Fearless Aesthetic Self-Analysis

There was an episode of a show called Dead Like Me. The premise of the show was that once a person dies they spend a long period of time working as a reaper, acting as a normal living person among the legitimate living. The lead character is a young girl who died far too young who's working as rookie reaper in a small team among veteran reapers.

Among the reapers there are many rules, one of which is you're not supposed to go back to meet your family. The lead reaper is agressive about stressing this rule to the rookie. This continues until she breaks the rule and gets heartbroken because she doesn't look like herself and she just said something that sounded crazy to her mother. She's cut herself off from her old family forever. After she does this all that the lead reaper says to her is "you all right?" and gives her a hug.

Many people resist the idea of aesthetic self analysis for a number of reasons. This mainly applies in Objectivist circles. Among many there's an idea that your tastes have to measure up to some strangly defined set of criteria and that if you follow this mentality, you either measure up to this and you're a good person, or you don't and you're dispicably evil. At least that's how many see it.

But the truth for myself and many people in another group is that the Objectivist aesthetic is a challenge and any time you've honestly experienced something which not only fit into that mold but matched your particular values and personality, nothing else will do. After you've been exposed to this it's both tempting and scary to run everything you happened to enjoy earlier in your life through this new lense.

It's tempting because you bubble with excitement about new things you'd never truly appreciated before. New levels to understand a story on, a new context to appreciate a melody through. Some times it truly blows your mind when you discover something so great and so new.

What seems initially scary is the idea of being found guilty by an unseen jury of a deficient sense of life. But the scariest thing about re-evaluation of your nostalgic loves isn't that you are going to be a horrible person for loving a bad work of art. It's likely that you'll still love your most treasured works of art just the way you remember it forever... you'll just learn that this version of it never really existed.

One of my earliest influences as a writer was the horror genre in general and the idea of "final girl" Today my view is that much of the genre itself is dismal, poorly executed, and the best example of a malevolent universe premise you'll ever see. But the idea of a heroine will for me always be exemplified by Alice Johnson from Nightmare on Elm Street 4 & 5. In some ways I appreciate her even more now that I realize what she had to rise above.

There may still be many things of value to be derived from flawed work of art, but once you view it through this lense it will never be quite the same again but it will ultimatly you'll be richer for the experience. Fearless aesthetic self analysis is a difficult process, but an important one.