projection zones

Music: Ezekiel Honig: Folding in on Itself (2011)

Perhaps with age the rest of us can develop an organ for detail, a thing to help process the kind of observations that a born artist can whip up at a very young age (in word or image or dream). Even a facility with detailed observation, however, doesn't mean one can self-monitor with the same, "natural" or hard-won skill. This is the blindness of the artist and the nudity of the aged. One of us tends to put on more clothes, to dress more conservatively or, to echo a mentor of mine, to channel an advisor in gesture and deed.

[I put my hands to my chest, to relay a funny story, like my advisor does, and the gesture was a deliberate homage.]

Borrowed patterns are sure, even loving. Dresses made of meat are not.

Sort-of.

In our present posty predicament, there is little insight to the observation that we cannot occupy another's interior monologue without invitation. As a culture, we've learned "the Respect." You know? Yeah, you do. But I worry this kind of recognition, the respect of that non-psychical occupation, has created a strange brand of over-projection---that the more we have refrained from prying into the personal in "meat space," the more we start projecting the missing information, the information we crave, the very human information of intimacy, onto our stranger peeps in ways that fashion them into unwitting mirrors.

In other words: in Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes the cultural fantasy of romance was invested in "the look," and paints this disturbing scenario of two hypnotists battling it out in a padded room. That much is the Hell of the Other, the ceaseless drive to "know" the mystery of the other, the stranger . . . . In postmodernity, we have sluggishly (if not cynically, but I do not yet think we are cynical, or may be prepared now to argue we have never been cynical)---we have sluggishly given up the drive to understand mystery for "mad props."

How many Facebook friends do you have? Why?

Coupled with the almost complete evaporation of secrecy as the horizon of intimacy and the increasing necessity of distortion or honest deception (e.g., social networking personas), "the Respect" is becoming almost a kind of entitled self-reflection ("in your eyes" is no longer a wedding day metaphor for the depth of conviction in a stranger, but rather, where I see myself in the pupils).

I've been reading R. Crumb's illustrated Book of Genesis, which is delightfully disturbing, so God is on the brain (a very hairy God that looks like Heston, with a beard down to his knees and who has seen every B-movie). And I think God perhaps gets the worst of it: "Thank you so much, to the Firm, for voting me in for this award; I'd also like to thank God, who makes all things possible . . . ."