by
Adam Kirsch
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
[...] Caring about our group can be considered a kind of false consciousness only if there is also a true consciousness, which would entail caring about our own individual genetic prospects. But while discussions of evolution often use metaphors of agency--as when we talk of evolution "selecting for" a trait--for a gene there is no such thing as "caring" one way or another. There is only an endless process of differential reproduction, in which genes that make more copies of themselves outnumber genes that make fewer copies. In other words, it makes literally no sense for a human being to care about her own genes or feel duped if she is made to care about someone else's genes. There is no one, no thing, to be the object of this concern. When we say that we care about our genes, what we really mean is that we care about our selves--but the self is an entity of an entirely different order, a humanly created order with its own priorities and values. It is because he wanted to perpetuate his self that Shakespeare wrote his boasting poems. Selves live by other means than genes do.
When Fukuyama published his book, in 1992, he was specifically concerned with the loss of thymos among Americans. It was America that had won the Cold War, thus establishing the uncontestable superiority of liberal democracy and inaugurating the end of History. Yet it was also America that, to Fukuyama, seemed to be growing soft in its prosperity--concerned with material goods and self-esteem, indifferent to duty and sacrifice. "Those earnest young people trooping off to law and business school," he wrote, "who anxiously fill out their resumes in hopes of maintaining the lifestyles to which they believe themselves entitled, seem to be much more in danger of becoming last men, rather than reviving the passions of the first man." [...]
honestly Fukuyama has good point here. links to how I feel about fitting within the system etc
Three more different writers could hardly be invented--which makes it all the more suggestive that their portraits of the spiritual state of contemporary Europe are so powerfully complementary. They show us a Europe that is affluent and tolerant, enjoying all the material blessings that human beings have always struggled for, and that the Europeans of seventy years ago would have thought unattainable. Yet these three books are also haunted by intimations of belatedness and decline, by the fear that Europe has too much history behind it to thrive. They suggest that currents of rage and despair are still coursing beneath the calm surface of society, occasionally erupting into violence. And they worry about what will happen when a Europe gorged on its historical good fortune has to defend itself against an envious and resentful world.
When I first met concussion specialist Dr. Michael Collins, after three and a half years of suffering from post-concussive syndrome, he said, “If you remember only one thing from this meeting, remember this: run towards the danger.” In order for my brain to recover from a traumatic injury, I had to retrain it to strength by charging towards the very activities that triggered my symptoms. This was a paradigm shift for me—to greet and welcome the things I had previously avoided.
As I recovered from my concussion, “run towards the danger” became a kind of incantation for me in relation to the rest of my life. I began to hear it as a challenge to take on the project of addressing and questioning my own narratives.
When it came to learning—or indeed any activity of any sort—my father believed that everything must be for the sake of itself rather than some greater ambition. The story my father told most often about himself as a youth was one in which, at the last moment, he ran in a race he had not trained for. He had been asked to replace a sick runner to represent his school. Not caring about running particularly, and knowing he had no chance of winning, he made a game for himself: he would treat the passing of each runner in front of him as a major victory. And so he ran the race this way, trying to pass each runner as though it were the end goal, celebrating each small triumph, until the end, when he suddenly realized there was only one more runner in front of him. He gunned towards the finish line, bewildered by the unexpected ending of having won the entire race.
It was a self-aggrandizing story, but he told it with such intense drama that, listening to it, you rooted for him to pass each person he was racing against and celebrated with him each time he did. This was emblematic of his relationship to success. He believed it was acceptable only if it had been realized effortlessly, without ambition, almost by accident, and born out of a love of the moment, a commitment to overcoming the present, immediate challenge, instead of a long-term strategy. I loved his stories, and their out-of-step-with-society perspective, even if I had heard most of them a thousand times.
So it wasn’t an unhappy relationship with my dad, just a very complicated one, just a very adult one, in a house that was falling apart with mice and moths infesting many rooms, and far too many conversations about the tragic pathos of pedophiles.
damn
The White Knight, who Alice meets towards the end of the book, is clearly based on Dodgson himself, a bumbling, incompetent eccentric who so wants Alice to be okay and ultimately helps her to find the final square of the chess game, where she will turn from a pawn into a Queen, thus abandoning him. In these scenes, with Tom Wood playing the White Knight, I played a peculiar concoction of love and scorn. These dynamics were familiar to me. I had spent a life on film sets, my puberty unfolding in front of dozens of men with no sense (or care) of what was appropriate to say or not say in front of children or of the boundaries between adulthood and childhood. The size of my breasts had been commented on, often, through the years. I had experienced unhidden yearning from people three times my age. I had heard explicit conversations about sex or had had them directed straight at me. I dealt with all this by wielding the only power I had, which at the time felt very real and potent: I could mock these men to their faces, I could say whatever I wanted, I could be as mean and bad and hurtful as I pleased. Because we both knew that, as a child who had felt their desire, I had something on them.
On my days off, I took the train to Toronto to see Corey. We had a place together in the Gay Village, a sixth-floor boxy apartment with little light in a 1960s high-rise. It had no furniture. We would sleep on the floor together, our possessions limited to two little candle holders with cut-outs in them that cast stars on the ceiling as we lay together in sleeping bags. We also had a goblet with grasshoppers carved into it, given to me by the legendary actor Bill Needles, who had told me he thought Corey was “adorable.” He told me that he had had this grasshopper glass in every house he had lived in as an adult and it had brought him good luck. “It’s time to pass it along to someone who needs it,” he had said.
just, evocative
Now, when I said goodbye to the White Knight in that penultimate scene, I could not stop the tears from flooding down my face as I said “I hope it encouraged him.” I watched him, losing his things out of the hole in his sack, as he trotted on alone, unawares. I wished there was something I could do for him. I hated Alice Liddell for abandoning Charles Dodgson by fleeing her childhood into womanhood. I hated that my dad left chicken pot pies on the stovetop for a week, insisting they didn’t need to be refrigerated, or that he made the red cabbage three weeks before Christmas dinner, and that the cards he played solitaire with no longer had images on them. I tried to block out the mornings I had woken up to find him, still sleepless, staring at reams of papers on the dining room table, full of tiny, neatly written mathematical equations, numbers doubling and quadrupling until he ran out of space in the millions. (I later discovered he was trying to ascertain how many humans had had to copulate in order to produce him, and how many of those couplings were likely rapes. “How much violence was I the product of?” he said, looking helpless and childlike.) I wonder, in retrospect, if these moments were signs of a typical eccentric Englishman who’d never had to do a single domestic duty until his wife died, or of mental illness, or early signs of the dementia that would be diagnosed many years later. I suppose I’ll never know, and there is something I can’t help but find funny about how closely these states might resemble each other.
On a visit home one weekend shortly after I had moved out, I found a half-written letter to his sister Janet in England. He wrote that a mammal’s purpose in life was to bear and raise their young. Now that I was gone, his life had no purpose. He’d thought he would have a few more years left of purpose. But I had left so young. He wrote this in a detached, intellectual way that implied it was a subject of some interest but not heartbreak. I later found a reply from his sister in which she attempted to comfort him, saying, “I’m sure your Sarah will change her mind and come back to you soon.” But I never did.
Around this time, my dad, when I would see him occasionally, would sing to himself, with a little side grin, “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?”
Recently, when I described this moment in the play to my therapist and the scenes of Dodgson’s rejection by Alice in Dreamchild, I tried hard to talk about my anger at being made to feel sad for the grown man instead of for the child, but all that came out of me was the sadness itself, a sadness so fierce I couldn’t speak for my sobbing. My therapist said, quietly, “There is something tremendously sad about being a pedophile. To love a creature you can’t have. To know that that love is bad. To know that you are bad for having these feelings, even if you don’t act on them. It’s tremendously sad.”