In recent vintage, the posts on this blog have gotten darker
and still darker, more and still more self-revealing, less and still less
well-advised. I’ve tried to make it a rule for this blog to keep some kind of
balance. Something dark must be followed by something light, something serious
by something frivolous. If it can be helped, no writer, and no person, should
ever edge too far in any mental direction without returning the other way. If
you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you; if you avoid the
abyss, the abyss no longer gives a shit.
Even as I’ve felt no less happy in the last month (if
anything, rather happier than usual), I’ve found my thoughts on these pages
gravitating toward bleaker and still bleaker sentiments. The longer an anxious
person goes without feeling anxiety, the more he feels anxious about the
anxiety to come. And the more premonitions he has, the more likely he is to
allow them to come true.
I’ve had two separate friends tell me that this blog is
coming to resemble a Dostoevsky novella, one of whom said it weeks before I
even mentioned Dostoevsky here. Lest you think I’m being overly egotistical by
bringing this up, please understand that I often seriously question whether Dostoevsky
is not an absurdly overrated author – and I don’t doubt that they meant it in
precisely that same spirit. I can love Dostoevsky for fifteen minutes at a
time, and then invariably get absolutely tired of him. But the sentiments in
Dostoevsky, the long-windedness, the narcissism, the constant hysterical confessions
by total strangers, the glorification of suffering, the proto-fascist longing
to be told what to think by a higher power….those sentiments are all beginning
to sound a little too familiar... I never wanted to write bad Dostoevsky, I
wanted to write bad Chekhov and bad Pushkin. Ideally, this blog was meant to
house well-proportioned writing which mingles every possible emotional state at
a length that never outstays its welcome. Blogging, like life, seems to aspire
to a state of Chekhov but ends in a state of Dostoevsky.
But all good blogs are good in the same way, all bad blogs
are bad in different ways (I know, I know, that’s Tolstoy). When this blog is
good, I like to think that in its small way it gets the whole flavor of
experience. From day to day, I have new ideas for all sorts of subjects whose
thoughts seem to write themselves, and they run the gamut from serious to
silly, sad to happy, heavy to light, smart to stupid. When this blog is bad,
the mental acuity slows, and I very much feel like I’m agonizing to think of
every word. When that happens, the emotions gravitate more toward one end of
those scales and forgets the other. Needless to say, lately it’s been
gravitating more toward seriousness, heaviness, sadness, perhaps even
stupidity…
Fortunately, the past year of writing’s experiences far
number more in the former category than the latter – I’m damn proud of the
writing I’ve done here, and would never take back a word of it (except the
grammar mistakes). Like any writer who finds the process easy, in my best moments I don’t
feel like it’s me who’s writing. It’s only in my worst moments when every
individual word feels as though it must be sucked out of my brain and I have to
tap into things which I probably shouldn’t’ be sharing on this blog in order to
keep the writing at a pace.
I do not regret becoming what many bloggers call an
‘oversharer’. If you want to write, then to a certain extent you have to draw
on personal experience – where else can you draw? If people want to understand
each other, then they unfortunately have to expose information to one another
that might not be well-advised to expose. My red flags used to go up instantly
when I saw someone share the private details of their lives online, as though
somehow that was indicative of a person being particularly volatile or insane. But
then I realized, who the hell am I to pretend that my bodily emanations don’t
stink? And what the hell do I have to lose? I’m not particularly special, I’m
just a nerdy kid from Baltimore who in his own way has led a fairly interesting
life.
And then I remembered, this is what most if not all decent
writers do – no matter how well a writer conceals the details of his life, all writing,
even all fiction, is a variation on autobiography. Even if your unconscious
dictates your material, that’s autobiography; even if you’re inspired to write
something by what you read, that’s autobiography; even if you’re inspired by
the details of someone else’s life – a friend, a famous person, a person you
meet at a bar – that’s autobiography. In each case, it's you who has to process the information, and at least in that sense it's happening to you as much as it's happening to anyone else. Some writers are clearly more upfront
about this process than others, and it makes little difference to the quality
of their work whether they conceal the details of their lives in their work or
share them – different processes work for different writers. But so long as
human beings do the writing, we can only write based on what we perceive.
I’d like to think my perceptions are about to change rather
drastically. Tomorrow, I’m headed to France and England for a month. This will
be the biggest vacation I’ve been on in thirteen years and the first time I’ve
been back to Europe in eight. Eight years ago, I lived in London for a summer –
and in so many ways that was the summer which defined all the choices I’d made
since then. It was in London that I began writing a blog, and blogging has been
the most consistent activity I’ve had since then. I had the most horrendous
internship with a British musical organization imaginable (not telling which),
and it’s soured me towards office work ever since (not that I’ve successfully
avoided it in recent years). I was in what is still my favorite city in the
world, yet all I could think of was how much I missed my friends back home –
friends who are still among my closest. Every night I heard new pieces of music
and theater that made me want to stay in this city forever, and it made me
broke three separate times during that summer – a financial state I became
intimately acquainted with as the years went by.
Like all Americans of some cerebral bent, I still put a
cache on Europe that probably isn’t entirely deserved. To Americans, Europe is
the place where fairy tales are reenacted. It’s less true than it once was, but
Americans don’t understand history. The idea that we are who we are because
other people got us here is completely antithetical to an American self-image. We
believe we are masters of our destinies, hatched from our mothers’ wombs sui generis, and view the entire world as
an orange to be squeezed. America has always been a vast, uncharted space of
opportunity – a blank canvas on which we can all paint our own mural. Europe is
a collage on which millennia’s worth of people already made their own forms. European
cities seem as chaotically organic as any natural forest, on which thousands of
years of growths collide, clash, and overtake one another – each generation splattering
a new seed and pollen into the ecosystem. American cities are like planned
forests, in which the buildings seem like trees planted in a straight line – no
American city is more than 300 years old, and it’s impossible to obtain the
diversity of style and spirit which each age added to the most mythical European
cities.
Americans view Europe with a confused mixture of intimidated
awe and the irritation with which young people have for nagging parents who try
to shame their children in an unconscious effort to stop the kids from
achieving more than they ever did. But Europe is even more confused by America,
and their stereotypes are hilariously inconsistent. Americans are fat, yet
obsessed with health. Americans are lazy, yet obsessed with work. Americans are
warm and friendly, yet could not be more obnoxious. Like an older generation
viewing a younger one, they dotingly observe everything about their ‘kids’ yet
can’t understand a single thing they see, and just like when old people try to imitate
the habits of the young, their oft-made attempts to be more like Americans are
rather hilarious. To take some famous examples, no American would place the value
the French do on Jerry Lewis, or the Germans on David Hasslehoff, or the
Russians on McDonalds. Every person interprets other people through their own
filter, and Europe and America continue to talk at each other in a series of blackly
comic misunderstandings that grow more unstable every decade. Once upon a time,
German physicists were imported to Chicago and New Mexico to work on a nuclear
bomb; today American physicists tele-commute to Switzerland work on the Higgs
Boson particle research. From the new American liberalism of Roosevelt partnered
the imperial conservatism of Churchill, the Atlanticist political relationship
evolved into the imperial conservatism of George W. Bush partnered with the old
American liberalism of Tony Blair. Fifty years ago Americans flocked to movie
theaters watch the Hollywood-influenced artfilms of Truffaut and Fellini, today
Europeans buy DVD’s by the gross to watch European art-film influenced TV shows
made for American cable in their own homes. Europeans once envied Americans for
their social programs and efficient government…you know the rest…
Europe is different than America. I plan on enjoying every
one of those differences for maximum contrast and updating this blog as often
as I can to chart precisely how weird it is to be an apple pie American again
on the strudel continent. If posts have gotten quite dark lately, I have a
feeling (though can in no way guarantee) that balance will be restored, because
the tone is about to get lighter in kind.
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