(no subject)

[proximoception]

For a while I was outraged that no one had explained what it would be like and why it would be like that - I was sure the explanation would have made it different, might not have made "all the difference" but in some contexts any difference, however tiny, is an all. I was right. Their silence sets fire to the arms of the drowning. But they're silent because they're drowning or drowned. To walk is to sink, and they were way ahead of me.

And who have I told? Some - but people react to such things as they do to confessions of terrible crimes. With silence: that silence of there's you and then there's them (or the silence that tries to make it so). Which is just what you weren't trying to tell them.

I almost ask why the solution is feared so much worse than the problem, but know that that's exactly what you'd expect to see in any world more than a day old. Things you could bear to fix already have been.

Comments

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

This probably doesn't even speak to your post, but, what I think when I read it:

There are variations. The mass of everyone who can't tell you nonetheless contains some people who are more knowledgeable, or are less hurtful, than others.

I have a former friend, a guy I knew who was throwing a lot of parties while I was throwing a lot of parties. I live in the San Fernando Valley and there was, in my social circle, an overlapping of the Rocky Horror crowd with people who were in adult video, and this guy especially liked the porn stars, or the people who wanted to be porn stars. He fashioned himself as someone who's really normal and a feminist, and likes throwing barbeques and likes everyone to be happy. Why am I writing this in the past tense? It's still all going on in the present. Except at one point in the past, about three years ago, a heroin addict porn star OD'd in his house, was revived enough to be asked to leave, and made it into her car at the curb, where she died.

And no-one talks about this and everyone still goes over there to watch TV (BSG was a big draw) and I still see Facebook photos of our technicically mutual but largely former friends hanging out on his comically big furniture.

And some people just don't know this about him, that he was pretty negligent in letting someone die (that his only concern was his liability), and some people blame her (those erratic would-be porn stars!), and some people, I don't know, they don't ever plan to pass out there, personally, and they like his big tv.

I saw something kind of dark in his soliciting the company of a certain kind of person, a person who tends more than the average to have certain problems and certain needs, and then when they're in trouble, to fall back on what his responsibility would be to, not someone he invited over, or had every reason to know extra things about, but just some stranger (get off my property before I get in trouble). And everyone around blamed her, which was easy, because of the stigmatized categories she belonged to. Her existence has been disappeared among the people who still go over there, because to remember it would be awkward.

They're silent because they're drowning or drowned. Although I don't know if this is what you mean.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's definitely degrees here.

The other people at the party are a little closer to what I mean than the guy. It was the people I trusted to be normal, only to discover normal is a series of traditional acts, not a body of shared principles or real knowledge that people have. Which fact makes the knowledge they so often pretend to have even more obscene and destructive. With him, there was something wrong; with them, the lack of what I need to be right in people. That absence is more frightening to me than recognizable outcroppings of asshole.

Smoke is a better metaphor than water. So many people smoke away. Poor girl.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

Sapolsky in The Trouble with Testosterone has a nice essay about what different stages of life are like, about what the imperatives are.

I say this because I sometimes wonder, when I think about how-so-many-people-I-knew-were-negligently-dangerous-assholes-and-I-didn't-even-know-it, how ignorant was I? Or - for how long was my will to know obscured by the near-imperative of proximity? Oh, screw the chicken-and-egg developmental psych of it. I'm thinking of, but can't find, that place in Howard's End where Forster talks about Margaret closing her social circle down, and noting that that's something you have to do as you get older if you're going to be serious about anything. Serious about being a decent person, I think he means.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

"I can no longer speak to you because you _________." I wonder where I'd draw that line.

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

I think there are a few versions of this. One is, I'm not speaking to you because I'm mad! And I want you to know! Was it Gore Vidal or Oliver Stone who refused to shake Bush's hand, and this was the message? In short: I know how I feel and I want other people to see.

Another is, I no longer speak to you because I find it really upsetting, upsetting such that I don't feel stable about the interaction, and so would like to avoid it for the sake of embarrassment, my own, other people's, maybe yours. So: I don't know how I feel, and I don't want other people to see.

And then the other two combinations, one of which is pretty Courtney Love. How will I feel? Let's go out in public and find out!

I've gotten together a pretty good head of the first (I'm not talking to you! I want you to know it's because you ____!) on my own, but find it nearly impossible to maintain in company. In company, usually all I can think is, communication is really difficult. And: good lord, how do any of us survive?

Not rhetorical: What's you icon?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

A snippet from a Tove Jannson Alice in Wonderland illustration.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Awkward's probably the word of words, here. On the hypothesis that we have the power to save everyone and our terror of the awkward's what stops us from using it, awkward is our demon.

It's also one of the best self-evoking words.

[ensenchiridion.livejournal.com]

no one had explained what it would be like

what's it like? idunno what "it" is, but i'm interested. moreover, i'm in a position where i could use a helping of perspective.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Me too. I'm mostly furious at the medical system right now, but it plugged back into the general failure of the adult world to know anything whatever, back up any promise, or understand a single consequence of their actions throughout my early years. And since - I just stopped assuming there was an adult world at some point. But there's definitely a world of older people, and I don't like the look of it this week.

So my perspective kind of sucks, but it's at your service. How are you?