Am I political yet?

Shortly after returning to America, to live now, in the country I had never really resided in, yet carried the passport of, I came across an article on Zlata Filipovic, the Anne Frank of Sarajevo. I wrote her a long, irate and (I am sure) self-pitying letter. Zlata might have been a year older than me, but as a survivor of the Bosnian conflict, she have infinitely more meaning capital, which is a short hand way of saying: she mattered, I didn't.

Before returning to America, and learning how you can generate & eat off your own hate for years, I had felt this distance between America and myself. It wasn't a painful experience, just a feeling, I suppose which arose from wanting to enter a contest and realizing the rules specified living in the US (what was this mysterious contest of which I can only remember the rules? What I wanted then escapes my now, only that vague knowledge of not being able to participate remains.)

While I will maintain that before America I had shame, but not yet hate, I do have to admit that in every confrontation with other kids that had more value than me, I had that first twinge of dislike. Maybe dislike is even too strong; the action was one of turning inward, of rotating away from the outer world, which gazed in unison at the momentary superstar---in grade school this ranged from broken arms to winning the Fire Emergency Awareness Poster contest. Flannery O'Connor writes about garnering attention as a kid by training chicks to walk backwards and loving the attention. I believe she says something about wanting to hang on to that moment, or never quite living up to it again. I know that I never got that moment, kept thinking it would come (but why?) and every day which rambled into my further mediocre adventures caused my to construct ever more bizarre fantasies of mattering.

And they were (are) weird fantasies. In that burrowed place (which I maintain to this day! usually while looking straight at someone and nodding), anything might emerge. I might be, say, a spectacular martyr, with my shirt cut open in the emergency vehicle, revealing achingly beautiful breasts and toned abs to _____.Or, here was a another favorite for months: I ride towards ____, and am nearly clipped by a car full of raging men. Perhaps they have leaned out of the vehicle and in a sexual pass, nearly toppled me from my bike. I am outraged. The taxi behind me, in which ______ sit, watch with wonder and horror as I speed up my bike, and swing (what?), possibly breaking the window or, at the very least we would hope, scratching the paint job.

Of course. There is also: standing in a coffee shop back in ____, speaking on the cell phone in a foreign language, unrecognizable (how? let's suppose suddenly thin or with dramatic long hair. or nice clothes) to ______, who merely see my extraordinariness from afar. There is that moment, oh, *that* moment, when I am recognized, _____ comes to my table. Any one of several things could happen. Maybe, I politely can't remember them. Or: I am polite, modest, while ____ rushes in with a thousand minor accomplishments meant to impress, I nod and give the slightest version of my life. Just as ___ goes to depart, a teenage girl stumbles up to me a little breathless and embarrassed, asking I could sign her copy of my recent book. And I flash the smile of, oh yeah, and I /do/ have meaning, afterall.

I do. right?

And this is just it. If we were to draw a chart, one line moving from right to left without variation, without movement, would be the value of my life. A second line, zig-zagging dramatically, steep up, then a drop down to the line, then immediately back up, higher this time: this line is my consciousness, or evaluation, of my own value. Mostly I avoid confrontation with that not mattering, not via action, but perpetual fantasy.

Zlata, wherever she is now, frustrated this desire for meaning by jolting me into the awareness that my lack of value was not only what I suspected --that I simply was mediocre, without natural talent and only vague ambition-- but that even this reality didn't matter. My /non/-ness, my not-being was not only my own nature, it was circumstantial. We might say: given my historical position as a privileged person exempted me from the world stage of meaning. My life was was not, had not, would not ever, be in danger of genocidal maniacs. The most I could hope for was a traumatized childhood. But I had already missed that. No incest. No lusty priests looming through my psyche(not that I'm a catholic. or a boy). Nor was I particularly talented, or friendly, nice, personable. I had all the traits of genius --irritability, anti-sociality, tongue-tied awkwardness, absolute devotion to my own inner world-- without any of the requisite ability.

So I took my nothingness for a metaphysical problem.

Slavoj Zizek expressed the terror that animated him to extremes in Astra Taylor's doc as a terror that he would cease to be. He might be one of the few people I've heard be honest enough with this here/not here fear, the horror that we might be a thing or no-thing. Mostly the association existential crisis is that of death. That being is being-towards-death (a clumsy handling of Heidegger, undoubtedly, but we must not let that slow us down). This, though, the terror that I will cease to be, does not nearly tackle the experience. I am not confident that I am /now/, in my being now. In fact, my one hope is that there will be a future in which I will exist. But what the fuck do I mean by this? Zizek is explaining a phobia of not being, that then drives him to chatter incessantly, act erratically, garner our attention, making himself into a constant spectacle. Is this, then, not metaphysical in the least, but in fact purely a psychological condition revolving around a need to be seen? To be the focus of the gaze? In my case, we might evaluate a certain pathological strain in that: she fears (that she does not exist), but does not in accordance with the fear (that is, she does tends to hide from view). To be fair, I should say that I hide because every explosive effort to speak, to gather attention does seem to backfire in such a way that prior to speaking with me, people have a better, more positive vision of me. But this is still not getting at the extreme: that I would /not/ speak, I willed myself into non-existence through silence. Then the pain would be /being/ there, but somehow simultaneously absent. Not present in personality. And people notice this. The non-response. I am nominally there, but inactive, inarticulate.

more to come