On Identity
So I’m starting to realize that the part of me that thinks about thinking isn’t as in control of my life as I thought.
I mean, yeah, I took Psychology 101, and I’ve read books by Dan Ariely. I understand that the part of me I think of as “me,” the part that’s open to analysis and accessible through words is just the tip of the iceberg. And I’ve read C. S. Lewis and agree with him that we can’t divorce our states of mind or behaviours from the states of our bodies. I even know that viscerally: when nothing seems good and I just want to punch someone, or myself, or both, it’s time to go to sleep, because exhaustion is the real culprit.
But somehow in the back of my mind, I always figured that knowing about these mind “bugs”* negated them. If I know something’s affecting how I feel, I can just discount it or work around it, right? Like, when I know I’m sad because I’m tired, I’ll go to sleep. When I know I’m cranky because I’m hungry, I’ll eat. And when I feel something inconvenient, like anger at someone I don’t want to be angry at or self-doubt or missing someone who’s not there, I can use mind hacks to make the feelings go away. Problems solved!
(If you build enough walls around feelings, eventually they’ll be pale and withered and weaker than you. That’s how it works, right?)
Only trouble is, logic works only as far as the other party is willing to accept it. And feeling definitely don’t do logic. Remember when your parents wanted you to try some new dish you thought was gross? Remember when they triumphantly pointed out that you’d been eating and enjoying the ingredient that made you wrinkle your nose in disgust just thinking about it? Remember how that didn’t help at all?
Because just being sure something is true doesn’t make it easier to believe that thing. It’s a corollary of what Stephen Colbert would call “truthiness“: sometimes things feel true when they’re not and don’t feel true when they are, and no amount of thinking analytically about it can change that gut intuition. It’ s why people who can read and watch pictures and see video still want to go gape at dinosaur bones in museums and feel starfish in aquariums, why there have to be barriers at art galleries to prevent visitors from touching the canvasses.
Sometimes feelings are a lumpish behemoth that shifts around under the skin, and while holding onto its logic-leash feels reassuring, really, how do you expect to restrain a boulder when it really wants to move?
Which makes me wonder about what I do for a living and what I write about on this blog. I like — no, love — stories and performances and books, and I love tearing them apart to see what’s inside just as much as I love reading or watching or hearing them for the first time. I love to wonder what makes me like a particular story or character so much. I love to take the lessons I learn and try to apply them to my own writing.
But can I really explain what draws me to my favourite stories any more than I can explain why I love some people and not others?
I can explain about people after the fact. I can tell you reasons I should love them, their quirks and virtues and adorable vices. But I can’t say why one person is my best friend and another is a passing acquaintance when as far as it looks on paper, they’re identical.
Likewise, when I study history, I try to avoid making causal judgments: so-and-so did this because of that. This war happened because of such-and-such. History is so complex and multilayered that it’s impossible to attribute any event to specific causes. I can show that plenty of things influenced a given event and helped it unfurl the way it did, but in the end, can I really pinpoint the spark and fuel once the fire’s lit?*** The closer you get to the screen, the blurrier the pixels of causality get. Like in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, even the historical actors don’t really know why they do what they do.
And neither do I. When it comes down to it, all I can tell you are reasons why a story I like is good, why a book I enjoy is well written or a movie well performed. I can’t tell you what hooked me about it and made me look for good things. Something made me notice the faults of the things I dislike and ignore those of the ones I don’t. What? How? I wish I knew.
What I do know is, this talking — the analysis, the history, the writing discussion — well, it’s fun. And even if it’s not accurate in that it doesn’t really explain what makes certain stories exciting or boring, it’s still meaningful. It’s still taking apart my toys to see what’s inside the things I play with.
* I don’t think that this part of being human is analogous to software bugs — that is, that the human mind is somehow “supposed” to run logically and smoothly, and emotions and belonging to a body are mistakes that get in the way. If “supposed to be” even makes sense when applied to living creatures, then we’re supposed to be as we are: messy, wonderful, awful, thinking-and-feeling-mixed-up-so-you-can’t-pry-them-apart creatures. But, hey, the word was handy. So sue me.**
*** I know I didn’t start it at least.