0hMan
germano-gaelic gaunche - modcel
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A man swiping through Tinder can give rein, one after another, to several of the different men that are in him: the laughing man, the lusting man, the thinking man; and inside the "thinking man" there is also a man who weeps.
The laughing man. Verily, he will laugh himself sick. The high opinion most of these poor creatures have of themselves. The importance they attach to their blond hair, to their sickeningly liberal political views, their going to therapy, etc. And of course, what is more important to these ladies than the regulation height of the gentlemen? The "expectations" of the young ladies - and what expectations! An inexhaustible mine of absurdity.
When the laughing man has had a good laugh and a good sneer, etc. ... to the point of thinking, if he is a bit sour: "Let's have a nice little war to clean up all this bullshit" (although it's true, adds this deplorable man, that one of the horrors of war, to which attention is never sufficiently drawn, is that women are spared) - when the laughing man has had a good laugh, he turns the switch and the lusting man appears. The man who cannot read "Foid, 19" without a quiver of excitement.
Behind each of these profiles a face, a body, an unknown something which, after all, may well be a heart. Behind these pixels, perhaps a hundred and fifty living women, living at this very moment, each of whom wants a man - and why not me? - each of whom, since she is there, is ready for adventure, legal or illegal (the legal being a thousand times worse than the other), each of whom has reached such a pitch of deprivation that she is ready to offer herself to the first comer. The men on dating apps (mostly third worlders), for their part, demand "large fortunes". We read this, for instance: "I wish meet young pretty woman with large fortune view marriage." Full stop. You: young, pretty, with large fortune. Me ... well, me, 'a gentleman': aren't you satisfied? Most of the women do at least specify 'gentleman with job' - bed and board. The bed first. And what more natural, what more respect-worthy than this demand? 'You don't feel poverty any more when you're under a blanket', as a homeless man once rather splendidly observed and relayed to me. (Sometimes you feel a different sort of poverty, but that's another matter.)
The lecherous and lustful man, darting his eyes through these pixels on his screen, sees them pulsating as the sea pulsates, swarming as the Roman arena swarmed when the beasts were let loose in it. There are too many of them, and he loses heart - like the art-lover confronted with two thousand pieces in a museum. A herd of women enclosed in the arena. Menacing as the beasts of the arena, and yet, like them, most likely less than half innocent and, yet, defenceless: all victims, even the worst. It is simply a matter of shooting an arrow into the heap. Brutes, cads, third worlders and perverts, swindlers and blackmailers, all the archers are up there choosing their prey. Every kind of threat against the race of woman. Extremes of candour and baseness, deceptions, disappointments, all the social dramas, even happiness, simmer in the witches' cauldron of a (quite gynocratic) dating app. Absurdity and pathos too, as in everything that has to do with life - and this is life itself, a microcosm of life.
As for the thinking man, he sees this matriarchal dating app, so ridiculous from one point of view, as an extremely valuable piece of social machinery.
One often hears people say to each other: "You should go to the *insert name here*'s. You'll make a lot of social connections there." I recall the remark of the old aristocratic lady who, on her death-bed, pestered no doubt by tiresome visitors, left her grand-children with something along the lines of this final word of advice: "Above all, avoid social connections."
And yet, after this initial reaction, one is struck by all the misfortunes engendered by the lack of connections. It seems a trite thing to say; but in fact it is less widely realized than one might think. One is struck by the vast number of agreeable things people lack simply because they have not known which door to knock at. And it is surely tragic to think of those doors simply waiting to be opened on to gardens of Eden which remained closed because people passed them by.
The people who wait all their lives for the one person who was made for them - who always exists - and who die without having met that person: the men who fail to find an outlet for their abilities and waste their lives in inferior jobs: the girls who remain unmarried when they could have made a man happy as well as themselves: the people who sink ever deeper into penury when there are charitable organizations which might have been expressly created for them; and all this because none of them happened to know of this person, that organization, that vacancy - it is a problem that can haunt one.
And it applies to small things as well as big. There is the book, song, or movie, or any form of media, really, which, at a particular moment, might have raised your spirits, but which you did not know about. There is the place that would have made the perfect setting for your first date, the treatment that would have cured your illness, the scheme that would have enabled you to gain time. They were all there waiting for you, but no one pointed them out to you because you had too few connections. The promised land is all around you, and you do not know it - like a wasp trying to get out of a room, endlessly beating and buzzing against the window- pane although the window is ajar a few inches away. A man is thrown into the water with his wrists tied, and no one has taught him the knack of freeing himself - yet such a knack exists.
This counterpoint of offers and appeals resembles the flight of birds criss-crossing in the vastness of space until at last some of them meet and they fly off two by two. A family friend once told me that his father, a soldier abroad, would have liked to see in every town "a certain place appointed, to which those who needed anything could betake themselves. Such a one desires company for a journey to Paris. Another requires a servant of a certain quality. Yet another a master, etc …" And he cites the example of two "most excellent persons" (perhaps Tesla and another, he did not specify whom) who died in penury and who would have been succoured if their sad plight had been known. Truly, the man who first thought of using an open internet forum (I am using the term forum here as separate from the like of an "internet forum" like this), and its precursor, the Gazette to help people find what they seek should have a statue erected in his honour. Anything designed to bring people together deserves encouragement, even when they are brought together for sentimental ends, with all the silliness and triviality that implies.
The old lady who enjoined her family with fierce pride, 'Above all, avoid connections', was condemning anyone who took her at her word to all the miseries of non-fulfilment - of soul as well as body - and an agonizing regret for all that could have been theirs for the asking, but which eluded them. Turning in on oneself is bad for all except strong and exceptional natures, and even then only on condition that it is relative and not continuous. Others pay dearly for it. One cannot shut oneself up in one's room with impunity. One cannot live on oneself alone with impunity. One cannot send one's fellow-creatures 'packing' with impunity. And it is right that this should be so, since turning in on oneself - unless it is dictated by high intellectual or spiritual motives - is more often than not the result of idleness, egotism, impotence, in short that 'fear of living' which has not yet been sufficiently recognized as one of the major evils that afflict humanity.
When the laughing man has had a good laugh and a good sneer, etc. ... to the point of thinking, if he is a bit sour: "Let's have a nice little war to clean up all this bullshit" (although it's true, adds this deplorable man, that one of the horrors of war, to which attention is never sufficiently drawn, is that women are spared) - when the laughing man has had a good laugh, he turns the switch and the lusting man appears. The man who cannot read "Foid, 19" without a quiver of excitement.
Behind each of these profiles a face, a body, an unknown something which, after all, may well be a heart. Behind these pixels, perhaps a hundred and fifty living women, living at this very moment, each of whom wants a man - and why not me? - each of whom, since she is there, is ready for adventure, legal or illegal (the legal being a thousand times worse than the other), each of whom has reached such a pitch of deprivation that she is ready to offer herself to the first comer. The men on dating apps (mostly third worlders), for their part, demand "large fortunes". We read this, for instance: "I wish meet young pretty woman with large fortune view marriage." Full stop. You: young, pretty, with large fortune. Me ... well, me, 'a gentleman': aren't you satisfied? Most of the women do at least specify 'gentleman with job' - bed and board. The bed first. And what more natural, what more respect-worthy than this demand? 'You don't feel poverty any more when you're under a blanket', as a homeless man once rather splendidly observed and relayed to me. (Sometimes you feel a different sort of poverty, but that's another matter.)
The lecherous and lustful man, darting his eyes through these pixels on his screen, sees them pulsating as the sea pulsates, swarming as the Roman arena swarmed when the beasts were let loose in it. There are too many of them, and he loses heart - like the art-lover confronted with two thousand pieces in a museum. A herd of women enclosed in the arena. Menacing as the beasts of the arena, and yet, like them, most likely less than half innocent and, yet, defenceless: all victims, even the worst. It is simply a matter of shooting an arrow into the heap. Brutes, cads, third worlders and perverts, swindlers and blackmailers, all the archers are up there choosing their prey. Every kind of threat against the race of woman. Extremes of candour and baseness, deceptions, disappointments, all the social dramas, even happiness, simmer in the witches' cauldron of a (quite gynocratic) dating app. Absurdity and pathos too, as in everything that has to do with life - and this is life itself, a microcosm of life.
As for the thinking man, he sees this matriarchal dating app, so ridiculous from one point of view, as an extremely valuable piece of social machinery.
One often hears people say to each other: "You should go to the *insert name here*'s. You'll make a lot of social connections there." I recall the remark of the old aristocratic lady who, on her death-bed, pestered no doubt by tiresome visitors, left her grand-children with something along the lines of this final word of advice: "Above all, avoid social connections."
And yet, after this initial reaction, one is struck by all the misfortunes engendered by the lack of connections. It seems a trite thing to say; but in fact it is less widely realized than one might think. One is struck by the vast number of agreeable things people lack simply because they have not known which door to knock at. And it is surely tragic to think of those doors simply waiting to be opened on to gardens of Eden which remained closed because people passed them by.
The people who wait all their lives for the one person who was made for them - who always exists - and who die without having met that person: the men who fail to find an outlet for their abilities and waste their lives in inferior jobs: the girls who remain unmarried when they could have made a man happy as well as themselves: the people who sink ever deeper into penury when there are charitable organizations which might have been expressly created for them; and all this because none of them happened to know of this person, that organization, that vacancy - it is a problem that can haunt one.
And it applies to small things as well as big. There is the book, song, or movie, or any form of media, really, which, at a particular moment, might have raised your spirits, but which you did not know about. There is the place that would have made the perfect setting for your first date, the treatment that would have cured your illness, the scheme that would have enabled you to gain time. They were all there waiting for you, but no one pointed them out to you because you had too few connections. The promised land is all around you, and you do not know it - like a wasp trying to get out of a room, endlessly beating and buzzing against the window- pane although the window is ajar a few inches away. A man is thrown into the water with his wrists tied, and no one has taught him the knack of freeing himself - yet such a knack exists.
This counterpoint of offers and appeals resembles the flight of birds criss-crossing in the vastness of space until at last some of them meet and they fly off two by two. A family friend once told me that his father, a soldier abroad, would have liked to see in every town "a certain place appointed, to which those who needed anything could betake themselves. Such a one desires company for a journey to Paris. Another requires a servant of a certain quality. Yet another a master, etc …" And he cites the example of two "most excellent persons" (perhaps Tesla and another, he did not specify whom) who died in penury and who would have been succoured if their sad plight had been known. Truly, the man who first thought of using an open internet forum (I am using the term forum here as separate from the like of an "internet forum" like this), and its precursor, the Gazette to help people find what they seek should have a statue erected in his honour. Anything designed to bring people together deserves encouragement, even when they are brought together for sentimental ends, with all the silliness and triviality that implies.
The old lady who enjoined her family with fierce pride, 'Above all, avoid connections', was condemning anyone who took her at her word to all the miseries of non-fulfilment - of soul as well as body - and an agonizing regret for all that could have been theirs for the asking, but which eluded them. Turning in on oneself is bad for all except strong and exceptional natures, and even then only on condition that it is relative and not continuous. Others pay dearly for it. One cannot shut oneself up in one's room with impunity. One cannot live on oneself alone with impunity. One cannot send one's fellow-creatures 'packing' with impunity. And it is right that this should be so, since turning in on oneself - unless it is dictated by high intellectual or spiritual motives - is more often than not the result of idleness, egotism, impotence, in short that 'fear of living' which has not yet been sufficiently recognized as one of the major evils that afflict humanity.
@HarrierDuBois @BrahminBoss @emeraldglass @Orc @pneumocystosis @gribsufer1 @Sny @Hardrada
