--
On a work trip to Washington, D.C. recently, I had one off night with nothing much to do, so I gratefully curled up in my hotel bed with a biography of the Haitian-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, written by Phoebe Hoban, and dug in. Hoban, you may recall, is the author of an aforementioned biography of Lucian Freud -- a similarly catastrophic individual who must have been a terror to know, but is a delight to read about.
Basquiat, like Freud the Younger, was one to rather burn his candle at both ends -- to such an extent in his case, however, that he tragically passed away from a heroin overdose at age 27 -- all-but-self-consciously modeling himself in so doing on Charlie Parker and other creative titans who guttered early, but who "gave" while they lasted "a lovely light." (Robert Hughes deemed him the Thomas Chatterton of the 80s art world -- albeit a comparison he did not intend flatteringly.)
As an actual human fate, this must have been awful to experience. But Basquiat himself was the first to read into own tragedy the compensating hallmarks of artistic grandeur. As a friend of mine once put it to me (a friend who will considered in quite some detail in the rest of this post), whenever he is in the throes of a particularly painful experience, at least part of his mind is able to detach itself and think: "At least my life is an interesting work of art." In my own case, I similarly horde any intense emotion that comes along these days -- however unpleasant -- thinking that here at least might be something that would come in handy for a future poem. Sublimation, as they call it. It's supposed to be a relatively healthy response to the discomforts and disappointments of adult life. And it's supposed to guard against the other kinds of responses -- such as those employed by Basquiat -- that tend toward self-destruction. All of which is why it is far better to read about Basquiat than to live like Basquiat. There are romantic fantasies that should only be indulged vicariously.
From the safety of my hotel room bed, however, the indulgence was so utterly vicarious that I began to feel the stirrings of actual envy. Maybe my life was far too sheltered and staid. Maybe I would never rise to such artistic heights until I had plumbed such human depths. Why don't such interesting things ever happen to me? Why don't I have elaborate and risky urban adventures? Maybe I needed more Basquiat tendencies in my life.
So there I was in my hotel room, thinking these thoughts. Basically, it was the perfect set-up for human happiness -- lurid details of the noble self-implosion of the romantic genius propped before me, a solid stretch of hours with no external commitments and no need to go outside, nursing a fantasy as to an alternative self and an alternative future that I would never enact. A couple hours in, however, I started to get hungry, and I realized the one thing needed to truly complete the experience would be a snack. Stumbling back into my jeans and coat, I left by the front of the hotel to find the CVS that I vaguely remembered seeing on my way in.
I had only gone a couple blocks when a well-dressed man stopped me on the sidewalk. "Hey man," he said, hesitating slightly, "Do you know where the place is.... where the cool people go?" "Im sorry?" I said. "You know...." he made a smoking gesture with his fingers -- "the cool people."
I was stunned. Somehow or other, I had been mistaken for a creature of the night. I had conveyed to a stranger (I mentally checked myself -- what had suggested it? my dark jacket? It could hardly have been my glasses and dimples) that I was hip to the ways of the underworld. It was an unfamiliar and weirdly flattering sensation.
On the other hand, there was my self-preservation to think of. There was a book waiting for me back in my room, along with central heating. There were cheeses and crackers to be obtained at the CVS. All of my most non-Basquiat-like tendencies immediately kicked into gear.
"No, sorry man, I don't know," I said. I shook his hand and left. He seemed like a nice guy.
It occurred to me, once I was back in my room, that this in a nutshell was the reason why I would only ever read about Basquiat, and never be Basquiat. It was also an object lesson in the fact that my comparative lack of wild experiences in the urban jungle was not as much due to a lack of opportunity as to a lack of initiative.
Talking after I got back from the trip with a friend -- the friend whose life, at least some days of the week, is a tragic work of art -- I told him this brief non-story. Then I said: "I realized this is the fundamental difference between you and me. You have the spirit of adventure. Your curiosity would have won out over your instinct for self-preservation in that situation, and you would have continued the conversation with the guy, at least to figure out what and where the place with the cool people might be. Whereas my desire for predictability is stronger." He didn't dispute the characterization.
More recently still, this friend said to me that he often felt that he would be equally open to adopting any human identity, so long as he found it aesthetically pleasing. I pondered this for a moment. "Have you thought about being the self-destructive, self-involved, but weirdly charming and charismatic creative genius?" I said. I had, after a hiatus, just gotten back to finishing that Basquiat book, and so his example was fresh in my mind. It thought he might work as an acceptable aesthetic model for my friend to emulate, as he somewhat reminds me of the artist.
I don't mean -- thankfully -- that he shares the latter's more extreme self-destructive tendencies. But he is similar in his relative lack of inhibitions, and the strange charm that this seems to exert over other people.
--
When I think back to the five years or so of our friendship, this strikes me as perhaps the most salient theme of our friendship. One of my most pronounced traits is and has long been my inhibitedness. And one of his is straightforwardness. It allows for a certain Bert-and-Ernie dynamic in our interactions that seems to serve us well. (I am Bert, in this relationship, in case you couldn't tell.)
He is forthright about of all the things that I would never be. He comes out with details about bodily functions, sexual habits and physical attractions, personal finances, his own triumphs and achievements, his grandiose fantasies, his forbidden political opinions, and the entire rest of the list of things that I simply "knew" from the earliest age that one does not talk about, and he does so without a blush. I am astounded by it every time. These are not just things that I choose not to talk about, these are things I believe on some level no one is allowed to talk about. It is simply not done. Which makes the fact that my friend does talk about them a source of endless fascination.
And because he is doing all of this without any inhibitions, it is entirely charming, rather than obnoxious. It grants to him a charisma such as Basquiat seems to have exerted over the people around him (how else to explain the seemingly endless supply of friends and girlfriends in the artist's life, despite his abominable behavior toward everyone). If the essence of prurience lies in the dialectical relationship between desire and repression, then someone without any repression is ipso facto incapable of prurience.
If I, by contrast -- with all of my inhibitedness -- were to try to talk about the same things my friend talks about, with the same degree of frankness, it would be repellant and lecherous. The evident manner in which it was cutting against the grain of my own personality would be too evident.
But my friend has won a freedom for himself in this respect. Because he does not repress, he is perhaps the least prurient person I've ever met. He is capable of simply standing up in a room full of people whom he barely knows and announcing "I have to go poo," and having it just seem totally natural. I would have to be ejected from human society if I ever said a thing like that -- if I tried to announce, not that I was "going to the bathroom," but told everyone exactly which of the bodily functions I was about to perform, and did so too in this bizarre sort of baby talk. But with him, everyone just laughs. It's delightful.
He once told me that in his childhood (and another great thing about this personality that I am trying to describe is that he won't mind me spilling the beans on all of this here, so long as I don't identify him), he had a particular habit that his parents were always striving to correct of leaving the door open when he went to the bathroom, so that he wouldn't have to miss a single instant of the interesting social interactions taking place outside.
Now, he doesn't still do that as an adult, to my knowledge. But it is a helpful symbol. The bathroom door of his personality, if you will, is left permanently ajar.
(Let us compare this with my own relationship to bathrooms as a child, in which -- after witnessing the overflow of a toilet one day at my preschool -- I developed such a phobia of these devices that for a long period I would climb onto the sink in the bathroom and make sure I was securely perched there before reaching down to press the flush handle, much as if I had ascended a jungle tree to evade a crocodile.)
--
Of course, there was a stage in our friendship before I had accepted all of these things. Being a Bert child from a Bert family, I had come into adulthood still thinking that everyone would share my Bert value system. I couldn't understand, therefore, why my friend would just flagrantly violate all of the rules. He didn't hide his achievements. He didn't downplay his personal advantages. He would tell me frankly that the college he had attended was superior to all others, that he had received a perfect score on the SATs, and so forth. There was one particularly infuriating evening when we were at dinner together, and he launched into what I would later call one of his "I'm-so-great monologues." "I'm so glad I was in a fraternity in college," he said. "It made me so much more social. It made me have a sex life. It made me have so many more friends."
I, being a Bert who plans all of his statements and public gestures in advance, brooded endlessly over this sort of thing. I assumed he had said all of this to me for some definite reason. He must intend an implied contrast with myself, I thought, who did not attend his college, who had never set foot near a fraternity, and whose SAT scores -- while respectable, I maintain -- were not perfect. He must be saying he's so much better than I am!
Also, being a Bert, I could not express my annoyance directly on this score, whenever he gave one of his "I'm so great" monologues. I would stew and ruminate upon it silently, and build up within me a nice invisible furnace of rage.
It was in this stage of our friendship, way back, when I was reading Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, and got to the part about the protagonist Anna's relationship with Saul, a blacklisted American screenwriter. Anna describes interacting with him as like listening to a stage monologue with only one character, "I." She likens his endless comments on himself to a rain of machine gun fire. Anna depicts herself meanwhile lying there listening to it and building up an inner reservoir of silent fury, unable to get a word in edgewise.
“[H]e was not listening, except to his own words, I I I, and [I] lay down again and listened to the words spattering against the walls and ricochetting everywhere, I I I, the naked ego. I was so sick, I was clenched up into a ball of painful muscles, while the bullets flew and spattered[.]"This seemed to me a great deal like my own situation. Especially over dinner, having to endure that fraternity statement.
And there was something else too about Lessing's description of this character Saul that seemed oddly reminiscent -- he has "no sense of time," according to Anna, and her armchair diagnosis.
My friend too often seems to exist outside of time. As he is the first to admit. Days feel like weeks to him, and vice versa. He is often late for things (as am I, but for me it is generally because I am dreading something and can't tear myself away from whatever I was doing before, whereas for him it is more because he has genuinely lost track of the hours, and drifts along in a different astral plane).
He sometimes claims likewise not to have a personal memory -- an exaggeration, to be sure, but closer to being true for him than it would be for me. He often says that he tends to outsource his memory function to his friends, including me. An appealing visual metaphor he once used to describe our relationship, therefore, was drawn from a fantasy novel he is planning to write. There is a type of being in his projected novel that has two faces -- one looking backward, the other forward -- and the two selves divide the functions between them of memory and vision. The backward facing side, Memory, is the one that tries to understand where they came from. The forward-facing one, Vision, plans for where they are going. And indeed, this image -- better even perhaps than Bert and Ernie -- does seem to encapsulate in large part our friendship.
--
My friend has also claimed not to have emotions. Which would make sense alongside his lack of a memory and his existence outside of time. After all, you wouldn't be able to remember ever having had any emotions if you don't have a memory. And, in my very limited understanding of neurology, I take it that it is fairly well-established that the imprinting function of memory is tied to the intense experience of emotion. As Richard Lanham says with apparent authority in his Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, "the experiences which move the limbic system most deeply are the best remembered[.]"
--
What is less immediately clear is the connection between a lack of emotion and memory and being a person with very few inhibitions -- someone who is comfortable displaying the whole of their personality and mental process in the open through a series of "I I I I" monologues, apparently without shame. The mystery is resolved, however, if we understand emotion to be essentially the product of repression. It is possible that inner experiences like emotion are only intense or salient for us -- or indeed, only occur at all -- when we deny ourselves the outer and immediate expression of the thought that underlies it.
Of course, this cuts against the grain of William James' persuasive argument in "What is an Emotion?" that any emotional experience simply is action, rather than the repression of action -- that it is the outward response to a stimulus, and that it is actually impossible to imagine an emotion that is not -- in its nature -- fundamentally reducible to its somatic component (heightened heart-rate, raised flesh, etc.). However, it is quite possible and compatible with this theory that we don't ever have so many somatic responses in the first place -- don't experience so much emotion, that is -- if our thoughts are simply expelled via our mouths as soon as they materialize, rather than being stored up.
Thus, there is room in this for both James's insight, as well as an opposing theory that Bernard Williams once summarized in an essay as follows: "emotion [...] is rather [...] a kind of inhibited action; the emotion of anger, for instance, is to be understood as a by-product of the activity, itself rather sophisticated, of stopping myself lashing out or something similar."
If there is any truth to this, then we should not be puzzled that someone with very few inhibitions should also have very few emotions. And in turn, since emotion imprints memory, it makes sense that such a person would exist outside of time.
--
If you are thinking at this point that my friend sounds like either a narcissist or a sociopath -- somewhat like Lessing's fictional Saul -- I assure you he has dispassionately considered both possibilities, in his usual matter-of-fact way. "I'm pretty narcissistic," he once said to me. He was not evincing concern about this fact -- just offering it as an observation.
However, I don't believe he is actually either of these things. I have come to accept that he is, rather, an Ernie. And in this lies both the beauty of his personality and the source of whatever friction there has been between us.
--
Back when I thought the world was made up of Berts like me, I assumed that all my friend's utterances were things he had stewed upon, and deliberately chosen to express after much forethought, and therefore things that must have layers of meaning behind what they immediately disclosed. There were always words within words, I had come to believe -- from my experience of my own inner life. For me, there are many cobwebs of consciousness that a thought must claw its way through before it can express itself as a verbal statement.
It would be several years before I realized that not all other minds worked this way. When my friend talked up his own achievements and his own glory, I eventually came to see, he wasn't trying to belittle me. He was simply giving himself a pep talk, in moments when he was feeling insecure. It is the kind of mental process I engage in inwardly quite often, when I am feeling down on myself and need to be reminded of my good qualities. It's just that his inner monologue happened to be outer -- and audible to me.
--
Much as I failed to understand the intentions behind my friend's speech, he would just as often misinterpret my silences. Being an Ernie and thinking he was amongst others of his kind, he assumed that if I wasn't expressing a thought aloud then I wasn't thinking it. This was totally contrary to what had always been my self-stifled approach with people. I was always trying to convey things to him via pregnant silences. But I guess they never seemed pregnant to him.
"You never get mad at me," he once told me, in the midst of the I'm-so-great-monologue stage of our friendship. "What are you talking about?" I roared, "I get mad at you all the time!" "Really?" He was genuinely dismayed to hear this, and I suddenly felt bad. It was the first time I had realized that all of my unexpressed thoughts had somehow failed to silently transmit to his awareness, the way I thought they would.
Similarly, my friend has a habit of commenting to me aloud on the physical attractiveness of strangers whom we pass in the street (something that Basquiat apparently also did, in Hoban's telling). He is often perplexed that I don't do the same. "Do you not get attracted to people?" he would ask me in wonder. Of course I do, I would just never say something like that aloud! Some of us are capable of keeping our thoughts to ourselves on occasion, thank you very much! But this retort, of course, would be silent.
Then there was the time my friend was commenting on all the great books he was going to write and how famous he would be. And, after an inordinate amount of stewing about this, a thought finally erupted from me during one of these monologues in the form of an actual utterance. "I'm the one who works so hard on his writing!" I said. "I'm the one who's always wanted to be a writer, since he was a kid! I should be the famous writer, not you!" He was fascinated by this. "Oh, so you actually are ambitious?" he said. "Yes, of course I am!" Well, why didn't I say that before? he wondered. How could I have had all these ambitions that I hadn't publicly announced?
--
Part of the reason for the persistent misunderstandings of the Berts by the Ernies and vice versa is not only that we see the world differently, but that we tend to moralize those differences. Berts believe, deep down, that our inhibitions are there for good reason, and that it would be wrong for us to lift them. To crow about one's ambitions, say, would be to obtrude one's self too visibly upon other people as a potential rival -- to present oneself as a competitor, in a way that might hurt someone's feelings or make them like us less.
It would be to confess, as well, that there are at least some elements of one's personality that see life as a race, as a struggle with others under conditions of scarcity, rather than as a harmonious collective endeavor in which everyone will benefit equally. It would be an admission that the entirety of one's soul is not so socialist and Christian as one would like. Therefore, it cannot be uttered aloud, without constituting a betrayal of one's ideal self.
So too, one cannot admit one's feelings of physical and sexual attraction to others, because this would likewise be an acknowledgement that some part of oneself looks at and evaluates people not only on the basis of their personalities, but on age and physical appearance and other things that are not fair criteria, and over which people have little control.
There is a moment in Carnival of Souls -- a film I find oddly relatable -- when the psychologist character leans toward the protagonist and asks, "Are you ashamed that you want the things that other people want?" I pose this question to myself. Well, yes, the answer comes to me, from deep within my Protestant soul, and shouldn't I be?
--
Where I got all of this from, I don't really know. I'd say it was due to some inheritance of the Yankee social reformer ethic transmitted to me through my parents' Episcopalian and Congregationalist roots and our present Unitarian Universalism... except for the fact that my sister seems to have gotten a less heavy dose, despite coming from the same origins. (While a far less extreme case than my friend, she is I'd say still far more of an Ernie than I).
From whatever source, however, this is the distinct variety of Midwestern "nice" and WASP puritanism that I internalized at an early age as not only my own moral code, but as the world's.
--
You will see that this moral code left as a mystery, however, the apparent charm to be found in the utterly forthright. It failed to explain my friend's lovableness -- the fact that there is something more fundamentally innocent about the Ernies of the world, the Baquiats, if you prefer, even though they lack all of the internal prohibitions that for the rest of us constitute morality itself.
It was only once I had known my friend in question for a few years that I began to unravel the mystery. I had to make it past the first stage of my annoyance with the "I'm so great" monologues to realize that the Ernie approach to life also has some significant moral points in its favor.
For one thing, because the Ernies air their ambitions and desires so publicly and unthinkingly, they are able to ultimately place these aspects of the self into perspective, and to recognize their relative insignificance. This is what always confounds the Berts, when they encounter them. Because for Berts, every idea must be deeply felt before it can be verbally articulated, so we assume at first that the Ernies must attach great significance to their own ambitions and appetites, since they are talking about them so frequently and publicly.
In fact, just the opposite is the case. It is as often as not the Berts who, in repressing their thoughts and desires, magnify them into such undo significance. By sitting upon their sexual or competitive or antagonistic feelings as if they were explosive canisters that might wound everyone in their radius, they ultimately come to see these feelings as more important than they actually are. The Ernies, meanwhile, trot out the same openly, and show them up in all their preposterous smallness and ridiculousness. They reduce them to their true pint size, where they can harm no one.
The same holds in matters of fear. The Berts, by showing a stiff upper lip -- by striving to tamp down their own inner sensation of terror -- merely make that terror seem to themselves an ever more dangerous thing. (If it weren't so dangerous, after all, why not let it out of the box?) By contrast, those who are simply forthright about their terror in one instant are also those most able to shed it the next and move on (lending support to our theory above that the experience of inner emotion is heightened by repression).
Thus, in John Barth's novella The Floating Opera, we find several characters discoursing with one another early on in the book about the fear of mortality. One, a sea captain, Osborn, acknowledges openly that there is simply no good way around the problem of mortality. The fact of aging and the specter of non-existence are plain awful. The other, meanwhile, Haecker, a school headmaster, quotes Cicero on the art of dying, and insists that there are many points to be made in favor of old age as a distinct epoch of life.
Yet, in Barth's telling, it is ultimately the headmaster who quails before the fact of death, when it approaches.
"I felt much sorrier, in my uninvolved way, for Mister Haecker," observes the narrator, "with his paeans to old age and gracious death: [...] one could anticipate that he would someday have a difficult time of it." (As he does, by the book's end). "Osborn, on the contrary, sniffed and wheezed and creaked and spat, and cursed and complained, and never knew a gloomy day in his life."Alasdair Gray -- himself apparently a Bert -- has a similar insight about the value of Ernies, in a precocious essay he penned in his post-adolescent years, included in his collection, Of Me and Others .(It is a highly confessional and revelatory personal essay that he originally submitted, incredibly, as a report to the trustees of a scholarship that had funded his voyage abroad -- an enviable act of authorial chutzpah.) Describing an episode during his trip when he was in a hospital following a particularly severe attack of asthma, he recounts meeting a man named Mr. Sweeney in the next bed over.
Sweeney is an Ernie in all respects. "[H]e continually presented himself," writes Gray, "which none of us did." And, another tell-tale sign: "He was not embarrassed by his sexuality." As a patient, Mr. Sweeney is one to constantly, loudly, and alternately protest both his fear of dying and his unshakeable conviction that death is merely an illusion, because, as a Christian Scientist, he knows that "the only realities are spiritual realities."
Gray's conclusion about Mr. Sweeney is a touching testimony of a Bert who has come to appreciate the Ernies for what they bring into the world:
I admired Mr. Sweeney quite apart form his national style. [...] He had worked and enjoyed himself and taken knocks among the solid weights and wide gaps of the world I would not face. Death worried him now that his body was failing, but since the age of twelve he had never been embarrassed by life. And by wrestling with the fear of death openly and aloud he made it a public comedy instead of a private terror. Aboard the Kenya Castle, when I was afraid of dying, my fear did nobody any good."--
Apart from their ability to reduce to proper proportion those aspects of ourselves we at times find most unsettling -- our libidinal urges, our fear of death --, Ernies also have the moral advantage on us Berts that they are essentially incapable of putting up a false front to the world. They may bluster. They may accidentally tread on toes. They may strike us Berts at times as "impolite," even "rude." But they never enact the kinds of truly ill-spirited designs that are only possible to those who have learned the arts of dissimulation, of prevarication, of deception. This is why the Ernies are, if occasionally "vulgar" or "immoral," nevertheless fundamentally innocent.
It is the Berts, by contrast, that you really have to watch out for. They are more likely to be "moral." They are more likely to be scrupulous. And, just so, they are more likely to be evil. As Nietzsche argued, evil is only possible when it has become conscious of itself, and capable of attempting to mask itself. The Ernies -- even at their very worst -- still do not have this self-conscious evil. They possess something rather more like Nietzsche's "master morality" of the "blond beast." The most detestable Ernies can get is to be like the dim-witted playboy King Henry II of Jean Anouilh's Becket, who does what he feels like -- often hurting the poor and weak in the process -- but intending at least no real harm, except for that which is the collateral damage of his desires. Unlike Becket who -- at least at the beginning of the play -- engages in the same odious behavior, while all the time knowing and averring it is wrong. (I hope you're full of noble feelings and all this strikes you as pretty shabby?, as he says to one of his victims. (Hill trans.))
Nietzsche had much to say on the topic of the dangers of the Berts; though, regrettably, he did not yet have this term available to him. He writes in his Genealogy of Morals, with his usual delightfully melodramatic prose and heavy-handed use of italics: "with some justification one could add that man first became an interesting animal on the foundation of this essentially dangerous form of human existence, the priest, and that the human soul became deep in the higher sense and turned evil for the first time[.]" (Diethe trans.)
So too, beneath the idealism of the Yankee moralistic inheritance, there lurks a kind of latent wickedness. The one who represses some aspects of themselves in certain circumstances is the one most vulnerable to the accusation of having multiple personalities (the most generous interpretation) or of having a false face they present to the world in order to mask a dark interior.
The silent, restrained exterior of the Berts allows the rest of the world to maintain for a time the illusion that they do not possess the desires and ambitions and rivalries and ill wishes that other people do. When this illusion is eventually shattered by the peeking out of the libidinal self from behind the mask of superego, one not only dislikes it, one feels the added sting of betrayal -- of having been misled. Marianne Moore captures something of this implicit capacity for wickedness behind the screen of Yankee morality in her short poem "Silence," which depicts her father's austere WASP social code. And she would know, being by all accounts the product of the sort of grim Protestant upbringing that would instill in anyone a Bert-like conscience -- with a vengeance.
In Hoban's biography mentioned at the outset, we have seen already that Basquiat himself appears as very much an Ernie. And, like many before him, he eventually found his Bert -- in his case, Andy Warhol.
The two of them, in Hoban's telling, enacted very much the moral dynamic we have been at pains to describe here. Warhol was certainly less gargantuan in his appetites than Basquiat -- less prone to excess of every possible kind. He was a more quiet and restrained -- even silent and passive -- individual. But for this very reason he was, we gradually understand in the book, more capable of genuine evil. Indeed, Warhol even uses the word in one passage, saying others before have accused him of the trait. "Now and then someone would accuse me of being evil," he wrote in a passage in his book POPism that Hoban cites, "-- of letting people [such as Basquait] destroy themselves while I watched[.]"
Hoban likewise cites an intriguing statement from Truman Capote about the fundamental essence of Warhol's character. Capote compares the artist-celebrity to a silent guru who offers nothing, says nothing, but who is nonetheless visited by thousands of disciples, because they can project onto him virtually any human wish or desire.
If the moral failing that most tempts the Ernies is to reveal too much of themselves, the danger of the Berts is thus in revealing too little. We deceive by allowing others to imagine that what we do not choose to show them is not here, and that they can project whatever they wish onto our empty slates. We are, of all people, most liable to be subject to D.H. Lawrence's "image-making love" -- a kind of love from which no one ultimately gains, and in which all are deceived.
--
The creation and performance of a self is thus, for the Berts, a particularly elaborate and paradoxical affair -- one which is seldom received by its audience in quite the way it is intended. My friend, for one, was astonished to discover that I actually did have ambitions all the time -- ambitions that I had not disclosed to him. Apparently, I had managed to hide from him a true fact about myself.
But, strangely, I did not take this with pride as a sign that I had carried off a successful deception.
It is in the nature of Berts that our motives for the way we present in public are ultimately self-defeating. Even if the official reason for our repression of a desire or the disguising of a personal attribute, say, is in order to spare someone's feelings, to appear modest, etc., we often also want our personal attributes to be so great, so self-evident, they eventually show through even our efforts to disguise them, and are thus all the more appreciated by others.
We often view the Ernies as ridiculous for "flaunting" their advantages, but it is not because we don't actually want anyone to know about our own -- it is because we want these advantages to be seen as so vast and profound that they are not ultimately capable of being hidden.
If we disguise our ambitions, it is so that we can triumph in the end, serpent-like, against an unsuspecting foe. If we hide our desires, it is in part so that others will be even more dumbfounded and overthrown by our success when we achieve them at last.
Therefore, here again, the Ernies serve as the ultimate moral corrective to us -- even when we so often think we are correcting them. Because the Ernies, of course, take us at our word. Since they display themselves so openly, they assume we are doing the same. So if we are going to present ourselves as modest, the Ernies ensure that we had better actually be modest.
They are the guardians of our humility. They will assume that if we are being humble, it's because we've got something to be humble about, not that we are dissimulating out of some strict moral code. As Hazlitt writes, of the people whom for our purposes we have dubbed the Ernies: "They always put their best foot forward; and argue that you would do the same if you had any such wonderful talents as people say."
We see here that there are few things as maddening to the Berts as that of being interpreted by the standards of the Ernies. We want the subtle layers of our persona to be understood. We want our surface level of modesty to be appreciated for its superior virtue, while also provoking people to marvel that we could manage to be so modest, when in fact we are plainly such brilliant and witty and amazing individuals. When the people around us fail to construct such an elaborate edifice of our social identity from the materials we provide (as frequently happens, since few will find us as interesting and worthy of biographical effort as we do ourselves), we are laid low by dismay.
--
Having gotten to something like this stage in my reflections and planning for this post, I felt compelled to sit down and read Luigi Pirandello's novel One, None and a Hundred Thousand, seeing as I knew it to be essentially a meditation on this problem of the mistaken self.
As Pirandello announces his subject in the first line of the author's note: "This book not only depicts dramatically, but at the same time demonstrates by what might be termed a mathematical method, the impossibility of any human creature's being to others what he is to himself." (Samuel Putnam trans. throughout). The narrator of Pirandello's novel is first stuck by this impossibility when his wife observes to him one morning that his nose sags slightly to one side. This is something he had never noticed or believed to be true of himself.
Gradually, he discovers that his wife (along with others) has constructed an entirely different conception of him as a human being from the manner in which he perceives himself, attributing desires and thoughts and tastes to him that are not his own -- at least in his own mind. At last, he reaches such a point of consternation over this fact that he despairs even of persuading himself that his own self-conception is more true than the others'.
At first, I thought it might be because my emotions were too complicated, my thoughts too abstruse, my tastes too out of the ordinary, and that for this reason my wife, failing frequently to comprehend them, proceeded to disguise them. [...] But what was I thinking of, what was I thinking of! She was not disguising them; she was not reducing my thoughts and feelings. No, no. So disguised, so reduced, as they came to her from Gengè's mouth, my wife, Dida, thought them silly [...] And who did, then, thus disguise and reduce them? Why, the reality that was Gengè, my good people! Gengè, as she had fashioned him for herself, could not have any other than those thoughts, those feelings, those tastes. He was a big silly, but a little dear. Ah, yes, how very dear to her!
[...]
She loved him so! And I—now that all at last was cleared up for me—began to be terribly jeaous—not of myself, believe me, please; I know you feel like laughing—not of myself, good people, but of one that was not I, of an imbecile who had intruded himself between me and my wife, not like an empty shadow, no—believe me, please—because he rather made an empty shadow of me—yes, me—by appropriating my body to win her love.As a Bert, it would seem, Pirandello's protagonist is distinctly vulnerable to being struck down by D.H. Lawrence's "image-making love," as warned above:
Always
in the eyes of those who loved me
I have seen at last the image of him they loved
And took for me
Mistook for me.
And always
it was a simulacrum, something
like me, and like a gibe at me.
--
The Ernies of the world thus reveal to us that our performances of self are often for nought -- that they were put on for no one's benefit -- apart from ourselves, and our own mental theater. They show us that modesty is ultimately no more a virtue than braggadocio, so long as it is intended as simply another and subtler form of showing off. They hold us to the letter, to the literal meaning, of the version of our personas that we present to the world.
In this way, they ultimately make us more honest. And they keep us humble. We Berts so often laugh at them, as at Mr. Sweeney, for their loud and bumptious "pretensions." But it is they who deflate the many-layered pretensions we nurse in our own hearts.
--
Thus: Bert and Ernie. The Apollonian and the Dionysian. The yin and the yang. The Warhol and the Basquiat. Anna and Saul. Osborn and Haecker. Sweeney and Gray. Henry and Becket. Gengè and Dida. Repression and desire. Superego and Id. Memory and Vision. My friend and I... All versions at last of the same necessary dialogue taking place in the heart of the human experiment.
Two approaches to life that are both necessary to one another, no matter how often they conflict. Two temptations that, without the check of the other, lead the way to the destruction of the self and others. Two complementary elements. Two eternal antagonists from whose conflict issues, perhaps, the deepest kinds of human love.
I know all that now. I also know that by this point in my life, I will never be an Ernie, or even have much of an Ernie side within me. I will always be one to choose holing up in his hotel room over adventuring out into the night, to seek new sensations and experiences. I cannot live the Ernie lifestyle. But I can ensure that there are Ernies in my life, to do what I cannot. To complete the two-part self that neither of us can be alone.
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