February 16, 2008

• Method Acting and Make Believe

  On loving and lying…

  It all fits together, I have found.  I write about lying — did two pieces, recently:  first, Who do I believe? and then a followup after receiving comments — and I write about loving.  Love comes into my blogging more often than I think to tag it.  It seems to me that most of what the culture that surrounds me has to say about love is a lie.

  All right… that might be unnecessarily harsh.  Most people aren’t exactly lying.  It’s more a case of making believe, pretending, lying to themselves… method acting.  Following Stanislavski’s system, Lee Strasberg, Anton Checkov and Stella Adler taught actors not just to indicate the emotions and motivations of their characters, but to identify with the character and act as if they were feeling what the character felt.  I know lots of people who are acting out roles of Prince Charming and Cinderella, because it’s expected of them, or because they are more comfortable in those roles than they are being their crass mammalian selves.

  I spent a large portion of my youth making believe, making myself believe my own lies because that was the only way I found to make my lies convincing.  I was always a terrible liar, telegraphing my deceit in various ways.  It’s a gift, actually:  projective telepathy.  I’m fairly good at the receiving end on tests of telepathic ability, but on the sending end, I’m an ace.  If I want a lie to be believable, I have to believe it myself.  Self-deception is an effective tool in lying, but a delusional state isn’t the healthiest way to live.

  That pragmatic form of self-delusion is somewhat different from the more common kind of romantic make believe.  Most people might not start out attempting to deceive others with their romantic fantasies (unless, for example, sexual appetite is the root cause and seduction is the motivation).  They have been indoctrinated with myths of romantic love, and despite having experiences that tend to refute the myths, they choose to believe in a made up version of what love is all about.  Many of those who don’t choose that path do become disillusioned and come to believe that love itself is a total myth, or that it is invariably bound up with psychopathology and emotional pain.  A few hours of surfing Xanga is more than enough to bring forth examples of all of these reactions to the cultural hypocrisy of “love.”

  Part of the problem there is semantic.  We use one word, “love,” to denote appetites and preferences, lustful physical attraction, familial affection, divine adoration, insecure emotional need for validation, patriotic or philosophical devotion, and probably several other shadings of meaning, as well.  It’s almost enough to completely discourage me from ever writing about love… almost.  I don’t have a missionary’s zeal for debunking romantic myths or trying to reform pathological liars.  My attitude is compounded of a natural-born healer’s drive to minimize malaise and dysfunction, and a persnickety Virgo’s knee-jerk, “Oh, yeah?  Sez you!”

  One recent message asked me how it is possible to choose to love.  I recognized in it the common confusion of mammalian mating drives, romantic love, with the kind of unconditional love that is a clear and conscious choice, a commitment to acceptance.  I tried to briefly explain that, and I hope I succeeded.  I can see no benefit, but only personal pain and family dysfunction perpetuated through generation after generation, in attempting to euphemise natural mammalian processes that are healthy and necessary to the continuation of the species.  Sex is okay all by itself.  It doesn’t need to be prettied up or covered up as if it were something nasty.

  The reader comment that really motivated this entry is this one from fairydragonstar:

  I think on some level we all lie ” I think that hat is gorgous on you”
  as an example when we really don’t think so but to me truth is
  realtive…if you ask 10 people what they saw in an event they will all
  give you 10 diffrent dialogues on what happened and none will
  match…it just means that they are tellinf what is in thier reality at
  the particular time (sic)

  When I read this, the jerk that lives in my knee asked, “Who’s we, Paleface?”  Differences of perception that are illustrated by the unreliability of eyewitness testimony are different from lying.  The fact that one of them exists does not suggest that the other does not exist.  Having someone say that she thinks everyone tells those polite little white lies tells me two things about the person:  she doesn’t know me very well, and she does engage in that kind of deceit that is generally motivated not by a desire to avoid hurting someone else, but rather by a personal need not to alienate or offend someone whose opinion of her is important to her.

  One can be sincere yet mistaken in one’s perceptions.  Often such delusions are the result of perceptions and expectations learned from a hypocritical and euphemistic culture.   One can also have clear perceptions and various motives for not telling it as one sees it.  In this culture it takes a rebel or a maverick to tell a friend that her butt doesn’t just look fat in those pants, it really is fat.  I guess you know what this makes me.  I’m the kind of friend who will tell you you’re looking tired or sick, and go on to ask what’s going on in your life and offer to help if I can.  So sue me.  I love you.  I don’t give a shit how you feel about me.  
  

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  In the Yukon Quest, Lance Mackey and his neighbor Ken Anderson have been running just minutes apart for days, with the rest of the pack at least half a day behind the two of them.   Mackey’s team of thirteen dogs pulled into Dawson City on Valentine’s Day, 33 minutes ahead of Anderson and his eleven.  Mackey dropped a dog in Dawson, and left with twelve at  1:40 AM today.  Anderson left six minutes after him.

  I heard Lance this morning on public radio, saying that Ken’s dogs may be faster than his on clear trail, but that his guys are “…just steady.”  Lance’s team’s overall average trail speed in this Quest is 5.5 mph.  Anderson’s team’s overall average is 5.3 mph.
  

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  This weekend, two snowmobilers have died in an avalanche near Turnagain Pass on the Kenai Peninsula.  State authorities are warning of extreme avalanche danger.  It’s a combination of early snows in October and November, glazed by rain in January, then more snow on top of the slick ice sheet, plus warmer weather that’s bringing out the crowds of air polluting recreational noisemakers from the city.  One of their favorite games is high-marking, seeing who can leave the highest arcing track on a steep hillside.  Many times, their marks are wiped out by avalanches they have triggered.  Sometimes, they are wiped out, too.
  

  • 2:28 pm
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