Me and Kevin Smith

"I think it's better to have ideas. You can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier. Life should be malleable and progressive; working from idea to idea permits that. Beliefs anchor you to certain points and limit growth; new ideas can't generate. Life becomes stagnant. "
-Kevin Smith

Ever since I’ve been able to consider my life retrospectively on the whole, I’ve considered myself very lucky. Even when things are in the suck, or like now, when I’m being a big sour bitch, I’m perfectly aware that my life is so good and I myself am very lucky. Some say blessed, and I would agree; that if there is someone in control of giving me the blessings, an individual of sorts whose responsibility it is to watch the blessings meter has irresponsibly let my balance compound out of control, and for that I’m no matter what, completely grateful.
But there are things that frustrate me. And this is good, it serves as motivation or an underguirding fire that serves to be the antagonist to propel me forward. And one frustration that I’ve been learning from recently is in dealing with what it means to believe. I’ve shared this with many people, and it’s so hard to verbalize my hypotheses or really formulate a visual reality of what this supposed reality looks like; a reality without belief.
And I don’t want to get into that too much, but I do want to deal with an aspect of it. And it is ironic, because with what I like to do and would hope to pursue in hopes of careerdom looks at least on a surface level antithetical to this hypothesis of mine. And this deals with something as simple as the word story. Well how is this antithetical, or what exactly is my hypothesis? I think story, and not solely, but story has become a collusive integer in how belief has soured humanity and society as much as it has hoped to serve us positively. And of course, I love stories. I love simple stories and stories with mucho amounts of complexity. I love stories that are meta and I love stories that are full of hubris. Ask me what my favorite films are and I’ll tell you I don’t watch films, I watch movies that tell stories. I want to write ‘em. I am good at telling them through words. It’s something I pride myself in.
But story, or as I shift the term to narrative, narrative is problematic because with it we have married the complex supposed value of Truth. It’s a total social manifestation but it finds itself in all types of endeavors. For Western culture, it has to be acknowledged that this praxis of Truth finding via story has evolved, ironically, from the practice of reading religious texts and interpreting and projecting Truths from the texts. Obviously that can be still be seen in the modern modes of religious Western practice, but so it is mirrored and executed in liberal thought who as a locus make it there identity to be annoyingly a polar opposition rather than a honest human understanding. Even in liberal circles, there’s the story or the narrative of “what it means to be liberal” or even “Evolution,” that succinctly mirrors “what it means to be conservative” or even “Creation” that follows the praxis of story and narrative. And with that comes the gleaning of Truth(s) from all these narratives no matter the social/political/historical locus.
This is where we still deal as a society, which isn’t terribly bad on a surface level, but as we hope to progress as a progressive civilization, we do have to deal with systematic thinking and it’s ability to dehumanize humanity into vocal automatons repeating the same Truths as truth. It’s this systematic indoctrination via narrative that has us all longing for the same. These systems rooted in Truth because of their supposed practical application as seen in the narrative, almost as if they’re holy, has cookie-cutterred humanity into codified molds of what it means to be a human. We subscribe to love, grace, progress, evil, good, and every dealing of Truth because finding an interpretive value of the such qualities can be found in narrative where the application of the such proved, at least via the shown elements of the story, as positive. And we’ve listen to a hegemonic voice that has commissioned us dedicatedly to listen to narrative; to read and hear narrative and go search for Truth. And notice here I mean big T truth and not little t truth. Because there definitely is a difference where the size of the T contributes the size of the hysteria over the value of supposed T/truth.
Here’s a way I’ve proved again as lucky. For some time, I spent time studying Samuel Beckett. Now if you told before my initial study, “Remoy you’re a lucky dude because guess what, you’ll spend a dedicated time studying that cool-guy Modernist Samuel Beckett,” I’d respond with, “Go Fuck yourself.” But again, this is where the felicity of life has found its way to surprise me and really fascinate me with luck. You see I can’t stand Art. I see it and value it as I do Truth: Truth married to story is a dead appendage of society that is valued and lauded for it’s necessity even in its death. And to make it even worse, I fuckin’ hate Modernist shit and what the qualities of “Modern” mean for Art. But because a pretty girl convinced me to, and because I honestly dig a good challenge, I took the time to take the study. And in the end, I found a genuine respect for Beckett because I found things he said in his writing by his anti-story writing was similar to my own hypothesis. Even so much so that it validated my voice in my hypothesis even when I was not sure that voice or that hypothesis was able to be valid. I gleaned from my study so much so that it took up twelve pages and a few hours of my time to dedicate and prove that Samuel Beckett’s impetus, maybe not solely, but in part, was to destroy narrative because narrative was still destroying humanity. IE: Auschwitz for Beckett and 9/11; genocide, ethnic cleansing, 3outof5womenaresexuallyabusedinourmodernworld, phalycentric indoctrination, etc for me and us. And his ability to anti-write to stimulate this thought of destruction by destroying the quality of Truth in anti-meta narrative was so euphoric for me.
And now this is where you say, “Remoy you’re being completely hypocritical.” And of course, hypocrisy is probably unavoidable, but I would like to invest a bit of time diluting this hypocrisy of mine. Not necessarily disassembling it, but really challenging its purity. First off I’m being hypocritical for saying finding Truth in narrative, meaning finding an agreeable systematic way to live in narrative is causing society to hiccup continually in its praxis. And yet, I say, “hey I read these stories and plays and novels by Beckett, and what he said rings so True that I believe it and I will hiccup with it as my mode of systematic thinking.” You get it? I look like to you and to me in the mirror as another normal hypocrite. But first, let me say that I wasn’t looking for Truth in Beckett. I had no expectation of finding any validation from Beckett’s authorship nor did I expect/hope/esteem myself to finding really any value of practical application in his work. Honestly, I expected to theoretically jerk Beckett and his corpus’s legacy off. I figured that’s all the study would be, a methodical masturbation of Sam Beckett. But contrary to my initial thoughts, I found value but only because I had to invest, and responsibly so, my time and effort to find it. Beckett was not the landscape I hoped or would ever think of looking for personal applicative Truth. But in his narrative landscape, where I thought I was marooned and hopeless, I luckily and benevolently found Truth. That’s dilution effort number one.
And now number two which deals with my study of Beckett and finding truth, but also deals, and actually deals more with this whole expository response against narrative because as I type and as you read, (if you’ve found the patience or kindness to make it this far) I’m asking of you qualify this reading of my, yes non-fictional or real, narrative as somewhat True. And how do I manage to defunct this whole you the reader, I the author, and this writing as not Truth but yet asking you to apply it as Truth, is similar to the defuncting of the statement, “Everything is relative” by realizing that that statement itself is objective therefore destroying any applicative quality of its hoped value. So this is what it looks like: “Hey guys don’t read stories or writings and look for Truth” but “Hey guys read my shit and see it as True.” Oh the hypocrisy! Oh the Humanity!
But this is the problem in and of itself. It’s the semiological decay of the point between sign and signification. The sign of the letter or the word has a breath in it into which where we read or hear the letters composing words, but that breath of impetus created by the auteur is flawed or maybe partially eroded because there is a secondary signification created by the reader who is not aware or connected with the primary sign. Therefore the audience the spectator the reader is recreating the sign in his or her imaginative psyche and formulating the value of the sign by their own secondary signification. That’s the fallacy of interpretation or as they call it, the interpretive fallacy. And even if we are true as truly possible with exigesis, it still is impossible to bridge the two purely because of the aforementioned semiological decay of language and that leaves Truth and interpretation marooned on two separate spheres. But as we, meaning civilization and society, have learned we ignore that separation between the two. Rather, we marry the two even when honestly we know, that we ourselves are reading the voice of our own personal writers into the story, devoiding the initial writer, and creating Truth out of the words of the actual auteur. We become the locuteur; our personal voice replaces the voice of what is acknowledged as simply the narrator.
So how do we fix this problem of one and two. With one, like I was luckily enough to do, was to find practical value, and not necessarily Truth, in places I wouldn’t look. I found value and qualitative practical applicative value in Beckett. And I was not there, investing in Beckett’s work, hoping to find practical application. But I did, and in that there can be validity in pursuing oppositional narratives and voices cause there you may find the most poignant applications of Truth. And then theres two. How do we finally acknowledge the decay of the sign of language found in narratives? It will sound easier said than done, but the most pertinent value of fiction is that the fiction where truth is gleaned is not your nonfiction. So to read the story in your own personal voice and to co-opt that narrative, and the learned or unlearned application of Truth by its characters is only valid for those characters in their fictional or non-fictional environments. To say, “This character lived their life and learned the such so now I will practice the such as big T truth as my application,” is noble and sounds normal or practical, but we are ignoring the facets of our lives which collude that supposed Truth because we ignore our own personal complexity of our personal narrative. And when you do that, when you steal the Truth, which I have to say is crafted by an auteur and not natural as in you and me the reader, you are bastardizing your own personal narrative by ignoring its complexity. However, the more appropriate retaliation to learned Truth, is remove the big T, and supplicate that with little t truths. There is nothing wrong with reading a story, encountering a narrative and seeing something valuable and acknowledging that truth and then go searching for the counter-truth in the myriad of stories and narratives out there. The ultimate Truth out there is that there is none (again this statement in defunct by the semantic argument of no objectivity is objective), but that there are many truths that tell our story in its fundamental complexity and that natural complexity is what makes fiction beautiful as a collection of truths lived and lives exposed.
Stories should serve as a broken mirror, shattered beyond comprehension where each sliver of narrative reflects in us a broken and fractured view of ourselves, and with that vision, we take the truth seen and we continue to live and look in order to see ourselves and the world around us as continually fractured, and with that we can continue to see ourselves as terribly lucky to really be alive without Truth.




Without Relent,
Peace
Remoy