"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on the plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. It is not without pre-established harmony, this sculpture in the memory."
-from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance
I arrived at the site of the all-day music festival early and looked around for a spot to claim for a hacky-sack circle where I could wait until my friends arrived. Hearing my name, I looked down and saw two girls sitting in the grass, making sideways glances at each other. Suddenly I seemed to be sitting next to one of the girls looking up at a nineteen year-old kid with shoulder-length hair parted down the middle, a goatee, blue-tinted circle-cut sunglasses and a distressed Levi jean jacket over a black Miles Davis t-shirt. “Hey, what are you doing here?” he dumbly asked, avoiding eye contact by looking at his shuffling feet.
Perspective shifted itself back to its normal state as Sarah answered, “Soothing Syrup of course.” Disoriented and confused, I struggled to remember that Phil, the drummer, and she were both music majors. “Yeah, Measure and House of Large Sizes are going to be good, too,” I responded in a ridiculous attempt at one-upmanship. Not much was said after that, and I wandered away, pondering what had just happened, feeling simultaneously embarrassed and proud.
It was the first time I’d seen Sarah since January, when I’d awkwardly brought her flowers in a failed attempt to apologize for not having spoken to her over Christmas break, during which I had been helping my dad build a house in Missouri that was several years removed from having a telephone installed. I thought back to the late nights the semester before, watching Kids in the Hall, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and whatever British comedy was playing on PBS. I sometimes still glanced at the rock I had kicked across campus between our dorms, which was still stashed outside the door of Dancer Hall, and realized if I was still making that trek I’d play keepy-uppy with my hacky-sack instead. Then again, I would have probably never learned how to play hacky-sack if we hadn’t broken up, because I would have never gotten bored enough to work up the courage to knock on Brad and John Paul’s dorm room door. One can only sit alone listening to the first two Zeppelin albums, Van Morrison’s “Moondance” and “Tupelo Honey” and John Coltrane’s “Kind of Blue” and “A Love Supreme” hoping for the phone to ring for about a month, it turns out.
It was now April 27th; in two weeks my second year of college would be over.
Brad, JP, Erin and Jacie finally arrived, along with three of their friends from Iowa City whom I’d never met. We started up a hacky-sack circle and the Iowa City guys were good, one of them amazingly so. I tried to copy his moves and failed miserably. After about an hour, the Iowa City crew got tired of playing and wandered off in search of other entertainment, taking the others with them. I couldn’t fathom this at all, thinking if I was as good as them I would never want to stop playing.
I spent the rest of the afternoon coercing people, including the Soothing Syrup members after their set, into playing hacky-sack while the music festival bands played in the background. The headlining band was Fishbone, who I’d never heard of. Since it was getting too dark to continue hacky-sacking, I got right in the middle of the mosh pit. This was something I’d never done before, and being someone who generally doesn’t like crowds, was surprised to find the experience exhilarating- for a while at least. I couldn’t really decide whether I liked the band or not. Most everybody else seemed to be loving them, and the band members were certainly not lacking in confidence. During at least one song, the singer stuck his mic out so that enthusiastic crowd-members could pretend they knew what they were supposed to be singing.
When the show ended, I finally found my friends and followed them back to Brad and JP’s room. I learned that, while I had continued playing hacky-sack, they had been hanging out with the Fishbone members. “You should have asked if they wanted to play hacky-sack,” I offered.
The dorm room was even busier than usual, and included two girls I’d never met on Brad’s bed in the corner giggling at each other while prattling off rap lyrics. I found them utterly obnoxious. I sat next to Brad as he repeatedly asked, “Who are these girls on my bed?” while rolling his head and chuckling to himself. I tried to reenact the occurrence from that morning and see myself from the girls on Brad’s bed’s perspective, but couldn’t, so I pondered it instead.
I wondered whether, even after all these months, my bond with Sarah was such that I could empathically enter into her mind. I quickly realized I had no idea what she was thinking or doing, especially after the months that had passed. In fact, I had been struck in that early morning moment by an awareness that I had completely changed since I’d last seen her. I hadn’t seen myself from another’s point of view- I had seen how I guessed I looked from another’s point of view. It was like watching a movie with someone and spending the whole time guessing what they thought of it. Or, if you knew what they thought of it, trying to attain that same feeling. Either way, the influence of company on a movie being viewed is undeniable, but in the end, everyone watches their own movie. A fondness for Monty Python, which had been cultivated by Sarah, was part of my identity now, even though I’d sort of forgotten about it. “Does anybody like Monty Python?” I asked aloud, starting a chain of conversation that I didn’t bother to follow because it was beside the point. They didn’t know Monty Python like I knew Monty Python.
An acquaintance from a few doors down was fiddling with something on the sink just to my left. He took a bill from his wallet, rolled it up and held it to his nose as the other end traced a line on the counter framing the sink. That was something I’d never witnessed before, and it was startlingly disgusting.
I was struck by a profound awareness of the present. I understood that everybody else was experiencing a reality that I couldn’t step into, and that I was experiencing a reality that only existed because of this encounter with others. I sat on the couch and absorbed everything, finally realizing my existence was a gestalt of the choices I’d made from the options I’d been given, and as such, it was of utmost importance that my choices were a reflection of my own convictions, standards, goals and desires. If my choices were based upon what I thought another would have me do, my being, which is all I could really ever own in this world, would dissolve into nothingness. "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." -Ibid.
I had to laugh at myself. While surrounded by chaos, here I was- remaining focused on some mental philosophical exercise. Why did I take everything so seriously? But that wasn’t it, exactly. I was only earnest about things that excited me. Half-heartedness was not in my psyche. I desired to excel at whatever I endeavored, not solely in the eyes of others, but also not solely in my own estimation. One thing I had learned from drumming was that I had thought I was really good at it as long as I had never paid attention to other drummers. Like drumming, hacky-sack gave immediate personal and public feedback regarding ones prowess at the improvisational and technical execution required, but unlike drummers, people who played hacky-sack were generally not dickheads. Hacky-sack also demonstrated that I wasn’t as un-athletic as my high school experience of sports had led me to believe. The thing I’d learned I appreciated about sport was its effectiveness at illustrating the maxim, “talk is cheap.” Unlike life, sport has a built-in measure of objective success.
In some class during college, I read an analysis of the myth of Narcissus that determined the vain hunter, after falling in love with what he thought was somebody else swimming in a river, needn’t die after refusing to take his eyes off his reflection or commit suicide after realizing the futility of loving something he couldn’t have, as the story is commonly told. Instead, he could evolve by incorporating his newly learned ability to judge himself objectively in all his contributions to the external world. After all, genuine self-awareness can be attained only after contemplating how our selves, including our actions, would be viewed by a neutral observer.
In another class, aesthetics, we spent one period with an artist and art professor analyzing his own paintings. The rest of the class was appalled at how much he loved the work he produced. I, on the other hand, was inspired to produce work I loved as much. "A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace." -Ibid.
Confident, informed and independent people are useless to those with something inferior to sell. The only thing a truly self-reliant person needs others for is friendship, and that isn’t a sellable commodity. Competition, not cooperation, drives capitalism. Winning is lauded at any cost, and is defined by our ability to convince others we’re better than they are. In its demand for us to try and impress it, society tries to beat the integrity out of us. The important thing is not the validity of our claims but our ability to convince others they are valid. Because of the “Halo Effect,” the phenomenon which causes us to trust those we find attractive, outward beauty becomes crucial in this effort. To keep the individual powerless, our culture stresses an absurd notion that when we look at ourselves, we shouldn’t like what we see. It convinces us to conform by teaching us to loathe ourselves. The ignorant and vulnerable are easily manipulated, and so we are raised to look for and obsess over our flaws, weaknesses and imperfections while revering an unrealistic ideal. We survive by pointing blaming fingers while eschewing responsibility, which only deepens our guilt. In the end, power is split between those fitting society’s definition of beauty and those most willing to destroy the self-confidence of the masses.
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
-from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
April 27th, 1996 remains a seminal part of my life. I wouldn’t trade that day of playing hacky-sack for anything. I’d only have a couple years of hacky-sack playing left before it would become impossible to find anybody to play with. In five years, I’d end up meeting up with Fishbone at a recording studio in San Francisco where I was working as an intern, but there was nothing memorable about that occasion. Today, one of those girls on Brad’s bed I contemplated from the couch and futilely tried to switch minds with remains one of my oldest, dearest and closest friends.
