...so I've been drinking coffee since about 9 PM. I used about twice the amount of grounds and a third of the water I should've, but it turned out some good homemade frappe and I've really enjoyed it. Only problem is I felt like my entire body was vibrating on the molecular level for about the first hour or so and now I just can't sleep. Hopefully I can write some of this off and crash soon.
I found a couple things while trolling the web a few days ago that got me thinking and I wanna share it with you guys. The first was an (obviously) edited, non-Watterson Calvin & Hobbes strip that kinda made me die a little inside. I grew up reading Calvin & Hobbes and owe a fairly sizable debt to Bill Watterson for supplying me with a high-brow sense of humor and a fairly sizable vocabulary at a relatively young age. When I was in grade school, my favorite part of the traveling book-fair (do they still have those anymore?) was checking out/begging my parents for the newest C&H collection book on the market. There's a part of me that still draws a lot of joy from those memories, and that part of me gets very defensive about integrity preservation when I see those ridiculous knock-off stickers of Calvin peeing on a Ford symbol or some lame-ass webcomic making up some joke about "grown-up Calvin." Calvin will never have a birthday and Miss Wormwood will always be his teacher. Hobbes will continually be imaginary yet simultaneously (and paradoxically) real. These are unchanging facts of the universe; as fixed as the laws of physics, and equally as reliable.
As I kept surfing, though, I ran across this article, and it forced me to contextualize the Calvin and Hobbes mythos. I would have quit reading halfway through and dismissed the entire affair, had the author not taken such pains to carry the analogy throughout its entirety. When you think about it, the comparison holds because, clinically, Calvin is a paranoid schizophrenic who projects aspects of his own personality onto a stuffed animal. If he were a first-grader in 2010, he would be doped up on some kind of psychotropic drug to "balance him out" and help him focus on his school work. It's a fascinating article and, if you read Calvin & Hobbes at all, it merits checking out. In fact, it merits checking out if for no other reason than the fact that it's what I'm going to spend the rest of this 'blog talking about and I doubt I'll t make any sense to you if you don't.
The article made me want to go buy Fight Club and watch it again (haven't seen it in years), which I did, and I totally get it. The movie is all about developing and changing social constructs for self-worth and identity, which is essentially what Calvin and Hobbes was always about, though with a more colorful, child-like frame of reference. Fight Club is basically what happens when you run the clock forward 25 years to see all these people in their thirties and working through the daily grind of life.
But there's something the article gets wrong and, frankly, I think the movie got wrong, too. In the article, it says that Tyler Durden resurfaces because "Hobbes" got repressed when it was time for Calvin to grow up. It pins the figurative-murder of Hobbes on Calvin's father, since absent/passive fathers are referenced in the film as the inciting agent for change and/or growth, and regards the "other" of Tyler/Hobbes as a vehicle for retribution. The end of the article essentially states that Fight Club is the cold, hard reality of a future that Calvin has to look forward to and makes it a sort of "Get used to life sucking, kids, because that's just the way it is" moral out of the thing. Even the end of the film is kind of driving home the point that everything is collapsing and you just have to figure out how to survive it. But whatever... I think those are wrong ideas, but that's not my main disagreement.
My main disagreement is the idea that the "real" character has to somehow conquer the imagined one. Somehow, Calvin is supposed to sacrifice Hobbes at the altar of adulthood and the Narrator ends up shooting himself in the head to get rid of Tyler, thus making the statement that one cannot keep up with the real world and have these figments of their imaginations running wild. The irony of this is that it fails to comprehend the very basis of the idea of an "other" in the first place: they're both just extensions of the main characters themselves.
If Hobbes really is Calvin and Tyler Durden is just the Narrator, then there really is no "other" in the first place. It's just one person trying to reconcile these difficult, sometimes impossible, thoughts and feelings into a worldview that doesn't accept or approve of them. Calvin needs Hobbes as an extension of himself to process the reality of growing up around parents and school and responsibility and friends; to filter his experiences through a lens of his own self-dialogue. The Narrator needs Tyler Durden to break away from his myopic way of living that thinks that materialism is the key to self-definition. But it's really just Calvin and the Narrator all along. They don't necessarily need to kill the other (well, except for Tyler... he was kinda crazy), they just need to assimilate him.
My hope for Calvin is that he learned to accept the part of himself that Hobbes was born out of and be okay with it. I hope he grew up and made friends and went to college and became an art major and never apologized for being weird. I hope he retained his desire to be outside and explore and try new things and not be afraid of steering his sled into a ravine from time to time. I hope he had confidence in his abilities and his creativity and never got suckered into a relationship because he was desperate and lonely. I hope he never bought into the lie that he was somehow insufficient on his own or that he needed to change to fit in with everybody else. And I hope all those things for Calvin, because I ultimately hope those things for me.
I look back on Calvin and Hobbes, and even Fight Club to a lesser degree, with fondness because they both represent processes I've had to go through. I've had to process these idyllic, romanticized notions of what life should be and sometimes I've used my own stuffed tigers to do it. I've had to stop and ask myself, "How did I get here and when did I start wanting to buy crap-furniture from Ikea in an effort to be more normal?" I relate to these experiences, but I don't feel the need make an either/or choice between conforming to society's expectations and being some radical outsider who can't ever fit in anywhere. I think there's a way to approach life holistically, where the two are unified into an entire man, where accepting reality but not being tied down by its rules all the time are simultaneous truths, not mutually exclusive decisions.
It's 5 AM now, and I'm actually kinda sleepy. Sorry if this didn't/doesn't make much sense, but it felt good to think about it a bit and get it out there. I should probably go to bed now, before *I* start imagining things...
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