Confessions of the Flesh
Chuck Palahniuk makes me want to write. Not necessarily to publish or to make money, but to capture in words those things that go through my mind and don't make it out of my mouth.
For as much as I talk, both personally and as a professor, there's a lot that doesn't make it out of my mouth. Too much, my mom would probably say. Just enough, is the way I tend to feel.
But Chuck makes me want to get it down, get it out, get it in front of me. Rather like when you've had too much to drink and you know you'll feel better after you've vomited all you've got - dinner, liquor, hope and all. You'll be cleansed. On the way to being normal again.
Chuck makes me want to dissect the tangles of my fears and dreams and look at the pieces of my life. It's not that I expect they'll make any kind of ultimate sense. I just want to caress the edges of my puzzle pieces, turn them around, see if they make a more pleasing pattern in another order.
It's so easy to be a slave to chronology when half our clocks are synchronized by the great satellites in the sky. But there's so much the satellites don't see, for all their technology.
Chuck makes me want to be seen, in all of my awkward naked humanity, while there is something of me to be seen. I don't want to care about anyone else while I do it; what they'll think or do or say, whether they'll even read me or not. I don't want to live in fear that my least revelation will be held against me by some omnipresent boss. I don't want to have to lock every other page away from view for some foul word (I just misspelled it as "world"; Freud, eat your heart out).
Michel Foucault said that we're all confessing, all the time, though we pretend we're not. We're all finding ways to reveal our dirty underthings, but it's better if we act like it's all forbidden. Stolen fruits taste sweeter. (Literally. Have you ever really stolen a piece of food, maybe as a kid? Best ginger snaps I ever had, I took when I wasn't supposed to have them, from a woman I loathed as much as she loathed me.)
It's better if we put up a struggle and act like we don't want it, like a teen-aged girl half-undressed who whispers, "No, we can't" (not, "No, I don't want to, get off me," but "No, we can't" because we'll get in trouble for wanting the same sweaty thing) and squirms just so.
Make no mistake. We get off on secrets, especially our own. We are invested in our personal sense of moral decay. We need our sins to be great. We need our secrets to matter. Because if we're just making the same mistakes that have been made millions of times before, then how are we unique? If our secrets are just as bad as everyone else's, how are we special? If we are not great sinners, then why do we feel so dirty?
If confession won't absolve us, how will we ever feel clean?
And if we are never safe anywhere - if our words are always liable to be exhibits in the great court of life, whether they're spoken around the office watercooler or written across the great abyss of the internet - then how will we ever dare to speak about anything that means a damn?
The masks that we wear to keep friends, get jobs, and deal with our elders? We all want to shatter them. We want to break them into as many pieces as it'll take to put ourselves back together again. When we look for a mate, we look for that one person who will glimpse even half of our deformity and not run away. We expect our dearest friends to sense everything that slithers and shudders beneath our facades, but how can they? They're too busy maintaining their own polite deceptions - the lies upon which many of our relationships depend.
They say the truth hurts, and this is often true. The truth is often messy, dirty, and desperately mundane - but if it's your truth, it means everything. It is only through our deepest failings and fears that people will truly come to know us. It is in our scars and our sweat, in our blood and our excrement that we are fully human, united in dust and ashes. Some say that we're all going to the same place when we die, but we've all been in the same place the whole time. The future is all around us. Just watch the elderly.
I'm talking myself into something. I'm talking myself into making more of my LiveJournal open. I'm working myself up to spewing into the ether the sorts of things I see in Chuck's writing. I'm daring myself to open my arms wide, knowing full well that I will eventually be cut. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not by my current employers, but eventually.
It's not about being clean. It's not about being a unique snowflake. It's about being the same decaying organic matter as everyone else - out loud.
For as much as I talk, both personally and as a professor, there's a lot that doesn't make it out of my mouth. Too much, my mom would probably say. Just enough, is the way I tend to feel.
But Chuck makes me want to get it down, get it out, get it in front of me. Rather like when you've had too much to drink and you know you'll feel better after you've vomited all you've got - dinner, liquor, hope and all. You'll be cleansed. On the way to being normal again.
Chuck makes me want to dissect the tangles of my fears and dreams and look at the pieces of my life. It's not that I expect they'll make any kind of ultimate sense. I just want to caress the edges of my puzzle pieces, turn them around, see if they make a more pleasing pattern in another order.
It's so easy to be a slave to chronology when half our clocks are synchronized by the great satellites in the sky. But there's so much the satellites don't see, for all their technology.
Chuck makes me want to be seen, in all of my awkward naked humanity, while there is something of me to be seen. I don't want to care about anyone else while I do it; what they'll think or do or say, whether they'll even read me or not. I don't want to live in fear that my least revelation will be held against me by some omnipresent boss. I don't want to have to lock every other page away from view for some foul word (I just misspelled it as "world"; Freud, eat your heart out).
Michel Foucault said that we're all confessing, all the time, though we pretend we're not. We're all finding ways to reveal our dirty underthings, but it's better if we act like it's all forbidden. Stolen fruits taste sweeter. (Literally. Have you ever really stolen a piece of food, maybe as a kid? Best ginger snaps I ever had, I took when I wasn't supposed to have them, from a woman I loathed as much as she loathed me.)
It's better if we put up a struggle and act like we don't want it, like a teen-aged girl half-undressed who whispers, "No, we can't" (not, "No, I don't want to, get off me," but "No, we can't" because we'll get in trouble for wanting the same sweaty thing) and squirms just so.
Make no mistake. We get off on secrets, especially our own. We are invested in our personal sense of moral decay. We need our sins to be great. We need our secrets to matter. Because if we're just making the same mistakes that have been made millions of times before, then how are we unique? If our secrets are just as bad as everyone else's, how are we special? If we are not great sinners, then why do we feel so dirty?
If confession won't absolve us, how will we ever feel clean?
And if we are never safe anywhere - if our words are always liable to be exhibits in the great court of life, whether they're spoken around the office watercooler or written across the great abyss of the internet - then how will we ever dare to speak about anything that means a damn?
The masks that we wear to keep friends, get jobs, and deal with our elders? We all want to shatter them. We want to break them into as many pieces as it'll take to put ourselves back together again. When we look for a mate, we look for that one person who will glimpse even half of our deformity and not run away. We expect our dearest friends to sense everything that slithers and shudders beneath our facades, but how can they? They're too busy maintaining their own polite deceptions - the lies upon which many of our relationships depend.
They say the truth hurts, and this is often true. The truth is often messy, dirty, and desperately mundane - but if it's your truth, it means everything. It is only through our deepest failings and fears that people will truly come to know us. It is in our scars and our sweat, in our blood and our excrement that we are fully human, united in dust and ashes. Some say that we're all going to the same place when we die, but we've all been in the same place the whole time. The future is all around us. Just watch the elderly.
I'm talking myself into something. I'm talking myself into making more of my LiveJournal open. I'm working myself up to spewing into the ether the sorts of things I see in Chuck's writing. I'm daring myself to open my arms wide, knowing full well that I will eventually be cut. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not by my current employers, but eventually.
It's not about being clean. It's not about being a unique snowflake. It's about being the same decaying organic matter as everyone else - out loud.