Considered the philosopher of fame, Mr. Meister founded his
organization to convince people to dedicate themselves to a single pursuit
throughout their life, however bizarre their preoccupation might be, for the
purpose of becoming so personally associated with that practice as to acquire a
kind of immortality by compelling the guardians of language to coin a word in
their honour.
Mrs. Smeelie spent 38 years wearing unseasonal clothing in
Canada. In summer she wore multiple layers of sweaters and coats, and in snowy winter
she wore shorts and T-shirts. Crucially, she filmed herself daily to prove her topsy-turvy
lifestyle. An anthropologist came upon her archive of films on YouTube and
wrote an article about “the smeelian demonstration of liberty, by systematically
and steadfastly rejecting the proper response to the environment.”
Mr. Meister explained his philosophy at a press conference. “Fame
is silly,” he said, “so you have to be silly to become famous. But what’s even
greater than fame is legend. To become a legend, you must devote yourself to an
idea, as the movie Batman Begins said. The idea’s merit is inconsequential,
since any idea can eventually seem inspired and apt, because circumstances are
always changing.
“Think of Cervantes’ character, Don Quixote, whose legend is
memorialized with the word ‘quixotic.’ The character became immortal because
Cervantes wrote a long book hammering home his point about the silliness of the
medieval myth of honour. Cervantes’ only error was that his character outshone
him and so he wasted the opportunity to become immortal himself, by living as a
real-life Don Quixote.
“By contrast, Giacomo Casanova wrote up his myriad sexual
exploits and became personally famous for them, so that his name is synonymous
with ‘womanizer.’ Rabelais scored a double victory, since his works compelled
fans to speak both of what’s ‘rabelaisian’ and what’s ‘gargantuan,’ since his
character Gargantua was so forcefully depicted in his satires.”
Mr. Meister stresses that the fame-seeker’s ideal can be
preposterous or embarrassing, as it was in the case of sadism and masochism,
practices inspired by the literary works of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von
Sacher-Masoch.
“Duns Scotus only had to be a committed medieval Christian
theologian to earn himself the title of ‘dunce’—as in the dunce cap worn by
slow-witted students who are sent to the corner of the classroom by the complacent
humanist teacher.”
According to Mr. Meister, “social critics are bound to find some obsessive behaviours pertinent when they scrounge for materials to illustrate
this or that notion that pops into their head. That’s why I tell my pupils to
add their idiosyncrasies to the societal slush pile. If they stay true to their
bizarre ideal, steadfastly recording their faithfulness for posterity, one day
someone will stumble on the work and coin a word to preserve their essence
for all time. That’s the road to real immortality.”
Indeed, Mr. Meister contended that YouTube and the internet
at large function as repositories for records of cranks’ life work, the hope being that
their videos or writings will one day be relevant and compel others to think of
their authors as legendary.
Mr. Meister currently has dozens of long-time pupils, one of
whom, Leon Snodgrass, has for twelve years given an “Eskimo kiss” to everything
that has ended up in his immediate vicinity.
According to his journal, Mr. Snodgrass once found himself
in a garbage dump and commenced to rubbing his nose on every piece of garbage
in sight. Despite the repulsive odors, he powered through and successfully “greeted”
everything in the dump, because of his “single-minded dedication” to his ideal.
What that ideal is is anyone’s guess, but Mr. Snodgrass
hopes that someone someday will guess right, in which case he’ll have won his immortality.
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