This sentence from the Rovi music review of Madonna’s first album contains a wonderful final phrase:
And that’s the hallmark of dance-pop: every element blends together into an intoxicating sound, where the hooks and rhythms are so hooky, the shallowness is something to celebrate.
And there it is. I tend to think that the shallowness we celebrate is the shallowness that offers us escape from who we currently are.
This is wonderful:
We want to determine the world, not merely be determined by it; we want to stand above the things we may want to consume. You can call this the urge for transcendence, so long as you don’t call it mystical. We are born as we die, a part of nature, but we feel most alive when we go beyond it. And we go beyond it often – every time we explore the world instead of simply taking it in.
To be human is to refuse to accept the given as given.
– Susan Neiman, “Moral Clarity”.
There’s a great interview with her here.
Saw this today on Quote of the Day:
“Every moment of one’s existence one is either growing into more or retreating into less. One is always living a little bit more or dying a little bit.”
– Norman Mailer
Indeed.
AG, last night before we said goodbye:
If you give a person eternity, there’s nothing they can’t do. Genius only comes into focus when there’s a time limit.
Incredible.
So the following from Alice Miller is what started the ground-shaking revolution a few weeks ago:
Quite often I have been faced with people who were praised and admired for their talents and their achievements. They do well in everything they undertake; they are admired and envied; they are successful whenever they care to be — but behind all this lurks depression, and a sense that their life has no meaning. These dark feelings will come to the fore as soon as the drug of grandiosity fails, as soon as they are not on top, not definitely the superstar, or whenever they suddenly get the feeling they have failed to live up to some standard. What are the reasons for these disturbances in these competent, accomplished people? Typically, this child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond unconsciously to this need of his parents to take on the role that had been unconsciously assigned to him by them.
This accomodation to parental needs often leads to the “as-if” personality. The person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self.
As an adult, this “grandiose” person is admired everywhere and needs this admiration; indeed, he cannot live without it. He must excel brilliantly in everything he undertakes, which he is surely capable of doing (otherwise he just does not attempt it). He, too, admires himself, for his qualities and success and achievements. Beware if one of these fails him, for then the catastrophe of a severe depression is imminent.
Click on the “Keep Reading” link, and after the jump she further dresses me down and talks about my choice of marriage partner, my contempt for others, my struggle for authenticity, and how all this craziness gets resolved.
As usual, this was quite a year.
365 days ago, I was living with spartan furniture in a different city, deeply in love and joined in a life with a woman I no longer even speak to. It was before Bon Iver, before The American Dollar, before my last birthday night, before the old apartment got new furniture, before Terry Richardson, before The Wire, before Facebook, before David Foster Wallace, before Gossip Girl, before AG, before the real estate project, before the apothecary, before Taleb, before creating the Legacy Strategy movement, before starting to make it work, before EB White, before the trips to Jersey City, before de Botton, before the summer, before love walked away with little explanation, before the aftermath, before the healing, before the new spots, before the new people, before the midnight swims and the new apartment, before Bammers and a whole new generation of change, before the new clothes, before the new deals, before the marriage proposal videos, before feeling the whole world rush through me again, before the new friends, and — most of all — before being completely changed by Alice Miller’s work on the origins of grandiosity & depression in the lives of adults.
The great lesson is that I have no idea — none whatsoever — what life will look like in a year.
And there’s something beautiful about that.
We. Shall. See.
I read two quotes from Jeff Buckley a couple weeks ago that made a big impression on me:
There is no ‘good’ singing. There’s only ‘present’ and ‘absent’. That’s it. It’s the balls, just the utter deathlessness, fearlessness.
He then goes on to describe how this “deathlessness, fearlessness” (what I should have titled this blog) is worthless unless you’re bringing that into the present moment of your everyday life. He describes how the background noise in the club he would play at first drove him crazy, but he learned to bring the fearlessness in his present moment:
I even had to learn the noise the dishwasher makes at this little cafe; I had to play in B-Flat, or it wouldn’t sound right.
These days, I’m learning how to bring my fearlessness in line with the dishwasher.
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