intactness

Intactness

by Bob on December 14, 2007

Life's journey seems to be weighing trade-offs between choices, however dubious.

Whilst looking through some surprisingly self-indulgent web pages of people who I had thought were actually honest and sincere artists, but turned out to be self-obsessed and egotistical, I was reminded of a quote from the brilliant book by F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Tender is the Night".

In it, we have the juxtapositional characters of the psychiatrist Dr. Dick Diver and his seeming patient, Nicole Warren. One, after all was said and done, pondered who was the winner, if that was a meaningful concept, or who was in control, or who was the doctor and who was the patient.

The quote which came to mind after seeing such ghastly self-aggrandising and self-indulgent websites was this, about Dr. Diver, from Book 2, Chapter 1, of Fitzgerald's novel:

"He knew, though, that the price of his intactness was incompleteness"

Yes, after all there was a trade-off. Being intact, or seeming so, versus being actually incomplete as the price.

And Fitzgerald goes on to quote Thackeray right after making that profound statement:

"The best I can wish you, my child", so said the Fairy Blackstick in Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, "is a little misfortune".

So for all these self-indulgent social interaction web pages, we find there is a huge emptiness in such seemingly beautiful personages of the e-village. There is no emotional town-crier. There is no redemption. There is little honesty. There is even less love than honesty. It is all about a clown's image being presented as a serious study in caricature. An inferior cult and culture of Narcissism reigns supreme.

Especially when one of these e-people, would-be artistes, answered the question "Who would you like to meet?", with the rejoinder: "another me". That's directly related to the ancient Greek myth of Narcissus, who drowned in his own self love in a pool of water wherein his reflection was contained.

Get real. Be there, or be square as they used to say in Greenwich Village in my hometown New York City in the Beat Generation. And one hardly is puzzled by Federico Fellini's curiosity about clowns. He even made a documentary film about clowns. Now that's what I call cosmic bemusement.