On the Validity of Neuroses in 2011

I STARTED this blog sometime during 2010, and since 2011 has now begun I figure it’s as good a time as any to reflect on the motivations behind the project, its first year of existence, and where things stand for Valid Neurosis in the year to come.

Regarding the blog’s genesis, I’d experi- mented with a few other online writing projects prior to clacking away infrequently at the keyboard in service of Valid Neurosis, though in the case of those earlier projects the focus of my writing centered on subjects that were near and dear to me, subjects that, fortunately or unfortunately, tended toward the existentially baroque.

The topical terrain that resulted was then akin to the fallout created by a four corners elimination pro-wrestling match between the works of Franz Kafka, Emmanuel Levinas, Andrei Tarkovsky, and David Lynch, and, that being said, those earlier attempts most often had a readership of one—myself, reading my posts as I wrote them.

The fact that these writings generated a decided lack of interest on the part of friends, acquaintances, and, god forbid, strangers wasn’t at all surprising considering the opaque nature of the interests I was asking them to be interested in. Neither was a lack of interest on the part of others necessarily a ‘bad’ thing. The need that drives me to produce a creative output, as meager or ineffective as said output might be, isn’t fueled by the desire to appeal to nor participate with a wide audience, but rather a desire to commune with individuals disturbed in ways similar to myself.

The same goes when seeking the creative output of others. Generally, I’m not drawn to an art that attempts to be socially reassuring or that serves as a means of solidifying a sense of societal cohesion. Instead, the art that resonates with me is that art through which an individual shares his or her own idiosyncratic worldview and, in doing so, challenges and scars the worldview of its observers.

As such, I find myself suspicious of ‘professional’ artists. It’s not that there aren’t countless examples of those working in ‘the arts’ professionally whose work is of interest and inspiration to myself and others, nor do I hold some ascetic objection to individuals profiting from creative pursuits, but at the same time it seems that if a work’s appeal is broad enough to generate a significant amount of income for its creator, then the thrust of the work must be at least in part more concerned with enforcing societal norms than it is with shedding light on the peculiar.

Of course there are instances where a work, socially accepted in its own temporal context, is so deeply connected to existential truth that it can be at once both financially successful and transcendentally meaningful.

Dostoyevsky, for instance, made a considerable ‘living’ from his work during his lifetime, yet this in no way takes away from the gravity his work has for an audience even disconnected by centuries, continents, and language. By the same token, if the peculiar isn’t a shard of something larger and more familiar it becomes strangeness for strangeness’ sake, a novelty as opposed to a uniqueness, and therefore self-defeating. The ‘strangeness’ of Kafka’s writing may have contributed to its being largely ignored in his own lifetime, yet his work, even defined as it is by personal symbolism, speaks to a truth great enough to have overcome its temporal social failings. 

For those of us who seek the idiosyncratic then, a razor’s edge is walked, as art that is massively appealing and readily available is oftentimes little more than a guidebook toward proper navigation through a given social system, while art that is truly unique and personal often rots within the drawer, on the shelves, or within the imagination of the artist.

Returning to my own clumsy attempts at creation, during my previous excursions into ‘blogging’ I tried as best I could to follow the example set by the work of Henry Darger—not in terms of content or form, but in terms of his approach and circumstances. Darger was a custodian by profession, quietly producing a sizable body of writing and visual arts that went entirely unnoticed until shortly before his death. Without any audience to speak of, Darger remained motivated to realize his vision and seems to have done so with untamed zeal, and this to me is the essence of the creative process—an inner compulsion that demands to be externalized, even if its externalization results in nothing more than an ignored heap stacked beneath a coffee table.

Art is then its creator’s response to the world, and the ‘value’ or ‘importance’ of this art lies in the response itself, not, it would seem, in its achieved level of material remuneration or institutional accolades. And so, Darger’s approach to creativity can be seen as the gold standard.

However, not everyone is as gifted as Darger in committing to his or her response. In fact some individuals are decidedly ungifted, and in the course of my earlier blogging projects I found my stamina for creation without an audience to be pitifully low. It’s not that I was or am seeking an audience of any notable size or stature, but when I found myself writing to literally no one other than myself it became hard for me to expend the energy necessary to create. I felt as if I were engaging in an absurd sort of vanity project, and the more vain it seemed, the more I began to despise the words hanging on my screen.

Which brings me back to the topic of Valid Neurosis. In late 2009/early 2010, I’d recently emerged from a hermetical hole in which I’d been hiding (and from which my earlier online writing projects had come forth), and returned to a somewhat more active ‘social life’ within a sphere of old friends and acquaintances. Part of this return involved re-embracing certain forms of popular culture that I’d attempted to forswear during my seclusion, and as I eased my way into a new phase of life that involved one foot in the sober world I’d been living in and one foot in the drunken world from which I’d come, it occurred to me that I might gain a small audience for my creative compulsion if I softened the obscurity of my interests through the lens of the things I’d grown up with—heavy metal, professional wrestling, punk rock, video games, and so on.

I remember back in the early 1990s reading a ‘college music’ magazine that profiled a number of bands—Smashing Pumpkins, Swervedriver, Codeine, Nirvana—and the profile on the then just-rising Nirvana featured a quote from Kurt Cobain where, to paraphrase, he hoped that Nirvana could be a gateway for listeners to ‘better’ bands like Black Flag. That line stuck with me ever since, and harkening to it once again I figured I’d try to bug my poor friends and family into reading about that which I find important and essential through the gateway of popular culture, using the (relatively) accessible to lure folks toward the more obscure.

Latching on to punk rock music as a focus, I initially hoped Valid Neurosis would operate somewhat like a ‘webzine,’ centering on bands, records, etc. and featuring columns written by myself and others. However, the ‘others’ never materialized, and, left to my own devices, the ‘punk rock’ aspect of the blog became a thinner and thinner skin holding in my incorrigibly ponderous guts. Still, the ‘trick’ worked. For the first time ever, I had visitors, readers, and commenters. Nothing amazing numbers-wise, but compared to my earlier efforts, the difference was astronomical.

And now, heading into a new year, one in which I’m hoping to rededicate myself to my electronic communications, I’m wondering what to do with this project. What am I trying to accomplish? Should I abandon its threadbare focus completely, or continue to hide my ultimate interests behind it like an elephant behind a fig leaf? Sitting down to write this entry, I almost started off by removing the ‘punk rock’ tag from the site’s heading. But now as I’m writing it’s occurred to me that perhaps the site’s focus isn’t as flimsy as I thought.

‘Punk Rock,’ a nebulous title for sure, made even more so by my own distorted interpretation, dominated the imaginal landscape of my teens and early 20s. It was alienation and nihilism that drew me to it, a perceived sense of meaning that kept me engaged, alienation and nihilism that drove me away from it in my mid-20s, and finally alienation and nihilism that brought me back to it, in a tentative way, in my 30s, all the while the brass ring of meaning still hanging enticingly overhead.

Through punk rock music and its attendant ‘DIY’ ethic it felt as though I’d found a cultural haven in which it was OK to be a loser, a worm, a failure, in fact what appealed to me in the early days of my involvement with punk rock was the sense that, in an overarching social system fueled by a desire for power and an unending sense of ambition, here was niche where both power and ambition were scoffed at. Unfortunately, as it turned out, this feeling was mostly a product of my personal distortion.

Where to me DIY meant embracing my lowly status in the social world and walking away from attempts both to conform to societal expectations and to achieve institutional status and accolades (literally ‘doing it myself’ in terms of living a life apart from the hive mind of systemic functioning), the more common understanding and application of the ethic was something very different. True, many involved with punk rock in the 1990s were drawn to its being a common ground for those unable to fit easily into society’s Procrustean bed, but rather than celebrate this outsider status, ‘punk’ as a subset of an overarching social system looked to legitimize itself.

The taste-makers and trend-setters within the 1990s punk rock subculture weren’t inclined to delve deeper into their status as misfits and rejects, but instead attempted to establish an alternative structure of power and ambition, and in many ways they were successful. Punk became a business, a hugely successful business for some, and with this business structure came a list of rules and regulations one had to follow in order to be accepted.

Punks, it seemed, were not interested in learning from their lowly position in the larger social sphere, they were simply angry about it and wanted to better their standing. As such, punk became, at first, an alternative marketing demographic to the ‘mainstream’ and eventually became the mainstream itself. Of course, this is a story familiar to most counterculture movements, regardless of external trappings and temporal context, and as a natural progression of systemic evolution it can hardly be considered to be a ‘bad’ one.

If the primary function of any codified system is to maintain its own viability, then one can’t be surprised when within the continuum of its existence counterculture becomes culture. But for those of us looking for meaning above and beyond culture, we’re brought back to the razor’s edge. While only a fool would believe in the ability to live life entirely outside the sphere of systemic functionality, life, it seems to me, can’t be lived with any kind of significance entirely within it. In my own experience and from my own perspective, meaning in all of its elusiveness discloses itself only at those points when we are able to momentarily step away from our social roles and designations into an unquantifiable, unqualifiable realm that is somehow more ‘real.’

Oftentimes this realm is accessed through engagement with the creative outpourings of others, and it’s only natural to seek engagement in places where such outpourings are concentrated—established ‘scenes’ and ‘communities,’ reputable and accessible purveyors of arts and creativity, etc.

The most essential and vibrant outpourings of creativity might very well be emanating from the Henry Dargers hiding in plain sight before us, but without the proper alignment of fate and serendipity we may never encounter them, and so, barring such chance meetings, we’re left to cast our lot in the world of socially recognized art. Occasionally this casting will net life-altering surprises, but more often than not the results will be clipped wings and a grounding back to earth as we peruse the latest filmed, painted, recorded, or printed ‘how-to’ manuals of proper socialization.

And so, as I prepare at least in theory to focus more time and energy on this blog in the upcoming year, I find myself wondering if by masking (even if ineffectively) my more obscure interests with the relatively accessible artifacts of my youth I’m deforming the project into something ineffective on all fronts. ‘Valid Neurosis’ is meant to explore the validity of my neuroses—the alienation, confusion and disorientation I feel when confronted by the social world. At the same time, it claims to concern itself with ‘punk rock and other minutia of the mundane.’ If the blog becomes too comfortable with that minutia, then my neuroses become invalid. Yet if the blog doesn’t report on punk rock in the way that the majority of communicative conduits concerned with punk have deemed appropriate, how does it have anything to do with its alleged focus?

The answer that occurs to me as I write this entry is that the person I am today was molded precisely through the minutia of the mundane—the miniscule yet infinite nothingness of a meaningless suburban existence. Any view of the world I may have, even if it’s a view that looks away from the world in hopes of something better, is inextricably linked to the garbage landscape of 20th/21st century popular culture, and it’s only by delving through this garbage that I might emerge on the other side. Similarly, if my own interpretation of ‘punk’ is as a landing place for the backwards, broken, and wretched casualties of societal absurdity, what could be more ‘punk’ than to fly the flag for a vision of the medium that has little to no bearing on its socially accepted normative description?

I recall coming across a quote from Wayne Kramer once where he was asked for his definition of ‘punk.’ To paraphrase, a punk, he said, is someone who is on the receiving end of sexual intercourse in prison. In a sense, he couldn’t have been more right. While I’m not suggesting anyone be incarcerated or engage in any sort of sexual behavior through social coercion or against their will, the truth is in the spirit of the statement. To be ‘punk’ in my own experience is to be the lowest of the low, nothing, a nobody, powerless and without even the illusion that most folks have of control. Not only is it to be this, but, in my case, it’s to revel in it, and in all of this nothingness to find something.

That being said, Valid Neurosis will continue to lurch along the way it’s been lurching, hopefully with more entries, sometimes pontificating on about the most esoteric nonsense, other times throwing up the briefest blurbs about the most mundane trash, but always as a beacon in the dark searching for similarly lost souls.

I’ll never be a professional artist. Even if I wanted to, I don’t have the requisite talent, ability, or know-how to make it happen, so there’s no concern on that front. In fact, I loathe the creative process. Some people who write actually enjoy language. To me, language is nothing but a barrier between what I want to express and what appears on the page. I hate it. But still, out of all this fear, all this loathing, I sometimes hear a slippery whisper of meaning. I want to try and share what little I think I’ve heard, and I hope to hear tell of the whispers coming from others around me.

** A year later I ended up taking the music focus out of the blog subtitle entirely. Listen to less music. Watch more professional wrestling!

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