I could never be a scientist, because I'm too much of an empiricist.
That sounds nonsensical, I know. But it's the same reason my religious career never took off: I have always struggled to fathom the incredible. There are certain facts about the world in which we life that just stagger me.
Things like atoms.
Dark matter.
Supernovas.
The big bang.
The idea that the universe is infinite.
The idea that the universe is finite.
Christ, I still struggle to comprehend that the earth is round.
At the risk of sounding like a Contiki tour of an acid trip, the things that the sciences require us to believe as fundaments of their respective disciplines leave me breathless and gaping, forehead pink and wrinkled like a baby taking the in-breath before a wail. If I can't fathom the foundation stones of these temples of thought, what hope do I have of mounting the dizzying spires at the pinnacle of scientific hypothesis?
I have been thinking a lot lately about things I can't possibly understand because one of my dear, dear friends wants to die.
Or rather, she wishes she could never have existed. She longs for oblivion - she struggles through each day dogged by the seductive siren song of nothingness. And no matter how eloquently she expresses it, I cannot understand, because the prospect of an idea as huge as oblivion terrifies me. It's a concept as vast as the ocean, and my mind is a grain of salt. Whenever I try to face it, I cannot help but be consumed by it, lost, dissolved.
How can we humans grasp the enormity of nothingness? I am a conscious being. Every single thing I experience is filtered through the gates of my ego, my sense of self, my "I." The idea of not being conscious, of not existing, is fundamentally not within my capacity to grasp. And so, because I have no way of understanding it, I fear it above all things.
Eternity is just as much a source of blind terror. I remember being about eleven, and trying to explain to my bewildered parents that I was crying because I'd realised that, according to conventional beliefs, the afterlife was either eternity or oblivion, and both options drove me into a fit of complete panic.
Perhaps I'm being immature or churlish. After all, birth and death are the only things we all share. There's a great Laura Marling song that goes 'Til I'm laid into my final resting place/Just like the rest of human race who've done it/Without complaining all the way.' So perhaps this is just another symptom of a bourgeois youthful mind clinging to a fin de siècle intellectualist tumult. But damnit, I like being alive. Right now, I have no plans to go gentle into that good night.
So though it sometimes feels like I'm embracing ignorance, I'll go on pressing down those unquiet waves of fear and insignificance. A good dose of wonder is good for the soul, but unless I moderate my thoughts, I'll never get anything done. For now, at least, I'll content myself with the little sneaking moments of vast epiphany that pounce on me on occasion, grasp me by the ears and scream 'Do you even realise how outrageously incomprehensible your own existence is?!'
We all need that now and then. But I sure couldn't do it for a living.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Hipster Youth
My friends and I play this game when we're out. We keep our eyes peeled for disaffected youth, clad in tight jeans and waistcoats, overbearded and bespectacled, or pairing heavy boots with tiny skirts. And when we sight one, we lean in conspiratorially close and whisper gleefully: 'Look at dat hipster!'
The phrase carries none of the snorting animosity of the internet tag LATFH - rather, it's a cry of muffled delight, mixed with, admittedly, a touch of superiority, but never bile.
The cafe I'm writing this in, incidentally, is ideal for hipster-spotting. The wait staff have asymmetrical haircuts and adorable fedoras. The customers ooze lower-Chapel Street cool, and congregate under the central courtyard sculpture constructed from gas bottles. And it began here, a few weeks ago, a fateful game of Look At Dat Hipster, when suddenly, four of us caught sight of ourselves in a mirrored shopfront, and with a start, realised that the hipsters were us. I appraised my reflection - wearing Doc Martens, an indian scarf, a leather jacket with Mickey Mouse emblazoned on the back from a Sunday market and an ink-stained bag because I never got around to buying another, and anyway, the ink made me look artistic - and the realisation slapped me lightly across the face.
The evidence rolled inexorably in. I work in a secondhand bookshop. I'm in a fringe theatre company. I own dozens of Popular Penguins. The last book I read was by Camus. The last film I saw was by Hitchcock. I mean, god, I'm a photographer who's procrastinating from her thesis in globalised puppetry by sitting in a cool cafe (so cool that you're still allowed to smoke in it), scrawling in a Moleskine an entry to post in my blog.
I think I'm a hipster.
I've been noticing the word a lot recently, usually finding it used in a derogatory sense. Because I'm a child of my generation, I wikipedia-ed the term, and found an article from Time Out New York by Christian Lorentzen, arrestingly titled 'Why the hipster must die.' It's essentially a rant decrying the Hipster Youth (ha) for being alarmingly uncool, but it had a neat little line in it: 'hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.'
Ah, authentic. It's a word endlessly evoked in Arts scholarhip (half my thesis is based on it), but when push comes to shove, it doesn't actually mean anything. Neither does 'cool.' They're both ideas, or states of being which, as soon as they are examined, are destroyed. They're mirages that seem solid until you step close enough to realise that they're ideas without a core. Cool people are always completely uninterested in the cultural cues that make them cool - take Tom Waits. He is at his coolest when he is drunk out of his mind, chuckling at the panicked confusion of an interviewer. Genuine cool never (or rarely enough, at least), arises from the desire to be cool. If you have to ask whether you're being cool, you're not.
So too with authenticity. The authentic doesn't fret over whether it is true, or natural, or organic, it just is.
So hipsterdom starts life with a profound disadvantage, inasmuch as the greater the fervour with which authenticity and 'coolness' are pursued, the further and faster they slip from reach.
But please don't think I'm merely pontificating on this issue without any subjective insight. I get it. God, I get it. If I could pick a subculture to belong to, it'd be the Beatniks. I long to wear dark glasses, a beret and a bob, snap my fingers at poetry slams and call everyone 'cat' and 'daddy-o.' I would love to be surrounded by people discovering Kerouac and Ginsberg for the first time, and realising that literature can be raw and painful, and can wrench parts of you which you'd 'til then considered forever private. I itch to speak a patois designed to designate inclusion, intellectual breadth and artistic sensibility.
But I can't. Because the moment I'd cross my legs nonchalantly, and rhyme a few too many words in a sentence, I'd draw eye-rolls and sneering glances like moths to the flame of my affectation.
It's a pity, really, that our contemporary youth culture is so accepting of purposeful aberration. Part of me wishes for the 50s, with its clearly defined mainstream, where all it took to shock and rebel was a haircut and some slightly too tight pants. Our youth culture now is a panoply of mainstreams, and we're running out of behemoths to rage against.
We are so saturated with culture that we feel like heathen. It's like those moments when it gets so loud that it's almost like silence. And the millions of middle-class youngsters who've replaced anarchy with apathy, whose feet have lost the pull of the undertow that anchors them to the drive, passion and flash-paper energy they imagine their forebears to have possessed - it's hardly surprising that they launch themselves so desperately on the books, the records, the ideas that last longer than they can. A novel weighs much more than its pages - it carries the gravity of generations who knew more, thought deeper and spoke more beautifully than we ever could.
That's where the constantly backward (and bookward) referencing of hipster culture comes from, I think - the vests, the winklepickers, the thoughtful moustaches and the hoarding of classic literature - it's not just a reaching for the physical stylings of the scholars of old, it's a longing for an age of something solid and true, and what greater constant is there than thought? In this age of sound-bites, where unfathomable tonnes of text are spewed at and from the internet, we are showered constantly with words, and it renders us strangely inarticulate. So there is a great comfort in turning a page in a book and discovering there, clean, succinct, and piercing, the words we cannot find.
Plus, daddy-o, it makes us look really, like, real.
The phrase carries none of the snorting animosity of the internet tag LATFH - rather, it's a cry of muffled delight, mixed with, admittedly, a touch of superiority, but never bile.
The cafe I'm writing this in, incidentally, is ideal for hipster-spotting. The wait staff have asymmetrical haircuts and adorable fedoras. The customers ooze lower-Chapel Street cool, and congregate under the central courtyard sculpture constructed from gas bottles. And it began here, a few weeks ago, a fateful game of Look At Dat Hipster, when suddenly, four of us caught sight of ourselves in a mirrored shopfront, and with a start, realised that the hipsters were us. I appraised my reflection - wearing Doc Martens, an indian scarf, a leather jacket with Mickey Mouse emblazoned on the back from a Sunday market and an ink-stained bag because I never got around to buying another, and anyway, the ink made me look artistic - and the realisation slapped me lightly across the face.
The evidence rolled inexorably in. I work in a secondhand bookshop. I'm in a fringe theatre company. I own dozens of Popular Penguins. The last book I read was by Camus. The last film I saw was by Hitchcock. I mean, god, I'm a photographer who's procrastinating from her thesis in globalised puppetry by sitting in a cool cafe (so cool that you're still allowed to smoke in it), scrawling in a Moleskine an entry to post in my blog.
I think I'm a hipster.
I've been noticing the word a lot recently, usually finding it used in a derogatory sense. Because I'm a child of my generation, I wikipedia-ed the term, and found an article from Time Out New York by Christian Lorentzen, arrestingly titled 'Why the hipster must die.' It's essentially a rant decrying the Hipster Youth (ha) for being alarmingly uncool, but it had a neat little line in it: 'hipsterism fetishizes the authentic and regurgitates it with a winking inauthenticity.'
Ah, authentic. It's a word endlessly evoked in Arts scholarhip (half my thesis is based on it), but when push comes to shove, it doesn't actually mean anything. Neither does 'cool.' They're both ideas, or states of being which, as soon as they are examined, are destroyed. They're mirages that seem solid until you step close enough to realise that they're ideas without a core. Cool people are always completely uninterested in the cultural cues that make them cool - take Tom Waits. He is at his coolest when he is drunk out of his mind, chuckling at the panicked confusion of an interviewer. Genuine cool never (or rarely enough, at least), arises from the desire to be cool. If you have to ask whether you're being cool, you're not.
So too with authenticity. The authentic doesn't fret over whether it is true, or natural, or organic, it just is.
So hipsterdom starts life with a profound disadvantage, inasmuch as the greater the fervour with which authenticity and 'coolness' are pursued, the further and faster they slip from reach.
But please don't think I'm merely pontificating on this issue without any subjective insight. I get it. God, I get it. If I could pick a subculture to belong to, it'd be the Beatniks. I long to wear dark glasses, a beret and a bob, snap my fingers at poetry slams and call everyone 'cat' and 'daddy-o.' I would love to be surrounded by people discovering Kerouac and Ginsberg for the first time, and realising that literature can be raw and painful, and can wrench parts of you which you'd 'til then considered forever private. I itch to speak a patois designed to designate inclusion, intellectual breadth and artistic sensibility.
But I can't. Because the moment I'd cross my legs nonchalantly, and rhyme a few too many words in a sentence, I'd draw eye-rolls and sneering glances like moths to the flame of my affectation.
It's a pity, really, that our contemporary youth culture is so accepting of purposeful aberration. Part of me wishes for the 50s, with its clearly defined mainstream, where all it took to shock and rebel was a haircut and some slightly too tight pants. Our youth culture now is a panoply of mainstreams, and we're running out of behemoths to rage against.
We are so saturated with culture that we feel like heathen. It's like those moments when it gets so loud that it's almost like silence. And the millions of middle-class youngsters who've replaced anarchy with apathy, whose feet have lost the pull of the undertow that anchors them to the drive, passion and flash-paper energy they imagine their forebears to have possessed - it's hardly surprising that they launch themselves so desperately on the books, the records, the ideas that last longer than they can. A novel weighs much more than its pages - it carries the gravity of generations who knew more, thought deeper and spoke more beautifully than we ever could.
That's where the constantly backward (and bookward) referencing of hipster culture comes from, I think - the vests, the winklepickers, the thoughtful moustaches and the hoarding of classic literature - it's not just a reaching for the physical stylings of the scholars of old, it's a longing for an age of something solid and true, and what greater constant is there than thought? In this age of sound-bites, where unfathomable tonnes of text are spewed at and from the internet, we are showered constantly with words, and it renders us strangely inarticulate. So there is a great comfort in turning a page in a book and discovering there, clean, succinct, and piercing, the words we cannot find.
Plus, daddy-o, it makes us look really, like, real.
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