Jesus, I'm going to have to ration myself, much as this'll hurt, as far as irony is concerned on here in future. A few weeks ago I posted a denunciation of Lia's infringement of an alleged unspoken "territorial imperative" which I assumed was premissed on such an evidently despicable and ridiculous view of things that no one could possibly imagine it was meant seriously. But apparently there really are some nutcases who frequent this board and genuinely suffer from such pathological delusions as that "Cracky belongs to some ineffable and transcendent order of being in which ordinary mortals can claim no part" or that "Cracky was much, much more than just a clever, pretty, self-involved teenage girl and no one who is JUST a clever, pretty, self-involved teenage girl like Lia has the right even to imply that she might be on a par with her".
Personally I see no contradiction at all in considering someone to be "just" a clever, pretty, self-involved teenage girl while also considering them to be the closest we will ever get to knowing and touching purity and divinity in this miserable and fallen realm we call human life. And, having enjoyed the possible benefit of arriving a couple of years (on another construal, a few decades) too late to have ever really encountered and experienced Cracky herself, I think I can further contribute the following, possibly nutritive perspective:
The impression the whole ramified "culture of Cracky" makes on a 50-year-old Internet illiterate wandering into it from outside is rather like the impression made by the Beatlemania of the 60's on a famous German intellectual who likewise only encountered it as a total latecomer and outsider, in his sedate and unmusical middle age. Max Horkheimer makes the remark, somewhere in the writings of his last years, that he was truly shocked and disoriented by the fact of how uncannily similar to one another all four Beatles were, as if they were cloned variations on a single young man, with the gene of winsome affability emphasized in Paul, that of introspective meditativeness in George, that of sardonic aggressivity in John etc.
Scanning all the dozens of girls I have seen to be involved, more or less casually or enduringly, in this culture in which the name "Cracky" recurs again and again, I have to admit that I experience a feeling very similar to Horkheimer's - although I'm aware, of course, that the thought will probably seem as utterly amateurish, ignorant, and off-beam to genuine Cracky obsessives as Horkheimer's Beatles insight (or lack of insight) doubtless seemed to genuine Beatles connoisseurs. I also am struck by an uncanny "clone-like" or "sister-like" quality that is present in almost all the girls drawn into the Cracky culture, already long before each of them yields to the insistent urgings of others that they apply Cracky make-up or adopt some specific Cracky pose or mannerism. The possibility has already often enough been noted of accurately and comprehensively characterizing each one of these girls in terms of additions and subtractions, hypertrophy and atrophy, of qualities more purely and emphatically present in others ("So-and-so = RavRav plus so-and-so minus so-and-so" and so on).
I suppose that there are many, many factors accounting for this impression that the girls are as it were merely kaleidoscopically shifting aspects of a single, never fully perceptible and determinable Girl. Fashion itself, of course - the immensely vast and delicate force-field that never ceases to mold and direct and animate young women's ceaseless pondering on what style and color of hair, what make-up, what general manner and persona will make the best impression on their social circle - could well be construed, by a mind of metaphysical bent, in terms of just such a mystically guiding Collective Consciousness. But whatever one puts the phenomenon down to, I think the fact of it alone is enough to invalidate any territorialistic "Cracky fundamentalism" which forbids us, in all seriousness, to have "any God beside", and Heaven forbid "before", Cracky herself and attempts to dictate just what, or just who, a "Cracky board" should be about.
Perhaps someone who cannot claim to share the surely foundational experience of having loved Olivia herself has no right to express this idea even as an hypothesis, or at least no right to express it here, but I'll end by expressing it anyway:
Another somewhat uncanny circumstance is the frequency with which I find myself citing, in Crackyhouse-related connections, themes and ideas from Jorge Luis Borges (actually not one of my favorite authors). Above and beyond and behind the impression of "cloning" and "mystical sisterhood", I sometimes seem to make out here the uncertain lineaments of a metaphysical mystery for which there is maybe not even a name, or to which different religions have given different names. Borges imagines in his story "The Approach to Al Mutaz'im" the slow approximation of a pilgrim to some holy figure toward whom he appears to be being led and guided by this figure's fragmentary reflections or prefigurations in other figures he meets on his uncertain way: a mannerism acquired, a tune taken over and obsessively hummed or whistled, from this "Al Mutaz'im" who is thus pervasively partially present but nowhere present really and in his entirety.
I ask myself whether it might be a mistake to believe that we can assign even to Cracky an essentially fuller and more final share in the being and identity of such an "Al Mutaz'im" than we can, say, to Lia, or to RavRav, or to any other of the hundred other girls who constitute approaches and approximations to....something we cannot name. In my 1970's London childhood, I remember being an avid follower of the British sci-fi TV show "Blake's Seven". The show, if I remember rightly, was notable for having run on into three or four multi-episode series even though the inarguably "central" character - "Blake" himself - was no longer to be seen on the show after the end of the first series. The reasons for this anomalous and novel narrative strategy were surely depressingly extraneous and prosaic: contractual problems, doubtless, between the producers and the actor who played Blake. But like many remembered childhood impressions, this idea too of a resoundingly and somehow fascinatingly "empty centre" has acquired. with the years, mystical and metaphysical connotations for me and has melded now with Borges' more overtly metaphysical "Al Mutaz'im". Also with my - indeed radically distanced and derivative - experience of Cracky and Crackyhouse. I remember experiencing a sense of awe and marvel at how the gaping inexplicable absence of "Blake" was able to transform, somehow, the otherwise somewhat nondescript and uninspiring "Seven" and make of them something they had not been, something that even Blake had not been, when he was visibly and tangibly present as a "center".
I will not try to pursue these vague analogies - the ramifications of which I have not even worked out myself - any further. Particularly as even wider ramifications are opened up by the additional fact that some expert on 1970's British children's television (I'm sure there's at least one such expert present here) will certainly be quick to point out: namely, that "Blake" eventually reappeared.
