The Bourgeoisie; The Past; Stalin

Random Thoughts #2

Photo by Marjan Blan | @marjanblan on Unsplash

It’s weird, my family. Don always comes to mind. Sandra. My father, too, of course. This odd disbelief that I was just a “bad seed” (my words not theirs), that it was my “nature” to be the way I was. The refusal to look right into the face of REALITY and acknowledge it. Don admitted in 2021 when I stayed after G’s suicide attempt that he’d always just thought of me as an angry spoiled rich kid, a selfish only child. Certainly there’s some truth to all that, but it’s only a partial truth and it definitely obscures the bigger, deeper truth that is this: I was treated badly in many ways by my narcissistic, controlling mother, and neglected by my good but detached father; I was raised by two well-intentioned but emotionally unstable alcoholic parents; I went through a LOT by the time I was 10 (molestation; gun in the mouth; spankings by a raging neighbor’s father; being dropped off at my mom’s shrink’s house at 3am; my mom’s confusing time in the psych ward; the inability for either of my parents to love me unconditionally or to actually SEE ME; etc).

It’s so strange, how people rationalize their lives and others’ and the stories of their lives they hold sacred. A true writer’s job is to dismantle those bullshit facades, showing the ugly truth beneath. What is beauty? Aesthetics: Confrontation versus avoidance; looking into the Abyss; facing, however uncomfortably, What Is versus What you Wish It Were.

I’m not claiming victimhood, either in childhood or now. I’m saying I wasn’t SEEN. I’m saying I was emotionally thrown to the [figurative] dogs. I’m saying my parents—who were and are profoundly good people—were deeply, wildly flawed, like everyone on Earth. I’m saying: Don’t ever judge a book by its pretty middle-class cover. I’m saying Eric Blair—also known as George Orwell—was onto something when he wrote acerbically and breathtakingly honestly about politics, almost always criticizing both sides, both the fascists AND the [Stalinist] communists. This is how we should all look at life, our own inner lives and the external/internal lives of others: What you see is NOT usually what you actually, deep down at the core, get. Fake it till you make it is horse-manure: Don’t ever fake it, not internally, not to yourself. Don’t lie to your own inner being. Tell your deep inner self what it *doesn’t* want to hear. Get honest. Get gritty, real and raw. Spit in the face of the cracked social mirror.

When my brother-in-law looks at my past, I think he sees weakness, privilege and a spoiled brat. Again: he’s not totally wrong. I was those things. To some degree I still am. What can I say: I come from the upper middleclass. Guilty as charged. Even Orwell, critic of critics, Looker of Lookers, admitted that he believed to some degree in private property, individualism, and capitalism. He was of the English middleclass. He was a free-thinker. A loner. An isolator. A cognitive renegade. A true writer in the most honest sense of the word. He once said (Orwell) that a serious writer can truthfully claim no political party. Touche, sir.

What is the nature of existence? Sartre might say it is to be “pour soi” versus “en soi.” In other words: To be someone who ACTS, who DOES, versus someone who sits around intellectualizing, thinking, theorizing. Sartre, in his real life, in the 30s, 40s and 50s in Paris (and on into the 80s) did much of both. He wrote and sat around thinking, but he also traveled widely, spent time with Simone de Beauvoir, protested colonialism and war, and fought for what he believed in. He did, it is true, buy into Stalinism (as did many of his contemporaries) for far, far too long, long after Camus and Orwell had rejected the fascist-communist dictator’s ideology. (Stalin died in 1953.)