Juicy Fruit
The other day I walked past a random piece of litter on the ground, a bright yellow square of packaging for Juicy Fruit. It immediately brought to mind the familiar jingle from my youth, a thirty- or fifteen-second generic riff in a genre that I find hard to describe as anything other than "jingle music of the eighties." My first response to this mental phenomenon was a kind of indignation. I was irritated that the marketers of that era had so deeply implanted this useless, horrible jingle into my brain that it would re-emerge whole, unbidden save for the mere words "juicy fruit," decades after I'd last heard the jingle - or chewed any piece of gum, for that matter.
But that indignation pre-supposes the existence of some "proper" mind or self on which the jingle has infringed. I resent the intrusion, but into what? What is my mental space, but the emergent phenomenon of millions of impressions and thousands of time-worn habits? In a sense, the "juicy fruit" jingle is as much a part of "me," this mental phenomenon that also motivates me to write this blog post and hope that someone, somewhere, might read and appreciate it, as is my vicarious experience of the Challenger accident and 9/11, of the pornographic magazine a classmate in grade school showed me once while we were walking home after school one day, the events that led to my broken arm in a game of kickball in the third grade, the parties in college, the night at O'Hare with a copy of Infinite Jest, and on and on. Isn't it? And if it is, then whence this critical faculty, which hopes to sift between that which is "me" and that which is mere ephemera, something unworthy of inclusion within my self-conceptualization - if not those same things?
The truth of it, I have to suspect, is that my critical faculty is just as much a product of an arbitrary history of personal experiences as the rest of my "mind" is. There is no, and there never was, any intentional guiding of its formation save what might have occurred by happenstance over comparatively brief periods of time - a college class here, a friendship there.
And if this is so - then how can I privilege any particular view of what I am, what I am to do with my life, as being in some sense "correct?" Intellectual application and inquiry are things that - I feel - make my life worth living. I want my intellectual practice to build towards something, to amount to something. Now I am accustomed to treating this desire as no more respectable than, say, a desire to play as many video games as possible, to do as much good in the world as possible, etc., because I am skeptical about the kinds of vindicating (or disapprobative) standards our society uses to assess such desires. I am not sure, so to say, that they amount to much. But what if, further than this, I cannot even claim any genuine authorship for my life's purpose? If the very notion of shaping my own life to a particular end is, itself, a fiction that covers how deeply and beyond my rational control even my most existential projects are?
Perhaps that's why, ultimately, what I want from this life is an inquiry that ends in constant confusion and frustration. There's no reason to expect a coherent answer to a question motivated by a desire that is irrational. My personality is just an assemblage of litter, layered on top of itself, several meters thick, that takes shape and substance in ways that feel like having a self, but it's nothing but random, accumulated junk all the way through. I might just as easily yearn to reach the stars, as to hope that my intellectual efforts might amount to anything. We're all just mimetic beasts.
But that indignation pre-supposes the existence of some "proper" mind or self on which the jingle has infringed. I resent the intrusion, but into what? What is my mental space, but the emergent phenomenon of millions of impressions and thousands of time-worn habits? In a sense, the "juicy fruit" jingle is as much a part of "me," this mental phenomenon that also motivates me to write this blog post and hope that someone, somewhere, might read and appreciate it, as is my vicarious experience of the Challenger accident and 9/11, of the pornographic magazine a classmate in grade school showed me once while we were walking home after school one day, the events that led to my broken arm in a game of kickball in the third grade, the parties in college, the night at O'Hare with a copy of Infinite Jest, and on and on. Isn't it? And if it is, then whence this critical faculty, which hopes to sift between that which is "me" and that which is mere ephemera, something unworthy of inclusion within my self-conceptualization - if not those same things?
The truth of it, I have to suspect, is that my critical faculty is just as much a product of an arbitrary history of personal experiences as the rest of my "mind" is. There is no, and there never was, any intentional guiding of its formation save what might have occurred by happenstance over comparatively brief periods of time - a college class here, a friendship there.
And if this is so - then how can I privilege any particular view of what I am, what I am to do with my life, as being in some sense "correct?" Intellectual application and inquiry are things that - I feel - make my life worth living. I want my intellectual practice to build towards something, to amount to something. Now I am accustomed to treating this desire as no more respectable than, say, a desire to play as many video games as possible, to do as much good in the world as possible, etc., because I am skeptical about the kinds of vindicating (or disapprobative) standards our society uses to assess such desires. I am not sure, so to say, that they amount to much. But what if, further than this, I cannot even claim any genuine authorship for my life's purpose? If the very notion of shaping my own life to a particular end is, itself, a fiction that covers how deeply and beyond my rational control even my most existential projects are?
Perhaps that's why, ultimately, what I want from this life is an inquiry that ends in constant confusion and frustration. There's no reason to expect a coherent answer to a question motivated by a desire that is irrational. My personality is just an assemblage of litter, layered on top of itself, several meters thick, that takes shape and substance in ways that feel like having a self, but it's nothing but random, accumulated junk all the way through. I might just as easily yearn to reach the stars, as to hope that my intellectual efforts might amount to anything. We're all just mimetic beasts.