In his biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, DT Max writes that one of DFW's major preoccupations was with the unrelenting demand to perform in the Post-Modern age. That we are constantly looking at ourselves from others' eyes and the after a point the audience in the head refuses to leave forcing us to perform even when we're seemingly alone. As someone who has spent long hours interviewing myself in my head, I know that almost all narratives I create are for an audience. This thought came back to the foreground as I was listening to The Seen and the Unseen episode with the poet Ranjit Hoskote and Amit Varma asks him if he presupposes a reader for his poems during the act of writing. After which he reads out a poem based on Joseph Fasano's prompt on Twitter.
My name is virtue.
Today I feel like Performance Art,
basking on the boulevard.
Sometimes I'm pretty,
sometimes I'm grotesque,
always I'm fake.
I ask the world,
How can I be me?
And the answer is
Performance Art.
I was talking with Amma yesterday and when I said I now undertand the importance of hypocrisy for the functioning of society, she said I'd changed a lot compared to where I was 10 years ago. I agree with her; I would've been enraged if someone had told me that I was performing then, lecturing them about the importance of being authentic to oneself, but now I see it rather differently. Even if there is, deep within us, something essentially ourself, uncontaminated by the external world, beyond mimetic desires, is only that us and everything else not just fake but dangerous and distracting? Is that what the spiritualists claim atma to be? I spent a good part of my life, over a decade more or less, turning that question round and round in my head and didn't get anywhere close to an answer. If there indeed is a bedrock, I have not been able to reach it. Maybe it is 'Turtles all the way down'. I've stopped actively looking for it after reading Martijn Koning's Capital and Time because his explanation of the self-referentiality and 'strange loop'-y nature of money answered perfectly my questions around personality. Obviously, that book was the final straw and wouldn't have been convincing without the questions posed and answers sought across the decade.
Thankfully, around the same time as I was reading the book, the unfailingly brilliant Rob Horning wrote a piece on social media asking the question, and I paraphrase, Why is it that we think that the first thought that pops into our head is the most authentic and everything else is either a compromise or corruption? Why is consideration, contemplation, deliberation, the decision to step back from expressing the first reaction not also part of ourselves? I can see Amma smiling as she reads this as this is exactly what she'd been trying to tell me for years.
"Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." -John Maynard Keynes
Maybe, infact, the first thought is an as-received, untreated remnant handed over by society, and the output after careful deliberation is more representative of your realer, deeper self- Kahnemanian System 1 and 2 framework?
While I understand this better now, my contention with Amma that not expressing not being the right response still holds. Over the years, I've grokked my way into the conviction that expression is not only important but fundamental to our relationship with the world. This is where the earlier aspect of performance ties in. Reading Anil Seth and Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel Dennett, among others, had brought the understanding that the our consciousness is not an insular entity (a problem DFW seems to have grappled with intensely and found respite in religious communion) but has to, and almost always does, interact with others', thereby evolving, transforming, and expanding. The eureka moment came on reading James Ley's astounding essay on SRB that, for starters, helped me get to the root of Sandeep Vanga's Animal better than any other piece I'd read but, more fruitfully, lead me to this quote from Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics-
An idea for Dostoevsky ‘is not a subjective individual-psychological formation … no, the idea is inter-individual and inter-subjective — the realm of its existence is not individual consciousness but dialogic communion between consciousnesses’.
That finally brought this long-running chapter to a conclusion. That while we are incredibly bright and complex, and filled with information and emotions and insights and impressions individually, almost none of it makes sense outside the realm of human society and culture. We are a lot like honeybees, performing an elaborate dance not for ourselves but others. The cool part about being human is that sometimes it is for ourselves, or atleast the audience within. Yet, it would be foolish to pretend we can, or should, live away from all this mess; It is a mess only when we're not able to parse and compute- words that suggest both unhumanness and also something profoundly, proudly human. When we can, though, what glory and beauty, what grace.
If not anything else, this hypothesis definitely explains why I can't stick to writing notes with any regularity anywhere else but have continued blogging for, what, 15 years now!
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