“…something that wants to rise and shake itself free” (William Carlos Williams)
I had a fairly disconcerting experience when I was a 9th grade spectator at our school’s varsity basketball game. It was a rural school, Kindergarten through 12th in the same building. Maybe 30 kids per grade, so we knew pretty much everyone, or so I thought. But as I was watching the game, one of the players, maybe two years old than myself, a member of our church, our mothers were friends, became instantly unrecognizable.
I lost the flow of the game and became hypnotically focused on this one person. I tried to juggle the knowledge of his “familiarity” with his sudden alien strangeness. His bearing no longer conformed to anyone recognizable. But in a deeper sense, I was noticing him for the first time. Noticing the discrepancy between the mask of confidence he was trying to wear (the identity he was trying to present) and the unfamiliar reality of himself.
And the alien feeling spread to the entire gymnasium. My hometown crowd, all familiar faces, looked like they were all struggling with masks. It was as if the known character of each person was peeling from their bodies, revealing a routine pretense, which was their public persona, which also revealed something of the real human being struggling with fear and doubt.
I also seemed alien. I had never noticed how herky jerky I behaved. I tried to snap out of this alternate reality, but it stuck around for a long half-hour and then a milder version never fully dissipated the rest of my life. I became even more self-conscious, more herky-jerky, and felt more like a fraud who didn’t know how to stop being a fraud.
But at the same time – and this is far more important – the effect was not one of haughty disdain for myself or others, but an unprecedented feeling of sorrow for the real human beings I’d never noticed before. Beneath the smiles and cheers they looked sad or tired.
Sheer forgetfulness may have been the key accident opening this glimpse into more subtle realities simmering beneath the surface presentation; beneath the scripts that often trap us into being people we weren’t meant to be. Where familiarity once was, now bewildered human forms could be discerned. The vague outline of a soul writhing in a spider’s web or a cocoon, depending on whether they would emerge or not.
I’m writing the persons who will replace us. At present we can only see the magnetic flash of someone in utero; that potential, which is more communal than personal. Some fetus audacious enough to see through its own charades.
I’m writing because this is the performance of a new way of being, this is how it begins to take shape. It’s you and I facing our shame, not I alone.
We don’t give birth to a new being by ourselves. This is an alchemical experiment, a shamanic dance. The eyes dance the words, and this ceremony creates someone capable of seeing the Self as a construct of self-deception. A way of being rises from the ashes of who we thought we were.
Imagine the courage it takes to not fool yourself.
Even the imagination of this person can’t be sustained without deception. The effort to do so creates a positive ideal, which is a desire for transcendence, and that desire is opposed to being seen as a fool. It doesn’t want to see how it fools itself. It hides from reality and never acknowledges that it does so.
This is the origins of our political situation also. The system is running from reality as fast as it can, right into the arms of a narcistic dictator.Read More »
I might have something to say about this eventually. I want this here as a reference point. Tremendous essay, as well as Trow’s “Within the Context of No Context”
Negative Geography 