by Anthology
Tatemae’s translation seems more straightforward: A constructed front. Yet the passive voice frustrates the Anglophone demand for definitiveness: Constructed by whom?
As used in Japanese, the distinction appears to be discursive and heuristic, rather than substantive and metaphysical. It does not refer to discrete entities, but to different ways of talking and thinking about the self. In this sense it is partially homologous to the Hegelian contradiction between essence and appearance, in that both taken together comprise a reality that cannot be apprehended in a single glance.
Therefore, a Japanese person would no more expect a honne to assume an existence separate from the corresponding tatemae than one would expect a shadow to detach itself from the body casting it. But just as stories are told in every world culture of such autonomous shadows, it is reasonable to expect incidents of such a separation between the tatemae and the honne.
Aaron Burch’s tatemae—henceforth to be referred to as Aaron-T—continued mowing the lawn in a strict rectilinear progression, waving to the neighbors on each side as he saw them.
It should not be surprising that a tatemae would be capable of operating a push lawnmower, but perhaps for some readers it is. While in Western philosophical traditions it is customary to treat appearances as ephemeral, a moment’s thought should make it clear that the tatemae has much greater need of the body’s physical form than the honne. Whether bowing at the waist, offering a firm handshake, making air kisses, back slaps or bear hugs, our social being makes regular use of our corporality.
The honne, in contrast, has the luxury of becoming spectral. Aaron’s honne—henceforth to be referred to as Aaron-H—chased after a blue-winged grasshopper trying to evade the mower blades.
“Please accept my apologies, O Blue-Winged Grasshopper, for cutting down the tall grass in which you were hiding,” said Aaron-H. “I hope a bird does not eat you.”
The grasshopper, being unfamiliar with the notion of apologies, mistook Aaron-H’s cries for the wingbeats of a blue jay, and fled further, taking shelter underneath a yellow toolshed. Aaron-H followed him there.
It was at this point Aaron-H realized that he had detached from Aaron-T, his tatemae, since otherwise he would not have been able to fit under a toolshed.
Aaron-T noticed no change, nor any grasshoppers, and continued mowing the lawn.
In fact Aaron-T remained oblivious through the remainder of the day, as the movers arrived with their possessions, and his wife Chloe and young son Jared followed behind, Chloe taking charge of directing the movers on the correct placement of their various goods and Aaron-T pitching in by shifting furnishings, repairing light fixtures, and otherwise acting as the very image of a good husband.
It was not until 9:30 that night, after Jared had gone to bed and he and Chloe rested on the couch, both too tired to climb the stairs to bed, that he noticed anything different. What he noticed was not something, but the absence of something, namely the compulsion to retire to his office and begin torrenting.
For Aaron-H, Aaron Burch’s true self, was a bit of a porn addict.
Strictly speaking that is not true. Aaron Burch’s porn addiction was merely the sublimated form taken by an assemblage of Aaron-H’s desires and fetishes that could not be acted upon directly in any manner compatible with the constructed front that was Aaron-T. In Aaron-H, these desires and fetishes were now unleashed.
So Aaron-T and Chloe briefly watched a re-run of Top Chef, then assisted one another in heaving their exhausted carcasses up to bed, as Aaron-H, having wearied of his meticulous exploration of the strange world under the toolshed, began wandering the town of North Glamis to satisfy his fetish: The musky smell of a young boy’s anus.
Of course Aaron Burch had smelled his own son’s anus many times, at diaper changes, bath times and bed times, but never could he acknowledge to himself that this was the smell he found so deeply satisfying. To do so might have called too starkly to mind a detailed recollection of his first Cub Scout camping trip. Instead, he would rustle Jared’s hair and put his nose to the back of his neck, reassuring himself that all he felt was simple paternal affection for his beloved child. This night Aaron-T had not even done that, simply pecking his son on the cheek.
For years Jared Burch had felt mostly safe but increasingly ill-at-ease with his father’s rituals. Twenty years later, after several more-or-less abusive relationships with older men, he would in a particularly searing session of psychotherapy recall this night and date it as the moment that his father had begun to pull away, depriving him of what he believed love to be and continued to seek thereafter.
Aaron-H, however, did not venture into the Burch house: What he desired, he believed, would hurt his son, and he did not ever want to do that. Detachment was a gift: At last, he could flee, and spare his child any pain.
It is only fair to assume that all parents who flee their responsibilities experience similar thoughts, sincerely believing that in fleeing they are sparing the child or children they love the agony of realizing what monsters the world had set over them as caregivers.
For Aaron-H, at least, this belief was more true than self-serving.
That a detached honne can be spectral in nature does not mean that at all times it must be. If a true self’s desire requires physicality for its attainment then it may assume a form corresponding to its self-image. Thus a detached honne in physical form usually looks much like the body from which it came, though often a bit younger, perhaps thinner, and with less definite facial features. So at various times over the next thirteen months, the residents of North Glamis homes in which there lived boys aged four through eleven would hear doors latching or unlatching, century-old wooden floors creaking, rustling in hampers full of dirty underwear, and occasionally, at night, the fearful cries of a child. As they searched the house for the intruder—often with a shotgun at the ready, for this is Maine—they might catch a glimpse of someone in the mirror, only to have him vanish before they could turn and aim.
Later on, these townspeople would meet Aaron-T at an elementary school art show, a firehouse bean supper or the village store, notice his dirty blonde hair, scraggly beard, and the husky physique of a high school running back gone a bit sedentary, and think, I’ve seen this fella before, don’t know where, but I don’t like the looks of him.
Aaron-T complained to Chloe that people in this town didn’t seem so friendly. Having grown up in Midcoast Maine, she knew what to expect, or thought she did, and told him it must be his Southern accent, the fact that he was so obviously “from away.” “Give ‘em time and space,” she urged. “They’ll warm up to ya.”
In fact, she had already found her peer group of stay-at-home-moms, and worried about her husband’s apparent inability to make friends in town. She was especially perplexed by the reluctance of Jared’s friends’ parents to send their kids over for playdates. Aaron, ordinarily jovial, became gloomy whenever he came home. Increasingly he found reasons to work late hours at the University, attend functions on campus, or go away on conference or research travel. His constructed front had bifurcated: Engaged and well-liked among his peers, resigned to domestic isolation at home, and preferring the former to the latter.
“Gotta make tenure,” was all he said to her by way of an excuse. He still torrented from time to time—his research was on comparative graphic literature of the 20th and 21st centuries—but now it was in service to the exigent demands of scholarly productivity, not an inner compulsion.
One balmy evening in mid-September, a housewife whose name has been withheld by the authorities but who everyone knows was Emma Farnsworth over on Pine Drive came home to find Aaron-H in her son Jeffrey’s first floor bedroom next to an open window, knee deep in Iron Man underpants.
He got out of there right away—in fact he vanished, though everyone assumed he jumped out the window and ran—but Emma got a good look at him. Since Jeffrey and Jared were in the same kindergarten class, best friends really, she recognized the figure as
Jared’s father Aaron. A bit wavy, perhaps, in the lines of his face, but definitely him, she concluded, after about five minutes of failing to convince herself that there was no way it could possibly be. Of course she called the Sheriff’s Department.
When Sheriff Dunleavy showed up on the Burch’s doorstep asking where Aaron was but being cagey as to why, Chloe assured him that, whatever this was all about, there’s no way Aaron could have been involved. “He’s been down in Boston the last three days,” she said. “At a conference. He’ll be back tomorrow morning, so you can ask him yourself.”
Unfortunately for the Burch family, there was no such conference. Aaron-T was at a B&B in Bar Harbor, balls deep in Su-Min Young, the new tenure-track hire in his department and a first-generation Korean-American by way of Flushing, Queens, who found his accent and his encyclopedic knowledge of manhwa irresistibly charming.
If he had been able to acknowledge this to Sheriff Dunleavy and his wife, he might not have been arrested the next morning for breaking and entering. Dunleavy would have loved to throw the book at him, but he could not find underwear sniffing anywhere in the Maine Criminal Code. The rumors all over town that he had done worse things to other little boys were just that, rumors, nothing that could hold up in a court of law: All those kids swore it was just a bad dream, a bogeyman, if you could get them to talk at all. As a mere tatemae, Aaron-T had bound himself into an insoluble contradiction, between his on-campus front as a friendly lothario and his North Glamis front as a devoted though antisocial husband and father. For more than a year he had lived without a true self to arbitrate his actions, and that honne had dragged him into a situation he found inconceivable.
Aaron-T spent the night in jail. Chloe bailed him out the next morning, but told him that she and Jared were packed and going to Brunswick to stay with her parents. No, she did not know when they would come back. She did not know if they would come back. If even one of the hundred rumors around town were true, she couldn’t spend another minute with him.
“I never laid a finger on Jared, or any of those boys,” he swore.
“How can I believe that? Where were you?” she asked. In her mind, his silence was sufficient indictment.
As Chloe backed her Subaru out of the garage and down the driveway, Aaron-T took a seat in his. Aaron-H slipped in under the closing garage door.
Aaron-T started the engine and opened the windows; Aaron-H hovered over the passenger seat. As alarms began to blare in the house, Aaron-T inhaled Aaron-H through his nostrils.
The Joy of Sects(Short story)
by Joseph Tomaras
The Journal of Unlikely Cryptograph (Unlikely Story No. 11, February 2015)
As an undercover agent in the Sect Control Commission of the Secret Service, I cannot allow the reflexes developed in my earlier assignments to survive. A capacity to isolate and overwrite tics and habitual rhetoric is the sine qua non for this job. We are encouraged to elaborate these narratives between assignments, both as part of the overwriting process and in the hope that historians of the coming Collaborative Commonwealth will be able to reconstruct and comprehend the death throes of class society. Under the old regime, there was a Secret Service that protected the president, but also was assigned to rooting out counterfeit money. Our Secret Service protects the sovereign people by uncovering counterfeit ideas.
I was one of the first assigned to this role, but it was not my first form of service to the Council. After the Bronx Uprising and the establishment of our power in the outer boroughs, the fact that I was one of the few accountants—a notoriously conservative profession—to be a trusted member of Workers’ Unity meant that I was put in charge of requisitioning and allocation. I soon realized that this was a mistake; perhaps Lenin was right in his day to think that economic planning was like accountancy, but I could tell that to take account of second- and third-order impacts in feeding a city of eight million people under siege and facing catastrophic sea level rises, I would need second derivatives, probability integrals, eigenvectors and Markovians—things I had not studied since I was nineteen. My assignment then became to find all the mathematicians who had gone to work for the high-speed trading firms, who had become Wall Street billionaires and who thus were on the other side of the lines, and promise that not only would they not be strung up, but they could have comfortable lives solving far more difficult optimization problems than ever before.
Yes, I had to promise them some privileges, and no, that didn’t sit well with the rat-burger scrounging masses, or the Council. But it was surprisingly easy: Half of them had already run their models and figured that, one way or the other, we were bound to win. That was how I discovered my talent for clandestinity.
Some of my early assignments were dull. For example, because before the establishment of the Unity I had hopscotched around some small Trotskyist and Bordigaist groupuscules, I was asked to infiltrate—with the help of some reversible plastic surgery—the remnants of various Marxist groupings that had not joined us. The Badiouan post-Maoists misconstruing mathematical formulas to determine whether our Revolution met their standards for being called an “Event,” the Spartacist debates over whether our power was a “degenerated” or “deformed” workers’ state or still too indeterminate to say anything about, the five Chirikians who defined themselves as the sum total of the “proletarian milieu”—I reported that they posed no more threat to us than they had to the capitalists beforehand. We were determined not to repeat the totalitarian excesses of the past.
The traditional theistic religions posed little problem, either. Those clergy and congregants who were inclined to go over to the counterrevolution rarely bothered with dissimulation, and a surprising number of religions split along “social justice” or “liberation theology” lines in our favor. As long as we can restrain the church-burning excesses of Insurrectionalists, we have little to worry about from the god-believers. The only truly interesting conspiracy I uncovered from that corner was the multi-ethnic Chan Buddhist temple in Flushing that was an elaborate cover for a fascist, Chinese-supremacist coup plotting to take over Queens.
What we have found, however, is that the scientific outlook of a historical materialist is rarely taken on in full during the present struggle for existence. People pick up little bits of utopian impulse here, some propositions reduced to the level of slogans there, mix them up syncretically with the cultural detritus of the old regime’s slow decline, and sects that no one could have anticipated spring up like mushroom clouds after the Zionist Masada.
Sometimes they’re harmless. The strangest cult I ever had to infiltrate was the Marcia’s Witnesses. They were obsessed with Maureen McCormick, a twentieth-century actress best known for having portrayed a teenage girl named Marcia Brady on an insipid television program eighty years ago. My final report said that while they were undoubtedly backward on the women’s question, they were mostly harmless, and so no extraordinary measures of suppression were needed.
But not all the syncretists are quite so harmless, and that is why I just shaved off a beard after a sojourn among the Feuerbachians.
***
To be fair, that is not what they call themselves. The official name is the Church of God as Love. Those of us in the Unity who identify as Marxists have yet to shake the habit of associating ideologies with surnames. The public preaching of this group does not differ substantially from the ideas expressed in Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity: “God is pure absolute subjectivity released from all natural limits; he is what individuals ought to be and will be: faith in God is therefore the faith of man in the infinitude and truth of his own nature; the Divine Being is the subjective human being in his absolute freedom and unlimitedness.” Or as Thawratullah—the self-styled True Essence Incarnate—would put it: “You are God, you will be God, but only in the Revolution. The Revolution needs us to become the God we are meant to be.”
It’s not just that this sort of rhetoric is a distraction from the urgent tasks of the day. Fo
r all their talk of love and unity, it’s basically divisive. Feuerbachian street-preachers have been known to trigger brawls outside of churches, mosques and gurdwaras. Their evangelists sidle up to the more fuzzy-headed cadres in the Unity and distract them with grand discussions of the unity of body and spirit. And the more political operators have infiltrated our council structure to divert scarce resources into “educational” ventures tied to the Church.
Then there are the sex parties.
***
My transition was interrupted when the uprisings began. There were still plenty of backward elements in the Unity who didn’t recognize their own cis-privilege, who dismissed synthetic hormones as cosmetic, not worth putting on the pharmaceutical ration queue. It wasn’t my first faction fight, but in the meantime, even though my breast growth was irreversible, resurgent testes had put hair back on my face. With all the work to be done, there was hardly time for shaving or makeup, let alone electrolysis or lasers. I was the one who started the jokes about “Lydia the Bearded Lady.” This is not the body I had imagined, but it has been put to good use in the struggle: For the Chan assignment, I had to bind and pass as cis-male. Passing as cis-female with the Witnesses was easier, once I got my hormones back and a facial graft—they were so chaste, so obsessively focused on Marcia, Marcia, Marcia. I could have been more comfortable with the Feuerbachians—Thawratullah hirself is trans—but someone on the Council had a bright idea.
Marx said that people create their own history, but not in conditions of their own choosing. However many times I overwrite my thoughts and gestures, my history is written in this body. The form into which I have been compelled appears to have been freely chosen by the True Essence Incarnate: Hirsute as a 19th century German philosopher, yet with full breasts and hips. My bio-engineered implants were synthesized in the same Lehman College labs where ersatz steak and bacon are grown for the carnivores on the Council; Thawratullah must have found an incubator on the black market. Hir penis is circumcised but otherwise intact, the scrotum baggy with stray, undyed white hairs, the only outward sign of hir advancing age. Yes, I got that close a look. The perfect synthesis, so they claim. I got my orders: To mimic Thawratullah’s corporeal engineering. It was not pleasant: Nanoactuators dusted into every follicle, t-shots strong enough to stop my heart and leave me convulsive, aggressive, priapic and masturbatory.