You love palahniuk or you hate him.
I am sorry but there is nowhere in between. He says save yourself, do something
else, don’t read this book. Maybe it is provocation that makes you feel to read
more, maybe the other way around. But he reflects American society who can be
both repugnant and hilarious perfectly. Everywhere is getting to be like
America each day. So I think he reflects us, human beings. I feel like, it
would be really nice to take some more-than-modern philosophy classes from him.
More-than-modern is not the right word but it is the first word that comes to
mind.

Victor Mancini is a pervert. He is a
loser, moreover he is a sex-addict. He collected all the bad stuff at himself.
Or is it just that he is different than what people expect from him? Would you
prefer to be a judge or a friend of him? Think at least twice. Because this guy
has already learned that “You have to risk your life to get love”. He
devices a complicated scam: pretending to be choking on a piece of food every evening
in a different restaurant. He has lots of savers who feel themselves as heroes.
Victor thinks that “Somebody saves your life, and they’ll love you
forever. It’s that old Chinese custom where if somebody saves your life, they
are responsible for you forever.” Do you disagree with him? Why do you
think many people everyday pretending to have suicide without really aiming it?
Why is it so difficult for us to get love?

Ida Mancini, Victor’s Mommy, is the
greatest woman I have ever met. Although she is insane, that doesn’t prevent
her being a wise person. She insists that “Art never comes from happiness.
Here is where symbols were born.” I think she is an artist by being the
mommy of Victor. She was shaping him every day when he was a small kid.
Probably, she was the only mother on earth giving her child an empty notebook
and telling him to draw his own map of world; rivers, mountains, roads etc.
don’t have to exist. They would exist in his mind, in his reality. She was
brave enough to change the color tubes in the supermarkets to give people some
excitement and fun in their life and more brave to say to her son: “By the
time you are thirty, your worst enemy is yourself.”

Victor does know too many truths of
life. I think this was his problem. He didn’t know how to deal with that. He
knows the truth about this Oedipal story: “The truth is, every son raised
by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don’t know, but until your mom
dies it seems like all other women in your life can never be more than just your
mistress.” He is not a feminist but he knows the truth about inequality of
men and women. He says: “Women are already born so far ability-wise. The
day men can give birth, that’s when we can start talking about equal
rights.” Can you believe that he is a sex-addict?

I do… When I invest some time in
thinking about addictions, I see that they are the only exists many of us can
see. “Ever addiction is just a way to treat the same problem. Drugs or
overeating or alcohol or sex, it is all just another way to find peace. To
escape what we know. Our education. Our bite of the apple.” Let’s look
around. All of us, after the bite, are rewarded with addictions and obsessions.
Education only makes the situation worse.

I think and think again… Why do we
force each other to see things in one certain common way? Common stuff makes us
to feel better. We don’t like deviations. However, things look very different,
most of the time opposite once you are able to leave the common stuff as Victor
does. He has a different idea of being strong: “You gain power by
pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save
people by letting them save you.” One day, a woman comes to Victor at St.
Anthony hospital. She thinks that he is a great person. Because he saved the
marriage of this old women’s son by giving him the chance to be a hero in one
of the hundreds of restaurant that he does his play.

While everybody is talking about
deja vus. He talks about the opposite: “There’s an opposite to deja vu.
They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places,
again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger.
Nothing is ever familiar.” He works at a theme park with a motley group of
losers. His best friend, Denny is a sex-addict collecting many big stones from
the streets and carrying them at home. Do you think whether this is the reason
Victor talks more about opposites? Or maybe his mommy who used rebellion as a
way to hide out and criticism as a fake participation.

She says: “The laws that keep
us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos,
we’ll never have true peace.” Was she really looking for peace when she
was stealing rented buses? In a world things are never “Good Enough.”
Nothing is ever fast enough. Nothing is big enough. People are never satisfied.
So what is improvement? What is peace?

Is it your fault when you are crazy?
I think that it will be your fault if you pretend to seem like not crazy when
you are really crazy. That’s something painful. It is better to let it go with
the craziness. Because if you try to change this, it will mean only a big
battle inside you. Then you will not be able to collect the pieces together
again as Mommy says: “We’ve taken the world apart, but we have no idea
what to do with the pieces”. You even cannot put them together I believe.

Mommy is a great woman, actually was
a great woman. She died in St. Anthony hospital because of choking chocolate
pudding. Could it be only a coincidence? Choking faces us again. Before she
choked, she was saying to Dr. Paige who was more insane than Victor and Mommy:
“Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Well, I
think those who remember their past are even worse off because they are paralyzed
with it.” I think the people who are best off are the ones who could
remember their past but who are able to forget it. I think Mommy was such a
kind of person. It is not easy to stop yourself admiring her and being a fan of
her. Let’s start up our own club “Mommy-Fans”. We can have a great
looking website, get-to-gathers. Then we can commercialize it more. First we
can start with Mommy-mugs and t-shirts and anything comes to your mind. Do you
think that I am serious?

Now it is time for me to stop and
live in my own reality and create my own world, to draw my own maps… You know
that our memories, our stories and adventures will be the only things we’ll
have left. Let’s live more! Let’s have more exciting things! I don’t mean to
become a collector of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art but I mean to
become a collector of imagination. “Nothing is as perfect as you can
imagine it.”…

Bu yazı, ilk defa 14/11/2006
tarihinde havadansudan.azbuz.com’da yayınlandı.