“Simply being a person in this life means inheriting all sorts of wounds and scars. And you don’t even exactly know what they are; all of this takes years and years of work to figure out.”

Ray Bradbury has been coming up in my timeline again more often recently.

What’s been on my mind lately? I was thinking of writing an essay about rugpulls. It’s a phrase that became more popular recently in the crypto/web3 world to describe scams – someone lures investors in with the promise of something lucrative, and then takes the money and disappears, effectively pulling the rug out from under them. I’m not a fan of scams (does that need to be said?), but I love how succinct and evocative the phrase “rugpull” is, and I think it’s a useful phrase worth reusing in other contexts.

Everyone gets rugpulled at least a couple of times in life. You believe that things are one way, and then the rug gets pulled out from under you, and you discover, to your shock, that things were very not going to go the way you assumed they would. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Covid-19 was a planet-scale rugpull for the entire species. But there are smaller ones. The betrayal of a friend or loved one is one that can be very private and personal and yet be devastating to the psyche. When people criticize and psychoanalyze Kanye West – and there is a lot to criticize Kanye for, for sure – they seldom seem to bring up the fact that he was blackmailed by his own cousin for $250,000. It’s the sort of experience that surely makes a person much more anxious and paranoid. Who can you trust anymore, if not your own family?

I’m reminded of a couple of other anecdotes that have really stuck with me. One was mentioned in passing in a book about Auroville– Better To Have Gone (2021), by Akash Kapur. I can’t remember the precise specifics ,but there was a person who, I think maybe was a spy during WW2. and he said something that shook me to my core. I paraphrase– he said… until he was tortured, he had never been truly awake, truly alive. It seems that torture was the moment he first experienced consciousness.

It reminds me as well of Andy Warhol’s quote about being shot:

“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television – you don’t feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.”

I have so many things to piece together here. Huxley talks about related things in The Doors Of Perception (1954). I’m not sure what specific quote I would pull out in relation to this, but I have a twitter thread if you wanna glance though it.

I’m also reminded of some things that Jeannette Winterson has written about being adopted… “Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark af the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.”

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One of the big award-winning movies to come out of Singapore was Ilo Ilo (2013), and I didn’t watch it until fairly recently I think because I sensed that it would reveal things to me about myself that I wasn’t comfortable facing yet. It’s a movie about a Singaporean Chinese boy being raised by a Filipino domestic helper. Or you could say it’s about the entire family. It’s kind of somber, slice-of-life… it gave me “photo album” vibes. There isn’t a strong sense of an overarching narrative trying to get you to see anything, which can be kinda refreshing. I quite like this review by Stephen Holden

Another movie that I watched recently was The Nanny Diaries (2007). I watched this one kinda by accident – my wife was watching it, and I joined in. It’s maybe a little more upbeat and light-hearted in general, but is also ultimately devastating from the point of view of the child who gets to experience a nurturing presence from someone who actually cares for him, only to have that cruelly wrenched away from him, without even the opportunity to say a proper goodbye. I thought this review by Richard Shickel does a pretty good job: “The Nanny Diaries is something of an odd-duck movie. It is not a broad comedy or a wildly romantic one, either. Nor is it Edith Wharton lite. But it does partake of all those modes in intelligently observant ways.”

I don’t want to go into too much detail into my own life but I will say that these movies affected me very deeply probably in large part because they reminded me of my own childhood experiences growing up with domestic helpers. People who didn’t have such experiences themselves probably won’t be as shaken to see someone else messed up by it. It’s strange how the earliest memories get convoluted. A lot of the specifics are kind of messy – I can’t quite remember people, timelines, names, places. But I remember feelings. I remember feeling the entire world go white and cold when I felt a sense of being abandoned. And I remember being told a story of someone else who was raised by a helper – when she left, he would cry every day at the window, and everyone else would make fun of him for this. Even when I was hearing this story, everyone was laughing about it. And I felt a protective rage within me, for these poor children who are aliens in their own families, who lose the only connection they have to caring.

some notes… a nanny’s reaction https://myartsyodyssey.wordpress.com/2015/03/22/sad-little-children/

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I spent quite a lot of time and energy wanting to be a kind of tough. I would occasionally try on conventional masculine tropes – going to the gym, trying to get muscular, trying to care about football. None of it was really my style. I think I married young in part because I was anxious to grow up, to stop being a child, to be taken seriously as a man, as an adult. For the most part I think this worked out really well for me. I’ve written a lot about the despair and anguish I had over the years if you want to look into it

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Disorientation

Feynman quote: “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.”

This quote itself might be a bit of a minor rugpull for some people. It’s hard to say. How are people doing?

The following Joseph Campbell quote is “about” LSD, but…

“The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.”

I must(?) learn to be kind to the people who did not obsessively read history to protect themselves from getting rug pulled by “unforeseeable” tectonic events

People who become a kind of tough and resilient can be strangely angry at people who don’t. One of my favorite youtube videos is about the King archetype

…. tbc