![]() “Have you ever noticed,” Elizabeth Bishop asks her friend Donald E. In response to an interviewer’s question, “What is the purpose of poetry?” Zbigniew Herbert replied, “To wake up!” When we cease to blend into the social world around us, the “chain of daily gestures is broken,” writes Camus, and what follows is an “awakening.” Breaking character is a refusal to become an instrument in the production of a system that is, for the most part, invisible and indifferent to us. Most often, we don’t select the roles we find ourselves playing in daily life as we move through the world, we are drawn into social scripts, texts that govern interactions we are trained to reprise without conscious recognition. So suddenly, one little thing will bring out the absurdity of what you’re doing.” The absurd, philosopher Albert Camus proposes, is marked by a tension between the seriousness you attach to your life and the inherent meaninglessness that is revealed when you catch a glimpse of yourself from an outside perspective: “A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible show: you wonder why he is alive.” Tuning in to quotidian, meaningless actions we perform on autopilot elicits a sense of the absurd, but when the actor of that incomprehensible show is oneself, the absurdity intensifies to the extreme. You’re never not aware of your surroundings. “When you’re acting,” explains comedian Ricky Gervais, “you’re not caught up in the moment. Before breaking into laughter during my talk, I was, in a sense, playing dead, if you think of dead as assuming a socialized self, pushing your emotions and spontaneous feelings underground. The British call convulsive laughter corpsing, a term that derives from the frequency with which a fit of laughter overtakes an actor playing a corpse onstage. Attacks of laughter are contagious: another person’s laughter-even if nonsensical-is enough of a stimulus to provoke your own. ![]() I had no idea why I was laughing, but the more I laughed, the more others in the room laughed with me. Seconds felt like hours as I tried, with little success, to pull myself together. I attempted to compose myself, apologize-Sorry, I just had a juvenile moment-and return to the passage, but when I reached the word ejaculation again, I lost it, doubled over, eventually putting my head on the table. That got really loud for a second, I observed matter-of-factly, then burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. I was explaining the concept of horror vacui, or the fear of emptiness, pointing to the part it played in the aesthetics of the Victorian era, causing every surface to be covered with tchotchkes, and in sex, leading some men to dread a sense of post-coital emptiness so much that they stave off-and this is when it happened- ejacuLATION. I became aware of my attempt to block out these actions, to pretend not to see what I was seeing.Īt one point, I must have turned my head in the direction of my lapel mic because suddenly the volume shot up. Another stood up, walked to the back of the room to get a drink, then returned to his seat and rummaged through his bag. ![]() One person directly in front of me scrolled and typed on her iPhone. As I gave my presentation, audience members went about their business as though they were invisible, like people in cars sometimes do. ![]() I was part of a panel on hoarding, along with another psychoanalyst and a memoirist. We were sitting at a long table, images and diagrams projected onto the wall behind us, while the audience faced us in silence.
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