These are the lies we've told ourselves, which we believe, and then present to the world. Nietszche coined the phrase - he was having a satirical dig at the Aryan brotherhood. I love this term. It conveys the kind of seeming-almost-real-innocence with which such lies are expressed.
They are often lies about ourselves. Like, 'I'm just not an angry person.' That's one I have told on many occasions. The reason I believed this lie was that I felt that I was not angry with a man who had wounded me nor with my parents for what I felt were their frailties and flaws during my childhood. Am I angry now? Hmmm... not about those things. Not right now, this minute. But I think I have been at times. And I suspect that now, this very moment, there's still some bubbling resentment. Like acid in my stomach.
(I write this after a very, very bad experience of too much watermelon. Indigestion so incredibly painful that I wondered whether in fact I was having a heart attack - the symptoms for women do, I think, include this feeling. I also wondered if I was having an aortic aneurysm. My father had one. It increases my risk by some unnerving percentage. He had a bad stomach ache. It's a symptom. ((And if I had one, no one would call 999 and vesides all the ambulances are busy and that cat and his blue eyed friend would eat me. Soft parts first.)) If stress is a causal factor - it surely is - well, I'd had a stressful day, not enough sleep, too much worrying about the future. Too much anger ((Ah! the truth will out!)) about politics, people, bosses. However, I do not appear to be dead ((unless this is the afterlife... in which case and if you can read this, I do not really recommend it - it's rather dull and one feels incredibly tired and somewhat slow-witted. Though that may just be my after-life. They could be individual. Especially if we are SIMS. All functioning with a unique CGI thingummy. But why should SIM-I die, even into a SIM afterlife if I'm a SIM? Why not just pop me, my consciousness, my conscious awareness of this consciousness, into another SIM-me in one of the zillions of other worlds in the SIM multiverse which is identical except in this one thing - that I did not die of a heart attack or aneurysm brought on by excessive watermelon consumption? And if that were possible (((why not?))), why can we not all be transposed to a better possible world? Why should we continue in what is clearly not the best of all possible worlds? Why are these programmers allowing so much evil and suffering? All this anger and aneurysm? Who do they think they are? God? He's the only one who can get away with such an immoral act. He'll send them to hell for this.)) and thus it seems that I am an hypochondriac. What helped, in case you're curious about my recovery, was a yoga pose with the nickname 'double wind relief. FYI it works. TMI?)
So. The resentment. I'll write more on this when I consider free speech - a post started to be programmed in my consciousness by the processors whirring away in there. And the anger that I deny I feel because 'I am not an angry person.' But maybe I will become unangry by virtue of believing this claim? I've discussed before how our beliefs about ourselves help us progress or hold us back. I think, though, that to claim is not enough. Nor to act on it without attention. It has to be more conscious than that. Not a swerving away or a burying, but a seeing clearly and deconstructing. A Murdoch-motivated habit forming moral progress that takes time, commitment, loving care. Or, Spinoza's view - to analyse the causes and see the reasons and the responsibilities. In either case, part of a distillation of self, not just a hiding of the sediment in a dark corner. Because then, shake the bottle, and all those bits and pieces of murky fury darken the liquid.
Oh, but and yes. Anger has its part to play, does it not? When apt? If indeed my anger is apt. If I suppress apt anger, am I not perpetrating on myself a second order injustice to add to the first order injustice that has already been dealt me by patriarchy and man and parents and bosses and fate - yes, and watermelons too, God damn them? Or is the anger always, as Martha-my-dear alleges, irrational, normatively bad and unhelpful? The jury on fury is out.
Amia Srinivasan does not offer counsel on this. Though she suggests that the display of anger - shouting and kicking cats (even when they pull the books from the shelf in an act of malicious destruction) - is often counter-productive. Can the display be divorced from the affect, for a better effect? Is it even possible?
People these days seem to think that if one is sad, one must claim to have cried. Post a teary emoticon. Or three. Stand in lines with flowers. Sign letters of condolence. Wave placards and hashtag causes. But does the act guarantee the sincerity of the feeling? Can the feeling still be sincere without the act? All these signifiers. It seems to me that we bury sensation inside the representation. Every signal infused with ego so that it ceases to be a clear carrier of meaning.
More questions than answers. My blue eyes do not lie. They say nothing and too much and all of it a jumble. Storms at sea in those pale blue irises. I capsize. I die in my own Brain-GI.
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