I learn by going where I have to go... ...welcome to my most recent endeavor of organizing thoughts, happenings, and art of all sorts. my creations and art things are here: http://www.tumblr.com/blog/smwportfolio
Interviewer: What about dignity?
Dave Eggers: You will die, and when you die, you will know a profound lack of it. It’s never dignified, always brutal. What’s dignified about dying? It’s never dignified. And in obscurity? Offensive. Dignity is an affectation, cute but eccentric, like learning French or collecting scarves. And it’s fleeting and incredibly mercurial. And subjective. So fuck it.
-A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
a better way to end the day
I don’t really like posting about icky things- usually those thoughts I save for the lovely ones nearby who continue to care and support me (my sister, mother, friends)…but tonight the ick just sort of oozed out (and I hate to use the word “ooze”, so gross), and I’m gonna just accept that. my beloved theater director always said, “live in the moment”. and so I am, regardless of whether that moment is one of ick or not.
however, I’d like to fill my mind with a nicer thought, not a perfect one, but one of less ick. and so I turn to the wonderfully talented and staggeringly heartbreaking genius: dave eggers…
““I like the dark part of the night, after midnight and before four-thirty, when it’s hollow, when ceilings are harder and farther away. Then I can breathe, and can think while others are sleeping, in a way can stop time, can have it so – this has always been my dream – so that while everyone else is frozen, I can work busily about them, doing whatever it is that needs to be done, like the elves who make the shoes while children sleep.” (Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius)
“a heartbreaking work of staggering genius” excerpt
MTV Realworld Interviewer: “So why are you here?
Dave Eggers: I want you to share my suffering.
You don’t seem to be suffering.
I don’t?
You seem happy.
Well, sure. But not always. Sometimes it’s hard. Yeah. Sometimes it’s so hard. I mean, you can’t always suffer. It’s hard to suffer all the time. But I suffer enough. I suffer sometimes.
Why do you want to share your suffering?
By sharing it I will dilute it.
But it seems like it might be just the opposite-by sharing it you might be amplifying it.
How do you mean?
Well, by telling everyone about it, you purge yourself, but then, because everyone knows this thing about you, everyone knows your story, won’t you be constantly reminded of it, unable to escape it?
Maybe. But look at it this way: stomach cancer is genetic, passed more down the female side of our family than otherwise, but because according to Beth and me my mother was done in dyspepsia, the dyspepsia caused by swallowing too much of our tumult and cruelty, we are determined not to swallow anything, to not keep anything putrefying down there, soaking in its juices, bile eating bile…we are purgers, Beth and I. I don’t hold on to anything anymore. Pain comes at me and I take it, chew it for a few minutes, and spit it back out. It’s just not my thing anymore.
But if the information is in the eyes of everyone you meet…
Then there’s that much more sympathy coming back at us.
But it’ll get old.
Then I’ll move to Namibia.
Hmm.
I am an orphan of America.
What?
Nothing. Someone else said that, years ago.
So about the dilution…
This is where the lattice comes in.
The lattice.
The lattice that we are either a part of or apart from. The lattice is the connective tissue. The lattice is everyone else, the lattice is my people, the collective youth, people like me, hearts ripe, brains aglow. The lattice is everyone I have ever known., mostly those my age or thereabouts- I know little else, know only six or seven people over forty, know nothing to say to them-but my people, we are still there, still able, if we start right now-I see us as one, as a vast matrix, an army, a whole, each one of us responsible to one another, because no one else is. I mean, every person that walks through the door…on and on, all these people, the people who come to us or we come to, the subscribers. our friends, their friends, their friends, who knows who knows who, people who have everything in common no matter where they’re from, all these people know all the same things and truly hope for the same things, it’s undeniable they that they do, and if we can bring everyone to grab a part of the other, like an arm at the socket, everyone holding another’s arm from the socket, instead hold to it, tight, and thus strengthening-Then, um-Like a human ocean moving as one, the undulating, the wave making…so people, the connections between people, the people you know, become a sort of lattice, and the more people, good people, they must be good people, who know that they are here to help, the more of these people you know, and that know you, and know your situation and your story adn your troubles or whatnot, the wider adn stronger the lattice, and the less likely you are to-
Fall through the snow.
Right.
