Loss, at Long Last

"Tyrannical fantasies of our own perfectibility still lurk in even our simplest ideals, Darwin and Freud intimate, so that any ideal can become another excuse for punishment. Lives dominated by impossible ideals - complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love - are lives experienced as continuous failure" (Phillips). If perfectionism is ultimately humiliating and the best source for (self)punishment, then: no more ideals! Suffer because one must, suffer without the hope of getting it right. The question is how to sustain any sense of optimism in this condition. The answer is easier to write than to practice while writing, so to speak. Darwin: "I have as much difficulty as ever expressing myself clearly and concisely, and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time." But this loss of time is also necessary to get a better sentence, a more thorough reasoning. No one better to see this than Phillips: "The obstacle proves to be an instrument, the loss a calling." What is required is to accept the necessity of this loss. It's reveling in loss, being optimistic about loss as instrumental, that is most difficult, especially when the loss lasts so long.

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night.

Some humans disable themselves, while some disabled are more than human. I cannot imagine what it would be like to have one leg and be happy: to get up at 4am every morning to hobble down 2 flights of stairs, take 3 different buses in a wheelchair to get to the corner of Michigan and Randolf and sell Streetwise by 6am, during rush, when people are using 2 good legs to speedily get to work and deftly avoid your wheelchair while holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a phone to their ear with the other.
It is never enough to be reminded that one has two legs.

Stars and Teaspoons

“How, if with paper and with pencil I went out into the starry night to inventorize the heavens? Who shall tell stars as teaspoons?” (Melville, Pierre)

A Blog Darkly

Does my diary reflect me clearly or darkly? I hope more clearly than I see myself, because otherwise I'm cursed.
I've been told I that I am comfortable in my own skin, and that I can be read easily. This means that people might see me more clearly than I see myself, which leads me to believe in the clarity that they see in me. It's a relief from the darkness that I can't see through in myself.
Am I an enigma only to myself? If so, that is a bad sign. I put my hope in this: that I cannot lie; if I do, I cannot forget that I did. It is extremely difficult for me to pose as someone I am not, or to pretend to know something I have not fully understood. If it is so difficult to lie to others, it should be the case that I cannot lie to myself, and that I am being honest with myself at all times.
How come then I do not know what I want? If I am being honest with myself--which I do not entirely trust--then with honesty comes ambivalence.

Just a single Strich from the persona to the personal! But what a difference. The entire subject bundled up in a single stroke. The goal: to embrace the impostor, however imposing it might seem.

Twice is coincidence. Thrice is fate (jokes, religion). The critic
tries to find fate in something that doesn't even happen once.