Musing on Authenticity
On a personal note.
How authentic should one ever get - in public? There is a code against airing your laundry in public. Why, in some parts of the posh world, neighbours even object if you pin your actual panties on the line in your own back garden. See, how swiftly the neighbourhood vigilantes will app together a new code (they can’t quite make it a law, yet!) that makes it improper and undesirable for you to hang up your washing outside. So, use a dryer and kill the planet instead? Ever smelled freshly aired knickers? Oops… sheets, then?
The problem with authenticity is the understanding it takes. If we take the word literally, we get the listener standing under the fount of your personal truth and allowing themselves to be showered in it. What if it pisses down on you!?
It is about taking the trouble to meet the other I. If this I is not "real" or "real truthful", as an American might drawl, but let me put a comma there and add: real, truthful and really true, then the effort to meet will feel wasted.
What makes a novel work is less its novelty (innovative styles and topics seldom make best-sellers in the first round of publication) and more its authenticity. But the word author is already the give-away there. Of course, a novel doesn’t do any of the work, really, nor does the writer (they just make it possible): the reader does.
Does it then say anything about you at all, whether you are read or not? Are you no more than a scribe as a novelist representing a greater common vibe?
There is much ado in literary criticism about whether to credit the author as a person in their own right or not. Do we need to know about their real life to believe their work? Do we even need to believe it? What makes a work valuable? It's credibility? Or is its credibility another value altogether? Still, most readers are devestated to discover when a seemingly authentic (real) experience as related by the author turns out to be entirely fiction. Or worse still, mysteriously semi-fictional (Why did Edward St. Aubyn leave out his sister in his "semi-autobiographical" Melrose novels!?).
None of this should be a problem in the land of fiction. But aren't our lives narratives, too? How real is any of this maya? I think only the heart knows. But the heart has become the head's puppy dog, trained to follow, with a dormant wolf below this fuzzy sense of self; and there the rub lies.
The Wolf Within?
Maybe, there are varying levels of acceptable fiction as compared to downright deception, but cases like the one of Joseph Hirt pretending to be an Auschwitz survivor, in view of his motivations, make for an interesting rumination on the ethics and artistic value of being genuine if only on your own terms. How free are we to be exactly as we feel fit to be? More on Hirt here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/24/holocaust-survivor-lied-joseph-hirt-auschwitz
Identity is authenticity is authorship of your unique being. Does sharing make it more real? Will any of it have ever mattered if nobody ever cared to know you?
I think of all the lonely people. Or the solitary ones. I think of all the invisible ones we call our friends. The guardian angel by your side, the masters in the caves of the Himalayas, the cherubim and the Alpha Centaurians. The ones locked up in their own coccoons (comatose, severely autistic, spastic, the traumatised, the hideously deformed, maybe even the souls trapped in senile heads).
Do we honor the men (mainly in Indonesia) with “treemans disease”, with their gnarled, uncontrollable warts disfiguring them beyond a normal existence (of work and play) by posting up shocking photos of their unbelievable condition? Or are we trying to understand their condition? Or is the condition actually allowing us (those who are brave and compassionate enough) to get to know the person behind the disease as individuals, better than anybody else in Indonesia (if you have no personal contacts with anybody there)? Such considerations bring us very close to seeing how we are all just aspects of the All we collectively comprise.
Everybody matters….. Nice idea, but it only gets a few of us through each and every day with the same ability to marvel and celebrate life. This thought also runs close to other notions of non-attachment and impersonal affections, which border on icy fronts and detracts from our modern, western and specifically Christian idear of forming communities by way of personal affiliations that surpass petty judgement and give us no right to condemn. The Christian ideal is to create morally sound brotherhoods (including sisters!) with a broad communal mind, and every facet of this geode sparkling in its own way as it meets with the light outside its survival range.
Apophyllite with stilbite
Authenticity is not the same as anything goes. It needs the reigns of discipline and thoughtfulness if it isn’t to become self-indulgent or attention seeking rather than a light brush, a sweet greeting, a delicate kiss or a necessary slap from one soul to another. It has an eye for beauty and an empathic ear. But why would it exclude your knickers? Not the twisted ones, but the freshly aired ones…. Many roads lead to Rome…. Also grumpy cats are authentic. Always nuanced differences…
Keep it interesting!
Your great article makes me think deeply. I am really happy to meet your posts even though it's hard to understand them totally. I will expect to read next posts. Thanks.
Thank you for your very encouraging feed back. It too makes me think deeply!