I read this in a football forum following the Jets/Patriots game:
Professional athletes are very unusual people. If they weren't, they wouldn't excel to that extent. One aspect of their weirdness is that they care a lot about what is just a game. If they weren't weird in that way, they wouldn't be all that good.
So many of my favorite authors were also very "weird in that way." They cared very much about something fictional that had no direct impact on the world around them or their own private lives, but lived entirely in their imagination until they recorded it onto paper and spread their concentrated weirdness to the world at large. This world seems so preoccupied at times with normality. How often I hear in conversation, "That's not normal!" I used to think that was a compliment; now I'm convinced it's simply a flawed standard of measure. How can I determine weirdness? What measure do I use? My understanding of normal is not the same as that of someone across the world. Judge it against what is familiar, and I fall easily into the trap of dismissing another viewpoint. How often I read and hear, "You missed the point." But there isn't just one point to any viewpoint; the world isn't so small.
It reminds me of a common theme in speculative fiction: the worth of life and culture, specifically that of aliens. It comes up so often: "They're just like us." So the common denominator restores peace and goodwill, and the humans take one step further towards enlightenment. But why must worth be tied to similarity? This came up in Battlestar Galactica and was argued poorly, I feel, the argument against the genocide of the Cylon race being that some of them are friendly, that some of them are "just like us." And I thought, "Why does that matter? What if they all hated humans? What if they were completely alien in nature, like the original Cylons? Would their lives and culture be worth less for being alien?" It seems to me that this is one of the deepest roots of war in our history, that we so often dismiss the dissimilar as being worth less and, at the extreme, being a direct threat to what is similar and therefore intimate and passionately defended. So it can become as easy to dismiss another culture's religion as it is to drive over the remains of a dead animal in the road. This approaches generalities, and I don't mean to, but the trend across history appears tried and true. I'm speaking a little from my experience as a translator and as someone who grew up in one culture though born to parents of another. It seems we haven't yet reached the point where being as concerned with or open to the dissimilar is as "normal" as to be focused primarily on the similar. The harder it is to recognize myself, the less likely I am to give time and effort to understand it. Few people (scientists, artists, poets, musicians, etc.) seem to have that certain concentrated weirdness to seek understanding across all barriers.
William Blake once wrote the following, and although it is just one part of a monumental work that contains far more thought and expression than I've been pondering here, this section still lingers with me since I first read it years ago. I never feel so small, nor so capable of soaring.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
I'm so grateful for concentrated weirdness.
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