Revelation

Rarely have I seen as neat a summary of my relationship with JP, and the machinery of our shared plans, as I've just found in this article. (from The Nation, Cutting Remarks)







A manifesto needs a goal, a green pasture where you'll presumably go when all your revolutionary acts are discharged. ... In the meantime, her happiness was made safely impossible by the unmanageable scope of her revolution. Solanas is saying she'll be happy personally after her political needs are met. Since this can never happen, she's perfectly justified in her misery and loneliness.



In a sense, Solanas's manifesto is an expression of powerlessness. Her revolution is so huge that it can never begin.



This is the clearest summation of why JP and I never could have been much happier than we were in 1995. All our plans revolved around our conviction that we would be well-known, famous, influential. There was no way we could have ever been as big as we wanted to be--because NO ONE could ever be as big as we wanted to be. We wanted to be larger than larger-than-life--even in this age of grossly bloated celebrity, no one has managed to be as enduring as we dreamed ourselves to be. And knowing that the goal we had set for ourselves was entirely unattainable, by us or anyone else, we were free in our own minds to quit trying and just take another shot.



One day we would have had to face up to the passage of time and the eventual knowledge that it was over, that our chance was gone, that we were too old to do what we'd planned on the scale which we'd planned to do it. We'd taken that into account, of course, in all our plans--faced with that, we planned to die together in some sweeping gesture of romance and contempt--but as I've learned over the past nine years, it takes a certain resolve to give up completely, and not everyone has that resolve--or the time to gain it. The living, for the most part, want to keep living, and the end is only sudden when you wish it wouldn't be; the rest of the time, death comes by slow steps, tiny abdications of will and volition. You think you're still fighting, and from where you stand you almost certainly are--getting up in the morning, going to work, doing what you do, coming home; sleeping and waking and cooking and eating and repairing and creating--and it certainly SEEMS like a fight--but then at some point you stop and look back and see what you'd hoped to be doing, instead of whatever it is that takes up all your time and energy now.



(I suppose it's clear from the tenor of this piece that, once again, I am at work.)