We can pretend to be anything…
Great allotments of time can be accounted for in any way we want them to be. We could have been anywhere. What have I been doing since I last blogged? Well, I went to New York on a business trip, stopped in for a bit of shopping, spent four grand on a Hermes suit, had some botox, and came back with an enlargement on my left boob.
This extends itself further. With articulation, I can be anyone that I want to be. By a few simple shifts in language, lUk @ me, I canZ b a chav, yo. I could be fourteen, I could be eighty four, male or female, fat or thin, beautiful or ugly.
Such is human trust that it’s slow to gain. But with a few carefully placed signifiers, expositions, “brb, need to get my dentures,” we can be get that trust quickly, easily, almost immediately.
This is not just the nature of the internet, either. Granted, the internet is greatest the chasm for this.
I could leave the house dressed in such a way as to make people believe I am the most dynamic person in the world. I could wear a fat suit. And of course, the slipperiness of language follows us in the real world just as it does online. Elocution lessons, psychotherapy…
Anything that happens immediately becomes the past. Therefore events only exist in our reflection on them. They are ‘primal scenes’ that are constructed through our discussion of them. If you say it often enough, that blue car can become red, that fat man can become thin, that terrible time can become great. The time I lost my leg, yeah it was the best day of my life. Repeat. Both internally and externally. Psychologists have examined this, police have used this to close cases.
And anything that didn’t happen can be believed to have happened in a weak mind. Even a strong mind is susceptible to it. But imagine someone mentally impaired, imagine perhaps a schizophrenic, they tell a lie to get themselves out of some bother. Sorry I couldn’t make it today, I fell down the stairs. They discuss it. They reflect on that primal scene. That event which only exists through it’s present exposition. And more readily than most they could possibly believe it themselves. Dementia is similar.
My point? I haven’t got one.
Now, I, an incestuous pervert from Oxford with three arms, have to go and skin a pink leopard.
Pink leopard, pink leopard, pink leopard…
