It’s a privilege to see the various segments of Chinese society colliding against each other in Shanghai, but once you get past their differences, you begin to focus on
their commonalities–you begin to notice the way people talk, their inflections, their slang, the content of their conversations, the things they choose to emphasize.
ANd you realize, not surprisingly, that it’s an overwhelmingly utilitarian and mundane world, and that people aren’t debating poetry and philosophy and politics on the morning commute to work.
The reason why it seems I am belaboring the point is because although i was aware of this, I don’t suppose I ever gave up the hope somewhere in my heart of hearts, that things would be different somewhere else, and that people that would understand and empathize with all my intellectual and artistic yearnings would somehow pop up out of the woodwork, as if they’d been hiding behind the curtains at my
surprise birthday party, yell surprise and then somehow be there, to stay, always with me, thereby creating some kind of cocoon within which
I could completely function. This would be, in other words, some kind of nurturing atmosphere, much like what I had at home, with my parents.
Put in that light, it’s going to be hard for me to truly find a place in this world. IT’s not only about me carving out a niche for myself, but somehow creating
and maintaining that kind of environment. YOu look at people here and the first thing are immediately overwhelmed by the sheer incommensurability
of your ideals–despite everyone being human, wanting happiness, etc. There is a just a sheer abyss, and that’s because the tendencies of any artist or intellectual
is towards greater individuation–and although this isn’t necessarily the case, it is quite often the case that there is collateral damage. The damage is you:
the alienation between you and the great mass of people that don’t share our intellectual or artistic proclivities. It takes some work to reacquire that
familiarity, that sense of belongingness with people. The great mass of people never quite lose it, because there are no forces within them that would
necessarily make them stray far from that cultural, psychological orbit. But the centrifugal forces that threaten people like are always going to threaten to
take us farther from the crowd. Colin Wilson’s “outsider”–is not going to simply, through sheer, brute force exercise of the will, change his status, reverse his fortunes
and somehow devolve or de-evolve into what he was not. The process, in some way, is irreversible. And here you get into Ernest Becker territory
because what you will find is that the artist’s attempt to find an inch of ground on which to stand outside society is doomed to failure: not because society is
all encompassing or powerful, but because the attempt itself contains a structural, inherent flaw: it comes from you, the individual. It presumes that you can somehow
become a god in your right and destroy part of the world (in your imagination, hopefully) and rebuild it in your image. And according to Becker that is going to fail.
One therefore simply has to find a consciousness that is higher: the point is that the artist has to climb to the heights that only artists can reach
only to crash back down to earth: and then from there, he must climb back up again, but this time, not just as artist, or artist-hero, but as mystic, artist, hero, and animal–all
rolled into one. And then, and perhaps only then, is there going to be any shot at redemption, some kind of peace that is something deeper than what a few minutes of meditation or yoga practice or anger management will ever give you.