The Philosopher's Attic

Die or don’t. Be creative, be idiotic, be silly, be eccentric, but don’t be too smart about it, or you might reveal a bit too much about yourself…

I’m not really into the weirdness that the current charts are subjecting us to, but not even I can completely cut myself off from the hype around certain things. Lady Gaga certainly falls into my category of ‘annoying’ and ‘heap of mental debility’ or even ‘be original at any and every price’. I won’t go into the difference between ‘being original’, ‘having a personality’ and ‘having an image’ of all the above here.
No what I am far more interested in is something the Queen of Over-the-top stated a couple of weeks ago in either a press release or an interview:

“You know, I have such an appreciation for where I am in my life because I’ve struggled and because I couldn’t get signed, and because I couldn’t get played on the radio,” … “There are times when it can be a lot to deal with but always when I get up in the morning I try to find that very joyful place that reminds me that I would die if someone took it all away. If someone did that I wouldn’t be a person anymore.”

cf. Contactmusic News and a much longer, twisted version in The Independent

That strikes me as odd. Well, to be completely honest, first thoughts are ‘oh dear’… then a touch of ‘how stupid can you get’ comes in. Once those signs of rejection subside, I get down to the philosophical problem that arises.

What makes us persons in the first place? Is it what we do (ie. the good)? What we don’t do (ie. the evil)? Is it where we come from? From who we are born? From what we’ve been through or haven’t been through (ie. the good and the bad)?

Or rather: is it what we want to project to the outside? Or rather that unveiled, harsh reality that we don’t want anybody to see? Is it the friends that cherish us? The people we love? The ones we despise?

Truth be told, what looks like a stupid quib by an equally stupid person, after scrutiny, actually is the true and profound expression of Gaga’s gagaism and true existence. She is what we make her to be. We give her the canvas on which to draw her meaningless existence out into something glamorous, something eccentric, something we in our everyday trot would never dare to do. Truly, if someone were to take that away form her, the icon would die. Just as any of the megahyped media models starting from an oversexed Marilyn Monroe to a slightly disgustingly exhibitionist Madonna. They exist because we see something in them. Because they dare to drag out the craziness that our reason cannot live out. Why? Because it’s not meant to be lived out. When craziness becomes the everyday role you play, then you lose what really made you a person in the first place. Or with the terms of Lady Gaga: if you make your ‘box of insanity’ your only kingdom, what’s left in the evening when you lie in bed alone, only turned on yourself?

Now of course, such a reasoning presupposes thought and self-critique which frankly I doubt Lady Gaga has enough of to even recognize a ‘bon mot’ when it would jump under her wig and ate directly at her brain. Chances are she really believes that losing her constructed image and fame would really kill her. The humiliation clearly would be enough to stop that superficial heart of hers.

But that leads me to a comforting thought: you can be what you want, wish and dream of. You can even construct your pseudo-memories about it all and make it real for us. And with the reinforcing strength of the perspective of people around us, we can even legitimize it until we completely and utterly forget what it was to be different or before.

Comforting or terribly unsettling?

yseult Issues, Philosophy, Philosophy and Pop Culture

I’ve already made a point for caring, to extend our own lowly existence wider into circles around us. But what about the other direction. It’s an old idea that everything in this world is realised in a split between object and subject.

We are all subjects, thinking, feeling, breathing, crying and laughing our way through our existence. But to everyone around us, we’re another object in a world that’s just getting fuller and fuller.
Care for another and make him a subject of your affection. But what happens when you’re being cared for and made a true subject of someone’s affection, love and friendship?

It’s possibly one of the hardest things to achieve: let yourself be cared for.

In times where we’re being tought to stand on our own two feet from a tender age, where being independent and self-sufficient, we’ve completely lost the notion of accepting anybody’s help. The idea that we need others in order to get better, be better, get more complete, be more complete has something revolting. Completely out of touch with the modern world and the idea that yes, man is an island and that every man can fight for themselves.

Accepting the care of others isn’t so much a dependency or a disguised profiteurism that only lets you consider others in their worth or what they can do for you. That’s just another way of being self sufficient and using anything and everything that you can for your own gain.
No, what I’m driving at here is the fundamental truth of ’seeing me through your eyes makes me fuller’.

As someone who had to very early on understand the terrible distance between me and the world and my own incapacity to ‘connect’ or blend in, it’s been the biggest change in myself and my not-so-funny automatisms of auto-derogation to accept that there are people caring for me and that them doing something for me, caring for me helps me be better, fight less to be oh-so-awesome and by admitting to liking it, actually learn to care for others more.

Letting yourself be cared for by others, on their own terms instead of your own, can offer new perspectives. Accepting help, accepting their view of you, of your needs and their ways of meeting them, is not just about you, but about them as well and about what links you to the rest of the world.

yseult Personal communication, friendship, love, mind, society, vices

Has it already started then?
That place of the inbetween when silence replaces whatever was there first.
Commitment, companionship, proximity… love.

Once and for all?
For ever and ever?
Over longer or shoter, harder or sensible,
over time and over that space that’s already expanding,
over hearts and stone,
blood and that visceral heartbeat that is the most solitary thing,
there is a change to come.

Soon. And when it’s done.

There will be nothing left.
Of that link. Bond. Heart.

Those oathes, these vows, this ring, this finger.

There won’t be anything but this insurmountable silence,
that unbearable weight of nothing at all.
When nothing’s wrong, and nothing needs to be shared.

Just another day in paradise.

yseult Poetry, Writing