Online social media highlights and exploits our universal human vulnerability, that we all want to be someone. We all want to be recognised, liked, admired, and generally believed to be an awesome human being because we think that, in the acceptance of our awesomeness, we’ll find escape from the horror of anonymity and obscurity in the face of inevitable death. Of course it won’t work.
We are none of us really anybody in this narrow sense. Even those admired and cow-towed to are no different to anyone else. They have their own problems, their own duel with death, one they’ll eventually lose like the rest of us. Then they’ll be forgotten, and even so little as a hundred years from now, no one will care. Many a good and talented man has gone to his grave unknown. It’s a sobering realisation, one we must face and understand why an obscure life is not necessarily a wasted one.
One of the pictures I recently put up on Instagram got forty likes. Experience tells me it’ll not get many more. It’s a about my limit, and seems to be a function of the number of people you follow and the amount of time you’re willing to spend liking other stuff, or somehow gaming the system. But it’s no big deal. It is, after all, just a picture of a hat. Sure, pictures of other people’s hats can garner tens of thousands of likes, and how they do that remains a mystery to me, but it’s still just a picture of a hat and as such will never confer immortality.
My Instagram account leaks a few clicks over to the blog, which in turn leaks a few clicks over to my fiction, which is why I’m on Instagram in the first place. It’s also why I blog. They are both subtle lures to my fiction writings, coaxing readers now and them into my fictional worlds. But my stories are not important either, at least not as influential tools to shape the zeitgeist, nor even just to trumpet my awesomeness. I leave that to others, more savvy, sassy, whatever, and dare I say, more celebrated for their craft.
My thoughts are perhaps too convoluted for a sound-bite culture to make much sense of, and I’m conscious too my outlook, though sincere, may be no more than a mushy blend of pop-philosophy sweetened by archaic Romanticism. The importance of the work then lies only in what it teaches me, and I’m coming to the conclusion what it’s teaching me is how to recognise those useless egotistical compulsions and to rise above words, that the forms of thought we pursue so doggedly throughout our lives, are just shadows of something we will never grasp. It’s not a question of lacking intellect, more that the brain is altogether the wrong shape to accommodate what it is we crave.
You don’t need to write to reach the same conclusion. You just need to live your life as it was given to you, and develop a mindful approach to it. I’m not talking about that self-help-how-to-be-a-winner-in-life kind of mindfulness either. It’s more simply an awareness of our selves in life, and the way we react to situations, and how we can tell if those reactions are the right ones or not, if they contribute to a general transcendence of this fear we have of living, or dig us more firmly into the mire of it.
It might sound as if I’m some way along the path towards nihilism, but nihilism isn’t helpful, other than as a place to bounce back from. Yes, so much of what we are capable of seeing is indeed unimportant, but the world is also rich with a transcendent beauty we are equally capable of recognising, at least in its more lavish manifestations, say in the natural world. And perhaps progress in the right direction is simply our ability to find such transcendence in smaller and smaller places. Indeed perhaps the ultimate success in life, the ultimate awesomeness, is the attainment of absolute obscurity, and the ability to sit alone, quietly, to stare closely at your thumb nail and go:
WOW!
So be the light and write!
Posted in current affairs, existential, Metaphysical, philosophical, political, tagged comments, darkness, energy, internet, light, longing, purpose, viciousness, writing, you tube, zeitgeist on March 17, 2020| 3 Comments »
It presents a dilemma for the writer. Do we tell it like we see it? Do we offer up the mess of the world for all to shudder at? Do we write stories in which our characters suffer and then die? Or do we look for the goodness, for the beauty? Do we write stories of cheerful outcome for our readers to escape into? Do we fashion for them fictional plots where everyone strives for happiness and everything works out fine?
By describing the suffering, do we help perpetuate it? By providing a pleasing escape, do we mislead our readers into underestimating the power of the forces of darkness? As self conscious individuals it’s hard to see how we can have any effect at all, but I’m beginning to think we are more influential than we know. I don’t mean as lone writers in isolation – that would be egotistical – but more together, collectively. So pick your side: light or dark, and write.
The Internet provides a voice for many an otherwise unknown scribe, like me for instance. Through blogging, and posting our stories online we find a readership and that has to be a good thing, but the Internet reveals also a darker side to us. We’re all shocked at how vicious it is, and the lesson of the last decade has been how influential it is as well. People take their lives because of the vile stuff that’s written on here. In the bear-pit of politics, elections are won and lost. Lies are spun into truths, truths smeared into lies. Entire groups are labelled as “undesirable” and showered with hate. But if the dark side can use this weird medium to such a powerfully nefarious effect, why can’t the light effect an opposite change in the Zeitgeist?
Darkness feeds off the suffering of others. That’s what sustains it. It’s what directs the darkness to inflict ever more suffering. The light is different. It doesn’t want to hurt anyone. It gains its energy from nowhere but the goodness of the heart, but is itself vulnerable to damage. In writing of the darkness then the light must take care not to be dimmed by it, and we must always offer the reader a way out.
I look at the comments on You Tube and, even though they are not aimed at me, I am deeply hurt by their depravity. This is the darkness breaking through, and all the fell creatures that dwell within us come out to create suffering, then feast on it. There seems little point countering such darkness by blogging cheerful poems about daffodils. Or bunny rabbits. Or the joys of spring. But if that’s what we of the light want to write then we should, because we’re all the light has got. Each of us with our own little lantern, we are the stars bringing light to an otherwise impenetrable firmament. We are the only thing making it worth while anyone lifting their eyes from the sorry earth at all.
I know, hate and fear-mongering go viral every day, while the light languishes unnoticed, but put pen to paper anyway. After all, it’s not like you have a choice, is it? And remember if you are not of the dark, then you are of the light. So be the light, and write.
May you stay safe, and healthy,
Graeme out.
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