Monday, July 5, 2010. Yesterday I re-read Adios Hemingway, a novel by Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer. Just a detective novel, but by a Hemingway aficionado, but one who, reading about the life that you lived, has serious reservations. In fact, he is repelled by The Hemingway Myth, the pointless killing of animals, the meannesses, the out-of-control behavior, even while he recognizes the generosity, the warm-heartedness, the serious craftsman.
You would find it a sobering thing, to see the opinions others hold of you. Even the exaggerated good would be a reproach; the bad opinions would sting as much because they were out of true proportion as because they were true.
You say “the exaggerated good.”
Well, if people see only the good sides of you, isn’t that a reproach, showing you what you might have been, if you’d had a better handle on your other selves? And if they see only the bad sides – or let’s say the unpleasant sides, put it that way – it is still a reproach, showing you how often you fell down, how many things you did that you wish you hadn’t. And if they had a truly balanced view of you, do you suppose you’d agree with the balance?
I’ve always known you were a highly moral man.
I was a perfectionist man. Like Jake [Barnes, in The Sun Also Rises], I wished I was a better Catholic. But, remember, we’ve been trying to get you into the habit of seeing yourselves and each other as the communities you are rather than the units you think you are. So if you look at my life you might profitably look at it again as an example of seeing from this new point of view. That is the point of your extensive reading of and now about Hemingway, remember — a public life that can be re-examined with insight gleaned from the inside. So think of “me” — the essence of the person — as the ringleader of so many individual elements. Think of “me” as the guy who got stuck paying the bill for whatever the guys inside broke. Of course, I also got the credit for what they accomplished.
I feel where you’re going, but let’s spell out some what and why.
Hemingway the borracho, for instance. Do you know — can you imagine — the trouble that brooding drunk cost the rest of me? Even the happy drinker brought problems as well as relaxation and exaltation. And what about the ones who married women, seeking something that others didn’t want and couldn’t stand? How about the violent clashes within me of so many elements that sometimes couldn’t stand one another? And above all, what of the resulting fly-off-the-handle temper, and worse the mean pursuit and getting-even and the right-at-any-cost element? I ask you, imagine yourself as ringmaster of so many strong contending elements — and the nervous strain that holding them altogether took, and produced. If you can see me as holding together what our mutual friends TGU are calling a person-group, a lot of complexities and perplexities in my life and in your lives will be cleared up for you.
I’ve said it before, but once again, you can’t really say this in life and be heard; It sounds like special pleading, asking for mercy, or even for what people call “understanding” which often amounts to forgiveness without repentance. Nevertheless even if it can’t be easily said, it remains true: I, you, we, everyone — we are not individuals in the way your society assumes that we are, and therefore we don’t function in the way we are assumed to function, and therefore most of our lives go unexplained and, as Thoreau said, they have to go unexplained, because even the explanations would have to be explained.
Theft again.
Can I help it if you leave stuff around to be stolen?
Smiles on both sides. Okay, and so –?
Well, if you look at my life and you try to see it as reasonably consistent, you get these puzzling anomalies, don’t you? How can one person be so controlled and so uncontrolled? So generous and so suspicious and even grasping, so great a friend and so treacherous a friend, so gracious and so snarlingly offensive, so this and so that endlessly? And you say he has “moods” or “streaks” or sides to him that this or that brings out. But these explanations don’t explain! They sort of explain away. Think of yourself. Who — trying to see you from outside and having a pretty good experience of you — could do more to understand you than to construct a more or less fictional individual who could have done and said what you have done and said, more or less consistently, more or less staying in character? And even that construction is going to show puzzling sides to it. The reason why isn’t far to seek. It’s because such a construction is a cover story, a papering-over of reality with an image that looks like what could be expected — at the price of not resembling what it really is!
Yes. This is ground we’ve covered before.
I think you’ll find that it isn’t enough to say a thing once. You repeat it, and the person hearing it is in “a different space” as you say; in actuality a somewhat different group of themselves is reading it than read it previously. You may have to say it ten times before enough of the person-self’s constituent parts have heard the message.
That’s an interesting concept.
Just consult your own experience. You read something, it makes an impact. You read it again and it makes a different impact, as if the words were different. It isn’t the words, it’s the “you” that’s different! And if it’s a different enough mixture, the words may seem almost brand-new, and you’re thunderstruck that you never thought to understand them that way when you read them before. Well, you, in that sense, didn’t read them before. Other parts of you did.
Yes. And what’s the specific practical application you’re putting this to? For I can feel there is something.
To transform your lives, it is necessary for certain new ways of seeing (hence, of being) to percolate all the way down. They don’t do this right off, it takes repetition in different contexts. So when, a while ago, we spelled out the way of seeing yourselves as a person-groups functioning within social-groups, we were loosening the hold on you that the socially accepted — assumed — fiction of the individual has on you. Once see yourself differently, and everything can change. But to see yourself differently is not usually the work of one flash of insight, but of the slow working of that insight into this and that corner of your existence.
Such an interesting, powerful post. Hemingway’s discussion of living in community, as person-groups, made me realize how lively and dynamic, even cutthroat, that can be. And what it can cost. It seemed to me that he chose to take on quite a tough and strong-willed group. In the end, you could see his ultimate balance of that challenge in what he wrote. Thanks for sharing.
He was an amazingly complete man, with his full share of challenges.