How to be a real phony
09-26
He Who Has the Laughing Face by Toshio Mori (what a great name)
“And this is the greatest thing happening today: that of a laundry truck driver or an equivalent to such who is living and coming in and out of parks, the homes, the alleys, the dives, the offices, the rendezvous, the vices, the churches, the operas, the movies; all seeking unconsciously, unawaredly, the hold of this sadness, the loneliness, the barrenness, which is not elusive but hovering and pervading and seeping into the flesh and vegetation alike, churning out potentially the greatness, the weakness, and the heroism, the cowardice; and therefore, leaving unfinished all the causes of sadness, unhappiness, and sorrows of earth behind in the laughter and mute silence of time.”
Can’t say I really grasp everything that Mori is saying, but I love that. The passion that flows from his words tangles everything up. My guess, or at least, how I interpret this, is that the everyday life, the comings and goings, springs a sadness that takes a hold of us, and everything about ourselves, everything that made us fascinating disappears, and then even the sadness dulls. Then, we’re just simple, invisible creatures sitting on park benches, without words or wit, laughing at intervals, with sadness but no misery. Common yet fascinating.
09-25
Colorblind, Counting Crows
I am colorblind
Coffee black and egg white
Pull me out from inside
I am ready
I am taffy stuck and tongue tied
Stutter-shook and uptight
Pull me out from inside
I am ready
I am fine
I am covered in skin
No one gets to come in
Pull me out from inside
I am folded and unfolded and unfolding
I am colorblind
Coffee black and egg white
Pull me out from inside
I am ready
I am fine
09-20
Shakespeare says it best:
Sonnet 138
When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.
Lying requires a knowledge of truth, of right and wrong. Why can’t I figure out which is what? All I know that love preceded truth, and now is not the time to regret or regress.
09/16
The Point of No Return
The sun has set on romance, it’s brilliant rays of passion illuminating the last seconds of its existence. But I remember not to be fooled by the glimpses of beauty, I remember the hard beads of tears under its relentless heat, its blinding light too overwhelming for human me, it’s endless cycle bringing a cruel hope with each sunrise. Now, I know and I choose to sit here in darkness, hidden in a place where no windows, no cracks will allow deception to seep in. Knowledge, as it is man’s greatest power, has become my guiding light.
07/29
A defeat in victory
You sat there next to me, tearing the napkins into strips, then smaller strips, then smaller, until the rip slid sideways and it was a tiny fragment. I sat there, next to you, staring at the glossy wooden table, eyes steady and my mouth tightened. It was a battle, our hundredth battle, and we had reached a stalemate.
You are the aggressive fighter. You form arguments with your silvery tongue and spit them out, all the while locking my eyes. You start off discreetly, subtle, a midnight attack when forces are weak. Then, with a change of intonation and a glimmer in your eye, it begins to build until you’re yelling at the top of your lungs, charge! charge! charge! Then a pause, and you look down, a momentary break to reload, then you hold my gaze, once again, pushing me and provoking me with silent insults.
Me, I’m the passive one. I sit there, resisting your attacks, hands pushed up against my ears to drown out the sounds of bombs exploding in the air. I rock myself back and forth, back and forth, repeating a lullaby in my head. My eyes are remain open, reminding you that this is no act of defeat. There are no white flags in my pupils, but a steady, voracious gaze that I hope will chill you to the bone.
The thing about wars is that they never amount to their cause. Logic fails and emotions run wide and deep. It’s a human thing that can never be rooted to comprehension. Fear controls the minds of soldiers and pride ruins the mind of authority. There is no victory, no complete triumph, yet here we are again, battling, bruising, beating each other to no end.
But, can’t you see? Because for me the end is so apparent. You’ll destroy me and I’ll destroy you, and then there will be nothing left to fight for. You’ve won many battles before, driving me into an unknown territory with nothing but a canteen of water and a pack of cigarettes. It’s never enough to know that I’m only in this fight by a thread, a splitting thread. You return over and over again, and I hold up my defenses (sometimes, I don’t even try), but can’t you see, when I’m gone, you’ll be all alone, defeated in your victory.
Brown Penny by Yeats
I whispered, ‘I am too young,’
And then, ‘I am old enough’;
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
‘Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.’
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.
O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.
07/26
Harken, harken in dreams they darken
Impale me tell me once again that you love me
Teary eyes and clutching cries
A double life I’ve come to prize
Lonesome at A Twosome Place
There’s a café near here called A Twosome Place, a place mean for couples to share intimate conversations, sipping sugary drinks and a slice of cake. Oh, what fun.
So, there I am, so inadequately donned in my oversized clothes, sitting in the corner smoking room, with my half eaten bagel and a cup of black coffee half spilled on my climb up the stairs. There I am.
There I am, what a phrase. There I am, so unsuspecting, when a handsome man asks me for a light and light conversation. There I am, so oblivious, when a kindly stranger tips over my umbrella and in his mess of apologizes, looks up and realizes that I’m the one he’s been looking for. “There I am,” a looking glass phrase, a person that looks like me and makes the same motions, a distant reflection of me, but unlike me, so innocent, so unassumingly perfect, perched on a chair, clueless of the fortunes that’ll follow.
There I am, yet nothing happens. I read a few uninteresting pages, smoke a few cigarettes, eat the rest of my bagel and rise, an hour later. I place my tray on the return shelf and walk down the stairs, not gracefully, not clumsily, just average-ly.
Isn’t it strange, though, that in my moments of mediocrity I feel the most? Maybe it’s the restlessness, a feeling that has taken over my life recently, although I can’t say when. I feel like I need to do, do, do, but what? My heart struggles against the confines of my chest, wanting to leap out of my static body, so frustrated with my pathetic hopelessness. I can see it, finally squeezing through, sliding out, maneuvering this way and that, trying to get out a constricting hole. And when it does, it’ll give a diabolical laugh, raise its middle finger, and sneer at my astonished face. Who can blame it, though? If I were in his place, I’d do the same.
And, there I’d be, without a heart, but nothing will change. Because, you don’t need a heart to be mediocre. There I’d be, again, lonesome at A Twosome Place.
One of the Greatest Essays Ever Written: On Self Respect by Joan Didion
Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a mater of misplaced self-respect.
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did to make Phi Beta kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through ones’ marked cards the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who we are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.
To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
To protest that some fairly improbably people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samara and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbably candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to make an accident.”
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.
Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-yaer-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke out about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnee.
In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.
That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my had in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult bin the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with ones head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.
But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meting the next demand made upon us.
It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands to much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
