audience

I have been thinking lately about how important audience is me. Not necessarily thinking of a specific audience for x or y, but in imagining or finding the existence of an audience. Here's what I mean:

Lately I've realized how central an imaginary audience is to my sense of humor. Most of the jokes I make and strange things I do are not for the people I'm around, but for an outside observe, whether real or imagined. So most people just feel confused by my humor, whereas an audience would find what I do to be much funnier, and what I think I do that is funny is funny to me when I imagine an audience watching. This is something I'm discovering rather than something I've been aware of or conscious of.

Similarly, with writing. I've heard creative writers given the advice to write as if no one would read what they wrote, write for themselves. I function in totally the opposite direction. My work only gains quality if I assume or imagine that at some point, some one will read what I'm writing. My writing takes on clarity, focus, and creativity, whereas without an audience it would be sloppy and self-indulgent.

Similarly, with music and performance. I can never bring myself during practice to perform as well as I do during the real thing. For instance, in my Shakespeare class last week I had a performance in front of the class, and did better during the actual performance than during any of the practices. With music, I sing better and play more creatively in front of an audience than during practice.

And I think this is why I don't enjoy "theatre" more, even though on an every day basis I'm constantly acting, throwing up masks and tricking people. With theatre, the artifice is too apparent. If I'm going to be acting, it has to be for real.

tradition

Many people, when they're stressed or unsure, adhere to tradition. I've noticed in the last year that I am the opposite, that when I really need to find a way to relax myself, I break with tradition and habit of what I've done before. No better or worse, just the way it is.

Over the last year, though, I've become even more deliberately at odds with tradition, especially tradition and origin as a source of authority. In part, this is why Derrida's arguments on the futility of trying to find origins for words (as a source of authority) is very appealing to me. This has become especially frustrating to me in trying to play music with people this year. I generally don't think it's a relevant question to appeal to the way we've played songs before as the way we should play them. Or, the way they were written or recorded by previous artists.

In this sense, I don't think of any part of a song as stable, or something that must necessarily be kept. I don't care about maintaining the melody, or the chords, or the words, or the mood, or the tempo. Likewise, when I'm playing music by myself, I rarely play a song the same way twice, so that I'm not creating a new authoritative version even for myself. More interesting to me than tradition is the creative impulses people are feeling at a given moment, and the context that the song is being played in, rather than anything absolute about the song. Of course, I can appreciate those sorts of tradition questions just for the sake of efficiency, or trying to remember a specific part so that people aren't confused, but not for anything more. Anyway, that's just how I work best.

In the end, I just feel embarrassed doing the same thing twice.

humanism

Up until recently, humanism has been very appealing to me. There seems to be something wholesome and true about the notion of human value, about equality of humanity, about inherent worth in humanity that has appealed to me. Further, the idea of a human condition or experience has been appealing to me, especially thinking of Jesus as entering experiencing the human condition (and by human condition I don't mean "sinful human nature.") While this human condition or nature often means sinful to people, it hasn't meant this to me for some time. I've seen people as basically good, and I liked that.

But there are certain problems to humanism that I do think are worth considering. For instance, humanism has the capacity to conflate and disrespect human experience and suffering. It assumes a oneness in humanity that means I have the capacity, on some level, to empathize and understand your suffering, and you mine, and of a oneness throughout time. In other words, it confuses people with one another and makes their problems the same. Humanism in this way acts as a metatheory or metanarrative that subordinates individual narratives into one human experience. And I do think that's a significant problem.

To break this down even farther: humanism is variously loving and non loving, respectful and non respectful of humans. Right now, I don't know what to do with metan-theories or meta-narratives, or essentializing claims, and this means I don't know what to do with humanism. Although, to be honest, "humanism" is probably just a red herring. I don't actually care about "humanism," I care about how I am to see, know, and understand myself, the people around me, and the world.

3 years

I recently passed the 3 year anniversary of my return to the States. I'm not sure what to say about it except that it happened, and that I haven't been disappointed.

And this is significant to me because I've been thinking lately about disappointment, and how inevitable disappointment is in life, in work, in relationships, in projects, in conversations and situations. And yet, when I look back over my life this far, I'm not disappointed. Ultimately, I'm not disappointed in the education I've received at SPU, or the time that I've had here. Of course there have been disappointing aspects, as there have been throughout my life, but in general I feel like what has happened has been good. And yet, part of me is still attracted to inevitable disappointment, to the idea of being old and looking back on life with great disappointment. Maybe that will happen, perhaps not.

Three years is a long time.