Of course, it’s no startling revelation that people have multiple selves. Beyond the garbs we change for situation – as employee, as parent, as friend and nemesis, we also have the duality of our inner and outer lives. When it comes to the veracity of these shades of self, it’s tempting to look at it like a series of concentric circles, with the private self being the most real, but that may not be valid.
It has been a weekend of twos for me. It’s what inspired me to write this. On Saturday night I attended a burlesque show. To highlight the dualism: it took place in a huge, old church. In fact, there was a large statue of JC in the background, seeming a little neutered by the hedonistic festivities.
I was invited by a co-worker, who works in the HR section for my department in the government. In our office, we have grey-blue carpeting, grey wallpaper and purple-tinged beige cubicles (or maybe grey, I think I’ve discovered a new shade.) To go from that in the daytime to flaming nipple tassels at night is almost the definition of a double life (although it’s subjective: he thinks that it’s not a distinct difference from his work-self). One of the starkly evident signs of this disconnect was the strict insistence of no photography.
Yet, is one more ‘real’ than another? One would be tempted to say that the version of the man that is doing what he is passionate about is him at his truest self.
But maybe that’s a bit romantic, because most of our lives are spent doing boring crap we just slog through. If you want an accurate representation of my life, me sitting at a desk with eyes glazed reflects a greater portion of my life than me being on stage, doing fulfilling and inspiring activities.
And what of the performance? Look at the act of going on stage and acting out a prepared routine, showing off one’s talents. If a person considers their “true self” as an actor and they are pretending to be someone else – is that the actor at their most candidly real self in the act of being candidly someone else?
That’s not even going into the whole sexual element. Sex might the easiest form of a double life, or perhaps the most common. When does sexual instinct end and sexual performance begin? Is it natural expression or just a rendition of what our ideas of sex are. Is the burlesque performer like a writer or a director? Creator or interpreter?
The question of the “true self” arose during another thing I did this weekend – attending an improv show. Here too we are faced with assumptions about the true self, like the idea that when someone is acting spontaneous, we see them at their most vulnerable and real. It’s why psychologists may ask word-association questions. Beyond this, this particular show was “Dangerprov”, which is sort of a Fear Factor/Jackass interpretation of improv.
One of the most memorable hijinx that occurred was getting a performer with an established fear of snakes to do a scene while getting huge snakes (including one I had seen before) placed on him. He went through varying levels of terrified while trying to keep calm and perform a scene. Was this display the improv performer at his most base animal instincts?
On top of all of this, we have to take other factors into effect. A layman (partial) definition of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is that you cannot measure/observe something without changing that which you are measuring/observing. This should be kept in mind in any performance setting. When a performer expresses their ‘true’ emotions wherever they are, there is an audience and there is an awareness of this audience.
This may be my cynicism and self-consciousness talking, but it can apply to any social situation. In a setting of two people in low light, soft tones and deeply emotional confessions, one person may break into sobs (or othersuch intimate emotional expressions). It is tempting to think that this is their true character, a glimpse into what their inside life is like. But if there is an awareness of the spectator, I’m convinced there is something altered (intentionally or not).
I suppose my inadvertent conclusion to this is that you can’t know anyone fully. This will either seem overly jaded or unsurprising. Even if you want to tell the person you love something deeply important to you, even to articulate and verbalize reframes the actual idea. Words are a performance, with meanings that require coding and decoding. Although there may be ways around this, there are constantly walls around us, even if we wish that weren’t true.
So we are left with as kaleidoscopic selves (sounds like an indie rock band!) talking through tin cans to our broken-mirror loved ones. If we’re a series of concentric circles, then I suppose the goal is to make a nice venn diagram.
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