deadken posted:
generally when i think someones being malicious or i dont understand their motivations i just try to remember that every fucking human being on the planet is either a bundle of neuroses and insecurities trying to project an image of something theyre not onto the social field and pretty much winging everything they do in constant terror of failure and ridicule, or a fucking psychopath. maybe your girl is a fucking psychopath though

yeah, i realize this to be true at certain points. actually, i just wrote about 15 or 20 poems, all sort of in ode to this relationship (though certainly they can be generalized), thinking about , well, this.

Impper posted:
also you wouldnt believe the sort of things she's told me in raw confidence, like, i wouldnt want her to see this, because it would be unfair as hell, and i honestly dont understand her motivations a good 90% of the time, or i suspect i do and it's always frustrating

did she tell you she's a marxist?

swampman posted:
the only people in my world who seem to love me are the people who don't have a use for my ambition. my friends are unwilling to engage my ideas on a level that satisfies me. this isn't a problem of intellectual difference. my friends are sufficiently aware of the dark nature of capitalism, the impermanence of life, the unreality of the ego. they're as well-read as me. i can't decide if they take me less seriously because they're guaranteed a comfortable life, or because they're afraid that the logical conclusion of my beliefs is my own annihilation. further, when i try to breach the walls between myself and other organizations, my only want is to give my talent, my time, and my service to the pursuit of something larger than myself. nobody is willing to take advantage of me in the way that i want to be used. sounds dirty but i simply mean i have a sincere desire to devote all of myself to work that i know others will find important. not according to the dreamers of the past or the historians of the future but to the living web i am a piece of. perhaps this arises from my fairly terrible past where the only escape from following orders exactly was to explicate their internal contradictions - while being drained of all trust in myself. but tomorrow i'll wake up again, wondering not who i am, or where i'm going, but what the world might want, and the world will not speak to me.

my assumed identity here has been swampman, a thought experiment (first posed by some douchebag physicist or something) about identity: the notion goes, i wander out to the swamp, and some supernatural flash of lightning vaporizes me completely; another flash reconstitutes an exact copy of myself down to the electron clouds in each atom of my brain. is that copy the same person as me, or is there a fundamental difference? i thought this was kind of funny but mostly frivolous and haven't really given a shit about it since i began posting online. now, with many years of hindsight at my disposal, i've found more probing and personal questions hidden in the original game of my name: if i choose to create myself, am i still me? as my ability to manage my identity increases, and my self becomes more and more my own handiwork, am i not inhabiting a replication of myself? if i do as i'm told, and yet i give the orders, does that part of myself that surrenders to myself constitute even a part of my identity? and can i ever return to that primordial self, the relational self, that grows not by building new walls but by tearing down old ones?

please let me know that i'm not going totally bananas, or at the very least console me & tell me it's happening in a constructive way. thank.

hehe, you know, it's interesting. everything you write here has been my principal concern for the last two or so years now, even my "impper" persona to some degree. the fact is there isn't much of an easy answer here - given our material conditions, authenticity, the grand project, the importance of the self, our desires & how that relates to the other, etc. is going to be a primary concern for any intrepid young man or woman who wants to make a difference in this world. in fact, my second book was about this tangentially, and my current book, the kobe biography, is about this almost explicitly. interestingly, and i don't mean to be like touting my own stuff to a large degree, but the part of my book i was editing today had this as its very topic:

We get the sense that Shanina was fundamentally happy in the end. She gave herself over to the happiness of others and found peace in destruction; she ascended as an individual through her sacrifice to the community. Then we have kobe, who’s gained everything, taken everything his society could give him, triumphed on nearly every imaginable level, and yet still he’s tortured and agitated; he’ll never be able to ascend for there’s nothing he can give himself over to. Like nietzsche, he’s stuck in an atomized society that’s empty at bottom, that’s fundamentally diseased, that has no use for anybody’s contributions because it hasn’t got any direction. We’re encouraged to drift on our own until finally settling into a small place that offers, at best, contentment and satisfaction; the best (or worst) among us attempt to ascend by forging a destiny, but it’s a doomed project that invariably condemns its partaker to absolute solitude and alienation. In liberal societies, weakness leads to small victories, and strength leads to grand defeats. Poor kobe! Even in victory he’s absolutely defeated—he looks around at the smiling faces cheering his NBA championship and his reaction is to sigh: there was never anything that could have made him happy. For kobe, there is no celebration: what is there to celebrate? But perhaps some of us have no use for celebration . . . We were tossed into this aimless milieu and we’re not happy about it . . .

Edited by Impper (Dec. 24, 2011 11:41:20)