Brilliant Toothpaste for Dinner
Alternately, to try and appear a little more pseud (stolen … umm .. leveraged from the Black Mamba)
“We are like sculptors, constantly carving out of others the image we long for, need, love or desire, often against reality, against their benefit, and always, in the end, a disappointment, because it does not fit them.” - Anais Nin
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Nice. Now if only we could get Ella and Louis to sing THAT!
Ha! Trying to be pseud are you? Think you should stick to what you know. You give me Anais Nin, I give you Dylan:
http://bobdylan.com/songs/aintme.html
Comment by Gargravarr — September 3, 2005 @ 12:52 pm
dont you think its more of what we perceive them to be..and then get to know them, realising only later that they’re not what we thought they were..
Comment by Itineranting — September 3, 2005 @ 12:59 pm
Gargavarr: Why not - life is about seeking challenges/getting stimulated, right
Itineranting: True, but maybe what we perceive is based on what we want to see … so the signs are there but we just choose not to see them - and since we can’t stay in denial forever, we have to acknowledge the dissonance at some point.
Comment by Administrator — September 3, 2005 @ 6:39 pm
MR / Rant: For what it’s worth, all this assumes that people don’t change and dissonance will out. The truth, I think, is that any relationship involves some element of personal change - it’s just about making a judgement call about how much you and the other person will need to change.
A good analogy (drawing shamelessly from the Pygmalion myth - MR, you did say you were trying to be pseud) is that of a sculptor choosing a block of marble to work with. You’re always going to have to chip away parts of the marble to get the sculpture you want - the trick is to see the potential for something beautiful in an unformed slab of rock.
It follows that it’s not about not seeing them for who they are in an absolute sense - subconsciously it’s about imagining that they’ll turn out a certain way and finding that they don’t. The difference is that I don’t think it’s possible to have seen that without having tried.
Comment by Gargravarr — September 3, 2005 @ 6:52 pm
Rant and MR, another dynamic that is often forgotten. in the initial stages, people are on their ‘best’behavior. in some sense they are not being themselves. at some point the true self peeks out.
Comment by He who shall not be flamed — September 3, 2005 @ 6:55 pm
Gargavarr: I like the Pygmalion analogy, but 2 points: 1. You need to assess whether the effort needed in creating something beautiful is worth it, i.e. chipping against the grain (or whatever the tech term is) takes too much work. And 2. Can’t you assess some of it by going down the friendship route? That’s a lower risk way of assesing potential, given that if you realise a relationship isn’t going to work, it’ll cause less emotional turmoil.
HWSNBF: I would use the same friendship argument. I realise it can never tell you everything about how a person will be in a relationship, but will help reduce false positives. Also false negatives actually … esp if you’re impatient with people, like moi.
Comment by Administrator — September 4, 2005 @ 5:14 pm
what IS this friendship thing you speak of?
Comment by He who shall not be flamed — September 4, 2005 @ 6:40 pm
Damn. Since I agree with all the thoughts floating around, doesnt leave scope for a discussion! And amusement ofcourse, at FG’s bravado!!
Comment by Itineranting — September 5, 2005 @ 4:53 am
rant, occasionally we DO run into that problem, when we find ourselves agreeing with everything the others are saying. usually the solution is to just take the opposite stand. why deny others the pleasure of argument?
Comment by He who shall not be flamed — September 5, 2005 @ 6:02 am
another dynamic is as follows: its v easy to start out in a relnship thinking u r quite flexible abt a lot of things, and will be willing to adjust for the sake of “amour”…but its only over time that one realises that to live with someone is a lot more difficult than to love someone…and unconditional acceptance stops happening once we cross the age of 18 (26 for some…sob!)…so the process of trying to change your partner is more an internal struggle that sounds like i-cannot-live-without-xyz (attributes), and hence an experience which teaches u more abt urself, rather than an external conflict of i-cannot-live-with-abc (person)…the pity of it, though, as Gargravarr points out, is that u cannot bypass the process…unless u have enuff experience to be able to fit EVERY person into a stereotype uve come across b4/ been with b4…in which case ur either 50yrs old…or MR
!!
then too, theres the risk that ppl change/ ppl’s expectations frm relnships change…so at which point does one lock the door and throw the key away?
Comment by clueless — September 5, 2005 @ 11:02 am
MR: Agree with both your points - but that’s what you’re looking at when you pick the rock to work with - an experienced sculptor will be able to tell just by looking at the rock whether it’s going to be possible to carve it the way he wants. He could be wrong, of course, but that’s what the initial evaluation is for. Oh, and there’s also sunk cost of course - if you’ve spent a few months on a sculpture and some parts of it have come out really well already, you may just stick with the chipping away against the grain.
Clueless: Hmmm…agree with you to the extent that in general it’s not always clear what one is looking for (or actually, what one is not looking for) at the start - so things you weren’t paying attention to to begin with can become salient after you discover how annoying they are.
At what point do you lock the door and throw away the key? Never. You always keep the door open and get out whenever things start going wrong.
Comment by Gargravarr — September 5, 2005 @ 1:14 pm
dating-shating.
relationships blah blah.
such a pain.
:)
Comment by He who shall not be flamed — September 5, 2005 @ 2:04 pm
…even a summer paper wud b easier no
?
Comment by clueless — September 5, 2005 @ 2:07 pm
Itin: Glad you agree, but would echo FG’s point - why not take the opposite stand to make sure the argument doesn’t die out … how else can we fuel all-night conversations
FG: And in your case, you can always just pick the alter-ago who disagrees, and let him speak
Clueless: It’s just easier to sterotype - why bother getting to know someone and then judging them
Re throwing the key away, I agree with Gargravarr .. note this does’t mean you’re not emotionally invested and don’t care about the person. It just means you stay with them till you are. And the truth is, even with a contract, that is what is going to happen - the terms of the contract might lull you into thinking that the key is thrown away, but it really isn’t … all the contract does is give us an irrational sense of comfort. Am reminded of this scene from Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (am guessing you haven’t seen it, but do), where a middle-aged client comes to Liv Ullman (she’s a divorce attorney) and talks about how she wants to get a divorce because she doesn’t love her husband. They’ve been together 30 odd years, but the kids have left, and she doesn’t see why she should live the sham any longer. It’s an extremely gut-wrenching scene, because it makes Liv Ullman think about her ‘happy’ marriage as well … anyway, it’s a memorable scene to me because it brings home the pointlessness of contracts we take so much for granted. It’s also a very hopeful scene, because it does show someone refusing the terms of such a contract.
Gargravarr: Bergman .. hah!! How’s that for being pseud!!
Also, chipping away at the grain to get what you want the person to look like, implies that there needs to be a specific image that’ll meet our needs … if we see part of what we want, and we can form an emotional bond, do we need to see all we appreciate in the image of this person?
Comment by Administrator — September 5, 2005 @ 5:00 pm
MR: See, this is why I think you shouldn’t try to be pseud. The point of that scene is:
a) That children complicate things. The old woman has no illusions - she’s always maintained that her marriage was pointless, and that she didn’t care for her husband. She stayed on because the kids needed her, so it’s the parenting contract she was honouring, not the relationship contract.
b) That you need to make sure that you think about these contracts in terms of the shortness of your own life span - the woman’s act seems pointless precisely because it’s almost certainly too late for her to have a full life when she’s already lived most of it.
Also, I totally fail to see how it’s a “very hopeful” scene (are you sure you were watching the same movie - you didn’t switch channels in between or something?). It’s poignant and heartbreaking because it’s about someone who saw the hollowness of contracts ages ago, but is realising only now, that she should have had the courage to break out of hers a long time ago when it would still have been worth it, like Nora in Doll’s House. This divorce now is a gesture, a pointless shrug of defiance in the face of a life already wasted.
Also, if you were truly pseud you would have pointed out that the right version to watch is not the crappy edited version made for US audiences (typical) but the full six part television series.
On the point about chipping away - obviously you don’t want to see all you appreciate in the image of this person - unless you appreciate very little, that’s almost impossible. That doesn’t mean however that you don’t have to finish the sculpture - the sculpture needs to be a complete image in itself, and must conform to a specific image that we desire, but it may not be the only image we can imagine or crave for, just one of the more interesting ones. Also, re my earlier post, part of the problem is that the image you want gets more sharply defined as you chip away, so that you start with only a vague idea of what you want anyway.
Comment by Gargravarr — September 5, 2005 @ 9:33 pm
Gargravarr: 1. What do you mean, ‘the’ point. The point is what I choose to see it as.
2. Was she necessarily honouring the parenting contract, i.e. staying on because the kids needed her, or maybe because she loved and needed them. If she thought all contracts were hollow, she may not have seen a larger reason to stay on for her kids than for her husband
3. Yes, it’s a gesture, but it’s a grand gesture that she’s making in spite of the fact that it is futile. Nora’s act was no less of a self-destructive grand gesture - she was hardly capable of going out into the world and building her life from scratch. And I think it’s hopeful (apart from the fact that I’m an incredibly passionate person and an incorrigible optimist), because she still has it in her to make a grand gesture like that, and make whatever attempt she can to live the last years of her life the way she really wants to. The 30 years of existence that she has trudged her way through haven’t beaten her consciousness out of her - she is still very much alive…
Comment by Administrator — September 6, 2005 @ 12:43 am
at some point, uve gotta wonder…is a relationship really meant 2 have so much intellectualization, deliberation and structure 2 it? at some level, is it any more than just a leap of faith? does having all the answers preclude the possibility of something screwing up?
ps- i hate the word “contract”.
Comment by clueless — September 6, 2005 @ 9:18 am