Perception is Reality (and other tales from the trenches)

Humankind cannot stand very much reality.

T. S. Eliot

Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable.

Cyril Connolly, “The Unquiet Grave”, 1945
(1903 – 1974)

 

The Chinese philosopher Lao-Tse famously wrote that there are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth. In today’s political arena, the same might now be said of reality. Reality is just a synonym for truth, anyway, right? And as anyone on the street can tell you, perception is reality. You make it up as you go along.

 

But it isn’t as though any of us are strangers to the concept of a fuzzy reality. Americans have been blurring the line between artful deception and truth for a very long time. If our country was once called the largest theater in the world – by now it’s a gargantuan soundstage.

 

As children of the eighties, we learned that reality wasn’t worth living if it didn’t have a great soundtrack to accompany it. We also became the first generation almost entirely weaned on a steady intake of MTV video clips, sitcom families, and movies where the dorky kid actually got the girl in the end. Looking around at our own dysfunctional, often-divorced, meager-income, mostly-boring families, we deduced that un-reality was decidedly better than plain-old reality. For awhile anyway, we were content to revel in the shades of our own self-created delusions of grandeur. Everything was neon, not just the clothes. Americans wanted bigger, better, faster, and we wanted it on our terms; that was our collective reality, crafted out of the clever delusions of Hollywood and our own dreams of a better life when we grew up.

 

Then, in the early nineties, in the midst of a first Bush-inspired recession, Americans became even more convinced that reality – or the “real world” – sucked. Better to lose oneself in the fantasy of one’s choosing than to brave living in the harsh, cool atmosphere of a poor economy and uncertain job status. For many of the so-called generation Xers, life was turning out as well as we had expected. For one, there were no snappy soundtracks. For another, the road to financial and qualitative success wasn’t as smooth as we had once been led to believe. It was a harsh awakening that led to a mass disillusion with the power structures at large. In a mirroring of the late sixties and early seventies, sarcasm and cynicism made a comeback. But was the darker side of things any more real than the sunnier, more optimistic side? Were we simply choosing to think of the glass as half-empty, instead of half-full? At any rate, gone were the days of the easy, blissful happy ending. If America was a soundstage, instead of teenage angst films, we were churning out self-reflective film noir.

 

It becomes impossible, in many ways, to discuss the conception of reality in America without dwelling on 9/11. That singular day, arguably the most riveting and shocking day since Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination, is said to have changed the way Americans thought about the world. It turned a nation of self-obsessed, insulated navel-gazers into a people that had to be more concerned with the world outside its own borders. Suddenly, Americans became more interested in things like Islam, Pakistan, morals, the effects of globalization on the disenfranchised poor, freedom, truth and justice in other countries – in understanding the “others” outside our doors. Or did it?

 

In fact, there have always been Lao-Tse’s three realities: ours, theirs, and the “real world”. The trouble is it’s never been exactly clear whose reality is whose. Even more difficult is the notion of which reality is the “real” reality – the Truth. Evolution has done wonders for the human race, but the one thing that we still consistently struggle with is our all-too-human obsession with knowing the absolute truth, as if there was one Truth out there to grasp. All 9/11 might have done is to shake up our notion of the boundaries, making us hungrier for that illusive reality that could make sense of everything: the planes, the smoke, the rubble, the people jumping from buildings; the disappearance of a certain faith in our own immortality, in the certainty that what we have built could not possibly end up no better than the Roman Forum, only bits and pieces left. It strengthened our resolve, not to figure out reality, but to escape from it ever further into our own ways of thinking, our own version of the truth.

 

The images of 9/11 haunt us. Five years later, it is still hard to watch the footage of the towers falling or see the searing blue lights of the memorial jettison into the night sky. But it is the constant replay of those pictures in our heads that makes any sort of reality hard to grasp. Most Americans were nowhere near the World Trade Center or the Pentagon or the stretch of field in Pennsylvania, but they felt like they were. Which is more real – standing on Church Street with ash covering your suit and your hair, filling your lungs, or sitting in your living room staring at your television screen and feeling a strange feeling of foreboding, dismay and horror spread throughout your body? Lao-Tse might argue that it doesn’t matter, that the reality in both cases is the same.

 

For reality to be real, it has to be personalized and felt and experienced by a human being. But no one person or nation’s reality is the right one, or the only one. We live in the modern age, with its I-Pods and wi-fi access, its internet and global commerce, its instant news and text messaging. The modern digital age is its own reality, distinct from everything that came before it and yet intimately connected to our past. The 50s, where the image of the modern perfect American family probably began; the 60s, where we learned that we could make our own reality or drop out of reality and make a better world; the 70s, where reality was confused and the idea of political truth was buried with Watergate; the 80s, where reality was personal and greed was good; the 90s, where reality bit us in the collective ass and we turned to conspiracy theories to make us feel better about the un-real state of the world. It’s all reflected in the reality of today – Americans in 2006 are the inheritors of a desire for truth, an effective “spin” machine which artfully turns out lies, and a dose of both naïve belief and unhealthy skepticism. These days, there are no middle roads. You have to choose what you believe in.

 

Americans love reality television and tell people to “Get real.” We say we want to be told the truth and are in love with plastic surgery, home makeovers, and the princess fairy tales. We lie about our age and our incomes. We tell lies about how good our friends look at age fifty, about how much we love our jobs, about how good we are in bed, and expect our good friends to lie to us about the same subjects. And yet, the reality that we have created seems to make some of us unhappy. We seek out gurus and health advisors and life coaches to teach us how to be happy, about how to change our realities. Over and over again, we get the same answers. Life is hard. There are no shortcuts. Get in touch with yourself, with your family, with your friends. Get real.

 

But the truth is we can’t handle too much reality. It hurts, it’s uncomfortable, and it sucks – a lot. In a world of political spin, global warming, human trafficking, and the ever-present threat of bird flu, who could blame us for our penchant for escapism, for reality bending? Americans will always be dreamers, which is what makes us a great people and the United States a sometimes dangerously naïve nation. Perhaps the trick is balance. Every great actor embodies a part, but only a crazy one loses himself entirely in the role that he plays. The entire world’s a stage and Americans are only one set of players. Our truth, their truth and the truth – it doesn’t really matter. It’s all in the perception, anyway, right?

My New Book In Progress (hereafter known as BIP)

Would anyone read further, if this were the first paragraph of something?

It all started with my father. At least that is what I tell myself as I stand on the roof deck, staring out at all the neon of Hong Kong invading the night sky. Eleven stories up, leaning over the concrete edge and staring down, I wonder how anyone could actually be brave enough to jump from a tall building, an open window, a bridge. I heard once that there are cameras on the Golden Gate to count the objects falling into the bay and that over the years it has added up to hundreds.

The red cabs below me line up on the street, honking whenever the drivers get frustrated, which seems to be every few seconds. From eleven stories up, they look like the toy cars that my neighbors’ kids would leave scattered about the sidewalk. From eleven stories up, everything looks smaller except the sky and the clear, big moon that shines down on my bare skin like a strobe light. It’s nearly four in the morning and I suddenly feel ashamed of myself and scared.

It was melodramatic, I’ll admit, climbing the stairs to the roof, propping open the door with a brick and sobbing as I thought about the effects of killing myself. Because I was never going to do it, anyway, it was simply the thrill of thinking it. The power of the suggestion. Like all the mystical words before it: birth, childhood, marriage, sex, love, truth, death. But in the end, suicide is something that is not in my deck, not a card that I can actually play. It is the ace of spades and I only hold a couple of queens, a jack, a seven of hearts and a two of diamonds. Instead of focusing on the high pair, I have always been obsessed with the two low cards that life has dealt to me. My father being one of them, but not the lowest.

 

 

 

 

Why I do not own a Blackberry

There is a great short piece by Dave Barry in the NYTimes Book Review on a book written about email and texting etiquette. This is an excerpt that I particularly like:

“Unlike my son, I did not grow up with e-mail and texting, but I have come to agree with him: electronic communication is superior to the old-fashioned paper kind. I do almost all of my communicating by e-mail. I’ve been known to e-mail people who were literally standing next to me, which I know sounds crazy, because at that distance I could easily call them on my cellphone. But I prefer e-mail, because it’s such an effective way of getting information to somebody without running the risk of becoming involved in human conversation.”

I, sadly, still prefer human conversation, though only part of the time. Often, face-to-face interactions disappoint me. However, I still prefer them to getting a text message. Actually, text messages – though I engage in their sending and receiving – bother me. Especially the acronyms and the smiley faces.

Ideally, I would never be locatable. I like being anonymous and out-of-touch. I’m old-fashioned, maybe, but there it is. If I’m ever in Hawaii, sitting on the beach and emailing on my Blackberry, someone is going to have to slap me. Or put me out of my misery.

Being attached to your hand-held device is not living your life. Unless, that is, your virtual life is better than your actual one. If Blackberry is saving us all from being the receivers of irritated angst, then I’m all for it. But I have a sneaking suspicion that it helps to create angst, not to rid us of it.

MA oral exams . . .

Well, I had my MA oral exam today with my adviser and another professor from my department. They each sat in chair at diagonals from my seat – placed directly in the middle of both of them. They were slightly turned in to to face each other, and not me, which was an indication, I thought, of my relative status.

Usual to my strange way of approaching things, I had not prepared anything in advance. I have always had this bizarre notion that tests should examine what you actually know from memory, not what you cram in at the last minute. And so, true to form, I had not even looked over my syllabi. I was, as they say, going to “wing it”.

The first question was a doozy. It would take me 18 parts to answer in full and left me with no clear beginning. It was, in a nutshell: “What has this year at Berkeley taught you about anthropology? How is your conception of anthropology different to what you came in with, and what specific texts that you’ve read might have influenced it? How has your perception of it changed your project?”

Sure. Let me get right on that.

I bumbled through, saying something honest about how I had no idea of what anthropology was when I came into the program, and how I had changed my project after I realized that bird flu had no “field site”. I said something about knowing what a Kantian subject was, and how Hegel had helped me formulate what it meant to become a “self”. Then, not to be left to my own scant answers, one of the professors called me on my bluff. “What,” she said, “did Hegel teach you about the subject? What reading from the first section specifically left an impression on you?” I said Hegel and Dubois had taught me how the “other” factors into our conception of our “selves” and that the idea of a “double consciousness” intrigued me.

Then I was asked to list all the papers I had written in the past year and to explain their basic arguments, both for the theory class and the medical anthropology course. I did so. In detail and much to my amazement. Then we discussed at least two of those papers – one on the body as it exists in phenomenology,  political-economy, and biopower or post-structuralism and one on the differences between biosociality and biological citizenship – and we were done with the “What I Have Learned” section.

We quickly moved on to the “What I Will Do in the Future” section of the exam. I was asked to list my classes for next term and to tell them how they related to my new project – plastic surgery in China. I did so. Then I was asked what my plans for the summer were. I told them what I planned to read and to think about. This, it seems, is key to the academic life. You must have things you are thinking about.

I didn’t dare tell them that I am planning to write my second book. That, I guessed, would not be academic enough for them. And that is true enough.

Did I pass?

I have no idea. I was asked to leave the room and they conferred. They each had a green sheet to fill out with my particulars and comments. I am assuming I did pass, but I could be wrong.

I think this because there was nothing I didn’t answer honestly and to the best of my ability. I said so when I didn’t understand something or couldn’t respond, and I kept up my end of the conversation. I cited texts and authors and seemed to know what I was talking about – more or less. Which is all that matters, in the long run.

So.

The first year, as far as I am concerned (and ignoring the paper I have to write this weekend and the Chinese final exam next week) is over.

OK, here we go . . .

For starters, I’m not telling anyone about this blog for at least a month. That way, I’ll know who is googling me or stalking me. And it will give me a chance to get going, so there will be some solid evidence that I can maintain a steady flow of new posts. In the past, I have been a bad, bad blogger. This is my opportunity to turn over a new digital leaf.

Can you tell I have my Master’s oral exam tomorrow and Chinese translation work to do?

Procrastination is such a wonderfully productive thing.