Out
In a crowd of strangers, one feels somehow identifiable as even stranger: as the one for whom any eye contact is an occasion for momentary panic, as the one who isn’t sure where to stand, as the one who cannot piece together what everyone else inexplicably knows: which lines lead to which bathrooms and bars, whether the left or right hand should be extended for a stamp, how much things cost and when one pays.
Out at night, one hears a sea of monologues. Stupidly loud music means everyone must shout, so only shouters speak: men drone on and on about themselves, drunkenly strain to direct conversations to those subjects they feel most clever discussing; it is painful for them to listen, to attend to anyone, to note or record what others say, so they don’t; instead, they run their shabby little routines; they are like bad artificial intelligences, like useless automated phone systems, like malfunctioning robots. Every verbal input yields but one output: “I’m sorry, I don’t understand [others]. Would you like to hear about (1) what I own or refuse to own, (2) putatively funny stories about me from my past, or (3) my imbecilic, demography-oriented opinions about current events?”
It is an embarrassment: they perform badly, and one is obliged to pretend that one believes them: not merely their inaccurate regurgitation of misunderstood facts —their college dorm-room vision of reality, with its random substitutions of names and dates and theories and its lazy, untroubled arrogance— but them, these false, enacted personalities! Willing one’s smile hurts; eyes darting here and there, hoping to hide their focus and reactions, eventually tire and burn. And what can one do with one’s hands that will not indicate boredom or disdain?
Going out means: sitting in the front row of a small theater while desperate, derivative, arrogant, insecure, incompetent, dull, mean, needy performers beg for attention, affection, release. Going out means: enforced dishonesty, involuntary performance, conscripted deceit. This is, in part, what Gombrowicz means when he says that we are helplessly distorted by the ass-like and shit-related stupidity of others:
An awful barful of drunks on a Friday night is an orgy of asses trying to shape one another, and weekend charisma reflects the power of the pupa to mould the faces of others with a fleshy, enveloping inevitability. One prepares for it uselessly: there is no way to remain oneself amidst such smushy, amorphous pressures.
What would honesty in such circumstances look like? It is not possible to say: “Stop, stop; please stop all this artifice; I cannot absolve you or admire you.” It is not possible because their performance, like yours, has been compelled: compelled by some other ass, by the great shared shame of all who shit, perhaps, or by the drive to control and redact and present our personalities as though we have shaped them, as though we authored our personalities, or worse: are our personalities, when we are not, not at all. It is not possible because, nightmarishly, we do not know when we are performing until after the performance ends.
What are we, and what do we want from one another? Out at night isn’t the time to ask these or any questions, only to loudly but casually allude to the fact that we have this many followers, or only eat such-and-such, or get phone calls from so-and-so, or can drink this much, or once did something-or-other, etc. etc. etc. Endless proclamations of self-aggrandizing opinions! All mouths, no ears! Shoals of deaf monologists! Asses mashing asses! What hell it is! What dementia! What simultaneity of noise-as-language and emptiness-as-meaning! Good god, why does anyone subject themselves to others? Is silence the only honesty?
