"No satisfaction based upon self-deception is solid, and however unpleasant the truth may be, it is better to face it once for all, to get used to it, and to proceed to build your life in accordance with it."
-Bertrand Russell
As I turn over in my mind the import of Russell's admonition in my own life, I find myself in reluctant agreement with the social theorist Judith Butler. To the extent that gender is almost entirely performative it is quite impossible to separate its construction from it's effect on the perceptions of others that we daily come into contact. We must present to the world . . . something, even if that 'something' is still simmering, waiting that moment when our savory natures are declared "just so."
And if it’s ever to be “just so,” who then will do the declaring?
It is, I think, in our venial natures to more closely scrutinize the "vulgar meat sack" that contains the ontology of our innateness than to look past those distractions to who we really are. It is not that we, for the most part, lack the ability to see each other, it is that we often lack the patience and the graciousness to look to the "best" that each of us strives to be.
Unable to wait for that striving to be made manifest nor aid it in any meaningful way, we presume by way of transference, to ascribe all manner of ill will to our individual struggles “to be” and inhabit an ontology of "completeness". It is likewise our nature to nurture each real and presumed insult certain that each is speaking directly to us. We imagine others able, with a deft flourish, to unmask our folly, our beloved hypocracy, in a moment.
All the while we wait for the cacophony to abate, certain that whatever else they have to say will ultimately communicate more about each of them . . . than about us.
When the only meaningful advice was uttered by the Pythia nearly three millennia ago – “know yourself.”
© 2009 Renée Thomas all rights reserved
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