
Last week I read
Stephen Jay Gould's essay,
"The Median is not the Message" and in it the author says,
"Heart and head are focal points of one body, one personality,"
which made me come away with a new understanding of how my compromises to the average can be unhealthy or, to speak in statistical language, a desire to
regress to the mean keeps me from imagining the infinite.
Doing so has kept me from appreciating my unique variations. And as Gould points out, in an empirical sense, variation is the only constant.
My worry has led me to shut up, not because I didn't have anything to say, but because I was afraid that all I wanted to say would alienate the larger group.
I weighed the trade-off between uniqueness and popularity and found deviation from the norm unattractive. Sharing one's thoughts is unhealthy when looking to hide within the crowd.
I feared I'd piss you off because whenever I sought after my unique perspective it seemed to violate the notion we should be seeing things the same way.
But eventually for me the pain of comformity had to give birth to something more vital.
George Orwell writes in
"Why I Write";
"From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer."
When I was young I felt the same, not because I thought I was good at it (in fact I often think I am very bad at it which paradoxically keeps me at it, slavishly sado-masochistic) but when engaging words to render meaning from my anxiety I found my anxiety transformed into meaning. And Orwell makes sense of this wonder better than I,
". . . there are four great motives for writing . . . they exist in
different degrees in every writer . . .
- Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc. etc. It is humbug to pretend that this is not a motive, and a strong one . . . Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
- Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose on the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not be missed . . .
- Historical Impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
- Political Purpose - using the word 'political' in the widest sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that should strive after."
They all make sense to me and they are all hard to admit.
I am an egotistical lover of beauty who hungers for truth and change.
I'm sorry if that means I will never share a safe bubble with you.
Gould wrote his essay when he was diagnosed in 1982 with abdominal mesothelioma, a rare and very deadly form of cancer, which technically speaking offered him, a "median mortality of eight months" to live. He took the time to understand who he was relative to the average and lived for 12 years.
His quote above is the resolution of the conflict between "what is" versus "what's possible" and, he postulates, a death sentence is only accurate if a person fails to appreciate, with head and heart, the unique variations s/he carries within. He concludes with sage advice,
"It has become, in my view, a bit too trendy to regard the acceptance of death as something tantamount to intrinsic dignity. Of course I agree with the preacher of Ecclesiastes that there is a time to love and a time to die - and when my skein runs out I hope to face the end calmly and in my own way. For most situations, however, I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy - and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light."
Makes sense to me.