Let's Agree to Disagree

            It was cold as Hell. I barely even felt my hands what with the air practically freezing my body in slow motion. It was pretty ugly. But it was delightfully wicked at the same time. Because I felt my heart freeze and, while it was extremely hard to act naturally, the agony of ecstasy of complete vulnerability was kind of enlightening. Some might think me a masochist. Lets agree to disagree.

            These, ladies and gentlemen, are antithetical statements. That means that they sandwiches (haha, sandwiches) of two opposing statements in a single sentence. I try to delve into how antithetical statements can bring a point across. I’ve heard they make for compelling speeches and yet I wonder. What exactly is ‘cold as Hell’? Since I happen o use that phrase quite often I’ve come to the conclusion that Hell is not noun as much as it is and adverb. It is basically an emphasis on the cold and yet the words themselves give the illusion of two opposite concepts melding into one. Pretty ugly also uses the former as an adverb and not as an adjective. These might seem so opposite in origin that one might wonder how they can come to make sense. But they can. And so the few of those statements that grace the pages of David Shield’s Reality Hunger might just mean more than I previously thought.

            In chapter O, Shields mentions a quote: “Something can be true and untrue at the same time.” I’m left staring at those words with a blank stare as I try to find some reasoning behind it. For starters, I’d just like to understand what he means by true. Truth is factual, things that are accurate. 2+2=4 can’t be true or untrue at the same time. ‘The sky is blue ‘ can, however. We label that slightly cerulean tint as blue and so that statement is true for most of the people that inhabit this earth. If there happens to be someone raised in some isolated cave in the middle of nowhere and is raised by a tribe with quite peculiar customs and rules, said person might refer to sky as ‘pink’ or ‘mghjk’ because that is true for them. Their pink is our blue. The truth is relative.

            Another such statement was “We're only certain ("certain only"?) about what we don't understand.” By that he’s trying to say that we know for sure what we don’t know. Ah, there I go making an antithetical statement myself. By that, I mean to say that we are only completely sure of what we don’t understand.  I, for one, admit to the fact that I know absolutely nothing about mechanics. I am certain about my lack of knowledge about soccer teams, the Greek Language, the sport of cricket, the sewing of rugs, the building of solar panels, the string theory, and I could go on and on to the point where my page span rivals that of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. The fact of the matter is that we know for sure, and we can be completely certain of the things we don’t know. But as for the things that we do, for me let it be books, guitar chords, cooking recipes, there is always  the uncertainty that there is more, that we don’t know all there is to know, that the world is limitless in it’s supply of books, guitar chords, and cooking recipes.

            Probably my favorite one in the chapter is the following: “Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.” We as humans like to have it all figured out. I, for one, don’t openly welcome confusion and indecisiveness because it’s not what I aim for. It’s not what anyone aims for, I believe. And since art is in a way a for of human expression, a manifestation of the human condition via talent and skill, via the human itself, I think that is a main component: art should demonstrate mixed feelings, clearly. Great art is art not masked by blurry confusion in an attempt to overcome it, but the acceptance of said mixed feelings, the ability to accept it and build on it.

           

            These all lead to the main topic of the paradox of the nature of reality: reality is relative. It’s not nature, it’s nurture. We all make our own realities because reality realism and truth are a matter of experience. What for me is the reality of Mao Zedong as a mass murdered, after being informed by history books, that is, is for most of the Chinese population a hero. Our experiences differ and the way our brains mold said experience via our own molded perspective shape them into our own reality. 

Coping Via Memoirs

            Press the ON button and you’ll see flesh and bones hanging from invisible string atop a gondola with Venetian merchants in the background. Or maybe you’ll come across twenty-something human beings screaming obscenities because living together, contrary to popular belief, is not easy. The again, you might even be grazed with Emeril Lagasse judging sixteen plates of abnormally sophisticated and gourmet food prepared just twenty minutes ago by frazzled contestants in Top Chef. No matter the topic, we are drawn to those documentations of the human condition. Because reality is fascinating and that vicarious part of us relishes shitty television that supposedly offers the satisfaction of those needs.

            This reality exposed through writing, art, or a video camera, can be seen in a certain Michael Kimball’s postcards. He writes people’s lives on the back of postcards. He doesn’t even have to beg or even dig to urge people’s disclosure and liberty with their feelings. “Over the past year, more and more people have contacted Kimball, telling him about themselves. Something about email communication, and the fact that he is a stranger, makes them very open,” says Kate Salter, who wrote about Michael in The Guardian. There’s something about disclosing certain personal secrets or actions to people we know, people close to us, that makes us cringe. Because, for some reason, knowing them makes them realer somehow, more able to judge us. In divulging our lives to a stranger, it’s almost innocuous, and painless. In a way, Kimball is enacting his own type of nonfiction, his documentation of varying memoirs. And people enjoy it.

            The thing about memoirs, though, is that they are wrapped too tightly in the constraining box of guidelines. A memoir, by definition, is an account of a personal experience. And so everyone is set on believing that every single detail has to be a fact because that is the genre that classifies the piece, ergo it should represent it correctly. But “ the memoir rightly belongs to the imaginative world, and once writers and readers make their peace with this, there will be less argument over the questions regarding the memoir's relation to the "facts" and "truth."” Because the human mind, the human memory, is so that it can’t fully hold every single moment, detail by detail, thought by thought, color or temperature, texture or sound. It just can’t. And to expect a memoir to be full facts is just stupid, because it is humanely impossible. When people write lyric poems and express themselves, we don’t question if whatever they’re saying really happened and read on with a critical and cynical mind. “We accept the honest and probably inevitable mixture of mind and spirit.”  And we accept this because history has brought us to understand the sophistication of the lyric poem infused with the poetry of words and the human mind, not just events. Memoirs, on the other hand, are expected to be crisp facts tied together on ink because it doesn’t have that same history as the lyric poem. Reality already happened. Someone’s retelling of reality is already not real. So people should just chill. ---Unless, of course, the author crafts a completely new event that clearly didn’t happen---. In that case, judge away.

            In a way though, by writing people’s memoirs, Kimball is composing a whole essay whose argument is the human need to communicate, to redeem oneself via words, to express. A lot of the people who participate in the postcard project “are claiming - or reclaiming - themselves.” They’re not just doing it to pass the moment or do something strange. Kimball said that he’s “heard about people being in jail, about suicide attempts, about communicating with aliens, about terrible things they have done.” This in itself demonstrates the people participating in the project, people with baggage, with hard lives and events that have probably affected them greatly. And maybe, for them, the postcard project is a relief, a type of redemption. And Kimball is demonstrating this idea of people wanting to cleanse themselves via ink disclosure: “In essays, ideas are the protagonists.” In doing this project, Kimball is contemplating, whether consciously or not, the human need to communicate and redeem. “Essayists in their stillness ponder love and death. Only inner space–interesting, active, significant–can conceive the contemplative essay. Essays, unlike novels, emerge from the sensations of the self.” Kimball is exploring all of this.

           

Illusions

            f. There is a psychology term called the Misinformation Effect, also known as False Memory. It basically states that the human memory is anything but flawless. Sometimes we believe we remember something perfectly, every minutia, every soft surface. But the truth is, we’re wrong. A perfect example of this is when ten witnesses of a crime seem to have ten completely different accounts of the crime. According to the misinformation effect, when we witness an event and then get some incorrect information about that event, we incorporate that incorrect information (misinformation) into our memory of the event. And so we end up with an altered memory of the event. We are all susceptible. And so when Shields says, “Consciously or unconsciously, we manipulate our memories to include or omit certain aspects. Are our memories therefore fiction?” I can’t help but agree. Because whether it’s the conscious act of trying to bar certain negative memories from our minds for the sake of coping, or the unwitting manipulation of certain memories, we do it.

            g. We all lie. We might refrain from telling a certain person she looks like a meat-packed penguin in that tiny red dress because we don’t want to hurt her feelings. We might not tell the current object of our affections that we just went out on a harmless lunch with our ex because, why have them worry when it was meaningless, really? And, I don’t know, maybe if someone asks you if you’ve ever had sexual fantasies with unicorns you’ll say no because there’s an extent to the normalcy of fetishes and you’d rather not be ostracized by all humanity. And, just maybe, you’ll play tonsil hockey with someone other than your boyfriend/girlfriend and casually forget to mention it, because it really didn’t mean anything. Whether it is by omission or straight out lying, we all do it. Because it makes life easier, it makes our relationships sail smoothly, it let’s us glide by without too much turbulence. And so I agree completely with #198. “We all stretch the truth and tell lies by omission. Just getting along with people involves both. Humans are hardwired to deceive. We deceive when we’re competing with other members of the same sex; we deceive when we’re trying to attract the other sex. Deception is more the state of nature than not deceiving. In the animal kingdom, virtually every species deceives all the time. Why don’t we lie even more? It helps our reputation for people to know they can believe us.” We lie to seem. We lie to appear like what we think people want us to appear. It’s more natural for us to appeal to certain things than for us not to because our society has made it that way, a competition for the most admirance in the entire pack. It’s so true.

            h. “The body gets used to a drug and needs a stronger dose in order to experience the thrill. An illusion of reality–the idea that something really happened–is providing us with that thrill right now. We're riveted by the (seeming) rawness of something that appears to be direct from the source, or at least less worked over than a polished mass-media production.” Morbid curiosity. We’ve all heard of it. But the truth of the matter is it is a cover that consumes most humans. Some argue that we're compelled by horrible things because it pays to scrutinize dangers that could threaten one's survival. Some argue that we just want to feel empathy. I just find that things that are ‘real’ seem somehow more impacting and interesting. To have primary sources divulge their feelings and some really fucked up events in their lives is almost like satisfying our craving for curiosity. But my curiosity usually deals with actual events and actual peoples because fiction can deal with my curiosity and millions of ways while reality has one sole answer. And the search for that answer, the idea of understanding reality and things that seem so far-fetched in my own life, is what makes the rawness of ‘reality’ and their sources all the more appealing.

i. “The illusion of facts will suffice.” I think what he means to say by this is that while we pride ourselves on keying in on facts, on praising them and building our lives on their morally-correct entities, there’s a part of us that would rather some things not be true. Like the fact that your partner is cheating on you. Or that your mother doesn’t really love you. Or that you can’t find the square root of negative numbers because, quite frankly, the thought of dealing with imaginary numbers kind of freaks you out. Just like imaginary people talking to you in your sleep. But that’s not the point. The point is we’d rather believe some things to be true when they’re really not, because that semblance of morality, of facts, will make us feel better about the fact that our life is, painfully, not able to deal with them

Response

            In response to the audio commentary, I understand what you mean about the quotation marks when using vocabulary that is not usually found in the dictionary. I had an inner debate about whether to use quotes or italics and yeah, it got pretty confusing. I also felt that it was too much of just random definitions and not a clearer analysis of what the vocabulary meant and I understand what you say about the wordiness, I do tend to get carried away with that. The misogynist aspect of it is something I didn’t really talk about and maybe it would have added another layer to the whole paper, as well as more information on how that Italian-American community feels about how they are being represented. The age group could have been another thing to focus on and when I think about it, it didn’t go as deep as I would have hoped.