{"id":15175,"date":"2024-03-14T07:43:03","date_gmt":"2024-03-14T05:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=15175"},"modified":"2024-03-14T23:43:58","modified_gmt":"2024-03-14T21:43:58","slug":"a-life-is-not-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/?p=15175","title":{"rendered":"A Life is Not a Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

[fragment]<\/strong><\/p>\n

by\u00a0Mike Amnasan<\/p>\n

Now that I\u2019m seventy-three I can tell you about the life of a failed writer. This is something no one is likely to have read or will read. A successful writer would not be able to write this. His experience would be very different. Repeated rejection has taken a toll on my personality, causing resentment that worsens my chances of getting published.<\/p>\n

When my son was younger he sometimes asked me to tell him a story to help him get to sleep. He thought that since I was a fiction writer I should be able to provide him with one. I had to tell him that I wasn\u2019t good at making up stories. That\u2019s why I\u2019ve finally switched from fiction to writing this. What am I trying to achieve through this writing? I want to create a serious life, one in which I can look out the front window of our apartment and feel myself to be someone who belongs in the world I see out there. Why is that so difficult, and why should it depend on my finally writing something that can\u2019t be ignored? My desire for recognition is simpler than any hope that my writing will benefit society. I\u2019m more like a child who wants his mother to see him go down the slide. Perhaps I want an accurate accounting. There isn\u2019t a word for what it feels like for an adult looking out a window to want to be a person whose qualities are known to intelligent people out there. Maybe if there was, we would have a new emotion, and I could talk about this emotion that grips me and you would have some sense of what I long for. Wanting to be judged fairly by the people in my life motivated me to look toward communities I wasn\u2019t invited into to try to find that accounting. But I also wanted to recreate all the magnificence of a human standing in a room, something that language can\u2019t capture. Imagine a series of faces shown one after another of people from different areas of the world or different neighborhoods, one after another as an unspoken legacy. No person can be summed up through writing. A person is always more than a description. That\u2019s something I have always felt when I imagine another person. I never see people only as things they have said.<\/p>\n

The most dramatic change in my life was getting into a construction trade in my mid-thirties. Before that I\u2019d been doing minimum-wage factory work, and living off a girlfriend who worked more steadily than me. Earlier still, I slept in a car for a while, on a rooftop, in an ally. I couldn\u2019t find a job that I could stand for long, and I wasn\u2019t helpful to anyone else, having so little confidence in what I could do. I can\u2019t now remember what I was really like back then, and perhaps that\u2019s something most writers won\u2019t want to admit regarding their subject–though I can offer some accurate statements. Late in my life, the money I got from construction work allowed me to go back to school. I got a PhD in philosophy just before I turned sixty at which time I became lonelier than ever before even though I had a family.<\/p>\n

I have had no overriding goal other than developing an intelligence through which to take on issues other people avoid or conveniently simplify. I met my wife, Sandra, while I was in graduate school. I was older than most of the faculty. Simon was born while I was working on my dissertation. When I began writing I hoped that if I was observant and articulate and saw things that others missed that this in itself, would be enough for me to gain recognition. I thought that being outside the social networks of people with advantages would give me a unique perspective. Imagine intelligence emerging in unexpected places where smart people could report about what\u2019s happening from the outskirts of society? Wouldn\u2019t the world then seem more transparent?<\/p>\n

Think of some low status monkey. From its marginal perspective it sees the whole troop. Writing could give that marginalized individual a purpose out there where no one cares to look. The people with opportunities would not then be creating stories for us all. From what I\u2019ve read published writers are a far more exclusive group of people than any other. The individuals who they circulate among have so much to offer, and they\u2019re in love with humanity because the only people they meet are successful. As I got older, I began to realize that the exclusion of people like me would create a little bit of heaven for well-positioned individuals who have brighter dispositions, more open expressions, who are better company for one another than I would ever be.<\/p>\n

People with advantages, including white men were already in the literary world when more attention rightfully went to social justice issues. They could be generous regarding previously excluded writers without bowing out to provide others with their place. The good white men, like all others in their positions, had opportunities to offer. People with money and position became those capable of the greatest altruism. I help no one while alone with nothing to offer.<\/p>\n

My wife and son don\u2019t understand my loneliness. There\u2019s no reason why they would. They\u2019ve never seen my writing as different from the other things they see me do in our apartment. Writing has been a part of my life since I was eighteen, but it hasn\u2019t resulted in lasting recognition, or invitations to appear somewhere in the capacity of a writer. Nevertheless, I can feel like a writer while I\u2019m keying these words into my laptop since that\u2019s what a writer does. What you\u2019re now reading can\u2019t give me much satisfaction without recognition from other people who aren\u2019t likely to read this. I don\u2019t need recognition to continue trying to write something that will impress people and change my life, and it has taken me a lifetime to learn how to talk about what is different about how I think.<\/p>\n

Philosophers have claimed that they have a broader view of the world than people doing more specialized work. It never occurred to the men who made this claim that a broader view would have to include much they don\u2019t care about, or that they would find cringe-worthy. It must include people who have no interest in their philosophical views, and it must include things they would never choose to look at. The closest I can come to achieving this broader view is through including more aspects of problems into my thoughts than I would like to consider or can remain conscious of. This is stressful. The more I include, the more random this information becomes with greater complexity. Factoring more into my consideration of problems is an emotional project that most people can\u2019t bear, something Nietzsche would attest to. It makes philosophy less a discipline that anyone might choose to study and excel at as a learned scholar, than a project that requires an emotional predisposition to think differently. I can\u2019t help but think differently, and I don\u2019t really care if this is considered philosophy or something else. Why would I? I don\u2019t relate to other people. This is not because I lack empathy, but because I don\u2019t resemble other people sufficiently. I must have read authors who I identified with when I was younger, but not anymore. I have the defensive tendency to believe everyone is wrong about me. It\u2019s a weakness that comes out of rejection. It\u2019s hard for a failed writer like me to acknowledge how much I\u2019m effected by editors and agents. How can I acknowledge the importance to me of people who don\u2019t take me seriously? I have less control over how I think than I like to believe.<\/p>\n

If I\u2019m talking to other people and feel that they are impressed with what I\u2019ve been saying, I feel embarrassed. Why? I realize that this favorable regard for me can\u2019t last. Identifying with others means so much to people. This is something they can\u2019t do for long with me\u2014but my problem is generally simpler than that. I feel so much energy surging through my body if I receive favorable attention that I need to get away from people to calm down, and perhaps it\u2019s this that embarrasses me: that my metabolism is different. I\u2019m overwhelmed by an especially favorable regard. I can\u2019t predict how people will take my uncomfortable flight from their presence when they were so receptive to what I was saying. There are always people who remain after I\u2019ve left. This is what I imagine happens once I\u2019m gone. Friendships are formed.<\/p>\n

How could I still think I could gain much attention when I haven\u2019t succeeded up till now? Language is magical in its capacity to produce errant beliefs. I rarely even notice that I\u2019m deluding myself. I never give up on my lonely project. I don\u2019t regard my own drives as reasonable. I don\u2019t trust whatever compels me to write what you are now reading. I don\u2019t understand it. I don\u2019t know how I might change what I\u2019m now writing so that it might be better received\u2014though there are plenty of writers who would be happy to tell me. Why would I work on writing every day that no one other than me is interested in reading? This effort should end with that knowledge, but it seems that it is natural for me to regard writing as magical in the changes it could make in my life. We are all deluded. Survival required self-delusion as soon as animals became conscious. They needed to believe they were in the center of the world and of the greatest importance to successfully compete with one another and I suspect that delusion lingers in me, even if it is weakened by my further reflection\u2014is it? I can\u2019t say for sure. It guides this effort for no reason I can understand. The drive that allowed animals to compete is interfering with our ability to create a better society. Overconfidence is guiding every effort that has a chance of success. A better understanding of the world will complicate our thoughts in ways that will be unpopular and lead to personal failure. It has done that for me. The world was not made for us, something every algorithm is designed to rectify, to give us what we can be convinced we want in place of a bigger world that doesn\u2019t care about us. Nietzsche realized that any individual who saw the world accurately would not be able to compete with beings who were deluded in a way that favored their survival.<\/p>\n

I now live in Amsterdam. I didn\u2019t choose to live in the Netherlands. I wanted to live in a place with different priorities from those that prevail in America and my wife wanted to live here. She made plans to start a pottery studio which she has since carried out and this allows us to stay here through an entrepreneurial visa. I\u2019m retired. I\u2019m not going to work here, unless you can call this work. I\u2019m okay with being a foreigner. I was foreign to the people I grew up around, and the constant drizzle is good writing-weather.<\/p>\n

It has always been difficult for me to retain friendships with people I talked to about my greatest concerns since my claims can be hard to hold in mind and they will be a distraction from what this person must focus on to succeed. Moving to Amsterdam, a place strange to me, seemed more likely to change me for the better than continuing to consider where I had gone wrong earlier in my life. Feeling alone in the world has become more intense for me here. I never would have guessed, back when I thought of myself as a promising writer in my mid-thirties, that I would now be in Amsterdam, writing this long memoir no one else reads, with the appropriately gloomy drizzle.<\/p>\n

My son is thirteen. Simon is now almost as tall as I am, but thinner. He hates to be ordinary, and fears that he is. At the same time, he doesn\u2019t want to stand out as different. He\u2019s above me laughing at something he\u2019s watching on his iPad. I had to build a floor out of plywood to make him an A-framed room. His floor lies across the rafters. I write here at my small desk underneath that floor. We are in a sixth-floor walkup of an old building with a peaked roof. He is changing, becoming a larger flesh and blood person who imposes his will, as he becomes a man with a body growing in size and strength and a mind yet unprepared for the society he will have to negotiate, and what example do I provide him with?<\/p>\n

Although I believe my conversation is often appreciated by a friend, the thought of getting together with me is anticipated with anxiety. The prospect of getting together with this friend will cause some concern in me as well since I will want to discuss discomforting issues that will be unlikely to benefit either of us. The way I think includes feeling stupid during periods when I\u2019m sitting at my desk. While writing this, I\u2019m also often trying to find distractions from a life without purpose or meaning. When I impress people with the things I say emotions well up in me that I struggle to keep from showing in my face. I feel the shame of revealing a difference in how my body reacts to situations involving other people. What should I feel after I claim to be different from everyone else? \u2014but I could only differ in some respects and not others. Should I feel proud, embarrassed, silly, honest about who I am, or should I admit to myself that I was pretending to be someone I\u2019m not. All those things are true at the same time, but only within some<\/em> conversations. In most situations, my claim to difference would be laughable. Do I have an alignment problem? People working in AI may worry that their creations, having taken over their own learning, will no longer serve their interests, but an alignment problem in a human simply means that I can be ignored, that I\u2019m not doing the things that will merit attention.\u00a0 My mother didn\u2019t reproduce when she had me, she produced something different instead, and this is bound to happen with complex animals. It is the irony of the drive to reproduce. Such complex entities as us never reproduce ourselves. My case is simply more extreme. My parents didn\u2019t even produce a good approximation of themselves.<\/p>\n

My father didn\u2019t speak English well when he entered school for the first time. At home his family spoke Romanian. Other students made fun of him. During most of his life, he taught auto mechanics in a high school. He liked to watch T.V. after dinner. His favorite sitcoms were Hogan\u2019s Heroes<\/em> and McHale\u2019s Navy<\/em>. They were comedies that showed that war and even incarceration in a Nazi concentration camp can be light and humorous if your clever enough to trick your captors into serving your interests. These shows celebrated American ingenuity in conning our enemies. I hated these characters, but I must have sat and watched long enough to develop disdain for this lighthearted trickster persona. I can\u2019t picture now how we all watched, my mother, father, and my older sister, Kathy. We wouldn\u2019t all fit on the couch facing the TV. There must have been a comfy chair or two. The couch had a plastic cover on it for a while to protect it from accidental spills. I was there. I wasn\u2019t retreating to my room. My life then couldn\u2019t have been as bad as the story I have created in my mind. I apparently exaggerate the terrible strain I felt living with my family. I would be taken by surprise when I heard a family member\u2019s logic that was so different from how I thought\u2014but how different really? My thoughts were as petty as any teenagers, guided by overwrought emotions that are common to that age. I listen to Simon now and I can imagine the kind of things I would say back when I was his age, statements that I would be embarrassed to include here if they were not long ago forgotten. They were so unlike the story I created of my past since then.<\/p>\n

My father hung a plaque in his garage that read \u201cIf you\u2019re so smart, why ain\u2019t you rich.\u201d I believe the character who accompanied this homely message had a cigar in his mouth and maybe a fishing hat on his head, clearly not to be mistaken for an intellectual. The plaque was meant to say that you may sound smart, but if you\u2019re not making money, your intelligence has no value. This is the entrepreneurial message, which could be popular with both people who would appreciate my father\u2019s plaque and those who would see it as sign of an ignorant man. I see a populist, anti-intellectual side to the tech movement. Tech billionaires are very focused on their work and expect the same from their employees. Only those who are \u201call in,\u201d can join their inner circles. They don\u2019t understand that the more intensely they focus on their projects the more blind they become to everything else. The prose you are now reading is one form of everything else.<\/em> Even the philosopher who opposes himself to specialized thinkers is more specialized than the prose writer who writes about a life that, if accurately rendered, will be more complicated than a story.<\/p>\n

My parents had once threatened to leave me at a sanitarium for the mentally ill. How can I not remember what I had done to warrant this response? I don\u2019t. There was always the concern that if I was emotionally disturbed, and perhaps I was, that I was doing it on purpose, like some irritating game I was stubbornly playing; I could stop at any time if I really wanted to. In high school, a school administrator stopped me in a hall to tell me that if I didn\u2019t snap out it I would become a heroin addict. Though I was clearly unhappy, and terrible shy among groups of people, what did this person, who had never spoken to me until then, expect me to do\u2014and why a heroin addict? Is it only in America that people believe that we can, with enough determination, bring our emotions in line with positive goals. I don\u2019t want to be aligned with other people\u2019s goals, and this includes what I\u2019m now writing. I don\u2019t want to evoke the feelings through this prose that you will recognize as right for the situations I describe. That\u2019s the role of commercial fiction, to allow us to feel the correct, and appropriately impassioned, emotions for every situation called up. How possible is that in any individual\u2019s life? How often in our actual lives are we caught in a situation where we worry that we\u2019re not feeling what we should, where we may even feel the opposite of what we should? Is there anything wrong with that? What comfort does reading a novel provide that allows us to feel exactly what we\u2019re supposed to? My life has never been that simple. My aberrant behavior that I honestly can\u2019t remember was ruining my family. I was told this in a note my mother left on my pillow. She wasn\u2019t there. Shouldn\u2019t this kind of message be delivered in person? I left home with just the jacket I was wearing. I slept in a big galvanized drainage pipe in the hills above the small track homes neatly laid out in the valley below. It gets cold at night in a desert. I got out of that drainage pipe at twilight and walked down the mountain\u2014more a large hill–scratching at the spider bites on my arms.<\/p>\n

After that first night, I stayed in the house of my girlfriend, Gus, for a while. Her given name was Rosemary. She didn\u2019t like it. She had been a chubby child and was given the nickname Gus after the fat mouse in the Disney version of Cinderella. I slept on her family\u2019s living room couch. Late at night, when her family was asleep, she would be lying on the carpet arching her back while I pulled down her flannel pajama bottoms. I remember Gus as the first person I felt to be on my side. We both thought we were going to become artists.<\/p>\n

My memory is getting worse–but the point of what you\u2019re reading is less to remember my past than to realize that the person I\u2019m trying to remember is gone forever. That\u2019s what a life is like.<\/p>\n

When I was in my thirties, I drove east with Jessica. We met in San Francisco. She had come into the Small Press Traffic book store where I volunteered on the weekends. I was sitting behind the desk at the front of the store. She later told me that when she first asked me a question I had seemed unfriendly. I was in my thirties. We became a couple. We were driving to New York City. We had a polaroid camera. Taking pictures along the way seemed to make the experience more available to us. One of us accidentally dropped the camera. It tumbled down a rocky slope, and while falling took one last picture of rock and sky. We soon bought another camera from a pharmacy. I dread looking at photographs of myself now. They always seem to catch me with an elderly expression on my face. Perhaps that\u2019s the only kind of expression I have now. I can\u2019t time travel, and I don\u2019t sound anything like I did during the times I recall. My thoughts were rushed. My vocabulary was smaller and I looked so different when I was twenty, and thought differently, as differently as another person altogether. The voice in what I\u2019m now writing, often doesn\u2019t seem to fit the occasions I remember. At other times, I don\u2019t notice. For me the most beautiful writing does little more than distract from the world out there to create its own appeal within the narrow focus of the reader, in an unconditional sense. It reflects making use of words that are only words trying to do more than they can. I don\u2019t know why that appeals to me. Writing shouldn\u2019t preserve anything we cherish, truth, love, whatever. The closest we can come to expressing ourselves is not in the past. If I try to tell you what I really want to write about and look to my past, it\u2019s not there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[fragment] by\u00a0Mike Amnasan Now that I\u2019m seventy-three I can tell you about the life of a failed writer. This is something no one is likely to have read or will read. A successful writer would not be able to write this. His experience would be very different. Repeated rejection has taken a toll on my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1681,77],"tags":[1682,1123,1697],"class_list":["post-15175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-egophobia-79-80","category-english","tag-egophobia-79-80","tag-english","tag-mike-amnasan"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DakB-3WL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15175"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15176,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15175\/revisions\/15176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/egophobia.ro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}