I've never felt so understood as when I watch Caveh Zahedi's "The Show About The Show." It mellows me out as a "simple" exploration and reporting on experience, and the emotional fallout from everyone around who does not like their behavior explored and reported on. It's as on-the-nose a piece of art as I've ever seen that matches my experience of the world.
I'm then drawn into this interview with someone who appears to be deeply aggrieved by the show, this character mrgirl, who interviews Caveh. It's like every conversational breakdown I've written about across 2.5 hours. mrgirl volleys some feeling-laden accusation, Caveh, extremely patiently, explains his perspective and relays why he doesn't agree or dismisses the assumptive premise the accusation builds in. I feel so deeply for Caveh trying to articulate something akin to, "Bro, you're making some harsh assumptions about me, moralizing what might otherwise be basic facts of existence I'm literally pointing my camera at, and if you had a better sense of honesty and decency you'd recognize the crippling projection exercise you're doing."
One of the best indicators someone is woefully dishonest is when they result in, "I know you are, but what am I." It's just the hallmark of a nonsense exchange when someone can't both qualify and explore to what degree they are something, but more in their immediate reactive "fuck you" that launches the comment after their behavior is pointed out.
One day I hope to be able to articulate this concisely or through a great story. It's a hard dynamic to talk about because I don't encounter very many honest people. More than that, I don't encounter honest people willing to put their sense of honesty into the world to be scrutinized. I can attempt to borrow from mythology or ear-wormy sentiments from pop culture, but building a comprehensive look that lands emotionally via scattered lines strewn about a thousand blogs is all I've got so far.
Sam Harris uses the term "moral confusion" to describe what's often people's loudest visceral reaction to something they poorly understand, but feel, beyond doubt, that they are on the "right side of history" about. How Israel is handling Hamas is the hot thing right now. Trump vs Biden for anyone confused about how fascism works. "Pro-lifers," always in quotes, think they're saving something that, allegedly, their savior already has. The hypocrisy and basic avoidance of defining words or evidence isn't even hard to do. There's aggressively motivated "reasoning" that tries to square truth and reality into your version of a moralized box.
But right there, the problem is much deeper than calling it "your version." Because, of course, it's not yours. It's "everyone's" to the degree you agree with and recognize how others are justifying in the same way. Any cultural movement grants you license to take liberties with the messy details or statistics that undermine a fundamental assumption that supercharges your righteously indignant feelings. Black Lives Matter kicked off that pendulum in some of the easiest ways to observe in either reflexively agreeing and enabling any version of a victimized black identity story, or being considered a complicit racist. Any individual that wrestled with evolving stories, details, or their own experience will all but certainly develop nuances and subtleties they'll feel "morally obliged" to stay silent about.
A big thing a dishonest person doesn't want to grapple with is how much "power" they're willing to cede to you in order to blame you. If you're the smart one, the rich one, the pretty one, or just the one with the idea and you bothered to say it out loud first, buckle up. If you're Louis C.K. you can mesmerize women who can't escape the force of your beaten dick energy radiating and hypnotizing. When I've tried to write about the worst accusations against me or my behavior, I was insisted upon, several times, to not even speak. Secrets were kept from me. It was if the "right" thing to do was to just shut up and take it. This, of course, because they already know how devious and articulate I am, therefore, when scrutinized I might not look so much like the demon they needed me to be. Can't have that.
Any given person's ability to see through you is bred from their practice of seeing through themselves. Whatever caricature you reflexively make about someone or something, there's at least 1,110 blogs of information about it, at least for me, you're not considering. You're not obligated to consider anything. I'm not obligated to respect or entertain you in turn. That's your power no matter how much you wish to give it away. That's an inescapable truth. I would also call it deeply unwise to teach yourself to avoid or attack conflicting variables. It's an uncomplicated point for people who can be honest with themselves about the power of, or holes in, their perspective. I know how much about you is unsaid, because I'm writing it. I'm speaking to it where you won't.
I appreciate how articulate Caveh is when he explores his own pathological behaviors and perspective of the people who feel "tricked" or "exploited" by him. In reality, they resent their own naivety, as though they are still children for whom it could be easier forgiven. We are infinitely naive and ignorant. That is the rule. There is an infinite amount of information we don't know, let's say for example, how we're going to feel after we try something or discover we're in over our heads. An honest person can say that and then hold themselves accountable to how they respond to or describe that discomfort.
If you pose nude for an artist and then recoil in disgust at their interpretation of your body, are you going to blame them? You thought it was going to be a flattering or emboldening and liberating thing, but it shocks you with a new reality to engage. You never imagined you "could be made to feel" like you did after seeing the work. So, what? The artist should apologize? They just manipulated you and you never wanted to pose in the first place? Of course not. Maybe they are a brilliant artist and nailed your form and expression perfectly. Now what? An honest emotionally accountable person simply states, "Oh, I didn't expect to feel this way. I should reconcile this feeling with my expectations or ideas about myself I took into this experience." 9 times out of 10, what do people do though?
In order to overcome or incorporate that discomfort, you have to be able to regard the artist as simultaneously fallible and harmless in the same ways you are. You have to make fundamental assumptions about intent or make peace with the degree to which everything is at least mildly mysterious and perfectly unknowable. "Why did he draw my eyes like that!?" You can drive yourself mad with endless "whys" to nowhere. And, what is "like that?" If it's a caricature artist, which you better not sit in front of if you aren't at peace with your own body, they did it because that's an exaggerated version of what we can all see. If you're asking from a desperate internalized sense of your own beauty and you think it's "ugly," maybe it's time to humble yourself or you've got a body dysmorphia thing going on like Megan from Megan & Jack.
It's hard not to feel trapped by this defensive, judgmental conversational environment. It's bolstered by everything from religion to TV. Most TV wouldn't exist were the entire plot not driven by a "secret" that doesn't need to be secret. It's "fun" and "funny" to artfully lie and parade yourself into ever-fantastical scenarios. It's a "compelling drama" to root for the consequences of doubling-down on the disingenuous dishonesties driving narrative arcs. Tony Soprano is a murderous family man, and so are you. The entertainment comes from asking if he's either/or indefinitely, and debating what side we're on, as if it's not both. In fact, it wouldn't be compelling television if it's not both combined with acting otherwise, because then we'd just accept and move to the next thing that sets us aflame or stop watching altogether.
The consequences of the superficial debate as it pertains to art feel safer. It's lazy and easy to project onto things that can't fight back. The imagination is being worked for you. Would you kill like they kill? Even the question might make you recoil. Would you fuck like they fuck? You don't want to entertain the thought. Would you risk the lives of the people you say you love and care about? Newsflash, you probably are already in myriad negligent ways, but you'll never entertain the thought looking for the next compelling narrative to glom onto. You won't figure it out while you're looking for the next person to blame. You won't arrive at some grand epiphany as you celebrate forgoing your agency.
There's nothing I've come to realize about myself that isn't available to you. That is, you can find the same things, or you can contrast the degree of difference. The patterns I point out I'm not generating, just accounting for. The language traps, and guilt traps, and blame cliches, and gut reflexes, and caricatured straw-men are waiting to be pointed out and felt and deliberately responded to. You can accept the responsibility and do the work in between dramatic scenarios or before you implicate others in your destruction and cover up. You absolutely can. That's going to depend heavily on whether you're reading this as some absolutely powerful mind-controlling attempt to get you to "believe" something nefarious about my intentions. Do I want you to have sympathy for my pathological compulsions? Am I unironically trying to escape the responsibility I insist upon others?
Sure, sometimes. But I bet you have a significantly harder time explaining when, where, and why than I do. And, I'm literally betting on the difference in our perspectives. That bet looks like every blog I write and word I define. It looks like the work behind getting the land developed. It looks like the effort and money I've put into the people I profess to care about. It looks like the emails I've written expressing the contradictions and moral confusions I could no longer entertain. It looks like the power I'm trying to harness with the company I started. And it looks like my continued ability to recognize and state my sense of obligation as I build more pieces into my awareness and practice.
No comments:
Post a Comment