Rather alarmingly (although you already probably noticed this long, long ago), I’m rediscovering that I’m still quite capable of massive shallowness, as I found out again a couple of weeks ago. I always suspected it, of course, but I rather hoped that I’d grown out of it or was, at least, above such petty-mindedness. You see, keeping up with writing my daily observations on the vagaries and ridiculousness of life was getting harder and harder to do, and I’d started to wonder whether there was much point to continuing with doing it at all, and, if so, whether I was actually doing enough by myself to promote these meagre witterings and so I started to think about what I could do in order to get a few more people to read them.
I know it shouldn’t, but occasionally these things start to bother me. It’s that whole ‘collossal waste of time and effort’ argument that I’m sure I’ve touched upon plenty of times before.
So, with a view towards addressing this matter, I did a probably not at all interesting experiment a few days ago. I wanted to see if there actually were any ways that I could get these small notes from my tiny little world a slightly bigger audience and so, on one of those mornings where I’d written what I thought was one of my better pieces (it does happen, you know…) I thought “Why not?” and clicked onto every sharing option I could find.
It didn’t make one tiny jot of difference.
I flit my way through this life and touch so very few lives that it shouldn’t really have surprised me, but that’s the way it is and I should just learn to accept it. Then, in a massive leap of ridiculous and reckless optimism, I thought that I might try something else and decided to ‘Twit’ a link to the piece I rather liked directly to the person who featured in it, justifying such a thing to myself, I thought, by the fact that I’d rather confess to authorship of such a thing ‘in person’ so to speak, and point out the intended affection behind it, rather than have it forwarded on by someone else and risk litigious ire at some future date, forgetting completely, of course, that hardly anyone had actually even noticed that I had written the thing.
You see, I was brought up properly, you know. I was taught that, if you are going to instigate a little gentle mockery of someone, you should never do it behind that person’s back. So, rather rashly, and with more than a little fear, I ‘Twitted’ away, fully intending that, if it should be even read at all and found to be a ‘bad thing’, I would remove it immediately and consign it to the dustbin of history.
I forgot, of course, the instantaneous power of the internet, and before I knew it, the quiet lanes of this dark county of ours were awash with visitors on a sudden unexpected diversion of the coach trip of their day, as there was this sudden surge of interest and my moment of humble mockery got looked at by more people than had ever looked at anything else I’d ever written before, ever.
This was, of course, nothing to do with anything special that I had done.
The rather brilliant young scientist that I had referred to in that post, however, was altogether another matter, for he has his admirers who hang upon his every word and, because there was a single moment when the light of his genius shone slightly in this unlikely direction, these humble mutterings and musings here in Lesser Blogfordshire were suddenly subjected to slightly more than their usual attention. Now, I'm not talking about millions here, you understand, just a more (literally) spartan figure of about 300. I suppose that I should be flattered by this. Recently, things like the so-called ‘House that looks like Hitler’ and ‘The Worst Song in the World’ have proved that the only way to create a true ‘Internet Sensation’ is to be truly dreadful, so maybe I’m just not doing things badly enough... (Although, when it comes to matters of a dreadful nature, there is my poetry to consider...). Of course, the much harder lesson to learn was that I am almost certain that very few of these visitors were really all that interested in what I had to say, they were merely looking in the same direction that their idol had so briefly looked in and wondering what it was that he saw there.
Still, I’ve learned my lesson now. Such blatant tarting on my part will, almost certainly never, ever happen again, but sometimes I can be hopelessly naïve about such things. Of course, someone of a more unforgiving nature (like me, for example…) might just interpret this as blatant media whoring on my part, or hanging onto the coat-tails of celebrity for my own self-aggrandisement, and I’m completely sure that maybe less that 10% of those visitors actually read the blooming thing, but it was rather troubling to discover how ever-so-slightly excited I got from this feeling that something I had written had finally been noticed by a slightly larger chunk of the big wide world out there and had garnered more than its fair share of interest, and that’s rather an odd thing to discover about yourself at my great age. Having spent much of my little life shunning the limelight I always thought that I’d hate it if it was to shine (however dimly) upon me and I was truly surprised to find that I actually didn’t mind it that much at all, despite the genuine fear that gripped me at the time when the phenomenon that was occurring first became apparent to me.
Why this should be, however remains obscure and is possibly more complicated than it might at first appear. I may very well ponder further upon this and report about it again another day. However, there’s a moment in “Twelve Angry Men” that springs to mind about this very subject, where there is a discussion about the eyeglasses that a witness may, or may not wear. It’s quite a crucial scene in turning the jury from one opinion to the other, and part of the argument comes down to a witness suddenly becoming the centre of attention and the feelings of pride and self-consciousness that this might engender to make them choose not to wear their glasses in public.
Arthur Miller understood this desperation and desire to just occasionally be noticed and paid some attention to, and put it so very well in “Death of a Salesman”, his savage indictment of the American dream that I couldn’t begin to attempt to improve upon it: “I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”
Since all this happened, of course, and like Icarus flying too close to the sun, I have come tumbling back down to earth and, almost as if the world in general has a finely tuned extra sense for this kind of showboating and can instinctively see it for what it was, those numbers have now plummeted back down to a level where they can barely manage double figures most days.
I'm sure most of us crave a certain amount of attention. It is nothing to be ashamed of. If I'm honest, one of the biggest frustrations of being unemployed is the absence of a captive audience for my pointless ramblings.
ReplyDelete