Halloween
I get a couple emails a week from kind, good Samaritans (or people who like to tell others they're wrong or concerned people who speak French well or just plain old French people) about my Twitter page. They all, in essence, say "Your French is wrong." but I always interpret it like "You're an idiot. I hate you." because I'm a reactionary jerk who has a weird cyber bloodlust that yearns to spar and argue.
Anyway, I don't speak French. But, on my Twitter page, where it says "Name", I wrote "Je est un autre", which is directly quoted from a letter written by a young French poet named Arthur Rimbaud in 1871. It's hard to express what he's getting at in English but the most common translation is: "I is another".
Rimbaud was a bomb who blew up the first person singular. I exploded. And so did you. Which is why I love Halloween.
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My friends are all in therapy. A lot of my readers are in therapy. Are you in therapy? If you're not, chances are that reading this blog will either bore you, make you call me a pretentious twat, or seek therapy.
Therapy's basic presupposition is that we don't know who we are. We don't know why we think what we think, feel what we feel, or do what we do. We are not who we think we are. We're opaque to ourselves. We're someone else. Which is why I love Halloween.
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I don't wake up in the morning. It's more like an irritable emergence into the costume of my humanity. I leer in the mirror, suspiciously. What will I be today? A husband? A dad? Someone who goes through the motions at work? I get dressed up. I act like a man.
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Tonight, the streets are alive with the dead and all the kids are something else. We all wear masks. Tell lies. Explore who we might be. Halloween sanctions this night of dishonesty, of being someone else. It's a weird night. Deception is the norm. Things aren't what they seem. But what's even weirder is the subtle sense that all these lies might indicate something truer than the truth. Makes you shiver. Better button up.
Who are you really when you take off your mask? OK. Well, who are you when you take off that one too? What about that one? And that one? That one? That one? That one?
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Happy Halloween!
May you be haunted by the dead, the richness of your selves, and a wild variety of other vague, twilit things.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Reader Comments (16)
"May you be haunted by the dead, the richness of your selves, and a wild variety of other vague, twilit things."
very nice. very very nice.
by the by - i don't give a twit about your french & i'm not in therapy, but i still feel you.
they spoke a different brand of french way back in ye olden days, just like they spoke a different kind of english. who cares?
It's more like an irritable emergence into the costume of my humanity.
Yeah. I know this well.
What will I be today?
I feel I have a greater range than you. I could also be a 12-year-old-boy, an old woman, an asshole, a communicant, a teacher, the list is almost endless.
We have to pay for this night of sanctioned dishonesty with aching teeth, hangovers, half-regrets for actions half-recalled. Tomorrow we are grounded. Luckily it's Sunday.
Apparently, here in Canada, we speak the English AND French of yore - meaning the 1600's or whenever things got settled here. Shakespeare's era. Which makes it sort of weird that they do Shakespeare with a British accent which didn't come along until later with the German influence.
I probably need therapy but I don't go. My sister is a therapist.
I had an excellent idea for a mask for tonight but I let my son's girlfriend use it. Am I great or what?
I love Halloween.
I like your cool French quote and I can't believe how lame it is that people email you to say it's incorrect!
I recall reading that Alan Watts held that the goals of psychotherapy are to help us get rid of the self, much like buddha in the East.
Love this post. LOVE. But I read it too quickly and need to go back and linger.
I'm not *currently* in therapy. New therapists always make me feel like I need to pass them some popcorn, as they sit on the edge of their seat. "And THEN what happened?"
I know I need therapy right now. Instead, I got a new tattoo.
It felt good to be the boss of my own pain.
Rimbaud: precociously talented; spent his adolescence hopped up on absinthe and hash; shot by his lover at 18 (what was that guy's name? oh, right: Paul Verlaine); stopped writing poetry before his 21st birthday; dead of cancer by 37.
Now *there's* a good Halloween story.
I was a French major in college and despised every second of it except for Pascal and that poet you quoted. And I'm not in therapy but your blog makes me want to peel off all the masks that I've acquired.
I miss therapy! Out of it you submerge and the layers grow back together. You tend to forget, most of the time, about the stiff plastic trapping your wet breath against your face.
I take off and put on masks every single day. Hmmm . . . and who, what shall I be today? The masking and unmasking are all I know. Maybe I DO need therapy.
I went as Adam Avitable this year. No one gave me shit for candy.
Therapists scare me. Why does someone want to hear all about other people's problems? What do they get out of it? And why do THEY think that they have all of the answers? What gives them the right to solve it all for me? A degree from some college that is run by people who live their lives in a world surrounded by 18-30 year olds? Some professor somewhere told Mr. Therapist man to answer questions A, B and C with response questions 1, 2 and 3.
Blah. Psychology. I think I'll be a therapist for Halloween next year.
I was the Wicked Witch this year. And everyone said, "Oh, the bad witch".
Because nobody apparently read or watched "Wicked" and so they didn't really know that my wickedness was not evil at all...just something different.
Like when I stand in front of the closet and say, "What to wear today? Oh, shit, meeting with XX, sexist pig who likes legs, and I know I'm wearing my hooker boots." Those are the days that I really am the wicked witch and wish I could get ready without having to look in the mirror.
I love your writing. Love it.