One of My Old Rants

 

May 7, 2017: The other day, when Susan and I were discussing threatened suicide, and I said it's just something we all did to a greater or lesser degree, Susan said "He's a Babel, and we Babels just hate ourselves." It suddenly struck me, not as a surprising truth of course, but because it must be more than 20 years since I've heard her refer to herself as a Babel. It got me thinking about us and our perception of ourselves as People with a Special Destiny.

It reminded me, or made clear to me, that we always have considered ourselves as not like other people. Even our ambitions were unusual: if Mike was to be a writer, he had to be a writer unlike all others; Kenny an actor not on the beaten path; even Susan wants the bourgeois lifestyle with a depth and a difference.

It is our Outsider status. We simply cannot pledge wholeheartedly to some stereotype, and when we have followed that stereotypical way it leads us into difficulties. It has something to do with our quixotic Honor, and our Honesty. It is our inability to agree with that awful author of quotes, Unknown (and rightfully unknown, for no great person would say it), who seems content with their bastard or bitch persona, and if you can't take it, well, that's your problem. We always stand in judgement of ourselves, and we always consider accusations no matter where they come from.

Much of this is inherited through judgmental forms of religion with no real acts of absolution, only acknowledgement of failure and (hoped for, but never confirmed) forgiveness. This always assumed a here-and-now resolution: if you were right, you were rewarded, but if bad things happen, you must be wrong and thus undeserving. It's that awful prosperity gospel and its assumptions. Paradoxically it quashed the impulse to rise, with its disdain for worldly achievement, for mere economical rewards.

We are unsatisfied with our status, and ludicrously measure ourselves after the most statistically unlikely heroes, people whose triumphs are unique and unprecedented and unparalleled. Our image of perfection casts dust on what we do achieve, and can sabotage us as we try to soar, or even as we try to merely flap from tree to tree.

And we caught the Cyrano outlook. The white plume. Standing not high, but alone. We might be deplorables, but we had qualities others do not. We were not bums or trash, but dreamers with standards, though in exile and wanderers. We hope for the best but expect the worst, and always look for the pill wrapped in the lunchmeat of any good experience. Call no man happy, lest the Gods be jealous.

It gives us a kind of stubborn pride that may well sabotage our chances of success in life. We refuse to bend when we think we are in the right, refuse to eat shit now to continue to have pie later, we stand on our dignity when a little compromise might smooth the way, and we will not toe that party line. It makes people who are more supple with their principles uncomfortable and our bosses uneasy about our presence.

Of course, our humility reminds us that that we're probably not unique, that everyone considers themselves special, that everyone is the hero of their own story. When we do fail (and we do fail big), we condemn ourselves but also excuse ourselves that we at least shot for the stars. The sneaking feeling prevails and whispers that, Somehow, we do have a special destiny and are held to a higher standard, perhaps only as a step to something amazing, but even then we consider we will be a vital link whose necessity will one day be recognized and maybe even celebrated.

[I might add, at this late date, that we'd almost prefer physical suicide to existential suicide, that is, actions that would kill what we perceive ourselves to be, if we are convinced we are in the right.]