For most of my life I reveled in weirdness, but as I get older and have suffered the real setbacks of being different - loss of employment, growing social isolation - I'm increasingly cautious about how I share myself. Having children who are legitimately disabled by my 'heritage of difference,' and are facing a future run by people who quite openly call for a homogenized society, just makes my anxiety around these issues all the worse. Self Portrait Guy here is listing complaints, but they are a loose category of half-memories and unscientific medical concerns. It's the spillover of an exhausted mind tired of holding everything in.
By the end of the list in the second panel, Guy is voicing paranoid concerns that don't really mean anything: an attempt to understand what it is that he can't see that nonetheless gives him away. There is no sanctuary, and there is no hiding.
It's an acknowledgement that we exist in a world in which other people are aware of our existence in ways that we are unaware. This is obvious, but Guy's concerns are concrete: what physical evidence are we leaving behind? What do others see and hear that we thought might pass? What smells that we're unaware of? (See the recent Pharm Life.) And further buried within: what code lies within us that would give the game away even before we existed?
It's a losing game, and is the reason behind the 'life's aspiration' of Invisibility. That's what it's down to: from a youthful celebration of weirdness to an elderly desire for disassociation. But, as he says, this desire is hand-in-hand with the knowledge of it's impossibility, for reasons that are outside understanding.
Art's response, as always, feels emotionally resonant, but doesn't make logical sense. It's a line from the lullaby "Put A Straw Under Baby" off of Eno's 1974 Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. Driven by a chugging pipe-organ, with a melody lifted along by the skew-toned Portsmouth Sinfonia orchestra, the lullaby tells a young child's stream-of-consciousness perspective of growing up in a Catholic boarding school. Imposing authority figures are mixed with awesome magical imagery.
I've internalized these lyrics for nearly half a century, and it became a song that I sang to my children when they were infants, eventually leading to my singing to them the entire Taking Tiger Mountain album front to back. In some ways, it is as close as I've come to a shared spiritual journey with my children. Appropriately enough, it's a religion that offers only questions over answers, and enduring striking imagery over platitudes. And, in this episode at any rate, a religion without answers feels to be one without hope.
For most of my life I reveled in weirdness, but as I get older and have suffered the real setbacks of being different - loss of employment, growing social isolation - I'm increasingly cautious about how I share myself. Having children who are legitimately disabled by my 'heritage of difference,' and are facing a future run by people who quite openly call for a homogenized society, just makes my anxiety around these issues all the worse. Self Portrait Guy here is listing complaints, but they are a loose category of half-memories and unscientific medical concerns. It's the spillover of an exhausted mind tired of holding everything in.
ReplyDeleteBy the end of the list in the second panel, Guy is voicing paranoid concerns that don't really mean anything: an attempt to understand what it is that he can't see that nonetheless gives him away. There is no sanctuary, and there is no hiding.
It's an acknowledgement that we exist in a world in which other people are aware of our existence in ways that we are unaware. This is obvious, but Guy's concerns are concrete: what physical evidence are we leaving behind? What do others see and hear that we thought might pass? What smells that we're unaware of? (See the recent Pharm Life.) And further buried within: what code lies within us that would give the game away even before we existed?
It's a losing game, and is the reason behind the 'life's aspiration' of Invisibility. That's what it's down to: from a youthful celebration of weirdness to an elderly desire for disassociation. But, as he says, this desire is hand-in-hand with the knowledge of it's impossibility, for reasons that are outside understanding.
Art's response, as always, feels emotionally resonant, but doesn't make logical sense. It's a line from the lullaby "Put A Straw Under Baby" off of Eno's 1974 Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. Driven by a chugging pipe-organ, with a melody lifted along by the skew-toned Portsmouth Sinfonia orchestra, the lullaby tells a young child's stream-of-consciousness perspective of growing up in a Catholic boarding school. Imposing authority figures are mixed with awesome magical imagery.
I've internalized these lyrics for nearly half a century, and it became a song that I sang to my children when they were infants, eventually leading to my singing to them the entire Taking Tiger Mountain album front to back. In some ways, it is as close as I've come to a shared spiritual journey with my children. Appropriately enough, it's a religion that offers only questions over answers, and enduring striking imagery over platitudes. And, in this episode at any rate, a religion without answers feels to be one without hope.