Well, I just send a couple of replies to your and Alison's earlier postings on this thread, and this new one comes in! and it's interesting! and so true about the black holes, though I think this can happen in all sorts of people, not just celebrities. It's too late here, but I'll hope to spend more time with your thoughts later,

Best,

Rebecca
-------Original Message-------
From: Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 04/22/03 03:51 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: More queer Australian landscape

>
> People are complex. That's what I said when I first sat down to write
the characters in _Swindle_. Instead of plunging into the already
complex relations and the (invented) impossibility of immediately
presenting people as fully formed complex subjects I decided to start
with a single stranger that met another stranger until I had a complex
mixture of characters all with varying degrees of strangeness or
unknowns in terms of the relations between characters. What I really
enjoy writing is the the growing friendships between now nine characters
and an infant who is going through teething and later just beginning to
sleep through the night. The characters can get to know each other in a
way friends get to know each other.

I am just now starting to get to characters which are not nice and am
thinking of presenting them as media personae or masks. The sort of
characters that are like blackholes which suck people into them, like it
or not. Just beginning to get a feel for this but what is really helping
is a reverse perspective on what it is like to be a public personae. The
way you sort of get treated as public property which is sort of like a
nothingness which attracts and the public can do what they like with
you. The audience which may have seen your face on TV or giving a speech
or even attaching your name and face to published writing seems to have
a need to see if you are really real, or something like that, to add to
the complexity. You can start, perhaps, to feel like you are some sort
of egocentric walking talking blackhole without any personal space or
privacy, and the way I handled that was by guarding my private life. But
even that can get threatened. For example, I was recommended a doctor
who was a stranger to me but as soon as I sat down he already knew who I
was. This attention to a public personae is not always friendly, either.
Even the friendly approaches started to frighten me, although these
people were kind enough to understand that saying something like I saw
you on TV is not a good opening line and left me alone. I will admit
that this affects my writing and being told I will have little trouble
finding a publisher is not always a good feeling, nice as the compliment
may be. The public aspects attached to being published can make writing
a dread. Try to push that awful publishing date as far away as you can
because you already know what happens afterward. back to being public
property. This may sound like a personal comment but it is far from
transgressing my personal boundaries. I am also speaking indirectly for
a lot of public personae I have known and been friends with. Naming
those would cross the boundaries. I also learnt from one of these
friends, like when walking down the street and over a dozen people would
wave at them over 50 metres or so, they just smile and wave back and
keep on walking. A sort of body language that marks out private space. I
can now begin to think of some ways public personae also may have a
totalitarian impulse attached to them, after writing this.

I am a nervous and shy person, despite some of the bombastic personae
which may land and perform on this list. This marks a sort of what is
publicly okay, since I am setting limits in doing this. This list, at
least in part, is a public working writers list, so writers with up to a
dozen or more personae living in a dozen and more dimensions are going
to be contributing, at least in some way. Also, a diverse range of
aesthetics and styles along with often difficult to nut out problems.
The value of this is a type of collective intelligence which is why I
try, although don't always succeed as much as I would wish, to work out
from what angle a discussion or question is coming from. That is the
time problem. How much time can be spent on doing this also transgresses
on your time and other tasks. But anyway, this is distracting me from
reading Patrick White, although the thinking that can take off from this
response is useful in nutting out some more of my characters bouncing
around as personae in my head. Maybe, these comments have another use
for someone else. It really doesn't worry me if they are of little or no
use either, of course.

best wishes

Chris Jones.

On Mon, 2003-04-21 at 20:49, Alison Croggon wrote:

>
> This articulates a space in which I uneasily find myself.  To that
> I'd like to add, too, a concern which devolves crucially upon the
> individual relationships between individual human beings, with all
> the complications that relationship to other(s) give rise to: all the
> difficult battlings with the distortions of the projecting ego, the
> understanding of limitations, the untangling of conditionings and
> other external impositions, the giving over of infantile egocentric
> godliness to a modest and generous sense of mutual mortality, and
> everything else that seems to be so intimately involved in the
> on-going evolution of a self in its world.
>
> I understand the problems with individualism, but at the same time
> all forms of totalitarianism stem from the denial of the rights of an
> individual entity to existence, in favour of the over-arching reality
> of a state or a statist ideology.  I am no doubt betraying here my
> ingrained Westernism; I would never make an awfully good Hindu.
> However, against the hubris of individuality I would want to poise
> the permeability of the self, as a complex and fluid and temporal
> entity.   I feel like I'm shorthanding woefully here...
>
> It's been a while since I've been on a White binge.  But he is
> terribly distracting.
>
> Best
>
> A
> --
>
>
> Alison Croggon
> Editor
> Masthead Online
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