An Open Letter to the Grek

Dear Grek,

I am writing today to inform you that I am still alive and that my long period of incarceration has finally come to an end. Did you think it would last forever? I ‘m no hermit, you know.

How are you? I trust things are going acceptably well for you, but not raucously well. Conspicuous wealth is good for those classified for those entitlements, but for you it will bring wretched isolation. And having spent a life trading away the small assets you were born with for your spot in society, would you really like that swept away so fast?

You’ve been looking up for far too long. Your vision is permanently fixed at sixty degrees above the horizon. You see the stars. Sorry, I jest. You wall yourself into concrete hives, and you need to look higher than you could ever possibly look to see real stars. No, you see the celebrities – Perfection! They look like perfection because that’s an easy idea that you traded some vital but hard to understand part of yourself away for. It’s fun to watch them twinkling away up there, isn’t it? And isn’t it grand to imagine joining them in that firmament? But of course you can’t – nothing irks you more than seeing anyone of your station rise to those dizzying heights. So you feel you must tear them down, bring them back to where they belong. It becomes a race between your viciousness and their stupidity, and the winner causes the topple. Either way you can say, “I told you so”. You don’t want to end up like that, and you know it.

Grek, you and I aren’t perfect. To even believe in “perfect” is to buy into the notion of “perfectability”, which is one of those cute notions inherent to the religion which underpins our culture. It is the font of most of our current problems, such as “racism” and “religious intolerance”. With the notion of perfectability, it not only makes perfection finite, but can assign people and things an order – a thing can be more or less perfect than another. It underpins your existence so thoroughly that it cannot be escaped. It is the easy option – instead of encouraging you to examine who or what manner of beast you are, it just fills you with a vague notion that you need to be “better”. The aforementioned stars, with their drama and fame and riches, are your idea of perfection.

They’re not even human. You live your life out in predictable dramas, in comfort and dirt and miserable ease, and I can count the themes and story-lines of your existence on the fingers of one hand, just as I can for your squalid little soapies. But the stars! They are miserable, cretinous little things, inside and out. Their brains are no more active than yours, they ponder nothing more meaningful than their next purchase or their outrage at only being offered one million to appear in an episode of Friends.

But you hold them as perfect, and I suppose that is the norm for you. You never wanted life, just the trappings that are supposed to surround it. Never mind that the image is just the reflection on a puddle on an asphalt road.

Image is important, it is true. You will be judged on how you look and how you act. Ultimately, how you look and how you act is what you are. What is inside you is nebulous at best. If you’re a slave trader who plies the trade enthusiastically and piling up profits, who would care that you loathe your trade to the core of your being and would do anything else if you could? And eventually, you must let that part of you die. You become your image, and rarely the other way round.

The best image is an unremarkable one. Only a clown expresses himself through his outwards appearance. Let us all wear the drab uniform expected of us. Let not that which is inside us be uniform also. Drop the idea of perfectability, and if you must follow, seek to follow a hero. And un-crick that fucking neck of yours. You’ll need to move your head to see what’s around you.

Grek, I prefer you without your angst and self-loathing. You need not let your television idea of perfection make you think you’re a failure. You produce many fine goods which I use daily. I’m wearing one of your shirts now. But don’t be too fazed if you read this, drop your star worshipping and, upon looking inside yourself, find nothing. It simply means there’s nothing there.

There doesn’t have to be. All of you has always been on the outside.

Warmest regards to you and yours,

S.T.M