Some Stuff about Pretending

V: "So why does raising a misunderstanding that nobody actually has and then resolving it count as low rhetorical form?" Partly because low persons have used it to coerce America into bed recently. It still hums with the sad fug of loveless sex. So people like Ann Coulter (may she be forced to raise Madonna's African babies Bolshevik) will accuse Obama of steering America towards Socialism, which is alas so far from true, and then explain in these-people-just-don't-smell-the-peril tones about how he's betraying the Pristine Vision of the Founding Fathers. That and bare clavicles will get you rich.

And another reason is that it's so genuinely difficult to understand other people that pretending to understand them easily in order to mischaracterize them has, I think, the broad consequence of giving people the illusion that understanding is supposed to be easy. This sort of mock-patient, didactic name-calling is so much like those grad seminars where everybody talked real fast and nobody really understood anybody else and everybody assumed that they were the only one not understanding and so everyone talked a little faster still. Actually saying something true is difficult and understanding someone else's attempt to say something true is maybe even more difficult. Saying and hearing are more like gardening than like dis- and reassembling a rifle while being timed. The patience and slow method, waiting for foreign and heterogeneous bits to slide together, grow together. Not meant here as a sexual thing, although there is also, weirdly, a strong fascination to what you don't understand that is like sexual attraction. Waiting for things to come together is wonderfully creative and sexy. The Universe's desire to try new combinations moving through us. Pretending, inclining towards, moving with, grokking.

I certainly don't mean to suggest that you have to mean everything you say. That seems like not only a depressingly high standard but also a misunderstanding of how language works. That is, we don't just find words to make the sentences in our heads. We also learn to speak the sentences that find us. Like a new dance form that teaches you an unexpected way to move your body, and you try it and you realize your body works really well that way, that your body is truer, more itself somehow or that it has this unexpected dimension, when it's doing this dance. People like me have to say stuff before they know if they mean it; lots and lots of stuff. We try to minimize and repay the tedium we impose on our listeners. And so another reason why this is a low rhetorical form is that we need the good will of those in whose presence we pretend. Willfully give pretending a bad name? Squander whatever meagre capital that pretenders may have saved up? Madness!

Pretending--or whatever, probably I should be more careful what word I choose here-- is not the same thing as lying. Pretending--fiction, vision, experiment, spirit-talk, art and making, as well as openly patiently reading and seeing and hearing these things--all these are attempts to find new dances that say something about the body, that let the body become itself in some way. And the body is changing, don't you think? Along with the rest of us? And so for people to pretend for the wrong reasons again gives the impression that something difficult and on-going is supposed to be fixed, finite, easy. Or that all pretending is lying. Or that accepted forms of pretending--like religion and annual physical exams--are true. Good understanding and good pretending are difficult and sacramental and sexy. Bad pretending: eegh(shiver).

I know that when I willfully misunderstand and when I falsely pretend it's out of lack of courage. Or maybe another way of saying it is that I don't have faith that the Universe is becoming Itself in me and so I don't pretend properly. And this aloofness is sadder than anything that I suffer at the hands of the Universe.