Monthly Archives: Aug 2019

What a Circus !

Have been torn between two opposite forces in me — give-in and total abandonment, or teeth-grinding resolve to tough it out on my own.

Thinking of what Charles Bukowski said: “We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. ”

Would it be for the best if we take a long view of the living business and live it up — getting in touch with what’s really driving us — rather than live it down — just accepting the safe status quo?

Trade-off

Been thinking about Ty’s marital situation after his “regret” statement, which slightly startled me. One of the chief unintended results marriage always manages to achieve seems to shut out alternative modes of living. It certainly suits many people, but the point is, that a singleton as singular as Ty could also get into the institutionalized love, shows this old institution offers something needed at an existential level by human lives.

I more have trouble with the narrowing down of life this sort of nuclear unit entails. So from now on it’s just “US”. The essential trade-off is between security and vitality. If the gift of life is precious enough, we’d fail ourselves and the world at large when we close ourselves off from experiences that have the potential to heighten our sense of being alive. Nothing could be more elemental and vital than a genuine erotic imperative.

Am actually not polyamorous by temperament (some people are, like Lessing, who said she was by nature promiscuous and liked “flitting from flower to flower” and “I cannot imagine myself not loving several people at once in various ways”). It’s more like I’m enamored with the notion of mental and emotional polygamy. Physically, I almost find I like to focus my lustful energies on one single person at a time. Spreading it around equals diluting pleasure. Although the duration varies.

Our Greatest Illusion

We tell ourselves stories in order to live … We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” which we have learned to freeze shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Joan Didion, The White Album

Our greatest illusion is to believe we’re what we think ourselves to be, and there is a coherent, single, core self. We’re way more fragmented and inconsistent than we could ever imagine, and the need to construct a coherent narrative about ourselves and our life stories serves as a sort of “psychological immune system” — to help us maintain a sense of well-being. Call it healthy self-illusion. And of course it could easily go overboard.

This constructed self and self stories…could be “more or less adequate rationalizations and secondary elaborations that convey the gist of our life story in a form suitable for the occasion”, as personality psychologist Robert McCrae intimates. We’re masterful spin doctors, rationalizers and justifiers of threatening information, and can always manage to find ways to reinterpret or even distort negative information to neutralize these threats.

The implicit, scattered antithesis to this explicitly constructed self that serves us in public space is more real. But there is no direct view to it. It has to be inferred, most of times not so accurately.

We also constructed stories (often based on faulty data) to explain our feelings, and these stories are often incorrect. “We can never, even by the strictest examination, get completely behind the secret springs of action” (Kant). Some really interesting lab experiments have shown evidence that, the feelings people report after analyzing reasons are often incorrect, in the sense that they lead to regretful decisions — compared to those in the control group, who just gave their unanalyzed, gut feelings, but turned out better informed in real life. “He who deliberates lengthily will not always choose the best.” (Goethe)

So the real trick is, to gather enough information to develop an informed gut feeling and then not analyze that feeling too much, as psychologist Timothy Wilson put it. We should just let our adaptive unconscious do the job of forming reliable feelings and then trust those feelings, even if we cannot explain them entirely.