There might be hundreds of worse jobs out there, but being an actor has a cruel, confronting element to it that always made me see it with a bit of pity. Imagine auditioning for the one who’ll be, more or less explicitly, the ugly and undesirable friend in the movie.
Imagine how Harry Dean Stanton must have felt while shooting Lucky, where he plays an old man who’s about to die, exactly like he was in real life, so much so that he would pass away before the release date. I vividly remember this sadness I took home with me from the movie theater.
Then I’ve seen an interview where he talks to David Lynch and he is painfully and wonderfully nihilistic, replying to the question “how would you describe yourself?” with ”as nothing, there is no self”. He seems unbothered by any confrontation, untouched by life’s cruelty. Without self there is no ego, and without ego there is no unfairness. He played an actor who’s about to die. He is dying. So what.
If I had to pick, I’d also say there is no self. But I’m a wishful thinker and like the idea of one, so I decided to adhere to the cult of selfists. To allow myself the possibility of still having friends outside of it, I’ve decided that I’m one of the moderate believers, and I don’t really practice. I’m fine with having a frame around my life that says “this is Benedetta La Rosa”, but I’m also fine seeing how I’ll wake up tomorrow: so far I’ve never been a fish or a chair, but I’ve definitely been a lot of humans. Memory and controlled surroundings give us a story to follow and it’s easier to do so than to embrace chaos, but it’s pretty obvious to me that Stanton has a point.
If they asked me to describe myself, until quite recently I would have certainly mentioned how structured I am. If I looked around me, I’d see how much more fluid the people next to me were, compared to me. How organized I was, compared to them.
I invite you to look around yourself, among the people you chose to be in your life. Do you recognize a trend in how you see them as opposed to you? Are the people who are the closest to you all similar in something?
Mine were often more scattered and free spirited than me. Losing things, being late, talking to strangers (which often was what made them late), getting sidetracked, spacing out, tote bag falling off their shoulder. That’s how I saw the Other. At least until recently.
Then a series of events served as wake-up call. Am I really structured, or am I simply a mess who learned, at a very high cost, to make up for that messiness with control? And if that is true, had I delegated to others in my life the representation of those archetypes, so it was clearer who was which? So that in our complexity we were all quite explainable?
I’ve learned, just as I’ve been doing multiple times a year since I’m able to think thoughts, that I am so much different than I thought I was. In a way that adds, and doesn’t contradict, in a way that makes things fuller, yet very unpredictable.
The other night, while sleeping on tatami mats in the Japanese mountains, I watched a movie called Hypnosen. In it, a couple of young professionals takes part in a workshop with other fellow start-uppers to learn the art of pitching their project. She has undergone hypnotherapy to stop smoking, but lost inhibitions.
It’s a hilarious watch at times, and very uneasy at others. What I noticed is how weird she looks when others are rigid and taken aback. When she is surrounded by judgement, the level of her strange behaviors increases, becomes grotesque. When they go along with it, it doesn’t seem so weird. Not because they are all acting strange, but because she softens: the weirdness is distributed now, she doesn’t have all of it on herself.
This dynamic between people is very well depicted in the movie: building individual selves through collective work. It opposes well to the environment they’re in, where authenticity and unique stories are emphasized to the point of delusion.
If we leave just one of us to be that one thing, everything collapses. That’s why the end of the movie works so well.
At the core, we’re all the same: nothing ready to become something. And it’s not so bad to be nothing. It’s not about void or emptiness, it’s just undefinable.
I am a moderate selfist.
If there is a self, it’s only there for a second. Its main role is to open the door and let the next one in. If we allow them this, to be kind door-openers, instead than self-promoting creators, then we can keep all our stories about ourselves while changing perspective on them.
Instead than a stubborn contest of line-drawing, a collective participation in my-self and your-self. How every particular combination of people made this self possible. How even writing on tatami made these word come out a different way than if I was sitting at a desk, or anywhere else.
If there is a self, it’s a community. If there is a self, it’s a convention. If there is a self, it’s a game we’ve decided to play. If there is a self, it’s there to invite us to imagine, but also to stay grounded in the flesh.
Empatherapy 