Some thoughts of self-awareness

You can run yourself ragged with self-awareness. It seems lke self-awareness is the necessary condition, an obligation, for all cultural prodcution now. and its exhuasting, to try and anticipate all criticisms, reactions, and thoughts and them off by demonstrating your thoughtful awareness of yourself. This is why deeply sincere things, cultural products of earlier times, seem so attractive to me, I think. There are those who are blissfully un-self-aware. Often, we make fun of those people, laughing at their ideas and feeling alright for doing so because they surely won't even be aware of themselves enough to notice we are laughing at them. Like this man on the Little Grey Book lecture series who owns a presidential museum in Ohio and who claims that George Washington was not the first president, among other things, with illogical, self-aggrandizing committment. The audience laughes at all his direct quotes - they are indeed, laughable, implausible or impossible arguments, far-fetched and amazing propositions, all filtered through a supremely un-self-aware personality. It's easy to LIKE this man, for all his obviously misguided notions, in fact, they make him endearing, but only in so far as he is unaware of how ridiculous they sound. He is piteous more than respectable. But we really only like him because he is funny to us, the audience. There are those who deeply and earnestly beleive in something, who have no patience or maybe even lack the sense of humor to make fun of themselves, and do not elicit laughter, like (here is comes. . . .) Carl Sagan. His "cosmos" seem to be a product of an earlier time when you could be serious without the need to acknowledge the irony of what you were doing. I love traveling to his place, via pixellated youtube clips, because, as soon as I got over the slightly cheesy graphics, the outdated and therefore kind o fhumorous musical scores and the occassional bad joke, i realized he had won me over with his overwhelming sincerity. I couldn't laugh at him walking among models of planets anymore once I saw the earnestness with which he was sharing his beleifs to us. I admire this. It is refreshing and endearing and deserving of respect in a very different way than the cold, removed, distant irony of so many cultural products today. I think it is because these videos could so easily fall into ironic appreciation that I love them even more, because they defy you to like them that way. You can try, and get your joke tshirt with carl sagan's head on it, but that just betrays your superficial rleatiosnhip to it all. If you allow yourself to put aside the obligation of hyper-self-awareness, you can see something very lovely and true unfolding, or at least that's how I see it. And that's the place where I'd like to be.