pro-choice

In a comment appended to my previous post, Desiree takes me to task for arguing that New York is somehow more "real" than other places. This is not precisely what I was trying to say, but her commentary raises other interesting questions.

In my post, I was trying to express that New York has taught me some hard lessons about "reality," has made me more of a "realist." Some might argue that being a realist is just another term for being a cynic or an individualist, but I don't see it quite that way. I like to think that my new perspective on life is the same idealism I used to have, tempered with a healthy does of experience. I've been dis-illusioned in the best possible sense.

But does that mean that New York is a "realer" place than any where I've lived before? Certainly not (cf. a post of mine from earlier this summer in which I argue exactly the opposite). Desiree offers us a memorable maxim, though, acquired from television viewing: reality is just another genre. Certainly our experience backs this up. Does any style of art seem more dated than historical attempts to depict life unfiltered, "as it really is"? The handheld camera work of French New Wave cinema or the pathological asceticism of Scandanavian Dogme seem as stylized to us as the overstuffed "naturalistic" stage settings used in 19th Century productions of Ibsen. Representations of reality are invariably selective; even the ubiquitous (and hopefully fading) fad of reality television, though unscripted, is edited to create tight, readable narratives and familiar character roles.

The "real" is just another modality, a way of limiting the totality of experience, which is too overwhelming (or, at times, underwhelming) for us to process without filters of some kind. What feels "real" to us is not substantively different from experiences that we describe as "surreal"; the two types of experiences just come at us in different ways, one in a way that we can easily process and the other in more unexpected ways.

What Desiree really seems to be saying is that living in New York seems to predispose people to a certain collective fantasy: that the hardscrabble way New Yorkers have chosen to live and arrange their interactions with others is somehow the only "real" way to live. That the dog-eat-dog world of competition this city fosters somehow allows us to access a truth about existence that the poor rubes in the sticks will never receive.

I came back last week from a trip outside of New York City, my first extended departure in many months. The journey made me realize that all of us create our own modalities of existence, based to a certain degree on the circumstances in which we find ourselves but also (perhaps primarily) on the choices we make or do not make to alter those circumstances.

"Reality" in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Ozark mountains, where I spent my vacation, is vastly different from the Manhattan sense of "real." In Manhattan living in the "real world" means paying half of your paycheck in rent so that you can meet all of your expenses and still live in a decent neighborhood -- defined not only by its safety, but perhaps moreso by its proximity to desirable subway lines (not the JMZ, please!) and its proportion of hip bars, stores and eateries. For Manhattan artists, social activits, and other counter-cultural types, living in the real world often means making commercial compromises to subsidize that kind of life.

New Yorkers in Little Rock may marvel that this state capital seems so suburban in places, that the downtown area can feel so empty on a weekday afternoon, that young bohemian twenty-somethings can live in a sizeable house on a tree-lined street and that you can wander around to local watering holes and bump into all kinds of people that you know and grew up with. It seems like a fantasyland, equal parts Andy Griffith and Harper Lee. But I'm sure that New York, with its unrealistically infalted prices, overscheduled appointment books and constant cell phone communication, must seem to outsidere like a theme-park spin off of Sex and the City. People who doubt that New York thrives on unreality only need to note the hordes of television crews that crowd the streets, filming the latest installments of Law and Order. Half the population here seems to be employed peddling fantasies of one kind or another; too few of us realize that we're also living in one.

The peculiar fantasy that New Yorkers subscribe to is that so many of the things they live their lives for are actual, undeniable "needs," rather than imagined ones. Leisure time, to a New Yorker, means being able to go to the Hamptons, or (for those who can't afford that) going out to the trendiest bar, which necessitates all kinds of further expenditure: cigarettes and clothes and hair care products and unlimited Metrocards. Being here for any extended period of time warps the mind so that we come to feel that this very peculiar way of living -- aggressive, with everyone piled on top of one another -- is the only possible option, when the case could well be made that it's actually incredibly unnatural and inhumane.

It's hard for anyone, in New York or in Little Rock, to distinguish between habit and need. As a lapsed Catholic Worker, I'm peculiarly sensitive to the burden that imagined needs can make on the human soul. The spiritual practice of truly divesting oneself of all the material possessions that one does not actually need is a hard but enlightening path to take (one I tried for a time to go down, only to settle for a compromise). Time in Manhattan, though, has made me sympathetic to some of the imagined needs shared by my fellow urbanites. I remember in college marveling that anyone -- anyone! -- would ever really need more than three pairs of shoes: sneakers, dress shoes and boots. Done. Of course, as I find myself packing up my belongings to move into a new aparment I find that my shoes have multiplied like rabbits in the two years I've lived in New York and are now a motley crew of various lether, faux-leather and canvas constructions ranked by minute differentiations of casualness and chic.

To a certain extent, the need for different shoes is a "real" one based on the type of functions that I'm accustomed to attending these days and the expectations of my footwear. More than that, though, our imagined needs are real in the sense that they are expressions of our desire for comfort, perhaps the most human of all weaknesses. One can be a complete ascetic and still be motivated by the same drive: the monk who enters a life of strict celibacy and scheduled prayer is similarly seeking a kind of comfort, an existence whose parameters and clearly understood and will remain unchallenged.

Most people live their lives as if someone, some oppressive power, designed the world to make them frustrated. I know so many New Yorkers who complain constantly about high rents or the stress level that they experience and yet who never admit that they themselves have chosen to live here when they could be in Santa Fe or living on Walden Pond. In fact, our frustrations just go to show how comfortable we are with the system as it exists; despite all our complaints, there must be something (even if it's just fear of the unknown) that keeps us here.

Imagine a world where more people were able to admit how much of their lives are based on their own choices, their own need for comfort. We would be a bit healthier as a nation if we realized that the Red State/Blue State divide is a manifestation not of two "fundamentally different Americas" but rather of two modalities of being American, that might have more in common than we think. The differences between your average Bible-belt Republican and your average limousine liberal are superficial at best: the one attends church regularly while the other goes religiously to a pilates class; the one believes he needs a firearm to protect himself while the other believes he needs macrobiotic food.

Perhaps in order to really experience reality what we all ought to do is own up to the fantasies we've constructed around ourselves. The consciousness that allows us to do just that is the lasting (and underappreciated) legacy of postmodernism. Human beings are fantasists; we construct imagined castles around ourselves -- whether out of material goods or ideologies -- to ward off the evils of the outside world. If we all recognized one another as members in this quixotic club, we might be able to have healthier debates and, indeed, to imagine new ways of being, new interactions that we could subscribe to collectively to lessen the conflicts between us.

Certainly some people in the world do not have much capacity to "choose their own reality"; a baby born infected with AIDS in Africa cannot just pack up and move on to a better life of her own free will. But for most of us in the West, the key to enlightenment is not going to be one thing that will work for everyone. For some people it will be going back to the land, while for others it's devoting yourself to your career or starting a family or living in voluntary poverty or some other mode of existence that offers them satisfaction. The key lies in recognizing that none of us has been forced by some ontological imperative to live life the way we do. Each of us has chosen and continues to choose. The real world circumstances to which we so often ascribe our motivations in decision-making are, in fact, changeable. Once we have seen that much, we may do nothing to make budge from our comfortable, imagined castle, but at least we've let a little light in. New horizons of reality become visible.