Knifethrust of Thought

“Authentic” celebrity is never the product only of the efforts of the person who is celebrated.  The actor commanding $10 million a picture is able to do so because in his second appearance in a film the screenplay was written by a genius, the director was a wizard, the producer kept his eye on the ball, the studio cut a hell of a distribution deal, or his co-star was a $15 million a picture celebrity whose notoriety (always a career booster) led to a record-breaking opening weekend.   Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of never-will-be’s  strive and sacrifice, “prepare” themselves and writhe with desire and hope until their intestines cycle into spin/dry, yet never get a call-back.  The predicament is too humanly destructive for a glib or frivolous comment about being in the right place at the right time (however apt that may be).  It’s just the way things are.  It’s the luck of the draw.  The only consolation the multitude of disappointed might savor is the knowledge that after that first big success, the celebrity in question gets his choice of five or six of all the good parts on offer at the moment and, more often than not, either exercises terrible judgment or never again receives a smidgen of the good fortune he enjoyed his second time out.  Bye, bye, happiness.  Still, there is a difference in being a 45-year-old car salesman who never delivered a line on screen, and a no-longer-employable leading man with fifty million dollars in the bank and a Gulfstream jet.  That is an irony that calls for sarcasm, but I am sorry—I just can’t seem to find it in me.

People who react to experience not spontaneously, but rather by first considering how the reaction might “play” for them—or in the case of our crusading intellectuals, how they might use it in the prosecution of their pet sociocultural narratives—and what its corresponding value will be, worry the hell out of me because interposing anything that is arbitrary between reality and our awareness of reality, which is to say, preconditioning our consciousness, is an ego defense that makes me wonder what’s wrong with them that they don’t want revealed through inadequate, inappropriate or inept behavior. I put them in the psychodynamic category that contains socio- and psychopaths, junkies maddened by desperation and rabid ideologues of all denominations.

Madness as Sanity, Reality as Madness: These were popular terms in the nineteen-seventies, a time when the twinning of opposites seemed profoundly philosophical and concepts such as these were intensely meaningful to someone with an armful of horse.

People who say they want to be entertained, as opposed to being edified, really mean they want to have their senses stimulated.  Their minds never occupy their thinking, and thinking never occupies their minds.

Speaking of Gore Vidal, he didn’t look like a wretched old Queen until he started launching the little bee bees that are all he has remaining from his blunderbuss days as the pinup girl of Marxian polemics.  Oddly enough, I met him in 1990 at a fundraiser during his surreal—it could have been directed by Fellini—Senatorial campaign in California, and he never looked me in the eye, though all I said to him was, “How are you?”  On the other hand, his sulky lips and aristocratic jaw worked perpetually as though he’d got some peanut particles lodged inside the crevices of his teeth.  Aha, I thought.  A man who’s not comfortable with his masquerade.  (When they asked me, “What about the money?”, on my way out, I replied, “I’m the wrong flavor, friend.  I bleed red.  I was just here to see the bon vivant and litterateur, not the hard-charging candidate.”)

We may confidently assume that those who lack curiosity are also “non-judgmental”.  People who fear being wrongly definite repress all their instincts.

I don’t like looking overlong at an acquaintance when he’s not aware I’m watching.  I start imagining outlandish things about him.  I think this is because he’s affectless at such times, so my sensibility isn’t influenced by the familiar prods and kneading we carry on with when we deliberately interact.

Why do we most need exercise when we least feel like doing it?  Knowing that the answer is “accumulated stress” has never yet prompted me to put a book down or get up from the couch and cut the DVD player off.  I didn’t prefigure this, but it looks as though I’d rather be fat and edified than lean and bored.

People who lack intelligence but consider themselves to be “players” self-identify by flagrantly accentuating their sexual characteristics, as though a fabulous distinction accrued to them by virtue of possessing the primary appendages of the species.

Pleasure is a sensation, happiness an emotion, satisfaction a mood, and contentment a dreaming rumination.

The ritualistic courtesy of the Chinese and Japanese stems from their societies being overcrowded; absent an objectified code of personal interaction their countries would descend into violent chaos.  America’s not overpopulated, but we have a much lower threshold for angry and irrational resentment than the Orientals, thanks to our having become infantile after 40 years of unrestricted self-indulgence, the evaporation of our educational process and the aberrant notion that we can heal our spiritual malaise by purchasing high-profile merchandise.  There are simply no spurs to empathetic understanding in a nation whose religious worship consists of thanking God for easy credit and whose standard greeting runs, “Get out of my face, you fucking asshole.”

Some people think that our intelligence is the master of our lives.  Other people believe it is the servant.  The vast majority of people couldn’t care less, and the patterns of their behavior, while they may be coherent, are never comprehensive.

Values are principles that control behavior.  They derive from a twin pair of evolutionary imperatives: the self-assertive need to achieve goals that are measurable, promoting the self-esteem necessary to continue achieving goals; and the self-protective need to assert oneself without fatally antagonizing other people asserting themselves.  Convictions, on the other hand, are intellectual formulations of values as they relate to the fundamental aspects of external reality at a given time.  Here’s the tricky part: The fundamentals of external reality (i.e., circumstances) are always in the process of altering as time persists.  Maladapted people hang on to their obsolete convictions with the ferocity of a downing man clinging for his life to an anvil.  Well-adjusted people know that dropping old convictions and adopting new ones as circumstances mandate is the only way their values can be preserved.  Soi brave, mon enfant!

Whatever Happened to Harmonic Dissonance? II: That a person could even utter a statement like, “I don’t need to read the newspaper because nothing in it interests me,” or, “I’ve never eaten Korean food because I know I wouldn’t like it,” betokens a breakdown of the speaker’s most basic associative operations (his mind “throwing a rod”); and it yields a proposition that is ridiculous—that we can judge the value or utility of an experience without having tried it. I remember when this fallacy typified the thinking of teenagers in the early Eighties.  Now we hear it from adults every day.  The disconnect occurs to people who haven’t managed to objectify, assimilate and conceptualize the elements and forces of contemporary existence; coping in desperation with incessant shotgun blasts of minutiae stresses them so completely that their minds simply shut down rather than entertain the thought of taking on something new and different.  Neglecting one’s mental capacities is not the wisest preparation for life inside a kaleidoscope.

An expert is a person who believes there is no middle ground between expertise and ignorance.

The vital intellectual component of humanity issues from the ability to objectify, interpret and analyze the features of our array of contexts and our subjective reactions to the contexts’ properties and dynamics.  When we reject the basis of objectification, therefore, as by abandoning confidence in the existence of uniformly occurring verities and their methods of operation, and as by substituting feeling for thinking as our singular instrument of “understanding,” we not only disable our intellect, we undo our selves.

Despite appearances, most people’s behavior is not irrational; it’s neurotic, i.e., dysfunctional in rational ways.  But because we imagine that certain people—most of them, in fact–are irrational, we solicitously counter their bizarreness with our light-wand of rationality, to no avail, because their maladjustment is spawned not in the intellectual faculty but in the awful chaotic swirl of modern life. I think we ought to reverse the terms of the process and purposely act irrationally in order to snap such people out of their neuroses.  The next time you run into that smarmy little self-deprecator who works down the hall, ask, “Why did you dye your hair blue?” and instantly leave the room. The baffled neurotic, imploding with uncertainty and doubt, will then take a couple of baby steps along the path to eventual normalcy by hastening to find a mirror so he can verify his hair color, then wondering why you might have spoken so strangely.  (Point #1: Your insanity acts like a cattle prod, shocking his malady into the open.)  The second time you see the patient, offer this assurance: “I don’t blame you for killing your wife.  Your secret is safe with me”; and then go away again.  After this encounter, the subject will begin to objectify his thinking as he tries to figure out what in the hell your problem is. (Point #2: Objectification is the sine qua non of emotional salubrity.) Keep this going, and the day will come when you two collide at the water cooler and the former human ant colony says, “You don’t play badminton, do you?  I just took it up and it looks like I’ve got a real talent for it!”

The mainstream media act collectively, though not in concert.  Its practitioners don’t need to conspire.  They all hail from the same general background (the  higher ranges of the middle-class), went to the same schools when those schools were being radicalized, practically form an age brigade, and cover a lot of stories indicating that the poor don’t live as comfortably as the wealthy.  Corporately they consider the left to be the center and the right as the domain of Nazi boobs and pinheads. What is not apparent is why they feel compelled to demolish the values of the social class that brought them into a safe and good existence, promoted their idealism, and funded their miseducation. You’d think they’d offer those values to the hallowed disadvantaged whose incentive to improve has been eradicated by the media’s insistence that the government needs to rescue them.  Do you think the journalists feel they don’t deserve their good fortune because they did nothing to earn it?  Self-disgust would certainly account for the irrational fury of their denunciations.

Success depends on knowing in your bones how things work in your field of activity.  The successful person beholds the field not as an organized schema but as a dynamic process; his knowledge isn’t acquired by simple learning, it is transferred from the field’s array of energy directly into his nervous system as a function of the totality of his involvement. The successful executive manipulates his knowledge to seize control of a sector of the process in order to improve the sector’s efficiency.  The successful entrepreneur locates an opportunity that no one else has recognized for a creative transformation of the process itself.  The necessary “knowledge”, in other words, is intuitive/intellectual rather than merely intellectual, and if you don’t have it, be content to do your job, and turn to your private life for self-fulfillment.

When the ladies of Wall Street torched their brassieres in the late 1960s, inaugurating the age of feminism, the preponderance of men were not the chauvinistic beasts the women’s spokespeople labeled them as being.  However, when the feminists objected to being treated “demeaningly” by fellows who stood up when they entered the room and made a habit of opening doors for them, then announced not only did they have the right to be promiscuous “just like you,” but had taken to regarding men strictly as sex objects, guys began to think, “You know what?  This suits the hell out of me.”  In the space of five or six years the feminists reversed fully three million years of the evolutionary trend affiliating men to women as post-mating husbands and fathers, a behavior not originally inherent in the anthropoid male. Consequently, most men today, if they had their druthers, would fuck at least one fresh woman every day of the week, no strings attached; and if the women didn’t like it, they could kiss the men’s asses as they left the bedroom.  Did I hear somebody say Mondo Cane?