeners have affirmed your subjectivity that you feel secure again--or until all of your friends are sick of hearing the story about that one time that creep called you "Bigfoot."
Storytelling is like that, but on this much bigger scale. In my life, some not-so-awesome things have happened to me. I lost someone very close to me, early in my life, in a pretty traumatic way, which probably explains why I was such a weird, morbid child. Then some other stuff happened--also not great. But later, really good stuff happened, as well as more suck. So basically, a series of random events occurred. It feels meaningless. It feels empty. And it feels depressing, because every sunset is the last time the sun will ever set in that particular way, and every day we march closer to death (it's just true!) and I have so little control over any of it!
BUT.
If I can make this into a story--like, say, the story of how I became a better, deeper, more compassionate person--if I can sculpt the narrative, then it suddenly doesn't feel meaningless at all. Of course, it may still be meaningless--the big dogs in Philosophy, as well as the bible, agree that there is no objective meaning behind life (and if you don't believe me on the bible front, go check out a little book called "Ecclesiastes"). But again, as long as my ego is established in the position of subject, it really doesn't matter whether you observe my meaning as significant, or even in existence. Case in point, that really sad sunset when I was eleven? Not gone forever, not wasted, because it became an anecdote in a blog post. There was meaning to it, because I gave it some meaning.
My point behind this unforgivably long post? I have no idea. I just got all nostalgic, and remembering my childhood makes me existential. I don't know what it all means. You're the subject of your own experiences. You get to decide what the experience of reading this means.
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