Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (3 page)

Thought Experiment:
Try to imagine the circumstances under which the fifty non-tables converted to use as coffee tables would become less and less desirable until one would actually prefer an ordinary table constructed of four legs and a top. E.g., imagine you are an archeologist of the twenty-first century, exploring the abandoned beach cottages of Martha’s Vineyard and finding all manner of strange artifacts used as tables—pieces of driftwood, capstans, shark jaws— and that you need a good worktable and, not recognizing these objects as tables, you construct a simple and sturdy table from a plank of wood and four lengths of two-by-fours.

Thought Experiment
(II): Consider to what extent an “antique” is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and another place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self—just as a pine piling saturated in creosote resists corrosion by the sea—and thus possesses a higher coefficient of informing power for the nought of self.

If you say that a writing table made by Thomas Sheraton is of value because it is excellently made and beautiful, how would you go about making a writing table now that would be similarly prized as an antique two hundred years from now?

The real question of course is whether the twentieth-century self is different from the eighteenth-century self, both in its reliance on “antiques” to inform itself and in its ability to make a writing table which is graceful and useful and for no other reason. Was a well-to-do eighteenth-century Englishman content to buy a Sheraton writing table, or would he have preferred a fifteenth-century “antique”?

^*
Yet another article
(The New York Times,
September 3, 1981) listed the following objects which were offered for
sale
and specifically for
use
as coffee tables: walnut clock ($2,200), ventilator duct grills ($300), sandstone mask ($250), ionic column capital ($400), Nigerian chieftain’s stool ($2,500), nineteenth-century English camphor chest ($2,350), trundle pine storage box ($550), nineteenth-century Norman poultry cage ($450), Korean coin chest ($350), fiberboard musical-instrument case ($175), Chinese bamboo trunk ($50).

The Self as Nought (II):

Why Most Women, and Some Men, are Subject to Fashion

THERE IS NO FASHION
so absurd, even grotesque, that it cannot be adopted, given two things: the authority of the fashion-setter (Dior, Jackie Onassis) and the vacuity or noughtness of the consumer. E.g., bustles in the West, bound feet in the East.

It happens that a woman will see a new fashion, a certain kind of hat, a new hairstyle, the cut and length of a skirt, a French-wrap swimsuit, and she will want it. She buys it. Often the source of the fashion is a famous and attractive person or a well-known couturier.

It is illuminating that some fashions are set by mistake. It is reported, for example, that when Wallis Warfield Simpson appeared at Ascot with the second button of her blouse left inadvertently unbuttoned, millions of women followed suit. And when John Wayne’s belt buckle slipped to one side in a scene in the movie
Red River,
thousands of urban cowboys began to buckle their belts to the side.

In a certain New York disco located near a hospital, interns and nurses would drop in at all hours wearing their hospital greens. Whereupon it became fashionable for non-medical people to go discoing in wrinkled hospital greens—which are now sold at J. C. Penney.
^*

The efficacy of fashion turns on the self’s perception of itself either as a nought or at least as lacking something, and its perception or misperception of the splendid wholeness of public figures as evidenced by even the most carelessly worn badges of their substantiality—when in truth the selves of Jackie Onassis and Wallis Simpson and John Wayne are probably more insubstantial than most.

Question:
What does the saleslady mean when she fits a customer with an article of clothing and says: “It’s you”?

(a)
She means the same thing the customer means if you should ask her: It is becoming to me. It looks nice. I don’t have a thing to wear.
^*
It does something for me.

(b)
She means that it—the hat, blouse, hairstyle, dress—actually accentuates your best features—eyes, hair—while minimizing your worst: no neck, etc.

(c)
It will please your husband or lover.

(d)
It will impress other women.

(e)
Most other women are already wearing it and you look dowdy without it.

(f)
The saleslady means what she says. It really
is
you. That is, you are not much without it, you perceive yourself as mousy, and you are a something—your self in fact, your new true self—with it.

(
CHECK ONE
)

But if the saleslady means what she says—and since you have gone through any number of such styles in the past— then it must follow that the other articles in the past were also you and are no longer. How can that be? It could only be because some sort of consumption takes place. The nought which is you has devoured the style and been sustained for a while as a non-you until the style is emptied out by the noughting self.

Consider the stages of the consumption:

First stage: You see an article or a style worn by a person with a certain authority. At first glance it seems outlandish, even absurd. Or ugly, like the long skirt of the New Look of the 1950s.

Second stage: You see more people wearing it. It is still outlandish, but it is an outlandish
something
and you are fading.

Third stage: You try it on. The saleslady says it is you. You laugh, shrug, shake your head, but secretly the possibility is born that it
can
be you.

Fourth stage: You buy it and wear it. For a while, it
is
you and you are it. That is, you perceive it as informing you and you as informed, either as a new you or the old real you which has never come to light before.

Fifth stage: Gradually the new style becomes everyday, quotidian, rendered neutral. No matter how exotic it is, like a morsel to which an amoeba is attracted and which it surrounds and takes into itself, it is devoured and becomes part of the transparent flowing substance of the amoeba.

Sixth stage: After a sufficient lapse of time, the husk or residue of the new style is excreted and becomes an oddity, a slightly shameful thing but still attached, like the waste in the excretory vacuole of the amoeba.

If you don’t believe this, take a look at an old snapshot of yourself wearing a Jackie-O pillbox hat twenty years ago—or a ducktail Elvis haircut. You will laugh or frown and put it away. It looks queer. It is not only not you. It is a not-you.

Thought Experiment:
Assuming there is a certain perceived, or misperceived, authority behind the setting of a fashion, e.g., the attractiveness and fame of a Jackie O, John Wayne, or the putative knowledgeability of Dior, try to imagine the nature of the authority of the fashion-setter and the state of mind of the consumer which brought it to pass that women wore
bustles,
which made their rear ends grotesquely prominent when women’s rear ends are already more prominent, relatively speaking, than any other mammal’s.

^*
This efficacy of fashion-by-mistake is similar to metaphor-by-mistake—those instances when a word misread is better than the word intended like the ordinary belt doing its ordinary duty holding up pants being perceived as not as desirable as a belt with buckle worn to the side. Consider Empson’s example of metaphor-by-mistake:

Queenlily June with a rose in her hair
Moves to her prime with a languorous air

Nice lines—because he misread Queenlily as Queen Lily, when the poet had only intended the adverb of queenly.

^*
What does a woman mean when she says “I don’t have a thing to wear,” when in fact she has a closet full of clothes? While her statement seems absurd to her husband or a connivance to get more clothes, she is telling the truth. She does not have a
thing
to wear because all the things hanging in her closet have been emptied out and become invisible.

She might as justifiably reply to him: “Why do you need a new car? This one works perfectly well.”

(3)The Nowhere Self:

How the Self, Which Usually Experiences Itself as Living Nowhere, is Surprised to Find that it Lives Somewhere

ON THE JOHNNY CARSON
Show, it always happens that when Carson or one of his guests mentions the name of an American city, there is applause from those audience members who live in this city. The applause is of a particular character, startled and immediate, as if the applauders cannot help themselves.

Such a response is understandable if one hails from a hamlet like Abita Springs, Louisiana, and Carson mentioned Abita Springs. But the applause also occurs at the mention of New York or Chicago.

Question:
Do Chicagoans in Burbank, California, applaud at the mention of the word Chicago

(a)
Because they are proud of Chicago?

(b)
Because they are boosters, Chamber of Commerce types, who appreciate a plug, much as a toothpaste manufacturer would appreciate Carson mentioning Colgate?

(c)
Because a person, particularly a passive audience member who finds himself in Burbank, California, feels himself so dislocated, so detached from a particular coordinate in space and time, so ghostly, that the very mention of such a coordinate is enough to startle him into action?

(
CHECK ONE
)

Thought Experiment:
You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and a dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. You make enough money and move to a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: “Brooklyn 9.6 light-years.” Explain your emotion.

(4)The Fearful Self:

Why the Self is so Afraid of Being Found Out

A RECENT POLL ASKED
people what they feared most. A majority of respondents agreed in ranking one fear above all others, above fear of sickness, accidents, crime, war, even death. It is the fear of speaking before a group, stage fright. Yet in the conventional objective scientific view, man is an organism among other organisms and a man should therefore not be terrified to be surrounded by his own kind, other like organisms who are not merely not hostile but by the very nature of the occasion well disposed, and to open his mouth and speak in a language he has learned from his fellowmen. A wolf howling alone in a wolfpack doesn’t get stage fright.

Question:
What is so frightening to so many people about speaking to an audience?

(a)
Is it because the ever-present chance of making a fool of oneself is multiplied by the number of listeners, so that an audience of 50 persons is 50 times more terrifying than one? Is an audience of 50 million a million times more terrifying than 50?

(b)
Is it because, since one person, friend or stranger, is often difficult to deal with, 50 people are 50 times more difficult?

(c)
Is it because, say with an audience of 500, you are being looked at by at least 499 people whose gaze you cannot defend against by looking back, that is, you are being seen from this or that vulnerable angle where your mask or persona may not be in place?

(d)
Is it because you fear a total failure of performance such as never happened in the history of the world, so that not one word will come to your mind and world chaos will follow? As evidence of such a danger, note the uneasiness of a playgoing audience when an actor forgets his lines or a congregation when a preacher falls silent for no apparent reason. The escalating terror of such a silence is a public phenomenon: five seconds of such silence is a very long time, ten seconds is almost intolerable.

(e)
Is it because you know that what you present to the world is a persona, a mask, that it is a very fragile disguise, that God alone knows what is underneath since you clearly do not, perhaps nothing less than the self itself, and that if the persona fails, what is revealed is unspeakable (literally, because you can’t speak it), like what was revealed when the Phantom of the Opera had his mask ripped off, a no-face, a vacancy, a hole which is much worse than the ugliest face—so frightening, in fact, that you remember, as a child, crawling under the seat in the movie?

Thought Experiment:
If you are a shy person, which of the following situations is the most terrifying to you? Which is the least terrifying?

In the first, you are a mid-echelon executive in the sales division of a large company in which you are both successful and well liked. You are scheduled to deliver a speech at the annual banquet, an honor. You have months to prepare.

In the second, you are the character Richard Hannay in Hitchcock’s
The Thirty-nine Steps.
Pursued down a street by his enemies, he ducks into a doorway which happens to be a stage door and finds himself on stage at a political rally where he is mistaken for the guest speaker and introduced. He has not the faintest idea what he is supposed to talk about.