insofar as it acts as the arbiter of sanity and the proprietor of the illusion that is “being normal”, pop psychology can go piss up a rope. i often say to astrid things like: fuck you’re a strange creature. she usually protests in this little voice: no i’m not, i’m normal and i always say bullshit, if you were normal i would leave you in a second. and i would. normal is dead boring (as opposed to the alive boring, which is fantastic).
now this is not to say that there isn’t a real psychological dimension to obsessive record collecting and, of course, any kind of obsessive tendency is complexly involved in deep issues of the psyche (and a psyche is always in a body). the problem with the pop psychologising of record collecting is that by being such a stigma – social retards, misfits, etc – it misses the fundamental issue, and that is: people need something to do to keep going on. if we put cultural stigma aside, what is the essential difference between the endless accumulation of records and the endless accumulation of wealth and property? profit and property are obsessions on a mass culture scale, with much farther reaching consequences than lonely men with houses made from vinyl foundations.
of course, the real issue here is unhappiness. and if the obsessive acts that people fill up their lives with seem a thin veneer to the unhappiness beneath, still it does not change the role that act plays in filling in the present. as my friend fred says: to fill your present with words and ideas. or as jackson mac low, one of my all time favourite poets, said: something to do – with great gratitude – otherwise than. people seem to need projects, or dreams, or narratives, to give their life a structure in which meaning exists, in which the passage of time can be dealt with. simply put: people are like the music they love, skeletons that desire to be filled with the world for more than a fleeting instant.
this need for a continuous project is brilliantly captured by the american talk poet david antin, in his piece living and dying. the reciprocal talk poem to living and dying, dying and living, also contains that umberto eco quote i mentioned in class: ‘generalisations are not a sign of strength of thought but of weakness of discourse’. and pop psychology is full of poor general ideas, a crucial weakness which inhibits it from seeing the experience of life as – in antin’s terms – concrete and singular.
