It was, last night, right in the midst of the man’s talk that I realized, pondering over my own life up until this point and the looming moment ahead of me, what exactly is meant by the concept of the trace.
One of the really important differences between living somewhere completely new — I mean this as a technical term: specifically, where all of your friendships and relationships are new — and living some place for 10 years or your whole life or where there are people you’ve known for those amounts of time, is that when you live somewhere completely new, and something important happens, there is no one around to talk to about it. I don’t mean “no one” in the literal sense, I mean no one who, by virtue of having known you for so long, will “get it.” This is the difference, or at least one of them.
PS: I say this because the importance of yesterday is nothing that anyone in this part of the world can possibly understand.
The conversation went something like this:
“And so, what do you do?”
“I’m an artist.”
“…Right, this is __, everyone here is an ‘artist;’ the question is what do you do, how do you feed yourself?”
“Well I…”
“…”
I had this dream last night that I just remembered. I was in someone’s living room in San Francisco, and one of them was there with me. Actually, we were sitting on the couch together, across from another couch full of a number of people. There were also people standing up, it was some kind of small party, and whoever owned the house was there among them. Then, who pulls up–in the gold Lamborghini her dad had bought for her mom–but the other one. She comes in, and there we all are, this random group of people, me, and the two of them, there in one room, at the same place, at the same time, being really nice to one another. These people have never met, so that was bizarre enough, but I took the image of the two of them smilingly, though of course warily, introducing themselves to one another to mean something about what I should do, some action my subconscious is telling my I should take. Whether or not I should listen to it is another question entirely, but that aside the image was extremely striking, and even more weird. The gold Lamborghini really made me laugh, but seeing those two together, same place, same time, all smiles, it was nothing short of bizarre. It may also be a message that I should be slightly less serious about certain things. Those two in a room together, introducing themselves, and being extremely friendly: I’m not too into moralism, but I could only take it as a message, nothing less than some kind of self-instruction.
Here are two things I don’t believe in, as I just told Ben:
1. That the phrase “the right thing” in the sense of “doing the right thing” means anything, or isn’t completely empty. I do believe this: that there is no such thing as “the right thing” that one can do.
2. That anything ever happens to anyone according to the strict adherence to the rules of some system. More specifically, the concept of “merit” in the sense of “meritocracy” is either also empty, or its true nature is deceptive. You will never get anything or anywhere by “playing by the rules” and “doing things the right way.” I don’t simply mean that you’ll just end up “ok,” “satisfactory” or in some good but not extraordinary position; I don’t mean that you have to “go the extra mile” in order to be “really, really” (as opposed to “plain-old”) successful. I mean that if you don’t play the shadow-game that each set of rules attempts to conceal but always carries with it, you’ll get exactly nowhere at all, not even to plain-old mediocre ok. There is a subtext, hidden clauses, spectral rules and regs–often visible on the surface only as traces, and made the clearest only through given processes by which we are initiated into the “secret knowledge” of a given system by the conscious and purposive intent of others–to everything we do, every system we insert ourselves into, every game we play. This goes for everything from collecting unemployment to getting into a PhD program to love to being the president of the world. There are no exceptions to the fact that the seemingly exterior non-rules that attend all formal or informal systems are anywhere from equally important to more important than the official line. This is what is meant by “playing the game,” and “the game,” unlike “the right thing” is absolutely real.