Wednesday, July 31, 2019

in the business of being liked

A large part of the reason I keep deleting my social media accounts frequently is because of Murakami's quote- " If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking"1. But the reason I keep coming back to the platforms is because it gets very lonely very fast when you're walking the solitary path. "కవి అనేవాడు గుంపుకి సరిగ్గా నాలుగడుల ముందుండాలి. మరీ ముందుకెళితె వాళ్ళేం మాట్లాడుతున్నారో వినబడదు, వారిలో కలిసి పోతే ఆ గోలలో పనికొచ్చే విషయం కనబడదు"-Someone, imaginary or real

If external stimuli alter the biochemicals in my mind and that in turn immensely affects the way I5 act in the world, why don't all of us ingest chemicals that turn us into wonderful, happy people6 and the world would be a wonderful place7, because that's what all of us seem to want. A world with no suffering8, untimely death, disease or hunger. A world where all existence is in perfect harmony, the Rama Rajyam. Of course utopias are boring by definition but then a true utopia would have enough excitement to satiate adventurism without toppling the delicate balance9.

Yet I think humans are never happy with the world they live in no matter how perfect by "objective" standards. I've only read bits and pieces (duh) of Joseph Campbell but I've convinced myself into believing that every story is the same story10- a hero living in a society is forced to go into a dark world, confront the villain (and his fears), fight and defeat the evil lord, and come back with the treasure (knowledge) to claim the heroine, win accolades and share the treasure with the world. JBP banally11 exposits it as imposing order on intimidating chaos, finding something useful12 from seeming clutter and that is the story of every story.

What am I trying to say? Like quote, "If I could tell you what the film is about, why would I make it?" 14, the post is what is; the maze exists to preserve the gem and the gem is valuable only because the seeker deserves it for having reached it when others have given up. Social acceptance is the only truth15,16.

I don't know what I've been blabbering about. But if I want to become at least an average writer/ filmmaker, I have to find ways to assimilate this unintelligible, chaotic stream of reality into already patterned models18. And I don't know how I'm going to do that, or if I even have the capacity to learn and present it. It is challenging because any half-ambitious maker wants to present previously unnoticed or un-mapable phenomenon and to do that is to precisely walk past the illuminated area, gain knowledge and remain "sane"19 enough to come back and communicate.

That will only happen20 if I walk through doors my immediate society is discouraging me from entering, either because of fear or jealousy. And the biggest force blocking my path is the need to be liked, from which stems the need to be approved. To walk out of the group is to risk being talked about21- adulation and envy if successful, pity and condescension otherwise22.

To talk out is to attract unnecessary attention, to stay low is a provocation to the ego. What to do?

1 A complementary quote is Nassim Taleb's, "Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty." The paradox is obvious- To follow or not follow contemporary advice exhorting to follow only ancient advice. I could also get extremely pedantic about it and skim books I really am interested in because I discovered them via recommendation lists
2 Herzog's distinction between accountant's truth and ecstatic truth3
3 When I made Based on a True Story, I was obsessed with capturing the fidelity of unexciting reality. I suppose I didn't, and don't yet, have the imagination or courage to comment on the character's lives in a much larger sociocultural context, so had to make do with and emphasise, as if it was truly original or insightful4, on the "mundanity" of everyday being as if it was highly poetic. Of course, a part of me still argues that there is poetry in it a la Jarmusch's Paterson or Linklater's Boyhood
4 There is still someone inside me who thinks that doing what I'm doing, without making a conscious effort towards improvement, since all improvement is stipulated by the specific sociocultural context and therefore not necessarily helpful in the pursuit of capital 't' truth, is valuable, or at least inevitable in the sense that someone could and would learn from the notes I'm writing while walking towards the dead-end, in building this repository of human knowledge ("నేను సైతం ప్రపంచాగ్నికి సమిధనొక్కటి ఆహుతిచ్చాను"). That I suppose is the residue of a long-held belief that the universe is teleological
5 "consciousness is like being the CEO of a large corporation" -[purpotedly] Minsky
6 Is this what the marijuana loyalists are after?
7 "America, like any realised utopia, is boring" -Baudrillard
8 Like many things in life, this seems to be elastic too in the sense that as long as pain is part of the emotional pie, people will find more and more trivial ways to embrace suffering while also rationalising its utility
9 Our world?
10 Actually, I picked this up from Jordan B Peterson's podcasts which I was listening to reverentially early last year
11 An easy argument is that it is banal because it's true and so time hasn't filtered it out but what if Lindy Effect is self-fulfilling and so any idea proposed first drives out all novel ideas only by the virtue of being first
12 Useful13 again is so spacetime specific and obviously dependent on the state of mind of the person taking it in
13 "..words and signs can never fully summon forth what they mean, but can only be defined through appeal to additional words, from which they differ. Thus, meaning is forever 'deferred' or postponed through an endless chain of signifiers" -[Wikipedia] Derrida
14 I thought this was a Beckett quote when someone asked him about Godot but I'm unable to find a reference now
15 This comes from reading about the nature of money from Blockchain tutorials and David Graeber's ridiculously readable Debt
16 I'm about to go have dinner now and I'm trying to document as much as I can before that break because I'm afraid all that's supposed to come now will be lost forever if I take that detour17
17 To put it more memorably, "हग के बजाओगे तो एक तरह से बजता हैं, बिना हग के तोह दूसरी तरह से" [non-sic], from Jaideep Varma's Leaving Home: The Longer Trip, which I can't be thankful enough for
18 If analogy is the core of cognition, then all narratives are maps of some sort
19 Sane, here, ofcourse means being able to understand and speak the language of the audience
20 And here is the fundamental paradox in my nature. I'm fatalist enough to believe that things happen to me and I'm forced to respond a certain way, yet ambitious, and vain, enough to want to transcend that imposition of fate and 'create my destiny'
21 I suppose evolution has taught has to stay at the centre of the group, preferring individual low-risk, low-reward and transferring the duty of finding new knowledge (usually an asset) to other entities within the group without which the entire group may fail
22 "You'll worry less about what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do." -DFW

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