is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Very Little� Too Much.
Very Little� Too Much.
A friend of mine wrote a book a number of years ago called Very Little� Almost Nothing. It�s a great book. If I didn�t already know the author, I would have wanted to know him because of that book. It�s an �academic� book in that it is about philosophy and literature and modernity and nihilism, but it is also not only an academic book. Like Alison�s book, but in a different way, it transcends academic-book-land by being rigorous scholarship and then much more. It also mentions the Sex Pistols more than once, and not in a way to make one cringe. Anyway, even if you are quite sure that you will never read the book, I think you�ll probably agree with me that it has a great title.
The book�s about whether it is still possible to live a meaningful life after the �death of god� (which means something like, �in a world where we can�t agree on one god or one system of thought and therefore where we will disagree about how to establish truths�). His argument is twofold, 1) that the meaningless of everyday or ordinary life is itself an achievement to which we should give thought, and 2) if there is to be meaning in our necessarily finite lives, we have to find it without recourse to anything infinite (god is dead). And so, what do we have, beyond ourselves, to help us build that meaning for our lives? Very little� almost nothing. If you read that answer as depressing, you have missed the point. That could be because I haven�t explained it well. But still, if you read that conclusion as depressing, try to imagine why it is actually beautiful.
But the entry today is titled Very Little� Too Much. And that is because today I am so very weary of the faintheartedness of people, a portion of which has converged in its impact on my life in the last few days, creating in me a misanthropy and a feeling of defeat that, along with the RAIN (wtf?!), conspired to make me stay in my pajamas and hide from the world all day, unable to accomplish anything more challenging than weeding through ten years of photographs and thereby reducing eight boxes to one. (It�s not that I am a ruthless tosser-of-memories, but that I keep very good photo albums in general, so there was oh-so-much repetition amongst the packratted photos boxes I�ve been keeping all these years.) The sorting process was, as you might be guessing, very complex, but I�ll spare you the details. Friends of mine will have an opportunity to look through a Special Stack of photos that I�ve kept aside for viewing this Sunday.
The title Very Little� Too Much came to me when I got an email from a friend of mine, telling me that he could not commit to attending a fabulous party with me because the party isn�t until the end of August, and he is afraid of making commitments in advance. We all understand that. But I hope we all understand this, too: I�m talking about a fabulous party such as does not happen everyday, or even every year or 5 or 10; I�m asking a friend if he wants to go with me, because it�s going to be fun, and because I know he himself isn�t invited; I�m telling him that it would be fun for us to spend that day together; many other friends of his will be there besides myself; � you get the picture. In other words, I was asking for Very Little. Not only that, but I was asking for a Little thing that promises to be fabulously fun and also otherwise not-open to the person in question. And so it depressed me that Very Little proved to be Too Much for the friend in question. It is wearisome, this ambivalence, this fear of committing to something that it is ludicrous to fear: a PARTY! With a FRIEND! No PRESSURES! All GOOD!
As I write this I am wondering whether the way I am writing it makes it sound like perhaps there are pressures I have placed on this friend of mine, given that I am made weary and annoyed by his refusal. Searching myself and my intentions, I think not; feel free to think me self-delusive if you must. But here�s the thing: he didn�t say yes, and he didn�t say no. He said it �sounded like fun� but that he had a pathological fear of committing to something so far in advance. And THAT is what I find wearying. It is the ambivalence. When you behave toward friends with ambivalence, remember that it takes your own inner battle (something we all live with and which is inevitably part of our constant formation of ourselves) and makes it someone else�s problem or burden or annoyance. And that is selfish and unthinking. And therefore it is, in the end, downright un-friendly.
So, since, as you know, I am for some reason tremendously (over)sensitive of late to various people�s failures to think about how their acts and omissions affect other people, this, combined with many other tiny tiny things, put me in a deathly mood.
No, I am not saying that I myself always remain perfectly aware of how I affect other people. But I do try.
And that is how it came to be 8:35 pm and I am still in my pajamas instead of sitting at the Pacific Film Archive with Gayle watching Gibbs project Princess Mononoke. Clearly that would be time better spent.
But let us not idle at the banks of this river for too long. For we have much better things to speak of, do we not?
Here�s one. Today I saw love! I really did. As I was weeding through my photos, I came across a whole group of photos taken during a certain time of my life, when I was deeply in love with someone who also really loved me, and all that was viewable in the photos. People�s expressions go all gooey or soft or something. It�s sweet. I don�t think I saw it only because the love in question �happened� to me, because I�ve seen it in other people�s photos, too. In fact, what I�ve always loved about many of the photos I have of my Grandma and Grandpa St is the very real love they�especially he�tended to have in their eyes and all over their faces in their photos together. It�s a sweet visual trace of how impossible it is to deny such things. Though, of course, people deny their loves everyday for various bad and good reasons. I am no stranger to that. And, yes, the reasons for denying love are sometimes even good reasons. But we are not idling by that river today. No, we are not.
So, today I saw love. And last night I saw Liz and Heidi! I love Liz and Heidi. Liz called around 7 and said she was meeting Heidi at Zuni for drinks. So I joined them. We walked in and were blessed with a table just opening up for us. We had three rounds of drinks, as well as food and dessert and lots of fun and/or interesting conversation. I had a yummy yummy fettucine with squash blossoms, pine nuts and lemon zest, followed by a deep and rich dark chocolate cake of the most amazingly fluffy light consistency. Liz and I marveled over how they got the light and the dark in there together. That cake had the complexity of a human life! The evening was fun, and much needed.
Then the night before I had dinner and drinks with Gibbs! I love Gibbs so much that in my mind I had written a whole entry using Gibbs as an allegory for my love for San Francisco. Perhaps I will speak more of this later, if the allegory gets written.
And then on the night before that I went and saw the ill-named movie about the girls and the traveling pants with Evany! Man, was that a chick movie or what? But it was a GOOD one. You don�t end up resenting the tears it makes you shed because the story is good and real and poignant, and funny and cute and sad� overall a pretty good mix of sweet and sour�not too teenage-utopian and not too teen-apocalyptic. It is not a story that accommodates every possible life-story. But we are not into universalizing statements anyway, are we? Sometimes magic pants do save the world, or at least help us be happy about growing up.
So, yeah, it�s been a bad day and a rough up-and-down couple of weeks, but I am happy to report that, though �very little� almost nothing,� as a philosophy and a reality, is a part of my life that I cultivate and embrace, luckily �very little� too much� doesn�t play such a big role.
10:17 p.m. - June 16, 2005
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