Girl,
Where You At?
So
that small popping sound you hear is my head being pulled
out of my ass, where it’s been the last few weeks.
If I were being less vulgar (and really, what’s the
point of politeness when you’ve been working at your
desk in the same underwear and nothing but for three days?)
I’d say it was my fingers being wrenched out of my
ears to the accompaniment of my no longer going ‘lalalalalala’.
Ladies
and lady-positive allies, I present the Ostrich Woman! She
walks, she talks, she works, she eats, she even appears
to have a good time! But is she on this planet? No, her
head is in the sand of her own world and we are merely shadows
on a stage to her. And where is her world?
It’s
not quite the realms of the unreal, as Henry Darger called
the fantasy zone where his 15 000 page novel took place
(yes, you read that right). But Jessica Yu’s documentary
about Darger did make me think about the isolation that
many artists work in, and the contrast between the isolation
of making the work and the public pressures, rejections
and sometimes equally upsetting adulations of sharing it.
And this has NOTHING to do with receiving three rejection
letters in one week.
There’s
a great temptation to see Darger’s working method —
writing and painting alone in his tiny apartment for sixty
years — as a ‘purer’ form of artistic production
(ignoring the circumstantial grinding poverty and physical
and emotional trauma of his childhood). He was his own teacher,
his own editor, his own reader, and his own critic. How
many of us could work so relentlessly without the praise
and encouragement (or at least interest) of others?
I’ve
talked in other columns about how the internet is strangely
like Darger’s room, despite being an increasingly accessible
forum to those with the technological purchase power and
know-how. Webzines and blogs are trees falling thickly-wooded
forest — no-one can stop and hear them all. So I write
as if there’s a reader, but in all likelihood, there’s
no reader. (This is not some Matrix-like pseudo philosophy.)
I edit myself, think about responsibility of the press,
shape my expression, in the back-of-mind awareness that
some one, some day may read this and be affected by it,
balanced with the next-to-back-of-mind (side-of-mind?) awareness
that it may remain forever unread.
Even
then, the Ostrich Lady can take over and insist that if
no-one’s going to read it, then it’s not worth
writing something crappy for the people who will (haha,
the fiendish brilliance of my awesome brain). So when I
do write for this site’s many readers who I believe
in, I do it well because no-one is likely to see it; when
I don’t chop down my tree in the empty forest, it’s
because I don’t want people to read my crap.
Care
not what others think, cry the self-help tomes! Censor not
your inner self in order to write truly, counsel the writing
books! Speak freely from who you are and others will recognise
your honesty, coo the public speaking coaches!
Bullshit,
I spit. Bull. Shit. We all create for others — even
Henry Darger, whose more heroic self was his ideal reader.
Or perhaps the children he was never allowed to adopt. And
we censor ourselves in order to be able to speak because
being too free would be incoherent and — potentially
— insulting. No-one wants to hear what you really think
or feel because then they may have to change their apprehension
of themselves. "Everybody cares. Nobody wants to be
inconvenienced," as Willow says in "Something
Blue."
Awareness
of others is crucial, and perhaps at a certain point becomes
so pervasive that we no longer censor ourselves but speak
openly within a carefully controlled framework. I’m
all for awareness. In fact, I’m hyper sensitive to
how I speak and how others speak to me. I hate to be criticised
for being unfair or mean or hogging the conversation or
saying ‘I’ too much. So the swing comes full circle,
and I stop speaking because people are listening.
So
if the world would all just shut up and return to non-existence,
I could start sharing with it again.
he