A grey tweed jacket on a woman implies intellectualism, and more importantly, an absurd gravity, a taking-oneself-too-seriously, reading Nabokov wide-eyed, gasping occasionally at particularly daring turns of phrase - the sort of cultured, ridiculous, sincere naïf who would use words like "naïf". Which for some reason really appeals to me. Romantics always do, I think because I tend to think of myself as a romantic wearing the skin of sardonic realism until I actually interact with a romantic, at which point I realize that the realism goes much deeper than the romanticism. I fundamentally do not take myself seriously - that's realism.
Don't believe in continuity of self except as a useful fiction, like free will, or (in my more cynical moments) love. I deny anything other than an accidental, superficial connection with who I was five years ago. I mutate in response to my environment, shifting to meet new matrices and situations.
If you've ever played Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, you may know what I mean when I speak of the Dionysian Hero. If you haven't played it (and you should - it's a beautiful game. Also there is a UFO abduction in a rural medieval-ish setting), all you really need to know is that the hero of the game, Link, must save a world he finds himself in entirely by accident, a world he has no connection to. He must do so by acquiring and using a variety of masks, some of which actually change his physical form entirely, allowing him to assume the roles of various specific individuals. Essentially, he is a blank slate which those around him overwrite to fit him into their individual stories. He's only the hero at all because the world needs a hero, and overwrites him to fit. And even his role as hero is taken away when the Big Bad of the story gets a chance to overwrite him - with another mask - as the ultimate villain.
Point is, I'm Dionysian. And that's weird, I think, because most people seem to think of themselves as Apollonian: they have themselves, and they attempt to shape the world around them in some small way to change it to what they want it to be. I do just the opposite: I have the world, and it shapes me. I don't think I'm all that different from other people, nor do I think that I am right about human nature and they are wrong: I think that both the Dionysian and Apollonian perspectives are legitimate lenses for viewing human nature. I just happen to use the Dionysian one where most seem to prefer the Apollonian. It works out well for me, I think. If I am whoever I am needed to be by those around me, it allows for smooth interactions, and closer friendships than I think I would have otherwise.
"What about personal integrity?" you might ask. "How can you switch between different social circles, particularly ones with conflicting views of reality without massive cognitive dissonance?" That's a remarkably apt question, actually. It's almost like you're a second-person interrogative projection of myself. The answer is that, yeah, it's weird when different circles of friends clash. Reality kind of goes all wavy. But I mean, this is obviously a very strong statement of what I feel like. In reality, of course, I do have some apparent invariants. I'm pretty consistently an atheist wannabe writer, for instance. But I feel like even these are (in theory and given extraordinary circumstances so don't hold your breath) negotiable.
And I was going to talk about Beck's The Information and Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? because they're pretty good examples of people taking themselves too seriously or something but I don't feel like it now so I'll do that later.
