Ralph Steadman– Viral Menace (2020)
We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone.
This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.
–Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway
Woke up a little dizzy this morning. Not something I remember having experienced before. A bit unsteady on my feet, sometimes stumbling slightly one way or the other, like I shouldn’t have had that third martini.
To be clear here, I didn’t have any martinis. Just saying.
Anyway, I wasn’t sure I would write anything this morning. I was also a little fuzzy as far my thinking goes. Not that this is much out of the ordinary but it was little more pronounced. But the need to do this blog at this time is, for me, something I can’t neglect. It keeps me afloat in some ways. So, I decided to look for something that wouldn’t require much thought– again, not that far out of the ordinary– that would satisfy this need to put something down.
I pulled up the snip at the top from Hunter S. Thompson from a book of his collected correspondence from the 50’s and 60’s, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967. I’ve had this passage locked and loaded for some time and figured this would be a good day to shoot my shot with it, even if I can’t add much to it.
The passage itself reflects something I began learning from an early age, that you have to learn to love and respect yourself. For one thing, you can’t really love or respect anyone else — or be loved and respected by anyone–without first having done so for yourself.
And secondly and most importantly, as Thompson points out, we ultimately spend most of our lives alone, from birth to death.
Trying to exist in the happiness of others is not your happiness. There’s a lot more to be said on this last sentence but it will have to wait for another morning, he says as his eyes go a little out of focus.
No, one must learn to be alone with oneself and that requires the love and respect of self.
After all, who wants to spend their entire life tethered tightly to a person who they can’t love?
Thompson makes an important distinction in this short passage, that being alone is not being lonely. That thought was like an epiphany for me when I first realized at an early age that I could find real comfort in being alone. That’s not to say that there wasn’t loneliness. As comfortable as we might be in our solitude, we all need other people sometimes.
Wow, this has rambled on for longer than intended and I haven’t even mentioned the art of Ralph Steadman at the top. I’ve been a big fan since coming across it back in the 70’s in the pages of some of Thompson’s books, especially Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
His image at the top, Viral Menace, is from 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. In an article in The Guardian at that time that featured this image, Steadman, who is now 89, stated that we are living in weird times and that Trump is ‘the worst person in our known history.’
Who am I to argue with that? Actually, it is a thought that has ran through my mind many times. If he’s not, he is in the top 2 or 3.
My opinion. I won’t argue with you on this.
In the article, he also spoke about coming across images of his old work in books, saying ‘I’m amazed how many things I’ve done that I don’t remember; I’m going through the book and wondering how on earth I did them.‘
I think that is something I have described here before. I sometimes come across an old piece and I can’t remember painting it or how it came about. I know at once I couldn’t recreate it now, at least in any way that captured what I was seeing in that older piece.
Different moment, different person, different energy, different emotions..
I would imagine that an older singer might have that same feeling on hearing a recording of an early performance. They might try to sing that same song now but it would be different in many ways.
Art is always of the moment. Great art carries that moment within always.
Holy crap, I am just going on and on when I thought I couldn’t write anything at all this morning. Of course, writing a lot doesn’t mean I am saying anything worth remembering. This one of those posts where I will look back it in a few years– hopefully– and wonder what the hell I was thinking. Or not thinking.
Oh well. Que sera, sera. That’s okay with me. Know why? Because I respect myself.
You know I couldn’t kick you out the door without playing this song. This is the always-of-the moment classic Respect Yourself from the Staple Singers. Doesn’t get much better than this.
Okay, you can leave now.
Redtree Times 