What Are You Pretending Not To Know Today?
The exaltation of one’s own gut feeling is tricky, especially when it exalts as somehow sacrosanct the isolated delusions of men with power over their fellow creatures. In practice, this can lead to a hopeless privileging of my personal fantasy, over the observable facts of those with less privilege, as the definitive and binding take on reality. Mistaking the still, small voice in our heads for absolute truth isn’t a uniquely American heresy, but combined with the deifying of whatever it is we might mean when we talk about the ineffable virtue of following our hearts, one prevalent understanding of personal strength becomes an ugly sense of personal infallibility. Being true to myself, in this context, might simply be a matter of being true to my endlessly self-justifying ego.
For some, the practice of pause, of consistently slowing the tape of the story and spin we intake, can feel like a career liability, a luxury those who’ve mistaken their positions for their persons can’t afford. This pattern can make me a victim of my own self-publicity and spin. It can feel as if there’s no escaping it.
At the risk of homing in on the example of a considerably famous person to the exclusion of the rest of us, I’d like to consider the case of Ronald Reagan. Like anyone whose presumed power depends upon believing (or pretending to believe) whatever it appears expedient to believe from one moment to the next, he lived much of his life in a psychic pickle. The question of expedience is always with us, but devoting too much of our lives to it can deplete the conscience considerably. Our hold on reality can prove disturbingly—even perversely—malleable. When forced by the 1987 Tower Commission Report to consider again his public denial of involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, Reagan offered his viewers at home an odd statement that illustrates the phenomena I have in mind: “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”
An elected official’s pattern of evasion often mimics, by design, that of the culture over which their office is said to preside. In a phantasmagoric bid for viability, the job isn’t just to conjure but to somehow be the product of enough gerrymandered voters’ preferred imaginings. I hasten to add that this brand of egotism isn’t the sole property of any particular political party, economic class, or group. “I believe in my heart” is a stunningly effective phrase in the perception of the American public, if the polls are to be believed, and presidents can refer to their “heart of hearts” and talk about the unique truth of what’s deep down in their hearts as if a man in a tie feeling something deeply is an argument in itself.
In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues document one particular faith formation as “Sheilaism,” the professed, private faith of a young nurse named Sheila Larson (a pseudonym) who named her most consistent religious conviction after herself. She’s quick to point out that she believes in God, but she isn’t religious: “My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own small voice.” Self-love and being gentle with herself concerning possible shortcomings are her primary creeds. The authors don’t question that Sheila has had experiences with a living God, but it does seem clear that God, viewed exclusively through the lens of rampant Sheilaism, can become nothing more than “the self magnified.”
Given the mental fight one has to undertake to hear oneself above the din of other people’s projections, sales pitches, and empty promises, I don’t begrudge Sheila her hard-won discernment of her own small voice for a second. There are so many ways we’re taught to doubt and grow estranged from our own best intuition, the lively genius many within beloved community believe lies buried in every living person, even when we’re reading teleprompted words we’ve been told we have to say aloud to avoid impeachment proceedings.
But there’s more than one way to believe your own heart. My preferred text for undertaking this life’s work rightly is Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters, a movable feast of healing, discernment, despair unto death, and communal exorcism. In a revolving cast of characters whose wise utterances speak to one another’s psychic dramas sometimes purposefully and sometimes accidentally, one of them, Sophie Heywood, insists that “every event is preceded by a sign.” Who has the authority to interpret them? That would be everyone who’s ever lived: “We’re all clairvoyant if we’d only know it.”
Bambara was the kind of person who put this kind of question to herself and others: “What are you pretending not to know today?”
Try that. Gaze into that corner. Lift that rock. Experience your own clairvoyance . There is no other way.