Introductions are an odd thing, preparing oneself for flattery and lies. Remaining casual (while you try to impress.) Your friends will concur with you, ratify the fabric of your fabrication. Having been sold your mythology years ago, they will readily reflect your armor. The only issue that may arise is human restlessness, when either you or the other challenges the status quo or confesses to being a bit bored with this sense of "you" or with themselves in conjunction to you. In repair, it is always easier--for both sides-- to welcome back that old but hardly solid version of self that you are both so vested in.
From strangers, on the other hand, their descriptions contain the tea leaves that reveal what they value or distrust. Their reaction to you, like your reaction to them, occurs through a series of screens: past experience, current prejudice, hopes and expectations. This means that the engagement of self with self, especially in these earliest encounters, is subject to a whole host of masks and memes that will confuse the scent for whatever part of us remains a diligent tracker for the "truth." We do better to think of human interaction as a kind of claustrophobic, sometimes exceedingly dull, theater. There is no ultimate understanding.
To this admission, there is an instinct to panic. The self is trained to thrive on valuation that comes from being "seen" and "known". Even unto ourselves, we create recipes to explain who we are and what we have or will become. It is comforting to measure oneself out in equal parts, to project predictability and (perhaps) progress. However, while most of the memes you are holding are highly reproductive ones, they are scarcely true. Reality is not built like that. Founded in the human brain, "fact" is only "perception" and what is essential evades the grunts and groans of this primitive tool called language.
There is speculation is the questions that fall out of little Ernie Hemingway's masculine mouth, but he, like all the others, is not waiting for the answer. Truly self-absorbed, his answer has already crystallized and been mined before you can offer anything: a defense, a reflection, a lie of your very own. Let us live out our gratuitous obsessions, the pathetic aching for recognition, the perfunctory dramatics that give a shitty day a kind of sheen, sure it catches the sunlight but that's just because the paint isn't dry. What do we learn from this? The headaches of our own frustration are the best evidence of the impossibility. Better to stay calm, break up the words into consonants and assonance, divide the world into poems and prose, distill it all and pour them like poison into the kings ear.
From strangers, on the other hand, their descriptions contain the tea leaves that reveal what they value or distrust. Their reaction to you, like your reaction to them, occurs through a series of screens: past experience, current prejudice, hopes and expectations. This means that the engagement of self with self, especially in these earliest encounters, is subject to a whole host of masks and memes that will confuse the scent for whatever part of us remains a diligent tracker for the "truth." We do better to think of human interaction as a kind of claustrophobic, sometimes exceedingly dull, theater. There is no ultimate understanding.
To this admission, there is an instinct to panic. The self is trained to thrive on valuation that comes from being "seen" and "known". Even unto ourselves, we create recipes to explain who we are and what we have or will become. It is comforting to measure oneself out in equal parts, to project predictability and (perhaps) progress. However, while most of the memes you are holding are highly reproductive ones, they are scarcely true. Reality is not built like that. Founded in the human brain, "fact" is only "perception" and what is essential evades the grunts and groans of this primitive tool called language.
There is speculation is the questions that fall out of little Ernie Hemingway's masculine mouth, but he, like all the others, is not waiting for the answer. Truly self-absorbed, his answer has already crystallized and been mined before you can offer anything: a defense, a reflection, a lie of your very own. Let us live out our gratuitous obsessions, the pathetic aching for recognition, the perfunctory dramatics that give a shitty day a kind of sheen, sure it catches the sunlight but that's just because the paint isn't dry. What do we learn from this? The headaches of our own frustration are the best evidence of the impossibility. Better to stay calm, break up the words into consonants and assonance, divide the world into poems and prose, distill it all and pour them like poison into the kings ear.
No comments:
Post a Comment