Sitting in my office at ------ killing time before going to class. I have to give my M/W class their midterm today. It snowed yesterday and the streets are full of slush today-- St. Patrick's Day. The five year anniversary of
that St. Patrick's Day-- that day of striving for an "artful" life. And today I'm in my dark bell-bottomed jeans (
with the button fly I don't like), my maroon velor shirt and my gold "TCB" charm with painted red "sex-star" lips.
Why? I think I write for posterity. I think that's why mediocrity scares me. I learned when Iw as 16 that it can't really be achieved by "achievement"-- there's way too much anxiety and raw talent needed to achieve immortality that way. I have tried to 6tn life to art, but that seems to be largely incompatible with the everydayness of things-- the quotidian requirements and the eye of "das man." That won't allow one to live artfully and conventionally at the same time.
I wanted to ask that in class the other day- if Heidegger's conscious beings (
da sein) are being-toward-death and evade the everydayness through consciousness, then how can they be happy? I think that I've learned that most of the
joy in life comes in "conventional" packages. Happy people are conventional people. I've always known that, but now by wanting to be happy, I'm sacrificing that other part of myself-- the part that fused art and life so fully that I started to hallucinate self-constructed visions.
It was desperate, aching, lonely and miserable but so very beautiful. Beautiful and
TRUE and I knew it.
