Hello
and welcome to my 12th annual April Fool’s Day observance. For those of you new
to this tradition, the idea is that I try to pick a topic close to my heart,
then tell you how foolish it is to invest in this topic, then tell you to do it
anyways. I try to pick a new topic every year, except in years when I don’t,
and also if you think too hard about it all of my topics are really the same.
But some of you keep coming back and listening, so maybe I’m not the biggest
fool in here. (Also, expect to be listening to me for 11 minutes).
Today I’m repeating a topic which I
covered 6 years ago, and I’ll admit that I’ve got a lot of fear about repeating
this topic. Don’t get me wrong-- I love it, I’m committed to it, and I’ve
prepared as much as I can, but we just never know what the future will hold, do
we? So how can I just return to this topic and hope everything will go better
this time around? At least you’ll all be with me, right?
Also before beginning, I’d like to
thank the following people who have served as consultants for this speech: Mimi Arbeit, Fonda Lowe, Yotam Schachter, Naomi Zaslow, and my therapist Mjriam.
When I last spoke about the folly of
love, I closed by noting how “sometimes love makes me feel like I’m two things,
like I’m one thing, like I’m one-half, and like I’m nothing.” I quoted my
partner at the time, Mimi Arbeit, who once asked me: “So if I’m yours, and
you’re mine-- whose are we?” Throughout that speech I was realizing, without
fully diving into, the fact that the follies of love are just propped up on top
of follies about the self. Questions about love expose problems in how we
conceptualize ourselves. So I’ve been wanting to pick this theme back up by
going into the deep end of relationship as a dilemma of self.
I
find “Who am I?” to be a rather difficult question. My current favorite
philosophical answer to this question is that I am a shifting bundle of
characteristics. This answer allows me to gesture vaguely at myself, while
leaving essentials of “who I am” undefined. I resist talking about anything
“essential” for two reasons: (1) The deepest parts of me may not actually
be accessible to my own consciousness, so I may not know my own essence, so,
strangely enough, I can’t factor it into my sense of self; or (2) There may be
no such a thing as “the deepest part of me.” I really can’t say whether I have
some solid unchanging core. My sense of self is as a shifting bundle of
characteristics, some of which stick around longer than the others; beyond
that, or deeper than that, I don’t have much to say. To paraphrase Augustine, I
know who I am, until you ask me, and then I don’t.
In facing the challenge of lasting
partnership, these poorly defined dimensions of self are leading to a lot of
anxiety. How does one commit to a long-term relationship when self-knowledge is
so limited? And the word “love”-- to me, it’s a word that expresses deep
resonances, contact between the deepest parts of two people-- what can “love”
mean if one’s own deepest parts are inaccessible or simply an illusion? In my
last speech on this topic, I noted Ayn Rand’s wisdom that “To say ‘I love you’
one must first be able to say ‘I’”-- so if we believe that the self is folly,
then love must be folly too.
I
mean, I’m not saying that the self is folly, I’m saying that self-definition is
folly, and since loving partnership (or any collective identity) is an attempt
at constructing a compounded-self and therefore an attempt at
compounded-self-definition, it is a compounded form of foolishness.
We
could think of self and love as mereological dilemmas, that is, dilemmas of
parts and wholes. To say “I”
about myself is this attempt to muster all the parts of me together into a
whole. To say “We” is to do the same, except to include a whole extra person in
the claim of wholeness.
Existentially-speaking, this is all
fraught with risk. To say “I” or to say “We” is to commit to an identity, which
means tending it, defending it, and facing its loss. To have an identity means
to be jerked around emotionally by it, to feel threatened by anything that
threatens that identity. To choose to be part of a couple or a group is, in one
sense, to reduce myself to a part, and to attach my individual destiny to the
destiny of a larger unit. Do I really want to do this?
Plato
says yes. In the Symposium, he has Aristophanes tell the story of human
creation, one echoed in Midrash, in which humans begin as double-sided,
four-legged creatures later split up by fearful and jealous gods. Love,
according to Aristophanes, is “the desire of one another which is implanted in
us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of
man.” There are two key statements in here that I question: (1) that we are
essentially united, with the individual as only a fragment of that larger
whole; (2) that each “I” is better off united into a “We.” How much do we
actually want oneness with others, and how much might we simply prefer
individuality? And am I being more “true” to my “original nature” by seeing
myself as a part of a larger whole? Am “I” better as a “We”?
I keep returning to this one
question split into two-- how is the nature of self fulfilled or troubled by
engagement in partnership? Is the self in partnership a fragment finding its
whole or is the self in partnership a whole risking fragmentation? This is
exhausting, and I don’t feel like I’m getting any closer to making sense.
Naomi gave me an engagement ring
with an inscription referencing a page of Talmud-- Sotah 2a. In a passage on
that page, one rabbi claims that God matches partners according to their
actions, and another chimes in that this task is as difficult for God as it was
for God to split the Red Sea. The text brings in a third rabbi who states that
people are actually matched before they are born, and so they are not matched
according to their actions. So which is it? Does matchmaking happen by a simple
divine command before birth, or does it happen through the complex algorithm of
some divine matchmaker? The text reconciles the two sayings by explaining that
first marriages are decreed by heaven, and second marriages according to one’s
actions. Which is fine-- except is the upcoming wedding for Naomi and me a
first or a second wedding?
Let’s ignore that last question,
because I’d rather unpack how this passage actually incorporates and organizes
the elements of my talk so far.
One scenario is that God announces
the partner of an individual before they are born. I’ll label this scenario
“essentialist”-- God proclaims the person’s identity and, in doing so,
associates their soul with some other soul. The essence of one paired with the
essence of another; soulmates before the rest of the self even forms. This
understanding of partnership stems from the framework of essential selfhood,
and suggests a framework of essential couplehood. Being my partner’s partner
would thus be essential to who I am.
The other scenario is more
complicated to unpack, so bear with me. In the second scenario, people are
matched according to their actions, which is described as “as difficult as
splitting the Red Sea.” Now, what’s going on here? If you’re God, what’s so
difficult about splitting the Red Sea? Also, what sense does it make to compare
the pairing of two people to the splitting of other things?
Rabbeinu Tam, a 12th century French Rabbi, provides commentary which I find
useful-- he explains that the difficulty for God in splitting the sea wasn’t
producing the miracle, but choosing to save some of his creatures while killing
others. Rabbeinu Tam makes the analogy more direct by providing the specific
example of a 2nd marriage between a widow and a widower; it’s super-morbid, but
it’s an example of God bringing two people together while having to ‘sacrifice’
their previous partners. Ok, that’s very morbid, so let’s abstract it
extensively-- a match is difficult for God, and for the partners, because it
necessitates sacrifices, requiring each person to cut off possible partners,
possible paths for themselves, and even parts of themselves that might not be
nourished by this particular partnership. If I called the first scenario
“Essentialist,” we’ll call this second scenario “Existentialist”-- just as God
at the Sea faced the anxiety of choosing some and nullifying others, a person choosing
a partner faces the existential anxiety of affirming and rejecting parts of
themselves.
And the heart of existential anxiety
in coupling is built on our uncertainty about self. If we have an essential
self, it’s hard to access it. If we have no essential self, then it’s our
responsibility to create ourselves, and that can be overwhelming. Somehow, acts
of self-creation in one regard are acts of self-destruction in some other
regard. Among all the parts of ourselves, how is it that we’re able to choose
who lives and who dies?
This is very real, and it’s
inescapable-- that is, it’s an anxiety built into both marriage and divorce.
There’s a violence in self-creation that makes me cringe because it’s coupled
with such uncertainty. I’ll quote Garnet from Steven Universe, who captures
this feeling: “Why am I so sure that I’d rather be this than everything I was
supposed to be, and that I’d rather do this than anything I was supposed to
do?” Can you feel that? I feel it when I face the decision to leave Boston
after 10 years, just to follow Naomi to New York City. What identity, what
self-knowledge, what attempt at self-- what is it that is enabling me to
choose this person over my life here? I also felt this when I was going through
the split with Mimi-- I felt exactly that, split, having to choose between
parts of myself as individual and parts of myself as the couple. Heart-breaking
choices. How did I choose? How did I know, or think I could know, what of me
was ok to leave behind?
Can you see how
both pairing and divorce involve sacrificing parts of self, making
decisions about who I am and who I will be? What qualifies me to make these
decisions? Whether there is or isn’t an essential self, how can a person wisely
commit such acts of self-reckoning?
Ok. As I say every time, but more
and more in recent years, this is getting long. If I recall correctly, my
responsibility is now to convince you all to engage in the folly of love,
despite (and probably because of) its foolishness. And, this year, I think I
have a double burden, which is to also endorse continuing the folly of self.
I think I’ve got it. There are two
follies involved in both self and love, and I think I can explain both their
foolishness and then endorse them anyhow. These follies go together-- they are
called “objectification” and “attachment.” The folly of objectification occurs
when we try to fix in place something that changes, and the folly of attachment
quickly follows, when we become emotionally invested in that illusion of a
permanent thing. In the long run, there is no Matt Lowe, and in the short run,
Matt Lowe changes-- so, in a sense, I’m more of an event than I am a thing. The
same is true for our partners and our relationships. But I easily forget this,
and so I get invested in these things, and then threatened when these things
change.
We become foolishly attached to
illusory objects, whether the object be ourselves or our partners. Caught up in
attachment to these illusions, we face striving, suffering, existential
dilemma, loss, and death. If it’s so foolish, shouldn’t we drop the charade?
(Sigh.)
Of course not. We love objectification; we love to do it to ourselves,
we love to do it to others, and have it done unto us. Naomi has fallen in love
with an image of me, and I’ve encouraged that illusion every step of the way,
because her loving image of me is a major factor in the image I attempt to use
to love myself. The same is true for how I’ve fallen in love with her. And if
there is no essential self, then this is the best we get. If the loss of these
illusions leads to a feeling of foolishness and senselessness, that’s because
the only meanings we do get in this world are the ones we build and prop up
ourselves, as long as we can. The illusions are the meaning. If it is foolish
to invest in our sense of self or in relationships, it would be far more
foolish to forego these things and simply begin and end with meaninglessness.
I’ll
close by ripping off and corrupting a Tibetan story about illusion and
attachment. Let’s say you see me, sometime around the wedding, looking very,
very happy. And you might say, “Matt, why are you so happy with yourself? You
teach that the self is an illusion.” And my answer is: “Self is an illusion.
And the love of another self is an even greater and wonderful illusion!”
Thanks
for your time today.
