Experiencing the shared subjectivity

Wednesday, May 18, 2022

6 a.m. I am inclined to talk about good guys and bad guys today, unless you have other plans.

And you don’t know whether to ascribe the impulse to us or to yourself, as if that were a distinction with a difference.

Well, sometimes clearly you do have a different track you’re on. So, setting switches for maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, focus.

Last night I watched the 1971 film “Dirty Harry,” which everyone else in the world at the time watched in 1971. (Weird to see young hairy Clint Eastwood, when I have only known him as a close-cut older man.) And I watched the ten episodes of “The Lincoln Lawyer” that popped up on Netflix last week. And – beginning in the 1970s – I read all of John D. MacDonald and moved on to several others who cranked out detective novels annually: Parker, Sandford, Swain, Crais, Mosely. And the classics: Hammett, Chandler, Sayers, Tey, etc. You might say, “What a massive waste of time” and in some moods I’d agree with you. But in other moods, I’d say such reading, like watching similar material on Netflix, was necessary grounding for someone whose experience of the world tended to be second-hand.

No, you’re going to have to go deeper if you are to have the effect you want to have.

Well, it’s still a striptease, and it’s still somewhat embarrassing.

That’s merely your persona, objecting to being exposed as in some ways only a pose.

That’s a pretty big “merely.” However, I take your point. The embarrassing thing is that I needed – need still, I suppose – such tales of good and evil to persuade me that such things even happen.

No, no, no! Slower, more carefully.

You’re right. I suppose such sloppiness accompanies first attempts to phrase things previously unsaid. I’ll try again, and hope this interests somebody.

Actually, your prime audience should be you yourself, no less than when we are discussing things you don’t take so personally, because even as you write things out, you learn. Things that were beneath your level of awareness are drawn to the surface by their links with whatever has just been pulled out of the lesser depths; it is mostly a process of association of contents, driven by a narrative thread.

And that process requires time, even if only a little time, which is why slower is better.

Yes. In effect, you allow your hook to sink deeper into the waters, where the bigger fish swim. So do your trawling slowly, even painfully slowly, trusting that your inner fisherman knows what it is doing.

All right. Well, how would I ever come into contact with the world of malice and insanity and stupid degrading obsessions and passions, if I didn’t read about it or watch depictions of it? And if I did not let myself become aware of it, on a continuing basis, how could I prevent my view of the world – of life – from becoming ungrounded? I do know a few people like that – people accused Emerson and Thoreau of being like that, though unjustly, in my view. I prefer truth to pretty pictures.

And your conversation last night.

Oh yes, I thought this would come into it. I don’t know how to describe her and still protect her privacy, though.

Merely say she is someone you were very close to, for many decades, who is not connected with, not sympathetic to, this work. Call her X.

I guess that will do. I figure people will be second-guessing this, trying to figure out if they know her, when in fact they won’t, but the guessing game would be an irrelevance. It doesn’t matter her name, rank, and serial number; what matters is her habit of mind.

See? These little obstacles can be overcome, and you can still move into deeper waters.

She (a) watches the news and believes what she sees, and (b) never sees anything from more than one point of view. I have been there, but not real recently.

Discuss specifics; again, slowly.

[Putting mine in Roman and prefacing theirs with TGU, when mine becomes too long to read in italics:]

She has bought the party line about Putin and the Russian-Ukrainian war. Knowing nothing about the Ukraine five years ago, suddenly she’s all concerned about it. Putin is self-evidently Hitler, and if he isn’t stopped here, etc. – the same Munich analogy that bogged us down in Vietnam 60 years ago. NATO expansion clearly is no threat to Russia because NATO is defensive, etc. The horrible things that have happened to the Ukrainians who were bombed, etc.

Counter-arguments, she could not hear. I wasn’t arguing that the Russians were right; I was saying, consider how things look to them. But this she cannot do. To her, arguments have only two sides, right and wrong. So I say to her – trying to find an example she should be able to understand easily enough – consider the three Baltic republics. If I were Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, I would certainly want to be in NATO rather than have to face Russia alone. But if I were Russia, I would certainly feel threatened if NATO suddenly was only a couple of days from St. Petersburg. Both concerns are valid. Each side could talk till the cows came home about the legitimacy and necessity of their position. Each would be right – and, in that each would not take into account the opposing view – each would be wrong.

I pointed out that the whole mess was one result of 70 years of Communist rule, with Stalin deporting populations from one place to another, mixing things up, creating little Ulsters everywhere. (I didn’t think of the Ulster analogy. It would have been a close one, in some ways.)

[TGU:] So, your view of the Russo-Ukrainian war?

I don’t know the ins and outs of it, nor do I want to. What I know is that there was never a war – never a situation of any kind, maybe – where all the good guys were on one side and all the bad guys were on the other. Not even World War II. Not even the Nuremburg Trials, where one of the Allied prosecutors was Vishinski, who had prosecuted at the Soviet show trials a scant decade earlier.

[TGU:] And, more closely, your concern?

Everything in the world – crime novels, shoot-em-ups, the nightly news, everything – can serve as instruction if you remember that it is only somewhat real, and can serve as delusion, distraction, if you let yourself think it’s realer than it is.

[TGU:] Still again: Slower, please.

People who accept the news as if it were gospel are losing themselves in somebody’s story. It used to be the mark of wisdom not to believe everything you hear. And I know, because for a long time I did believe anything I heard. I did decide, “This is right, that was wrong,” as if anything could be all black or all white. I remember in college, deciding who was right in the Spanish Civil War. It took a long, long time to realize that even Spain was not as clear-cut as I had thought. (Hemingway saw it; read For Whom the Bell Tolls. He saw that neither side consisted of angels, nor could.)

[TGU:] You’re doing all the work, yes, but we’re holding the space. We are acting as left-brain for you, this time.

Seems that way.

[TGU:] You still have not expressed your thought. Tie in crime novels and films; news broadcast; single vision.

I thought I’d done that. Well, I guess what I’m saying is that the 3D world is real in its own terms, and needs to be seen in its own terms. But, it is also only somewhat real, and that “somewhat” is to be remembered, if we are not to be sucked in by the drama, forgetting who we really are and what we’re really doing here.

[TGU:] And?

And one way to do both things at once is to remember that there are always more sides to a story. That helps us remember that both sides in whatever conflict are embodying the forces allowed in by the moment. To some extent they are playing the marshal and the outlaw; to some extent they are the marshal and the outlaw. In no case are they writing the script, though they may be padding their part as best they can.

This still doesn’t express the thought I began with, I see. That is, the directors or authors of these dramas do everything they can do, to make you hate the villain and want to see him or her killed. That reaction strikes me as a good thing and at the same time a bad thing. On the one hand, it has us standing up for good against evil. On the other hand, it has us channeling hatred.

[TGU:] But even there, you don’t know which is all good and which is all bad. Rooting for good over evil may lead to your thinking that you are all good and no evil. Channeling hatred may be one way of directing that energy relatively harmlessly. Life, if you haven’t noticed, can rarely be summed up accurately by snap judgments.

Is this how we’re going go proceed now, with me doing the work and you nudging?

We’ll see, won’t we? Can you argue that this didn’t accomplish anything?

I’ll see when I transcribe. Today’s theme, “Good guys and bad guys,” I suppose.

Maybe, better, “The players and the play,” or perhaps “Experiencing the shared subjectivity.”

Hmm. That’s an interesting suggestion. Maye so. Well, I guess I’ll thank myself for all this. 😊 Thanks for holding the space.