Get Real — Part I

Now I sus­pect these few sec­onds of video elicited at least a few adjec­tives, inter­rog­a­tives and maybe even some exple­tives.  I hope some of you asked the sim­ple ques­tion ‘Why?’.  I also imag­ine that many of you actu­ally, at least implic­itly, already know why.  Why is it that you can sub­mit some basic searches on YouTube and find scores of peo­ple doing things that strike us as almost unbear­ably stupid?

Heck for your view­ing plea­sure here is another pole walk­ing attempt.

You may also notice that this phe­nom­e­non is prac­ti­cally the exclu­sive domain of young men.  Coin­ci­dence … I think not.  Com­ing across this video reminded me of two things.  The first is a short story I am work­ing on that reflects on my expe­ri­ence of rais­ing beef cat­tle in south­ern Man­i­toba.  What stood out to me as this piece pro­gressed was the role of cas­trat­ing and de-horning the young bulls strip­ping them, per­haps, of some pri­mal layer of wild and reck­less mas­culin­ity.  I will leave that thought to develop another time.

Sec­ond, this video reminded me of Dostoevsky’s Notes From the Under­ground (bear with me).  The Under­ground Man says, “So this is it – this is it at last – a head-on clash with real life!”  And so we have what comes to close to how I would char­ac­ter­ize Dostoevsky’s work.  In each work it seems that D is will­ing to walk out from pole to pole know­ing the cross­ing or crash­ing will, hope­fully, bring an encounter with ‘real life’.

Dos­to­evsky will take any step and make any turn nec­es­sary so that there will be a pos­si­bil­ity for the real.  The Under­ground Man both despises and feels despised by his anony­mous audi­ence.  He attempts to recount his life with bru­tal hon­esty which means being hon­estly decep­tive at times.  He throws any notion of con­sis­tency out into the street for it is being tossed on your head into the street that one might actu­ally learn some­thing about one’s self.  The Under­ground Man con­cludes spite­fully that he was sorry for ever start­ing this account of his life rec­og­niz­ing that is was a pur­suit in van­ity and has moved away from lit­er­a­ture.  For, “[a] novel must have a hero, and here I seemed to have delib­er­ately gath­ered together all the char­ac­ter­is­tics of an anti-hero, and, above all, all this is cer­tain to pro­duce a most unpleas­ant impres­sion because we have all lost touch with life, we are all crip­ples, every one of us – more or less.”  We all began on pole and fallen so we may as well try and walk them again.  He goes on to tell us that because of our dis­abil­ity with are left with a dis­gust for any encounter, any taste with ‘real life.’ In response to any rejec­tions his audi­ence might raise for this view the writer con­tin­ues by say­ing that, “for my part, I have merely car­ried to extremes in my life what you have not dared to carry even half-way, and, in addi­tion, you have mis­taken your cow­ardice for com­mon sense and have found com­fort in that, deceiv­ing your­selves.”  You have seen the poles, thought of ven­tur­ing out onto them but said to your­self it would not be pru­dent and thought your­self the wiser.  And even after this the Under­ground Man is not finished.

My open­ing quo­ta­tion from this short story came about half-way through the nar­ra­tive and imme­di­ately guided me the rest of the way.  It has crys­tal­lized for me what is clear to all of us.  As humans we act out and artic­u­late the desire for some­thing ‘real’.  Though I don’t think we do this for all of our life.  Real­ness in child­hood is know­ing that the world is more than it is.  Real­ness is cre­ative and unsta­ble.  Real­ness becomes in young adult­hood more con­crete as we begin to pur­sue tan­gi­ble goals in love and voca­tion.  Because the real was always more and big­ger than our­selves it was never cap­tured or tamed and so in time most of us began to sim­ply give up on the real and sought the com­fort­able and sta­ble.  And so from below the ordered streets and time-conscious pedes­tri­ans the Under­ground Man emerges not with a chal­lenge but with an asser­tion and a con­dem­na­tion.  I have fol­lowed through and looked around the cor­ners of the dark cor­ri­dors of the real.  I have said yes to all of life.  The pitch of the Under­ground Man rises in its crescendo.  In deceiv­ing your­selves “as a mat­ter fact, I seem to be much more alive than you.  Come, look into it more closely!  Why, we do not even know where we are to find real life, or what it is, or what it is called.… We even find it hard to be men, men of real flesh and blood, our own flesh and blood.  We are ashamed of it.  We think it a dis­grace.”  The Under­ground Man includes him­self in this con­dem­na­tion.  I think gen­der in this lan­guage should remain spe­cific.  I hope to develop this more in Part II.