Entry 559 — My Self-Image
I think the main thing that keeps me from being Completely Obnoxious is my sincere sense of humor about myself. Depending on my mood, I think I’m the greatest super-genius ever, a joke (well, make that the Greatest Joke Ever, since I never quite escape megalomania), or the Most Contemptible Failure Ever. Actually, when I’m in the kind of mood I’m in now in (10 November, around noon)–after my first dose of APCs in over two weeks (because my head felt too blitzed for me to get anywhere with my Shakespeare chapter) *, I tend simultaneously to believe I’m terrific and a colossal joke.
*Gad, how good it made me feel to close my parenthetical expression as soon as I’d finished typing it! How rarely I do.
My self-image intrigues me, not only because it’s mine. It is important to me, perhaps more important to me than most people’s self-images are to them. (A few of them may not even have one!) True, when I take off into a project, small of huge, the project consumes my every thought. But my self-image is usually instrumental in igniting my take-off. I usually (I think–I really haven’t thought that much about this before) need to feel that I’m a hero with a grand quest ahead of me. Even when merely shelving scattered books, for–behold–I am then preparing the field for the greater project to follow, whatever it is. This has a lot to do, I suddenly see, with why I hate jobs like brushing my teeth or shaving in spite of how little time they steal: they seem to me to have nothing to do with anything of importance. Such jobs are what we have slaves for, or should have them for!!!! (Oops, gotta watch that elitism of mine. Know, I implore you, that the slaves I have in mind are of all the human skin-shades.)
On the other hand, while I often wished I could get out of it when I used to run three or more miles daily four or five times a week, each run was a mini-quest, with a time to shoot for–as well as exercise to make me fit for greater quests. Shopping wasn’t quite the same but even it had a bit of questness to it. And the pleasure the food or drink would give me could make up for its not being much, if anything, of a quest. It occurs to me that normal men dislike shopping for clothes because clothes lack the pleasure, for them, of food and drink, and we have no instinct for capturing clothing.
Those of you familiar with my theory of psychology will have realized that I’ve been speaking of what I call the sagaceptual awareness. That’s one’s innate system of brain-cells and interconnections that causes one, when it is active, to feel oneself to be the hero of some archetypal saga–chasing one’s Venus, for instance; starting one’s ascent of Parnassus; going out on the tennis court to compete for first place in the Charlotte County B-3 over-55 men’s league . . . This awareness becomes active much more easily for me than for others, it seems to me. Once enheroed in it, I stop thinking of myself as a hero, from that point on it being sufficient for me to be the hero in whatever saga I’ve become a part of. But I become aware of my self-image in flashes. More often, the glory, or the equivalent thereof, that I will win, breaks through my concentration on the task at hand.
My impression is that the sagaceptual awareness is stronger for the greatest achievers than for others, and that most of them have no shyness about indicating it–Keats, for instance, writing somewhere (in a letter, I believe) that he wanted to be remembered “among the English Poets,” or something close to that. Unconcealed ambition. Others don’t want to be caught being proud. It may be that our age is particularly harsh on those who want to rise above others. Even I have worked out ways around that, which I actually believe in (intellectually, at any rate): for instance, I have said that followers are as necessary as leaders; an effective leader is just another necessary component of the greatness (however defined) that can only be achieved by a group of people, which includes effective followers (and their effect cats and dogs). Actually, this is unarguable true, but I have to admit that I tend not finally to believe anyone counts but me. . . .
I believe that existence simple is, it has no meaning. But for biological reasons, we have to act as though it does have some meaning–which in the final analysis comes always down to the triumphant attainment of a sagaceptual goal. Meaning is the finding of meaning.
One last thought before I leave this for an attempt to continue my Shakespeare chapter (into Greatness): that there is a role in the sagaceptual awareness for each of us to take, that of the spectator. This allows us to root for ourselves, something too few others generally seem willing to do. The best because they are busy rooting for themselves; the non-best because they’re too dumb to recognized our worthiness of cheers. Until we’re safely dead, of course.
Whee.
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