Saturday 30 November 2002

Pic of the day: The Sims seem to like it too.

Lives we didn't live

I'm playing the song "One Life to Live" by Richi M. It feels kinda appropriate. The lyrics are somewhat limited, and frankly a bit hard to get. Evidently it is about someone special, whose soul was made for giving life to a dream. I guess there are at any given time a number of minor avatars who could be said to fill that role. People who have something more important on their minds than being just a normal human.

Lots of people want to be unique and special. But not very unique and special. Just a little. Like, richer than other people, that would be nice. Or stronger, or prettier, something like that. Something that could make people admire them. Of course, that's an illusion. People don't admire you when you are rich or pretty or famous. They envy you, because they want it for themselves. That's what daydreams don't tell.

Lots of people want to be special, but not different. Just more of the same. Their dreams are the same small dreams, just a bit larger. But if you magnify the dreams far enough, they become very coarse, like all images. Like the iron age mythologies, in which Zeus and Odin and the rest of them quarreled and squabbled like other dysfunctional families, just with earth-shattering power to back up their sulking. Kinda like superhero comics, I guess, only less noble. Superman doesn't abduct and seduce women on a regular basis, leaving a trail of half-super kids. Nor did the first two Green Lanterns ...

The rich and famous aren't happy. But, you may argue, it is better to be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy. Actually the jury is still out on that one, but certainly most people seem willing to try.

***

But some people live truly different lives. The religious zealot who lives for God, and who has no time or thought for the things of this world. The artist who truly lives for his art, and for whom material wealth is only important in so far as it lets him continue to create. And the less fortunate: The insane who live in a world terrifyingly different from ours. Those who are born blind or deaf probably also think of the world in a very different way, though I would think their wishes and purposes are much like ours.

We all live different lives from one another, even when not that extreme. Life here in Norway is subtly different from for instance Britain or America, and more dramatically different from life in India or Malaysia. Yet I have found, thanks to online journals, that these national boundaries are less important than one could think. Greater differences exist within each nation. Most nations have some people who are starving poor. I'll probably never read their journal, as they don't have the time and resources to make such a thing. In fact, only those who already belong to our shared global culture are accessible to me. The lives of those in the slum or in jungle tribes are less real to me than Hercules and Harry Potter.

If we are so alike, then why do I bother? Can't you just read your own diary instead of this?

***

This would be a good place to stop, but of course I don't have that much common sense. I just keep going. First, I don't just write about my personal life. Perhaps too much else. I write about computer games, the world economy, human nature, global epidemics of incurable diseases and the risk that we may be swallowed by a black hole.

But even when I write about myself, I sincerely believe that my life is different enough to warrant mention. And like my favorite autobiographer of all time, C.G. Jung, I believe that it is the life within that is the most interesting. People may live under different circumstances and still feel the same. Or they may live under the same circumstances and feel differently.

In particular I think my life diverged sharply the day in my mid to late twenties when I sat in an apartment not very different from this, having taken time off from work to think through the ever more frequent panic attacks and diffuse fear that had begun haunting my life. And I put the pieces together and found that the fear seemed to come from my resolve to grow up and live a normal life with wife and children and a house. Well, the "grow up" part is something I see in retrospect. I realize now that I feared to stop being me and become a stereotype I could not identify with. But right then, all I knew was that I must never marry.

With that out of the way, I could indeed grow up, even though I took my own sweet time to do so. I had a really long list of complexes to work through. But now at least in some ways I can think and feel like a mature person. (I still react very badly to stress, if you haven't noticed. Another reason why it was probably a good idea to not have a family. Children are stress with legs, as most of you know by now.)

By the time I could love without fear, it was already too late to channel that love into the forms common in our society. So I love women who don't love me, and it's OK. It is for the best, because I couldn't have acted on their love anyway. That's not to say that I don't have a pretty good idea how humans make love, and I probably know more than most newlyweds about the reality of marriage. (Which may be why they marry at all ...) You do absorb a lot of knowledge over this long a time, when you have inherited a brain like this one. But knowing is one thing, doing is another.

***

And when we sit at the breakfast table, before any makeup or perfume is applied, and she is still the most beautiful and precious thing in my life ... I know that I could have loved the way humans do. I could have loved a spouse. I could have loved our child, or children. (I am still not sure which she was most to me ... not a little sister, though. Little sisters are documented to be intolerable brats. I think our friendship was kinda like romance without the sex at the end.) If things were different, if I had loved someone who loved me, or at least accepted me... It would not have been an entirely normal life (how could it be, with me in it?) but a lot more normal than this one. And a lot less easy. Still, love tends to offset the "not easy" part, I notice.

But the road from here to there doesn't go from here, it goes from someplace far away in the past. And if I had taken that road, I would not have had all the joy of being me. There was no such road anyway when I was there. There was only this. Because I was only me.

"And all the bridges are burning that we might have crossed
but I feel so close to everything that we lost
we'll never have to lose it again...

Leonard Cohen: "Tower of Song", from the CD I'm your man.