I wish that Man had Never Told me to Read René Girard
It’s all shrouded in code. The code of interaction, the code of friendship, love, cordiality. We live in a mimetic world. A mimetic world where no one can say what they really mean, no one can be honest, can be real. And it’s a skill, it has to be, to mimic like that, right? We have to learn it somewhere, someway, somehow. Alice Miller would say that we learn it when are still babies, when we cry and our mother doesn’t come sometimes, and does others, so we think, just as a little baby, “Oh, if I cry like this, then my mother loves me,” when maybe the first cry was who we really are and what we really meant. Or maybe it’s wrapped up in desire — Rene Girard might say that we learn to layer meaning and wants when someone seems like a God in school because everyone likes them, so we take notes, we learn the social cues, the dress, we pick a crush based on a name we’d feel proud to declare affection for, a name we feel semi-likely to have reciprocated, and we pass notes, and if the box is checked yes, then we don’t want it anymore, because clearly that means we can do better. Better. Better. That’s one thing I hate about this mimicked way of living, it’s always on the hunt for more, and I can’t want more, I can’t because I think in Black or White, I think in all or nothing. I think I’ve messed up once and someone hates me for life, or that I’m alone for one night and suddenly I’m alone forever, for the rest of my time.
I don’t think I ever learned how to mimic. I don’t say how I feel — that’s too much, too scary, but it’s in my eyes, it seeps out of my tone of voice, and I barely use my voice because I spend so much time inside of my own head trying to pry through all that code and sort it and understand — understand what I wore when I got Madonna Love and not the Whore kind, what I did when the paternalism felt nice, how I sat down outside in a way that showed people I was friendly and wanted to be talked to, how I loved that earned reciprocity and consistency and faithfulness and how I loved that didn’t and I’m trying to figure it out, all the time. I’m always trying to predict how I can fashion myself in a way that won’t hurt later on, and I always come to the same conclusion which its that we can’t and I want to know why we can’t. Is it innate. Is it just built in there? Some twisted form of supply and demand of human affection and kindness? And yes, right? But why why why. By design? But it can’t be, because who would design it like that, that would be cruel.
There was a woman who implied I should never be alone in a room with a man once, and she told me that the reason we have free will is so that God can feel chosen the same way a prince would want to be in a disguise so that his future wife would really love him and not just fall into it. But he would still be a Prince. Maybe she would feel distrustful after the big reveal. Maybe she wanted a pauper. Why did they eat the fruit, those two. They were in God’s grace, in a good, closed system where they lived in a real world where things were what they were — a tree was a tree, a snake was a snake, and the body was a body made of flesh and dust and breath and rib, and they ate one of the real things, the thing that they weren’t supposed to, and they opened up the system to mean all sorts of things, they limited the demand of the things that are actually there for us to live for (I think) and they made it to where I have to sit alone at night because I’m too afraid of messing up, too afraid of acting out of code, of hurting the people I love and having to sit with that guilt, relive it, sit with the memory of it in my head and throat and chest, until it drains away with time, something else that is limited(?) and this is why I have to believe in Christ because nothing else makes sense to me and if I didn’t believe that — that if I stuck it out until the end and did my best, that I could go somewhere real real real, a good closed system where love was love in a way that felt like love, then I don’t know if I could do it — stick it out like that. But I am trying. I am here and I am trying. And I don’t want to mimic. I can’t. I won’t. But God, I plead, I beg. Please give me the courage to speak. And really say what I mean without fear of love lost.
xx