“Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; in this love, you are like a knife with which I explore myself.”
― Letters to Milena, Kafka
My favorite people are the broken ones, the messy ones, those who speak before they think, who seem to breathe in experience and breathe out emotion, who make glaring mistakes, who embarrass themselves and still manage to be kind. I especially love those who have the presence of mind to be otherwise, but who affirmatively choose a way of being that accentuates their flaws and uncertainties, because they seem to have discovered other, more valuable things on which to spend their energy. Such people are beautiful and far too rare. They also seem to suffer more than most people, as they explore themselves, not with a flashlight, but with a scalpel.
I don’t mean to imply online performative awkwardness, which is a deliberate style (almost a form of marketing) that ultimately comes across as studied, cynical, and inauthentic. I’m not talking about anything created in a book publicist’s brainstorming session or by an agency trying to associate social justice with light beer. Nor am I talking about those who suffer from the sort of social anxiety, shyness, or autism that painfully prevents them from experiencing a full range of human experience.
Rather, I mean to point out the sort of person who calls herself “Ursula the Bear Shaman” and stands up among scientists at an ecological conference to give George Monbiot a stern talking to (as actually happened); the eccentric professor who’s willing to be laughed at by his students in order to induce suspension of disbelief and thereby dramatize his subject matter; the daughter of a poet friend who can’t speak to men without first criticizing them up front (bizarre and off-putting but actually very amusing when you come to expect it); or an amateur stand up comedian I know, who isn’t funny but who keeps trying. I’d never discourage him because it’s the trying that interests me, not the flat jokes. It’s the decision to try, the choice one makes to discard certain social mores, that I find compelling.
We shake our heads. Such people are trying—trying our patience. We want to say, “Boundaries are good. Boundaries are important. Close your mouth. Open your eyes and ears. Learn what’s appropriate. And please do not stand on that part of the carpet. You’re messing it up.” But I think that’s shortsighted. People are generally lovely, creative, and endearing. But, like flowers, they need the right conditions to demonstrate this. Deep breath. Sometimes, you can smell them at a distance, for better or worse.
Even when they’re being petty, resentful, cruel, egotistical, or otherwise ugly, there can be an aesthetic to it, a shape to their behavior that causes you to say (or maybe just to think), “Yes, you are a repugnant, perhaps loutish, perhaps unnecessarily hysterical, perhaps wrongly jealous, perhaps hypocritical, perhaps exhausting individual, but you’re doing it so well. Bravo!” And, of course, when they (and we) get tired of playing those roles, we can play others. The script is endless. The cast is as big as the world. At some point, we think everyone will choose to play the holy fool. It’s a favorite role of mine.
Certainly there are creeps and degenerates, those whose brokenness has rendered them toxic or harmful. We don’t want them hurting people because they lack self control. We don’t want their tiresome problems always within our field of vision unless we’re being paid by the social panopticon to supervise them in some way. As a friend once said about a strict Zen temple that seemed packed with angry obsessive-compulsives deeply concerned that their arm hairs and the fibers on their trousers all pointed the same way, “Some people just need a prison cell to feel right.” If one is not provided for them, maybe they’ll create one by virtue of their actions or in their existing groups. That’s not the sort I’m talking about, either.
My favorite people aren’t trying to consume or enslave others. They’re not abusers or parasites. It’s hard to love a parasite, which is one of the fundamental messages of the traditional vampire myth. The vampire might look young and beautiful, but it’s actually a corpse that wants to drink your blood to perpetuate its wretched antisocial existence. And so, like all folk myths, it presents the audience with a cautionary choice: go for the pretty, superficial thing that will undo you or accept the harsh truth.
Sadly, harsh-truth-accepting can also become reified into a self-defeating, self-righteous personal style, where we don latex Oliver Cromwell masks and get off on shutting down the theaters. If we can’t have our own fun, maybe we can ruin everyone else’s as a kind of anti-fun and that will be almost as satisfying as the genuine article, like drinking someone’s blood just to keep shambling along to the next victim. Accepting reality (or a reality) is a good thing, but performing the Person Who Faces Hard Truths is back to selling light beer for equity and inclusion while auditioning for The Witch.
I’m trying to describe the sort of person who has dispensed with many, if not most, social filters, but who has done so in a conscious way. This makes me think of the Egyptian deity, Set, who was the god of foreigners and some say an ancient symbol for the conscious mind. Being conscious is more than just being deliberate. In a Viktor Frankl will-to-meaning sense, it’s accepting the deep existential responsibility of investing life with depth and purpose. In Man’s Search for Meaning (one of my favorite books), Frankl provides what might be the most useful (if existentialist) definitions of consciousness ever formulated:
It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
That’s more than mere deliberation. That’s a one-pointed engagement with experience. It’s the heart of mindfulness. It’s “be here now” taken to an inevitable, ontological extreme. It’s a rejection of social vampirism and an acceptance of a type of transpersonal imperative focused on the individual. When I see this image of Horus and Set advising Ramesses III, I see the tension of social appropriateness versus individual consciousness, like the superego versus the id, resonant in the mind.
On the left, Horus, the ultimate pharaoh, the embodiment of the State (the state of affairs) and its collective moral, social, even municipal will. And on the right, Set, whose therianthropic form has never been conclusively defined because consciousness is protean and ultimately beyond type.
Here, one thinks Ramesses III must be faced with the core Frankl-ian problem: “Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” There’s what the group (the State, the state of affairs in one’s life) dictates. Then there’s what the individual’s conscious mind has deemed important.
In this essay, I’m celebrating those who lean a little away from Horus and a little more towards Set, a little away from what they think they should be thinking and doing and a little more towards meaning. So even if, as the Smashing Pumpkins sang in 1997, “The world is a vampire/ sent to drain,” transforming us into angry rats in cages, let’s be quality angry rats.
I was going to send Andrew Marvell’s brilliant “To His Coy Mistress,” another favorite, to a literary friend of mine today because I have no doubt this person—being the good sort I’m talking about here—would read it and appreciate it. Instead, I’ll excerpt the last few lines for everyone who reads this essay—because it applies to all of us leaning away from the Horus of propriety towards the Set of conscious meaning, saying, doing, and appreciating what matters most instead of what merely passes.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
She was my first real girlfriend and she terrified me. More precisely, the possibility of her getting bored with me terrified me. And she was always at great pains to remind me that boredom would have dire consequences. Boredom was the end.