Second Letter to Dear Grimmi:

There is a passage in his novel *Nausea* where Roquentin witnesses a guard accost a pederast and, inexplicably, Roquentin then retaliates against the guard. Roquentin knew that this man was a pederast and, up until that point, he had rejected all this man’s attempts at friendship and camaraderie, yet nonetheless he rushes to the pederast’s defence within this passage in the later chapters. This is easier to understand if one reads *Being and Nothingness*, wherein Sartre makes a point that, when I hate one Other, I hate all of them, and, when I witness one man hate an Other, I perceive that I am hated, too, for, on some level, I must recognize that I am one of many Others, all of whom are hated. It’s a rather stupid argument, admittedly, yet I must just as well confess that I have felt a similar projection.


Why I bring this up is that the stream last night produced in me this feeling. Ordinarily, I find that Grimmi and her Chat are kind and sentimental to a fault, and it is therapeutic, if intoxicating, to enjoy an attitude of tolerance. This time, however, I was left with haunting, creeping, even “nauseous” feelings. It is not that I believe that any Other represents *all* Others simply by default of being-Other. I could not imagine such a sense of narcissistic, all-consuming solidarity with everyone, and simply “being-human” never made me automatic in my sympathies. Yet there was something in the character of “Matt” that I found so relatable within that moment, listening to Grimmi while I laboured on my project. It was not a sense of solidarity I felt, but rather loneliness, since, on some level, I wish to believe that all of us “go through” the situations which the narrative described. That sense of *ennui*, the drive to overcome it by an act of greatness, the desire to attain to Godhood of some kind, the sheer disgust at those who settle for a slavish mode of being: all of these I’d thought, at least, to be a set of universals.


I believe in equity, on principle, since I reject the notion that the Masses are a mob of idiots and weaklings; I would rather see us all as vessels for potential as of yet untapped. Yet there are always nights when I am made to question just how universal is that drive to *overcome*. There is a haunting tendency for people, speaking in a trance, to say, sarcastically, “So you believe that *you* are right and all of *us* are wrong?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. Would *you* have *me* believe that *all* of you are right and I alone am wrong? Do you believe me to be *that* delusional, that I’d believe the lot of you, without a shred of evidence, against the sum of all my faculties? Are you so meek that you would sell your Soul because your neighbour does it? No: deliver me from that. The lot of you can hide within the mob, the cult, the trend, but history exposes all of you, for most of us are wrong most of the time, and it is far more likely that the few, at any moment, will see clearly than the many.”


Note: I put the paragraph above in quotes because it’s not directed at the members of this channel. It is rather what I hope that some of you will read and will agree, not just because I said it, but because you’ve thought along such lines before, electing authenticity above conformity. *That’s* what I value most in Grimmi.


**[({R.G.)}]**


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