“Indulge me, Warren. It’s all I ever want.”
Once upon a time I fell in love with a movie called A Life Less Ordinary, featuring an up-and-coming Cameron Diaz (still obviously getting acting coaching) and Ewan McGregor (first class actor and obscure dreamboat). It was a quirky, semi-independent movie that I imagine went swiftly to VHS. To summarize, a spoiled brat assists her kidnapper in his naïve attempt at extorting her own father. There was something about the way Cameron uttered this line about indulgence, said with a childish irritability unsuitable for most polite conversation but entirely true to her character and, it seems, entirely true to my own.
It has come to my attention recently that I am purportedly self-indulgent. This is a claim launched by just one singular, very vocal faceless person and a claim that I was quite resistant to at first. “Self-indulgent?!” I thought, “Who the hell is he to call me self-indulgent?! I am not self indulgent…” The tirade continued on in my head for as long as I could reasonably allow until I realized I should simply embrace the title. After all, most of the people I admire are entirely self-indulgent. I would like to think that this is the place from which great things materialize, and others are thus benefited in a Republican trickle down effect.
The heady interpretation that my writing is done entirely to service my own needs struck me as inaccurate. In a way, it is. But then I began to think about, well, pretty much everything that happens in this world evolves from utter self-indulgence – religion, art, various dogmas. I came to the conclusion that everyone is self-indulgent, and if not, they should be.
To not tap into one’s own desires and passions is to go the way of egregious masochism. I can assure you, the former is much better than the latter. Even Mother Theresa indulged in some unerring passion of her own: helping other people. Though the outcome of this woman’s actions extended beyond the very definition of “good”, at the end of the day Mother Theresa as just as indulgent as the rest of us. Some like heroin; Mother Theresa was hooked on do-gooding.
“Daddy, I want an Oompa Loompa noooowwwwwww.”
She was an obnoxious girl, that Veruca Salt. I hated her even as a child. She was my least favorite character featured in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Even the fat blonde boy was more appealing in personality, and I don’t remember him doing anything but slobbering on a lollipop and grunting while digging his hands around in mushrooms made of frosting. Veruca Salt was bossy, precocious, and everything I was trained from a young age to not be and to subsequently abhor in others.
I never tugged at my father’s sleeve demanding anything, let alone an orange colored little person wearing OshKosh B’Gosh. The reason her brash and commanding nature turned me off was mostly because I was secretly jealous that I was not allowed to behave that way without getting put in the corner of the dining room for a lengthy time out.
Despite the fact that Veruca’s demise would be a bumpy ride down a trash chute into what was presumably an incinerator, I really think she had the right idea: immediate gratification. It’s essentially what every investment banker and corporate leader has been doing up until the end of 2008. Similar to Veruca, those people bought a special place in hell when they singlehandedly destroyed this country for 18,000 square foot houses, private planes, and yacht rides around the south of France. These people were the ultimate personification of self-indulgence. Veruca Salt incarnate. I would imagine they had fun.
At the end of the day, we all just disappear into nothingness. Most of us will not make a marked impact on the world. The legacy we leave behind will merely be a forty-by-forty square foot compacted cube of rubbish occupying a landfill somewhere. We will not grow up and be politicians, we will not invent a civilization altering technology. The best we can hope for is to live whatever silly little life that we have and to enjoy it optimally. So I guess what my lesson here is: indulge yourself. Live your damn life. Go see bad movies. Eat Ben & Jerry’s. Get fat. Whatever. And for my part, I will continue to write about whatever I want, no matter what anybody thinks because, well, why not.
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If this is in reference to me, I think you really missed my point.
I don’t care if you eat Ben & Jerry’s, go see bad movies, or take yacht rides around the South of France.
Unlike eating Ben & Jerry’s alone in your apartment, writing is a dance that is supposed to involve two – a writer and someone you’re writing for. I didn’t mean the self-indulgence as a meta-criticism about your entire life, but that it detracts significantly from the quality of the pieces you’ve published here.
Rather than continue on a long and mean rant, I googled “self-indulgent writing”:
“Another breeding ground for self-indulgent writing is the assumption that everything you feel, everything you see, and every ‘insight’ you have must be brilliant because they seem so to you — and that the significance of everything you say must be just as obvious to the reader as it is to you.”
That’s a decent summary of your story about the shoes.
Sheesh, with Netflix instant and some work here and there who has time to read writers they loathe besides Hitchens. Everything, including assuming the world needs more people that look like you and then having kids is self indulgent (forget for a second that the over pop. scare has gone away), maybe even more so than blogging, stories full of personal insights, or commenting. “Well NOBODY is as great as he thinks he is!” -Russel Brand, and everybody is more self indulgent than they think they are, um duh – ME.
On the self-indulgence front, at least as that applies to writing…
Most of my nonfiction writing involves me (Paul, the guy writing) as the subject, either directly – because it’s a story about me – or indirectly – because I want to relate whatever it is I’m writing about to my own experience. In this way, writing is then a therapeutic exercise; I’m trying to understand my place in the world and all that.
I think most ~creative~ writing is like this.
As it turns out, some peoples’ writing is entertaining/enlightening/helpful to others. If that is the case, it is deemed “good”.
Thus – and this is only my opinion – lots of writing (of the creative nonfiction variety) is concentrated on ’self’. But not all of it is good or relatable. I happen to think that Jenny’s is good/relatable, just as I think that about the writing of everyone on my site. But not everyone will agree. Whether lots of people agree will be what determines if we (individually – not as a group) make it as writers. Time will tell.
Fazer,
Unlike yourself, I opt to not waste time reading things I find I don’t enjoy. Please feel free to keep babbling away on this, but know I have ceased actually reading them. This is not because I can’t take criticism (because I can) but yours does not qualify as such as is therefore irrelevant. That is all.
Fazer –
As much as I hate to feed the troll – what is your deal?
“This is not because I can’t take criticism (because I can) but yours does not qualify as such as is therefore irrelevant.”
Why doesn’t it “qualify as such?”
Jenny- There is one thing I have learned in my years being critiqued and slaughtered in comments sections on various sights; Don’t respond. You can’t win. Don’t even try. Just keep doing what you are doing.
“the writer and who they are writing for”
This is just a poor statement. It presumes that there is an intended audience, when it could simply be writing for the sake of writing. Yes it’s posted on the internet, but that could be from a desire to have certain pieces seen, and they are all posted for the sake of a chronology of development, or a timeline of ideas. Not all writing has an audience. I just think that’s a bit of a reach.
The relationship between writer and reader is complicated. Roland Barthes separated documents from people by defining “Texts” and “Contexts.”
A text is the objective fact of a document, in the case of writing, it literally refers to the text of what is written.
Context is then the subjective experience of the text by an individual. Each person has their own history and mental makeup that informs how they experience the text.
So if someone writes a story about a seasdie east coast town and I read it as someone from a seaside west coast town, my Context will be different than someone raised in the town the story was about. Its unavoidable. We all experience everything based upon out past and makeup.
The tricky thing is that the authors have their own context in relation to the text. If you lived in a town you are writing about, you have all sorts of emotional connections and background knowledge tthat your reader won’t have. Even if they live there, if they were from a different generation it will change the experience.
To convey the essence of your subjective experence in text is a difficult task. You must abstract your experience to its necessary components, then imagine how the text will interact with people you’ve never been before. It is easy to go awry.
As a result, of these intricate relationships, its safe to say it is impossible to write something outside of your own experience. Therefor everything written is to some extent an expression of yourself, the writer. Within that usually lies the motivation for writing.
However, the reader most likely reads as an extension of THEMSELVES also. They look for themes they can relate to or subjects that interest them.
Succesful writers know this and keep both their own motivations and those of their readers in mind. Are you making it worth their while to take the time to read what you write. Are you expressing your intents in the manner most conducive to others understanding it?
Self indulgence often doesn’t effect this equation, provided the indulgences in question inform the reader. Proust and Joyce may have been the most indulgent writers ever, but they are still appreciated today because the quality of their indulgences. However, the writer-reader relationship is deep and important, and if one truly wishes to communicate, they must keep both sides in mind
I’ve never read anything by you before this piece, but I will in future because of it. Not just because of your intelligent and creative use of words, but because you make a good point. I want to read things that make me think – about the person writing whom I don’t know at all, about my friends I may see in the words, and about myself, whom I invariably see a part of in anything worth reading.
I guess that makes me self-indulgent, as well.
But when I write my blogs, I write from my perspective (obviously) about things that occur to me, and I use words to describe the impact those “things” have had. I think it takes humility to assume that your thoughts might appeal to and be shared by someone else. To assume all your intellect and emotions are unique would be arrogant.
So, please, self-indulge – so I can keep getting something out of what you write.