Final Draft of An Open Collection of Thoughts

Jenny Ijoma

Nolan Chessman

GS-UY 102 D

6 August 2015

An Open Collection of Thoughts

            There is confusion in choice. The difference between one story and another is the explicit ending; the tell of a tale is how articulately the story is formed, how masterfully its conclusion is spun, like a silk web, waiting to be found. Time and again, what is assumed to occur, is different from what actually does occur; the disappointment ensued from such a bittersweet realization is often hard to fathom, to stomach, like the journey to somewhere new.

The man that climbs down these steps into the oblivion that is the burrowed subway has a goal in mind. He descends, quickly, seemingly fluid in motion, as he navigates between the estranged persons tumbling around him, from the grotesque stares and disturbing lurches at him, the clutches. Why bother to be consumed, bothered, by the faces around you? There is no value, no point, in memorizing an entity that doesn’t smile. So, in this stream of consciousness, the man boards the open doors bestowed upon him, jostled to the middle of the car by fellows more entitled than he, and soon enters the semblance of normality. Normality. Customariness. Familiarity. And his destination? As soon as he stumbles from the crevices of deep thought, he’ll have missed his stop; time to retrace his steps.

Malcolm Gladwell in the essay The Art of Failure elaborates this conventional disappointment, the denotation of an established win that’s arbitrarily highlighted by loss. To shed some light on this, take into consideration the absence of thought. Whereas a step-by-step guide detailing the twists and turns to get from point A to point B may prove useful in some sense of the word, “human beings... falter under pressure” so much to the point that when equipped with the tools to withstand any and all form of failure, submit to said failure, unexpectedly (Gladwell). Take the magnifying glass closer. What is failure if it is personified by the varying perspectives around a person? What is it if it differs from person to person?

For this reason, it can be viewed as an attempt, and righteously so. To fumble, to mess up, are all synonyms of failure, sugar coated for the more sensitive to hearing. Despite the faltering escape from such a mundane event, one must come into the thinking that this is a reality that encompasses all people. I screw up, I miss deadlines, I slip upstairs, and I fall, fanatically imagining it was a fabulous fail, but most definitely an embarrassment to all involved. My mindset? I aim for perfection, I lay in wake for the next opportunity to do better than the last time, better than my better, but perfection, like failure, is relative to every entity involved and “the distinction between these two states is critical”, like choking and panicking, and it creates an almost irrefutable, ironic disparity, that while the two could be polar opposites, the degree of difference is almost laughable (Gladwell).

This idealistic perfection is unreachable and creates a large topic of concern, for when our choices are consumed for an impossible end goal, that goal slowly but surely becomes invisible. We can take this form of unattainable perfection and pine it under a warmer light. In Jonathon Franzen’s essay Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts there is a clear focus on what such a fanatical perfection will give the user; any attempt to subjugate another person to a watered down form of empathy, commonly referred to as love, is a distorted idea, when in fact the watered down substance you then produce is the self-induced “like” embodied within “a person defined by a desperation to be liked”, lacking “integrity…, a center” (Franzen). This perfection is “less of a victory” when compared to true, daunting effort that failures, that flaws ensue (Gladwell). If our unreliable success is from the impeding need to be perfect, then our failure should therefore be a catalyst of acceptance for our imperfection.

The film The Five Obstructions, directed by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, pillars this belief, as time and time again a single piece of work is ripped and torn at to be turned into something different but almost equally fervent. What is an idea if not a string of thoughts that are seemingly coherent? And if a thought is mutated in a way, turned blue to the air of change, what would one make of the idea? Is it different, its inner workings holding the skeleton of something strange, or is it the same, because essentially the colours were never a cause of concern for the thinker?  The work recreated is the film The Perfect Man but its essence stays the same; the idea is that no matter how bountifully profitable something can be, its essence can remain in whatever is derived from it, no matter if that work is redone with different people, different places, or different equipment. An idea is mine whether it is colourized, cut and paste, laughed at, or ignored; it bares my name, my fruition, and any and all apparently evident creativity nestled within the burrows of my mind.

And this creativity is a pawn. In the essay Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle, this creativity is marked by an excursion from the beauty of the hummingbird, its magnificent abilities and star potential, to the realization of something much more sublime, something so grotesquely and beautifully human. Despite age giving our minds time to grieve on the truth inkling within our cores the knowledge that “all hearts [even ours]… are bruised and scarred”, afraid to feel for fear of lack acknowledgement (Doyle). This, is the gateway to self-destruction because from the fear to bear our weakest selves, our hearts, brings resentment, no better shown than on our faces, for if I have to lie to another how collected I am for them to better accept who I am then it shows “[I’ve] been despaired of being loved for who [I] truly [am]”, a person capable of so much more than being a face on a screen (Franzen). For who am I but just another person fully capable of the same failures as the person to the side of me, another face on this screen, each perfectly imperfect in all the same, odd ways.

When we compare ourselves, each despairingly different, we collect the similarities we find amusing, the features we wish to highlight upon in a new entity, this we call perfection. In walks an entity possessing fewer blemishes than what another has; jealousy is produced. From the get-go, we are creatures of habits, stalking our prey, watching their ways, pouncing when opportunity arises, often breaking the bounds we create to protect ourselves in order to get to something greater. The times settle in of the occasions in which I found myself dreading the frown that would sit in my face as I peered at what new picture the mirror would show next. I would jab my fingers into my cheeks and push upwards, tricking my mind into the few milliseconds of delight that would make a clown weep. I can physically feel jealousy, compare me to the creatures in heeled feet the stalk the streets like the falcons of the sky. I can emotionally feel jealousy, stray away from the petite, the beautiful, but compare me to living gazelles, their beautiful two toned coats, far more richer, in perspective, than me.

If jealousy is the product from the obvious and outrageous failure to achieve unreachable perfection, then there should not be much a surprise when it arises; jealousy is a poignant being that lives on the irrefutable belief that a person can attain anything they wish to attain when that isn’t possible. So much time is wasted for the heart to simply to be hit and start crumbling down “in an instant” when in the time it spent saving “its heartbeats” for the perfect opportunity to open itself, it could have realized it was no better off than any other part made entirely of flesh, pumping within (Doyle). There is far too much disparity in the augmented perfection in the sky and its success and the lesser inadequacy along the stones we walk along and its unsatisfactory failure.

We shouldn’t hold our hands up for the ball that won’t come. If there is truth to Gladwell’s and Franzen's words, then the beauty we wholeheartedly look for within ourselves comes from the mistakes that we make, the unapparent journey to the finish line waiting for us to cross; there is this existential route in which we embark in order to find something we like about ourselves, that I love about myself, and it’s one that is more than profitable, that although there is no perfect answer to this, there is an acceptable one. There are a motley of different crossings and passes we can make, but the track is circular, its finite, and it’ll be crossed one way or another, with your knowledge or without. Take in stride the beauty found within the journeys― all the new things you’ll see.

Works Cited

Doyle, Brian. "Joyas Voladoras." Joyas Voladoras. The American Scholar, 12 June 2012. 
          Web. 2 Aug. 2015.

Franzen, Jonathan. "Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts." The New York Times. The 
          New York Times, 28 May 2011. Web. 2 Aug. 2015.

Gladwell, Malcolm. "The Art of Failure." Gladwell.com. Gladwell.com, 21 Aug. 2000. 
          Web. 2 Aug. 2015.

The Five Obstructions. Koch Vision Entertainment, 2003. Film.