There are a few themes that turn up in my writings year in year out. I'm sure there are plenty that I'm not aware of, but a few are mythologies that are so built into whatever expression that I have that I can't expect to make something that isn't somehow influenced by these themes. Maybe its that I project it onto whatever it is that I do, either way - who cares, chicken or the egg. Forgive me if you find that I'm making totally over assuming statements about myself, I don't presume to know who I am fully, but I've got a decent perspective and I did enough hallucinogenics when I was younger to feel like I managed to get a decent third person perspective on myself.
The first is split and divided parts. Whenever I'm caught recycling this theme in my diatribes, I used the clichéd excuse that I'm a half-breed. An easy joke to a Canadian and an easy way to change a conversation from getting serious into a simple laugh. More appropriately though, I'd say a sum of halves. Half Canadian, half American, half critic, half creator, half cynic, half optimist, half lover, half loner, half good, half bad, you get the idea. All my philosopher friends who read this will probably cringe at the dyads, binary pairs, but, to them, I'd like to say that thats probably the reason we ended up becoming friends along the line of philosophy. At one point I got into de Saussure, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, whatever, because I had these ideas and eventually found people discussing them in a specific school of structural philosophy (and to all my friends that cringe, post-structural). But even before I got into philosophy it was a theme. Before philosophy I dabbled with religion, I wonder how many of my friends realized that my second choice after Ryerson was Theology at UofT. I would read Taoist writings obsessed with the Yin and the Yang, I don't remember how old I was, maybe 16. On some sublime moment in the mountains of Colorado well before I had persued any of these notions of duality with an academic perspective, I believed that my personal philosophy was "walking the fine line between yin and yang." Its what I would call it. In moments of self depreciation, I call it hypocrisy, I call it a lack of conviction, I call it two faced, or something, anything, because I feel guilty for making euphemisms for my shortcomings. Its always been an issue, I'm always one foot in, one foot out, never a specialist.
For a while I was obsessed with the modern mythology of the "Jack of All Trades," maybe I was that, never a specialist, but always handy. But then plighted by the second half of that mythology "... master of none." So, to keep from feeling guilty about being so fickle about the trades that I would pick up, I would be determined the master each of them. Really and truly a neurotic's obsession. Even more neurotically, I feel half guilty half proud about being good at things.
There was a medical case that has stuck with me since I first read it. One case of multiple personality disorder, where the patient refused to be electro-shocked into being a contributing member of society, free of their disfunction. She would refuse any treatment and repeat to herself, "Je switche, je suis, je switche, je suis, je switche, je suis." I switch therefore I am.
I don't know if I'm "right" or "wrong" for who I am, maybe thats another pairing of dualities thats working its way into my train of thought. Maybe I'm both. Maybe this is a faceless confessional with no minister giving me any number of Hail Mary's in order to be cured.
The other is the idea of the somnambulist - walking dreamer or sleep walker. In the states, I righteously thought that the people were all walking sleepers. Unconsciously digging their own graves, living each day like a zombie. Some Romero fantasy of America. In a Hitchcock film,Shadow of a Doubt, Joseph Cotton plays uncle Charlie, a psychopath with a similar criticism. In one scene we are brought into the darker underside of Hitchcock's only film dealing with Idyllic suburban life. In this smoke heavy bar scene, surrounded with the till now unseen derelicts of this town, Uncle Charlie delivers this horribly morbid and dark monologue of America, "...You live in a dream, you're a sleepwalker. Blind. How do you know what the world is like?”
Jaded is one way to put it. In all honesty, I probably would have suicided if I'd stayed in Colorado. To fit in, I'd kill myself with drugs, let them see the one sided coin of a junkie. One face, one performance. I don't regret these years fucked up, and I will love all my friends from Colorado till the end of time, but I couldn't be there. Recently, I'm coming to terms with sleepwalkers/walking dreamers. Somnambulism. One word fits it all perfectly. Its ambiguity fits into my first theme. One criticism of America that I would have is of how people dreamed. They would dream but would never pursue it. Its a world of sleepwalkers filled with dreams, but too defeated or stifled to believe in them as more than dreams or dreams that were little more than sleeping. Sleepwalkers means the opposite to a walking dreamer, but they are so similar that makes them hard to distinguish. So hard that even that I don't think its fair to break them into an oppositional pairing, who can judge -- I did, and righteously too. When I was young (not to say that I'm not young still) I chose to leave the United States to save myself, but it was a decision that was so self centered, selfish, solipsistic, etc, and I still feel guilty for being so bold to judge others, others that i'd come to love and respect. I hope that this time, I've left more maturely, not to get away from sleepers, but to chase my own dreams.
A series of analogies that have stuck with me, pieces of analogies that stick to my consciousness trapped into this obsessive theme.
Rousseau was once asked why he painted a couch in the middle of a jungle, he replied by saying, "We have a right to paint our dream."
A French postman spent over thirty years building a miniature castle with stones that he carried in his pocket during his mail delivery. When he was questioned about this project he answered: "When a man has to travel for thirty years along the same road, there is no way for him to be saved from the monotony except by the creation of something he dreamed."
"The dream was always running ahead of one; To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle." - Anais Nïn
I think i'll end it there for today, I'm out of steam.
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Mp3:
Avrocar - themes these three (tele:funken remix)
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