Characters (30 July 2009)

By long and familiar use, sentences become unbreakable--we say things that cannot be taken back; we quote our favorite movies; we talk about "them". Clichés are to us what natal charts were to the astrologer. Just as our character is written in the constellations, so too we call ourselves by what we think we are: normal, sane, chill, jock, artist, dreamer. It is not our fate that is read from our resemblance to the stars but it is this resemblance that makes us worthy of having a fate which, by definition, we cannot know until we are forced to suffer it. And just as our fate is conditioned by character, so too our characters are conditioned by the very descriptions we use, i.e., by the way we are seen as characters: the drama queen, the token minority, the butch one. We cannot know what we are "looking for" without at the same time being able to see ourselves and others as such characters. -- But who writes these characters?