Whenever I hear someone drop the word ‘project’ it feels a bit suspect. Typically if you display any sort of curiosity about this ‘project’ you’re met with vagueness and pretension. It seemed like half the people I knew in my 20’s had projects coming out their ears, none of which ever amounted to anything. I think the best way to illustrate this is to talk about JK. JK was a guy in our little circle of friends. He was an illustrator of mild talent, had a number of tattoos on the low end of good taste, and couldn’t handle his whiskey. Whenever this guy got a few slugs down him there were tantrums, tears, and broken glass. At one such party he stormed into my room, visibly shaking with anger at some thing I’d said earlier. I sat there and acted all calm which pissed him off even more. After about a minute of matching wills like this I could see we were either going to fight, or have some god-awful heart to heart where we get our real feelings out in the open. I took the bottle of gin from the table, led him to another room, and opted for the latter. We drank some gin and he professed his true love, and eventually he got around to saying it: He wanted to Collaborate with me. We were both artists and he respected me so we were supposed to Collaborate on something. I don’t know what he thought we were supposed to do; he wasn’t in an articulate mood. But in his mind this is what artists did, they collaborated on fucking projects together.
Fast forward a few years later I’m with the poet people in New Orleans and everyone was a Dadaist and the thing for poets to do in the bars and the cafes at 3 in the morning was to write a Corpse. You know where you write a sentence on a piece of paper, fold it down so the next person can’t see it, they write something and so on. When the page is full someone unfolds it and reads it out loud and sometimes you’d get this melding of contrary ideas but usually it was disjointed nonsense. One of these poets called an aspect of this successful melding a ‘word collision’, two words which never appear together in sensible language, colliding to form a new sense of reality, like, say, harmony daggers, or Pinocchio serum, or basically the name of most rock bands: Nine Inch Stone Temple Chilli Peppers. To me this was like rearranging a human body, you know have the legs growing out the chest, or the hands flapping like wing beards beneath the jaw-line. Funny to look at, a little surreal, but not very functional. But then that was Dada. Anti-art. Anti-function.
Whatever small thrill this parlour game has to offer is in hearing the familiarity of your own words in a foreign environment. You have all this banal anonymity and then, oh look! That’s me! I sound awesome who are these other fucking people. Or say someone you really like shows you a picture. They’re set right there in the middle looking real swell and surrounded by their friends who are a bunch of people you don’t know. And they might say this is Ron and this is Carmen she’s really drunk in this photo and you sort of fade out because you don’t really care about anyone else in that picture, in fact you want to steal that picture and show it to your friends and say guess which one she is. No not her how could you think that about me. Yeah, that’s her, she’s pretty special. Just look at her.
Wether we like to deal with ourselves in these terms or not we are rigged in a way which says, This Is Me, and this Is What I Value. So what about a digital world of online identities where we can dispose of the first part and say, ‘This is my representative, and this is what he values.’ And you know what goes here. Oscar Wilde is dead he is a fixture, a simulacrum, he no longer has any feelings and I can make him say, ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’ To that you have to ask how much of the self is actually informed by it’s values. And to that you have to answer, about half of it, and sometimes all of it.
You have to wonder why we our so myopic when it comes to anything regarding ourselves. None of us has a correct estimation on how we look or what we create. Exceedingly beautiful people can feel very unattractive, and incredibly bad writing can seem like incredibly good writing to the person who wrote it. And the reason for much of this seems to be the variety of disparate values we use to author ourselves.
I knew this girl growing up who went to one of the more redneck high schools. She told me how students actually had to claim an identity or a tribe. If a student’s dress was vague or say a mixture of one or more tribes they would be asked, ‘what are you claiming.’ And you would have to say you were a goth or a punk or whatever. If I was ever asked that I’d just make something up and be like, I’m a headlight. And they’d be like dude what the fuck. But eventually word would get around and I’d be walking down the hall one day and some chick would be like, oh my god that guy is so headlight.
But as the years go on values change. Shit happens to us. We read more books, see more films, fuck more people, more countries go to war in new and interesting ways, more natural disasters happen. And most importantly, new bands emerge. All these things more or less inform our values and when our value system gets updates we often find ourselves getting re-written. That is until you’re 38 or so and you’re stuck with your last update, for like, a decade. You have a long wait before the identity of old and wise can be pulled off.
Think of what must have informed George Bernard Shaw when at age 92 he started trying to rewrite all his plays. His friends were like, pin him down he’s going to destroy Major Barbara! And George is like, don’t touch me, I have to change just this one line here I’ve been thinking it over, and they’re like no you’ll destroy it it’s a masterpiece! And George is like fuck off man you are poison! POISON I SAY!
An author’s identity ie what they stand for, what they meant to say and no, that is not it, that is not what I meant at all, is summed up with Elliot terrified and sprawling on a pin. Fast forward a couple decades and we have an Elliot who says, in so many words, that he no longer gives a shit (in regards to The Wasteland): Various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling.
Horses of Meaning 