INTERLUDE: what is authenticity?

nondualism, the importance of distance, and fact versus honesty.

There are three things you should know before I make my point:

1. I am possibly the least qualified person in the world to be any sort of cultural critic. The first time I ever saw what a “labubu” looks like was, to my recollection, about a week ago, despite them having been prevalent for much longer than that by now. Probably. Again, I don’t know. I keep to myself; I am generally unaware of pop culture and that’s the way I like it. If there is a pop culture phenomenon that I am aware of, it’s because of Tumblr, which is a disclaimer in itself (as well as a terrible way to actually get a grasp on an event or general situation).

2. As a child, I had an active imagination. As an adult, that active imagination tends to be labeled as psychosis, which is something a good deal of the people I talk to also experience.

3. In first grade, my best friend made me break up with her playground boyfriend. I didn’t really want to do it because he and his twin brother had the same birthday as me, which certainly was some sort of omen, and they were both strange in a way I recognized and subsequently suppressed in myself; I did it anyway because I found a certain delight in taking hits for her. At recess that morning, I walked up to him and said, She doesn’t love you anymore and she’s breaking up with you. He said what? so I repeated myself. She’s breaking up with you. I don’t know what happened next, but later, there was a segment in class where we talked about our days or something— I don’t remember, it was a long time ago— and when it was his turn to stand in the middle of the circle, he brought up what I did. I don’t remember what he said, but it didn’t really matter. He was fifty feet tall. I stared up his legs at the underside of his chin, watching him slowly rotate on a platform like he was giving a speech to an army in a movie. My comparative smallness was visceral. I was a mouse, or some other type of rodent that gets crushed under the wheels of big cars. He didn’t name any names, which I was grateful for, but I knew how to be guilty back then. His hurting hurt me. I took the hit. During the next recess, I squirreled myself away to the patch of dirt between the building and the bushes and threw up. It was voluntary; I wanted to get his hurt out of me. I kicked some dirt over my vomit and went back to playing house with my best friend and I never, ever told anyone what I had done— the breaking up or the vomiting.

This wasn’t the first or the last time that an exaggeration like that had happened. Logically, I was well aware that he couldn’t have actually been fifty feet tall and revolving on a platform, because this was a first grade classroom’s patchy carpet and not a film set; emotionally, though, it was true. He had been a giant and I had been subatomic. My shame ate me down into a particle. If I told the story as factually as possible, I would be lying to myself. If I told the story with my exaggeration, I would be lying to everyone else. And I knew that. I knew that if I said it out loud, someone was going to have to get lied to, so I never said it. I just couldn’t betray my own reality like that.

The point is that this wasn’t the first or the last time that I had to reconcile the fact that my reality looked different from other realities, or that other realities all differed from each other in a variety of tiny little ways. Words had different meanings for me than they did for everyone else. I was a different person to myself than I was for other people. I watched my sibling recount a movie with plot points that never happened. I heard my mother exaggerate and misconstrue something my father said while on the phone with her friends. I sat through people telling me, out of genuine concern for my soul, that I needed to change my behavior or I would go to Hell. I wasn’t worried about Hell; I didn’t really think I had a soul. But it was real to them, so it was true in some way, and I couldn’t discount that.

By the age of nine, I had decided that nothing was true, and the world consisted entirely of facts, lies, and untruths— facts being dates and names and whatnot, lies being a deliberate deception, and untruths being honest without being right. As it turns out, this is something that people aren’t really receptive to, especially if it’s coming from the mouth of a nine year old girl. That was okay. I was good at keeping things to myself at that point. Later in life, I discovered this thing called “philosophy” and had the distant reassurance that I was not the only person who thought this about the world, although the philosophers used different terms than I did. Some call it “nondualism”. A personal favorite term of mine comes from Werner Herzog, who refers to what I call untruths as “the ecstatic truth”:

[Ecstatic truth] has to do with a different approach to truth. Number one, nobody knows what truth exactly is. Neither the philosophers are in consensus, nor is the Pope in Rome, nor are mathematicians, or whoever. We have to be very cautious. Touch that term only with a pair of pliers, please. There's a school in filmmaking, the so-called cinéma vérité, it claims truth in its very essence, but it's fact-based. It's fact, fact, fact. I keep saying facts do not illuminate us… Truth, I understand, is something vaguely somewhere at the horizon. It's out there. I'm fairly sure. The intense quest for it and search for it, the approach to it is worthwhile, and that's what I'm doing in films and in literature and in everything I do.¹

Or, as said by Lady Gaga at the beginning of the music video for Marry the Night:

“When I look back on my life, it’s not that I don’t want to see things exactly as they happened, it’s just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way. And truthfully the lie of it all is much more honest because I invented it. Clinical psychology tells us arguably that trauma is the ultimate killer. Memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics. They can be lost forever. It’s sort of like my past is an unfinished painting, and as the artist of that painting, I must fill in all the ugly holes and make it beautiful again. It’s not that I have been dishonest; it’s just that I loathe reality.”

It’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Because, despite chasing the idea of authenticity, we also hate reality. I might be out of touch, but the only word that seems to get thrown around more than “authenticity” is “escapism”. Most people simply do not want to be living their life 100% of the time. I don’t either, in all honesty. Life tends to be shitty; living in the present day is shitty in new ways that we unfortunately discover every single day. The contradiction of craving both escape and authenticity isn’t necessarily a contradiction, though. Or it doesn’t have to be.

I think there’s something to be said about the resurgence of heroin chic amidst this authenticity obsession. Similar to the Pre-Raphaelite era, heroin chic— which I’m sure everyone is sick to death of hearing about, sorry— relies on glamorized realism, beatifying the sick and dying into aesthetic transcendence. We want real, but we also want pretty. In turn, seeming “authentic” in a society that values presentation and beauty above all else means that you have to be authentic as beautifully as possible. And there’s capital to be made there, so surgery, cosmetics, and lifestyle changes are encouraged by every industry that has a stake in health and beauty. That glamorization of real life, especially with the help of social media, provides both the escapism (the beauty, the voyeurism into a life beside your own) and the pseudo-authenticity (the curated messiness of the chosen imagery) that we crave, and in a culture that’s intensely referential without being original (and the uptick in bigotry we’re in), it only makes sense to resurrect an aesthetic that really should’ve died in the 1990s.

Emotionally speaking, it seems like we want honesty from everyone but ourselves because we want to be close to everyone but ourselves. And obviously we want to figure our shit out, become the model result of whatever therapeutic route we choose, but the thing that keeps bleeding out far enough for me to see is how apparently, no one wants to sit with themselves. It’s not unprecedented or disingenuous to want to know yourself without having to actually deal with yourself. It’s just not something that’ll ever happen, either. I guess you’re just going to have to carry that weight.

There are three more things you should know:

1. As stated in my friend Ra’s essay on the obsession with and detriment of pursuing authenticity, there is a lot of value in distance. Eroticism is commonly acknowledged to come from distance; the famous example there is that someone half-dressed is much more erotic than someone fully nude. True celebrity comes from distance. Intrigue— which you simply cannot have without mystery— needs distance to thrive. Glamor needs distance. Fantasy, too. Facts (though important) are not a replacement for truth. Facts are a way to manufacture closeness. When it comes to truth, I’ve found that you sometimes have to talk your way around a subject to get to the heart of it. You can’t just go blazing in. You have to sneak around the walls.

2. All language is inadequate. You know what happens when I say something? I translate the mess of noise in my head into words, then fit those words together into a structured sentence that’s coherent within the syntax of the language I’m speaking. Then, when whoever is listening to me hears the sentence I’ve chosen, their brain— which probably doesn’t work tidily, either— has to translate that into their brain-speak, and they derive a meaning out of it that is anywhere from a bit to entirely different than my original meaning. There is no such thing as perfect translation. The only thing you can be “authentic” to is sensation, which has a tendency of being slaughtered by convention and fact before it even gets out the gate. The only drawback to being true to sensation is that most of the time, the truer you are to yourself, the less you’re understood by others, especially if you don’t function in a grammatically perfect way.

3. One of the most honest conversations I’ve ever had happened when I wasn’t myself. I was sixteen and temporarily stranded in Oklahoma (long story); when the woman sitting next to me on the plane started making small talk, I went with it. I told her I was from a small town in Wyoming, that this was my first time on a plane. Both of those things weren’t true. It’s not my proudest moment— I’m well aware that lying is bad, objectively speaking, and that is exactly what I was doing. I was never going to see this woman again, though, and didn’t I already tell you that I don’t always want to be myself? So I wasn’t. Some of the facts I gave her were invented, some of them were untruths, but the emotions behind all of them were real. In return, she talked to me about her kids, how it felt to leave home, her hopes and fears. We sat on the runway for two hours. In the meantime, we both ended up telling each other things we had never told anyone before. She cried over being a parent. I teared up over having to be parented. It was probably the most honest I’ve ever been with an adult, even though it happened under a persona.

I’d like to make it clear, just in case it wasn’t, that I’m not advocating for lying or deliberate ignorance of fact. Fact absolutely has a place. If we go back to a term I mentioned earlier, “nondualism” is the idea that there is a universal, true reality of the world that we’re all just interpreting, unable to fully see because our selves keep getting in the way— the implication there is that there is a “real” reality, it’s just mostly untouchable. My point is that there are as many versions of the truth as there are people in the world, and in that vein, there are an equal amount of versions of authenticity. I’d also like to make it clear that human understanding still does exist despite this. I’m sure I came off as a little fatalistic about the fact that people can never fully comprehend each other, but perfect comprehension is cheap compared to interpersonal recognition. You see yourself in me. I see myself in you. We don’t need to understand each other perfectly; the authenticity and beauty of interaction relies on that distance. You kill the veil and lose your honesty as a human if you’re unable to acknowledge that you come from a place of inherent bias.

To say it more directly: the only thing we have is fantasy. Authenticity is fantastical by nature. The idea of authenticity is a fantasy, yes— we are pursuing a fictional idea— but the world and self are untranslatable and to be properly conveyed, that requires a bit of fantastical thinking. All presentation of self is a persona, because it’s impossible to fully communicate your whole self. All presentation of fact comes from bias, because presentation comes with language, and all language is biased. I edit photos to make the depicted thing look they way it looks through my eyes; the camera has given me a fact, and I make it more honest by fucking around with the depth of shadow, because if I take a picture of something, it’s because I want to show someone else how it looks to me, not the fact of the picture.

All of it is storytelling. We don’t like the world “storytelling” because we don’t like the implication that there’s a narrative behind what we’re saying, since narrative implies motive, but there is. It’s a story. Everything is a million little stories crisscrossing and holding hands and playing leap frog. I’m telling you a story right now. I will continue to tell you stories. There are facts within the stories, but they are stories.

And obviously I’m not an expert on any of this, or someone who can offer a solution to the obsession with authenticity. I’m not going to tell you what to do. That’s your own damn decision. I’m just saying things— telling stories— recreationally. But if you catch me saying that someone around me is fifty feet tall, well. Just know I’m only being honest.

1. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/tnyradiohour/segments/werner-herzog-ecstatic?tab=transcript