Jul 10, 2004 12:59
Much has been written about me, the firey red, brammer supervixen, known to the world as Shirley Manson. That binty creature, however, is a fictional one, a Shirley-o'-the-wisp that jinks or dances from tabloid to tome, written by a flock of bampot's, with relentless inaccuracy. Nothing unusual about that: everyone who comes to public attention is reflected in fragments, half-truths and downright lies since every observer projects his own fantasy upon the famous person in an illusory folie à deux.
In any case, when it comes to chronicling a person's life there is no such thing as absolute reality, even if the writer of my life happens to be me. I, for one, subscribe to the Heisenberg principle, that nothing in the universe can ever be accurately clocked or observed because the act of observation always changes it. For every one life, there are a million observed realities, including several of the subject's. 'A stranger caught in a portrait of myself,' as Nabokov described the phenomenon, is commonly reflected back to a bemused me.
In my paradigm, every person holds the reality of their own experience either in their mind's eye or just below the surface of consciousness, or even deeper in the unconscious mind; but in the latter level we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and the mysterious workings of our unfathomed parts are revealed only in our dreams.
Not a day has passed that I haven't shook my head, chuffed, and marveled at my miraculous survival of profound childhood trauma. My ability to sustain myself beyond those days equally impresses me, for once I became kenspeckle and was known to the world, another challenge presented itself: to survive the trauma of fame. Every person who comes to public attention experiences an alienation of self, the formation of a deeply unsettling chasm between one's true and inner self and their public persona. The danger lies not in the confusion of the two as is commonly thought, but in the widening gulf between them.
Fortunately, my survival skills ever sustain me. When I am asked the essential, penetrating question of how I've managed to summon the resources to turn trauma into thrawn triumph, I have no insight or lucid explanation, my only answer is that I didn't come down the Clyde on a water biscuit.
Perhaps scrieving in this journal I will find a more sensible answer.
aim: shirley mannnson