Psychology (and common sense, but who uses that anymore) tells us that different stages in life lend themselves to different stages of mind. That is to say, we come to think differently as we age. This is true for pretending, and here I propose the beginnings of a basic developmental model.
(I have not thoroughly researched this topic, and rest my conclusions heavily on personal experience and the less-than-random sampling of people whom I observe or am acquainted with (you can get away with that in the soft sciences, right?)).
Pretending, for our purposes, can be defined as thinking or acting in accordance with an intentionally imagined reality. Not all pretending is the same, however, as is evident when observing both children and adults.
As infants... well, actually, I don't know much about infants, and I can't remember that far back, so let's just skip to slightly older children. Kids, then, tend to engage in a lot of active pretending, for example when I used to tromp through the woods as an explorer, or have a certain shirt that turned me into a superhero. Or the people I knew whose child was always pretending to be a cat. Here the pretender typically engages in the imagined role for its own sake.
Later in life, this type of pretending becomes less common, as people tend to move from active, imagination-based pretending to more passive, others-focused pretending. This is evident in dress, mannerisms, hairstyles, and so on, as people pretend to be rich, pretend to be poor, try to stand out, or try to fit in. The pretender still participates in the pretense, but largely for the sake of influencing others.
Of course, there is overlap between the two types of pretending, and well-adjusted, genuine individuals might not ever heavily depend on the second type. That's just the general trend I see. And me, I'm trying not to let my imagination become strictly defensive.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
Artificial Representation
Artificial Representation
“Over the mountains and the sea, Your river runs with love for me and I will open up my heart and let the healer set me free”
I hear these words stream out of my mouth in a sort of apathetic monotone. I’m not even comprehending what I’m singing. The switch was turned to ‘on’ and my vocal chords began vibrating in a systematic, pre-programmed manner, thus churning out words that my mouth allowed to depart my body. Each syllable is pronounced, leading directly into the next without any need for thought or comprehension. My heart, mind and soul are uninvolved in this process. This is solely a noise game and the bare necessity of organs are on it. There’s no need to bother the rest of my body. This one is covered.
“I’m happy to be in the truth and I will daily lift my hands, for I will always sing of when Your love came down.”
I look around. Some seem so devout about this. You can see in their faces that they are truly buying into it all. When I see these people, I struggle between judgment and envy. The woman just to my left appears to believe, truly believe in the words we’re all singing together. Her eyes are closed tightly, her hands are outstretched and with each word that drips off of her lips, she seems to become more entrenched in excitement and joy. She is smiling genuinely. She is flush with color. She exudes a passionate investment in each individual syllable she’s singing. She turns upward and her smile continues to grow as though this single second, this very moment, is the most important and uplifting single time of her entire existence. I find myself hating her. I hate myself. I envy her.
“I could sing of your love forever. I could sing of your love forever.”
I can’t help but ask myself why I’m here still. Expectation? Fear of loneliness? Habit? What would happen if I just stopped coming? Would I be missing anything? These people in this room all think they know me, but few of them have any idea of who I truly am. Of what I’m truly capable of. Sure, they would all miss me at first. Then my absence would become extended and questions of concern would soon turn into statements of judgment. Someone would reach out to me and attempt to save me. They would call and pray and act sincerely interested in where I stand on my journey. I know this script. I’ve used it myself on many friends before. I would call them, we’d do coffee, I would express concern. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
“I could sing of your love forever. I could sing of your love forever.”
I am a Christian by proximity and convenience. I do not believe. But, I do feel pain. I am a fake. I don’t know how much longer I can do this.
Yet, still, it continues.
“Over the mountains and the sea, Your river runs with love for me and I will open up my heart and let the healer set me free”
I hear these words stream out of my mouth in a sort of apathetic monotone. I’m not even comprehending what I’m singing. The switch was turned to ‘on’ and my vocal chords began vibrating in a systematic, pre-programmed manner, thus churning out words that my mouth allowed to depart my body. Each syllable is pronounced, leading directly into the next without any need for thought or comprehension. My heart, mind and soul are uninvolved in this process. This is solely a noise game and the bare necessity of organs are on it. There’s no need to bother the rest of my body. This one is covered.
“I’m happy to be in the truth and I will daily lift my hands, for I will always sing of when Your love came down.”
I look around. Some seem so devout about this. You can see in their faces that they are truly buying into it all. When I see these people, I struggle between judgment and envy. The woman just to my left appears to believe, truly believe in the words we’re all singing together. Her eyes are closed tightly, her hands are outstretched and with each word that drips off of her lips, she seems to become more entrenched in excitement and joy. She is smiling genuinely. She is flush with color. She exudes a passionate investment in each individual syllable she’s singing. She turns upward and her smile continues to grow as though this single second, this very moment, is the most important and uplifting single time of her entire existence. I find myself hating her. I hate myself. I envy her.
“I could sing of your love forever. I could sing of your love forever.”
I can’t help but ask myself why I’m here still. Expectation? Fear of loneliness? Habit? What would happen if I just stopped coming? Would I be missing anything? These people in this room all think they know me, but few of them have any idea of who I truly am. Of what I’m truly capable of. Sure, they would all miss me at first. Then my absence would become extended and questions of concern would soon turn into statements of judgment. Someone would reach out to me and attempt to save me. They would call and pray and act sincerely interested in where I stand on my journey. I know this script. I’ve used it myself on many friends before. I would call them, we’d do coffee, I would express concern. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
“I could sing of your love forever. I could sing of your love forever.”
I am a Christian by proximity and convenience. I do not believe. But, I do feel pain. I am a fake. I don’t know how much longer I can do this.
Yet, still, it continues.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Seventeen
This year, for the seventeenth year, Gabriel will be Santa Claus.
Year one began as a bit of a joke, really- a gentle jab in the form of a shopping mall Santa application he found folded neatly under his electric razor. His laughter had shaken white whisker refugees from the corners of the page and sent them sprinkling like incriminating snowflakes onto Chelsea's slippers as she wrapped herself around him from behind. "It's only that you'd be so convincing," she had whispered. He applied the following week, two days after their 37th wedding anniversary, still hopelessly unable to tell her no.
By year three, the job had started to grow on him. Getting him hoisted and strapped into that sauna of a red suit had become a ritual of sorts. Chelsea would stand ready on the end of the bed, dwarfed by the red poly-velvet coat, and the two of them would struggle to work his considerable self into character, cursing all the while the row of shiny black buttons that couldn't actually unfasten. Her eyes were incredibly bright that last good year, and she would watch him playfully as he adjusted his hat just so. She would never let him kiss her once that hat was on - something about an affront to the very essence of childhood. He would have given every moment of his childhood for a half a minute of her smile.
He was at the hospital for most of year five, but she insisted he not miss the season. Leaving her there, tubes snaking around her like cage wires, felt like a betrayal. He stopped by her room the first night of the run fully suited, a bouquet of poinsettias in his white-gloved hand. She was sleeping soundly for the first time in what must have been weeks, and he could not bring himself to wake her. That year, the fifth year, was the first that she wasn't sitting on the bench across the atrium, reading and laughing, waving and watching. In year five, he began to understand how much he was going to have to miss her.
Year six read like an obituary column. Loving wife, mother, sister, leaves behind grieving widower who will honor her by donning a suit and masquerading as joy in a shopping mall. He will hear nothing, see nothing, smell nothing, feel nothing. The children will love him, but he will not be moved. Instead, he will sit numbly and wonder how it is that the world has continued, that time has failed to stop completely. No one will be able to give him an answer that makes any sense.
In year nine, Leslie and Tom moved the grandkids back to Boston to be closer to their PaPa. Leslie got in the habit of bringing the girls by every Saturday morning and cooking breakfast for him on the stove that had been accumulating dust and memory in equal parts since Chelsea had first been hospitalized. Gabriel made a big show of leaving the heavy black boots by the chimney, claiming he'd won them from a now barefoot Santa in a bet. The house was better for every small moment of laughter, warmer, more tolerable.
He took a lover in year twelve, nine years his junior, with the memory of red still alive in the ends of her hair. They made love exactly four times. On the fourth night, she shifted in her sleep and made a sound that was so like his wife he forgot for a moment that she was a stranger. Reality hit with a force strong enough to drive him out the door, into the car, and back home to sit quietly and alone. He saw her again once, sitting on Chelsea's bench across the atrium, watching him with child after child. He pretended not to notice her, and when he looked up a second time, she was gone.
Year fourteen they hired a kid from New Jersey with the shiftiest eyes Gabriel had seen. On his break, Gabriel would watch the kid slink in and out of the mall store fronts, pocketing small items - a book here, a tube of lipstick, a pair of sunglasses. He could never quite bring himself to turn the kid in, though the kid regarded him with that specific breed of disgust the young reserve for anyone who reminds them that they too may one day be aging, and alone. When some eager Santa visitor made a selfish or impossible request, the kid would make a strange, disapproving sound that reminded Gabriel of the coyotes he and Chelsea would listen to in the evenings the summer he found work in San Antonio. She had loved the hauntingly sad conversations those dogs would have. He found them disturbing, and she laughed every time he jumped.
Gabriel almost didn't sign up the sixteenth year, but in the third week of October he found an old Polaroid tucked into the pages of one of Chelsea's mangled novels. In it, his wife perched gracefully on his knee, a little lighter and less tangible than she should have been. Year four. His beard had been especially long that year, and the kids were relentless with their questions and their tugging. Chelsea had begun to fade early that November, and by Thanksgiving they had a diagnosis and the weight of precious little time. She had shown up anyway, dressed in her best holiday sweater and smiling from ear to ear, to watch him interview child after child, afternoon after afternoon. He tucked the photo back between the pages and went straight to the car, the mall, and the rented red suit that, once upon a time, her hands had touched.
This year, for the seventeenth year, Gabriel will be Santa Claus.
Year one began as a bit of a joke, really- a gentle jab in the form of a shopping mall Santa application he found folded neatly under his electric razor. His laughter had shaken white whisker refugees from the corners of the page and sent them sprinkling like incriminating snowflakes onto Chelsea's slippers as she wrapped herself around him from behind. "It's only that you'd be so convincing," she had whispered. He applied the following week, two days after their 37th wedding anniversary, still hopelessly unable to tell her no.
By year three, the job had started to grow on him. Getting him hoisted and strapped into that sauna of a red suit had become a ritual of sorts. Chelsea would stand ready on the end of the bed, dwarfed by the red poly-velvet coat, and the two of them would struggle to work his considerable self into character, cursing all the while the row of shiny black buttons that couldn't actually unfasten. Her eyes were incredibly bright that last good year, and she would watch him playfully as he adjusted his hat just so. She would never let him kiss her once that hat was on - something about an affront to the very essence of childhood. He would have given every moment of his childhood for a half a minute of her smile.
He was at the hospital for most of year five, but she insisted he not miss the season. Leaving her there, tubes snaking around her like cage wires, felt like a betrayal. He stopped by her room the first night of the run fully suited, a bouquet of poinsettias in his white-gloved hand. She was sleeping soundly for the first time in what must have been weeks, and he could not bring himself to wake her. That year, the fifth year, was the first that she wasn't sitting on the bench across the atrium, reading and laughing, waving and watching. In year five, he began to understand how much he was going to have to miss her.
Year six read like an obituary column. Loving wife, mother, sister, leaves behind grieving widower who will honor her by donning a suit and masquerading as joy in a shopping mall. He will hear nothing, see nothing, smell nothing, feel nothing. The children will love him, but he will not be moved. Instead, he will sit numbly and wonder how it is that the world has continued, that time has failed to stop completely. No one will be able to give him an answer that makes any sense.
In year nine, Leslie and Tom moved the grandkids back to Boston to be closer to their PaPa. Leslie got in the habit of bringing the girls by every Saturday morning and cooking breakfast for him on the stove that had been accumulating dust and memory in equal parts since Chelsea had first been hospitalized. Gabriel made a big show of leaving the heavy black boots by the chimney, claiming he'd won them from a now barefoot Santa in a bet. The house was better for every small moment of laughter, warmer, more tolerable.
He took a lover in year twelve, nine years his junior, with the memory of red still alive in the ends of her hair. They made love exactly four times. On the fourth night, she shifted in her sleep and made a sound that was so like his wife he forgot for a moment that she was a stranger. Reality hit with a force strong enough to drive him out the door, into the car, and back home to sit quietly and alone. He saw her again once, sitting on Chelsea's bench across the atrium, watching him with child after child. He pretended not to notice her, and when he looked up a second time, she was gone.
Year fourteen they hired a kid from New Jersey with the shiftiest eyes Gabriel had seen. On his break, Gabriel would watch the kid slink in and out of the mall store fronts, pocketing small items - a book here, a tube of lipstick, a pair of sunglasses. He could never quite bring himself to turn the kid in, though the kid regarded him with that specific breed of disgust the young reserve for anyone who reminds them that they too may one day be aging, and alone. When some eager Santa visitor made a selfish or impossible request, the kid would make a strange, disapproving sound that reminded Gabriel of the coyotes he and Chelsea would listen to in the evenings the summer he found work in San Antonio. She had loved the hauntingly sad conversations those dogs would have. He found them disturbing, and she laughed every time he jumped.
Gabriel almost didn't sign up the sixteenth year, but in the third week of October he found an old Polaroid tucked into the pages of one of Chelsea's mangled novels. In it, his wife perched gracefully on his knee, a little lighter and less tangible than she should have been. Year four. His beard had been especially long that year, and the kids were relentless with their questions and their tugging. Chelsea had begun to fade early that November, and by Thanksgiving they had a diagnosis and the weight of precious little time. She had shown up anyway, dressed in her best holiday sweater and smiling from ear to ear, to watch him interview child after child, afternoon after afternoon. He tucked the photo back between the pages and went straight to the car, the mall, and the rented red suit that, once upon a time, her hands had touched.
This year, for the seventeenth year, Gabriel will be Santa Claus.
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