On Crazy, or, The Victor Belongs to the Spoils.

"Don't do it! I know what you're doing! Stop!"

"I am peeing!"

"You're bent over the toilet!"

"Hey! I want to pee! Privacy would be nice!"

"You are not peeing! I know exactly what you're doing and you need to stop!"

"What am I doing? How do you know?!"

"Really, GG! Who goes to the toilet with a fork?! Now get out of there!"

That is my trainer talking me down from a ledge that exists on the edge of a commode. It's not chronic, no, it's something I indulge in once in a while. And it's exhausting. And messy. It's a good fit, frankly, with the anxiety, the insecurity, the affectations, the acrid regrets...On my nights on the town, I feel like Zelda Sayre, "dreaming how much better I would be than I am if I were somebody else, or even myself, and feeling that my estate has been unexploited to the fullest!" See, a handy quote! This is a very well put-together production of Crazy. That word is so gauche, really! It conjures up images of wildness and immaturity. This Crazy (distinguished by its Capital 'C') is Compelling, Complex stuff. 

I am not Crazy because it's fashionable. I am fashionable because I can, with skinny ties and suspenders, also do Crazy. It's wonderful, really, to have an outward locus upon which to place my neuroses for a while. I cannot internalise them anymore. Gosh, I was so repressed when I was fourteen! I remember, Mother, Father, friends of the family and I, we took The Grand Tour when I was that age. It was in Paris that I, a Xanax sous'd carcass of a 1950's housewife, stuffed inside the awkward body of a fourteen-year-old boy, actively fought desire, fought back a sexual awakening. It was all too sordid, messy...and I had invested in a new wardrobe. Besides, it was Paris! I wanted languidness, elegance and grace that I was hard-pressed to find in that swathing body that I inhabited. I took to the Sex Shoppes one evening with my partner-in-crime and dear friend (who did not hold back, as far as his sexual awakening was concerned) by my side. I remember a lot of red. I remember pretending not to understand the French on the signs of certain, fairly intuitive devices. I remember going to these establishments just to stick my nose up to them. Mentally condemn those who came by to buy porn, cat o'nine tails...It was very satisfying, and I returned to the hotel bearing two seemingly innocent (yet enigmatically apropos) post-cards depicting The Mona Lisa. I think I knew that those patrons were freer than I ever would be. They didn't have to prove a thing to anyone, and neither did they have to derive sustenance by feeding upon someone else's alleged depravity.

Now. Now, I find myself walking the streets of my Spitsbergen: over the top and under the table; bitchy and sparkling; contentedly sad; inveterately single, measuring in shot glasses how much the heart can hold! A young thing with sad eyes...oh Crazy, Crazy! So Crazy! But not free. Never free. Always envying those who don't care, and never have. Always playing at Keeping Up Appearances. So interesting! But so fucking Crazy! But, just Crazy enough to be interesting! 

What is this blog post about? I had initially decided that I would delineate Crazy, but I really have entirely too much to say about it and most of it is in stream-of-consciousness which, those of us in the know know, is so three seasons ago! I'd talk about my relationship with food and how it is as dysfunctional as my relationship with certain exes and members of my extended family. Lots of hoarding and trippy guilt-trips...but even my sort-of eating disorder is so...disorderly given the lack of commitment. 

As I sit before Dick Diver V (yes, there have been five therapists! I feel like a slut of/in/under/atop analysis) and obsess about perfunctory comments that I have overanalysed to the point of implosion, forgotten pipettes,   the immunology of my non-existent "sex" life, my inadequacies, my Crack-Ups, the weird mix of repulsion and concupiscence I felt when a stranger groped me outside a bar...I feel like Zelda Sayre-Fitzgerald. I feel like I am not really Crazy, but very, very spoilt! All of these symptoms that I have mentioned seem to cohere together into a recherché tableau that is, at its very core, a misprized tantrum. A tantrum that I have been throwing for the longest time that it has become a gradual performance; a tantrum that I have thrown about something that I no longer remember or even care about. It's just...fun to live in a world defined by camp, tears, metaphor...like Richard II, like Hamlet. But, no, those aren't fair comparisons. They were committed! They put their deaths where there mouths were! 

Have I been so vile for nothing? I am not fishing for compliments, I am not looking for someone to hold my hand...I just want you to know that I know. It is hard to live with Knowing. It's hard to keep asking oneself: have I been so vile, so Crazy for nothing?

Indeed, it is with the loose ends that men hang themselves.

Excuse me, I am going to sedate myself now.

Until the next time,

GossipGuy. 

On Beauty

At some level I knew it all along that it was a falsehood, this idea that "inner beauty" is what actually counts and that no-one cares whether one is outwardly beautiful or not. I believed it because there was a plethora of quotes from eminent, respected people who claimed that beauty is this ineffable, untranslatable Light of some sort that dawns upon one and seizes one with a rapture that is ineffable, untranslatable...

Maybe that's why no one talks about in terms that are more concrete. I have never understood this idea of inner beauty, and I think that it is a pretty lie that has been propagated so that we may manage ourselves during times that are not so beautiful. 

I have just finished reading a novel by Iginio Tarchetti called Fosca. This nineteenth-century, quasi-Gothic Italian novel became the subject of Stephen Sondheim's haunting chamber opera Passion. The novel tells of handsome Giorgio who is having an affair with the equally beautiful (and very married) Clara when he, at an army outpost, meets the desperately ill and desperately ugly Fosca. The novel is an examination of the peculiar powers that are found in both beauty and ugliness. Fosca is sickly, hideous and vile. She milks her ugliness to create this aura of pity and self-concern that is, in a sense, a twisted Black Mass version of how someone may milk their good looks to get their way. One gets the sense that beauty is power, and indeed it is. It is a drug. All these hallucinatory ideas of wanting to die for someone because s/he is so beautiful, of being half-in-love with death, life and nature because they are Sublime...to me, these are symptoms of addiction. You may either be addicted to the effects of beauty, Sublime as they are, or you may be addicted to being the agent of that Sublimity. You either want the drug or want to BE the drug. Fosca creates permutations in which she addicts the drug to its antagonistic agonist. That frightens me, because it tells you how powerful beauty is, even in its absence. 

And how does this pertain to me? I feel this incredible sense of self-loathing every time I go to the gym, mainly because I know why I am doing it. For the shallowest of reasons: to be beautiful. Every time I go to the gym, I find what I once prized as my own exclusive and delicate sensibility to flow down my back as sweat. People go to the gym for various reasons: to be fit, to stay fit, to keep pathologies at bay, but I? I go there to punish myself for being shallow, while engendering a novel aesthetic of pretension! You see, I have begun to equate beauty with goodness, for good things happen to those who are beautiful. Hell, even if Bad things happen to the beautiful, they still appear Good because they feature such an agreeable cast of characters. The travails of the beautiful and the plain are the same: the former's are just so much more involving! I can't be Fosca, and believe me I have tried: she sickens me. She sickens me because she has very carefully crafted her "illness" her "deep melancholy" her "episodes". She reinforces the belief  that ugly is as ugly does. One doesn't need to be that...cerebral when one is beautiful! For what is beauty if not happiness?! Aren't these interchangeable? I have begun to believe that they are. 

IF:

I am beautiful, I shall be able to leave my Spitsbergen for an Eternal City somewhere.

The Eternal City will give me the Romance of opportunity and that of the heart.

I shall be poised, upright, aware, never fumbling and loved in that Eternal City, wherever it may be. 

Life will be...so beautiful, and do you know why? Because I am. Or shall be beautiful! 

It kills me to acknowledge that I, at some level, do truly believe this. I also know them to be libellous, ugly things but I cling to them anyway. I am respiring anaerobically again. I think it's because I am frightened. I think it's because I am foolish. Or, like Fosca, I am addicted to the trippier drug, man!  The selfsame that makes one want to be that phantasm with the hooded-eyes who waits in the tower, one who is hooked on longing. Longing for something ineffable, untranslatable, beautiful. Aren't these such noble ideas? The patience, the waiting, the refined aesthetic of it all? 

Am I being so vile for nothing? O God, God! Please let this mean something, let this amount to something in the end! Let me, in the end, finally see what is beautiful about all this! 

Until the next time,

Gossip Guy.