Superficiality and burnout

First of all, some sympathy for Charlie McDonnell:

I just love the way he exposes his vulnerability and honesty in this way and i really feel huge sympathy for him.  He must be under an enormous amount of pressure and it's impossible to imagine how things are if you're afraid of disappointing more than one and a half million people.  This really makes me feel he's just a normal bloke, and it reminds me of my MA.  Poor guy.  Even so, he's got the video absolutely right:  monochrome, black background, cuts between him being on the right and the left and even L-cuts.  He's worrying about nothing.

Anyway, i now think i was right about him having a quarter-life crisis.  Not that i'm smug about that, and also, it's really annoying when people try to cram your pain and suffering into some nice, neat theory, although i suppose it might help to have some kind of explanation, or just some recognition that other people have been through the same thing and come out the other side.  It's also like writer's block, which in a way i wish i suffered from because for all i know i just spout complete garbage, but very fluent complete garbage.  I think if anything i feel fatherly towards him, which is weird because i'm such an underachiever. It must also be really annoying and creepy to have total strangers like me holding forth about him, so i'll shut up now.

Right, so no video of my own today because i accidentally made two scheduled videos public yesterday along with Liz's poetry, which is here:

Mr McDonnell may be scared of us but i'm scared of poetry, so i'll leave it there.  I have faith it's good but - well, see the other post.

Superficiality is supposed to be the topic of this entry, so i'd better get on with it.  One of the things which postmodernism sought to subvert was the notion of depth, in the sense of "deep and meaningful".  Depth, so far as i can tell, has been seen as desirable all over the world, except maybe by the Piraha tribe in the Amazon whom i think are probably a hoax of some kind, perhaps self-perpetrated.  For instance, natural phenomena are often seen as needing an explanation, often articulated through myths, way back into the prehistoric past.  The idea that this is a mistake is fairly new, at least in academic circles.  It's also quite annoying and i'm not sure where it's supposed to go.  However, it relates to the issue of hypnosis as mentioned yesterday.  My concern that something frightening might happen as a result of relieving a mere symptom through hypnosis is based on a depth-oriented view of psychology.  A shallower understanding would include the notion that the only concern is, for example, a phobia or addiction which needs to be addressed, and once it's addressed that's that.

Jimmy Savile once said, while on 'In The Psychiatrist's Chair', that what you saw of him was what you got.  In fact, that has turned out not to be so and the statement probably revealed two things:  that he probably wanted certain activities to stay hidden, possibly even from himself, and that he may even have believed that himself.  Here's a clip of that programme:

So he clearly had something to hide, hence the idea that what we saw was what we got.  Returning to post-modernism, isn't it interesting that a philosophical movement popular from the 1980s which effectively killed philosophy should prize superficiality?  Maybe we all have something we'd rather not think about.

A blog without a video

This is how today went and why there's no video apart from the one which says there's no video, which isn't worth linking to now i've said that:

There are in fact two other videos, one of which is Liz's regular Friday poetry, partly on Doctor Who as it happens.  That's here:

The other one is the ad for the ebook, which was finished and uploaded yesterday.  You don't have to be that clever to find it but you may wish you hadn't if you make the effort.  I stand by everything in it but would prefer you to read all the non-fiction bits first.  It's a bit of a mess right now.  Firstly, it's an EPUB, not the most accessible of formats, for instance i think it's incompatible with Kindle.  Secondly, since i did the front cover myself, it's not too wonderful although it does at least stand out.  A couple of things went wrong with it - the Table of Contents doesn't work at all so it's a great big monolithic block of text which i aim to resolve ASAP, which sadly probably won't be very soon, and the front cover is for some reason the wrong shape in spite of me meticulously following the instructions, meaning that the right hand side is lopped off.  I've announced it in the requisite places which get me traffic on the other channel though, such as the channel itself and deviantart.com, so maybe i'll get some sales.

Anyway, all that was quite time-consuming so to most people it's going to look as if i've done sweet Fanny Adams all day, but in fact it was really hectic.  I also managed to relieve our financial situation somewhat, sorted out a stupid pre-ordering problem with Amazon and posted some herbs.  So it's OK.

Now look.  Please don't try to find the ebook.  I'm prepared for any flack but i need to concentrate on 'Here Be Dragons' now.

Why i don't read proper books

Here's the vid:

As you may be aware, i don't read "proper" books, by which i mean the likes of Dickens, Lessing, Steinbeck, Hemingway, whomever.  Also, notoriously, i never read poetry, which considering that i'm married to a poet might seem to be a bit problematic.  The above video should serve as an illustration of why.  When i read a book with convincing, realistic-seeming plots, characters and settings, it makes absolutely no sense to me.  Or rather, it appears to make perfect sense but when i come to discuss it with anyone else i find that they have had insights that i haven't had or it's meant something to them which it hasn't to me, and furthermore, others tend to agree broadly on what it means or what insights they've gained.

There was a time when things were different.  Up until i was about seventeen, i was "normal" in my response to novels and poetry.  I wasn't intimidated or overcome by a sense of obscurity.  They just made sense, and the sense they made to me was shared with others.  When i had insights which others hadn't, they often came round to my opinion of them after discussion and seemed to be perceived as meaningful or in some way more advanced than others, or maybe refreshing, I have no idea.  I found the O-level Eng Lit syllabus easy but stimulating and i was happy to read whatever.  The literary canon held no terrors for me and i got one of the highest grades in O-level English at my school, although of course all of that may not be terribly significant because anyone can parrot stuff they're taught.

This even continued up until the point where i applied for university - my initial choice of course was English and Philosophy.  However, for some reason at about the age of seventeen, there was a sudden failure of nerve.  The A-level English Lit syllabus and approach made no sense at all to me, practical criticism seemed to assume there was some kind of common humanity or universality which was entirely alien to me, and of course if it was alien, it wasn't universal because i am human.  Therefore i ran away from literature, abandoned my attempts to pursue it at degree level and abandoned it completely forever.

Now, you might ask me why this matters.  Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and if you don't "get" something it needn't destroy you.  It's also the case that i have no trouble following and appreciating drama even in the form of scripts, and also have considerable insight into other art forms such as music (which is however dangerously emotionally manipulative, but that's another melody) and painting.  Unfortunately, for literature this is not so, and here's why.

More than anything else, humans are language-users.  The fact that i reject Chomsky's views and think we've stumbled upon it is irrelevant - it still makes us what we are.  Without language, we are trapped in our own worlds, can't benefit from others' wisdom and can only help or communicate to a very limited extent.  Whereas emotion can go some way to transcend that, language is part of that emotional expression.  Look at feral children.  They're an example of what we'd be without language.

Now the highest expression of language is literature.  Poetry, novels and other works of art express and communicate humanity better and more appropriately than any other form of expression or art.  Whereas there are other expressions, they all depend on language to advance and be sustained.  Dance for example would not get very far without it.  Nor would technology.

Therefore, if one fails to appreciate literature, it really, genuinely does make one an inferior, inadequate human being to a much greater degree than any other failure.  I am about to  choose a hackneyed cliche of a metaphor because of this very failing:  i am a flightless bird in a world of birds which can fly, and a mute bird in a world of songbirds.  I am a fish which can't swim, a solitary termite (also known as a cockroach), a barren and blighted leafless tree.  I am literally less than human because of this deficiency, and there is no way back from this realisation.  Prowess in any other area is unimportant compared to this lack.  It makes me necessarily inferior, because humans are language-using primates and i cannot use language to the full.  It's a biological fact.

Nor can i blame this on my schooling, which is the reason for many such problems in others, as if there could be a failure to compare to this one.  In my mid-teens, this was not an issue.  I "got" things better than anyone i knew, including my teachers, although clearly i was hampered somewhat by lack of life experience.  However, something happened when i was seventeen which destroyed that and it's gone forever.  It's like being blinded.  It has nothing to do with confidence or boredom.  I can approach a piece of work without fear of failure and express my reaction to it, and i can guarantee that that reaction will have nothing in common with anyone else's.  When i read a story or a poem, i write my own and i can't see beyond it.  The only way i could express my appreciation of a work of literature would be to photocopy it.  I might as well go through it, cross out all the O's and count them.

I don't really know where i'm going with this.  If i could end this properly and neatly, i wouldn't have this problem.  I just wish i knew what had happened, why i died inside without even noticing and why every time i have to confront a "proper" piece of writing it feels like i'm slicing open my innards and rubbing bleach into them, but that is how it feels.  A total, devastating sense of inferiority from which there can be no recovery.

It's all very well being able to heal the sick and raise the dead, and you can be as compassionate and competent, and as intuitive as you like, but if you don't appreciate poetry you might as well never have been born.  That's how i feel about myself anyway.  I wouldn't impose that on anyone else, but face it:  that's the truth.