VIII.
Authenticity. It’s the Big Word around which so many of our anxieties orbit, the standard against which we’re asked to judge our experiences of people, places, food, and art, which is to say experience itself. You hear it so often nowadays that you could turn it into a drinking game: after every mention, take a shot of small-batch artisanal bourbon, chase it with a quaff of craft beer. Authenticity is at the top of a class that includes other buzzwords like empathy, community, human, and organic. Concerns about these things intensify, of course, when the conditions of existence conspire to make them difficult or impossible to achieve. So the more mediated our lives become, the more we’ll stress the value of the organic. The more automated we ourselves become, the more we’ll worry over what’s human. The more dislocated and uprooted we feel, the more we’ll talk about community. And given how neutered and disembodied, how literally superficial people are online, lost as they get in the endless clown hanky of a social media feed, it’s no wonder that we’ve got folks out there rah-rahing empathy. But the ubiquity of these words shouldn’t be mistaken for a mark of comprehension. Situation’s quite the opposite, it seems to me: the more they’re used, the less they’re understood. It’s more than that, though. The more they’re used, the less they need to be understood at all.
Asked to define authenticity, for example, most of us would probably start small. Something is authentic when it is, in fact, what it professes to be. This is what we mean about eighty or ninety percent of the time and it doesn’t really trip us up. We roll right on by Mexican and Ethiopian food that claims to be authentic because we know that it means genuine, the real deal. At a restaurant that boasts authentic Sicilian pizza, we can expect to find za on the order of what we’d get in Sicily. And so on. Same holds for garments claiming to be made of one hundred percent authentic cashmere or Mulberry silk or Japanese denim. Concerns about this type of authenticity grow out of our awareness of and sensitivity to phonies and fakes. We like hearing food is authentic because we’ve eaten tacos whose shells are waffles, burritos swaddled by quesadillas, pizza whose crust is gravid with cheese. Knockoff clothes have burned us, so much so, apparently, that eBay has felt compelled to offer tutorials on how to identify, say, a bogus Lacoste polo shirt. (For what it’s worth, on an authentic one, the alligator logo is dark green and sits between the bottom stitch of the collar and the bottom button. . .) This simple meaning of the word comes to us from the art and auction world, the museum, where experts are trusted to certify a piece’s origin and originator. Think of Antiques Roadshow, which shouldn’t be anywhere close to as compelling to watch as it is. It generates its surprising tension by stoking our desire to know whether, e.g., a chair that’s been in the family four generations is an authentic Chippendale, whether the vase purchased for the plant it held is an authentic Lalique. Replicas, counterfeits, impostors, facsimiles—they impart upon authentic shit its aura and appeal (and, therefore, its value).
It’s when authenticity comes to be applied to people that things get dicey. Pressed for a definition of it in this sense, we’d likely have to MacGyver one. With Scotch tape and spit we’d affix a dim notion of truth to a considerably dimmer one of selfhood, that blessingcurse modernity bequeathed us. It means being true to yourself, we’d say, not caring what other people think of you, not needing their approval. You do you or whatever. We might go on to claim that some things about us are really us, while others are only incidentally us, and that to live authentically is to live in such a way that the real things are tended to and nourished more than the incidental ones. Only then can we declare, proudly, that we’re self-fulfilled or self-actualized or self-realized. We don’t really learn this ideal of authenticity so much as we absorb it, don’t choose so much as inherit it. And once internalized, it recedes to the background, where it serves as the screen upon which we project our wildest hopes and dreams for ourselves. It’s burrowed so deeply into our understanding of how we should aspire to live that it’s easy to overlook the fact that it has a history, both a personal and philosophical one.
Everyone has a fund of experience with this—it’s the sort of thing that you find everywhere once you start looking for it. Here’s but one example from mine: for my fifth-grade banquet, a get-down thrown for graduating elementary school, the youth pastor from my church was called in to deliver the keynote. While my cohort and I ate our single-serving ice cream tubs with wooden infinity spoons, he held forth about the difference between thermostats and thermometers. A thermostat controls the temperature, while a thermometer only reflects it. Thermostats influence the environment around them; thermometers are influenced by the environment. “Which one are you going to be?” he concluded, and the question hung so heavily in the cafeteria that even the festive helium balloons seemed to bum out a little, to droop upon invisible shoulders. His tone and manner conveyed the message more effectively than words alone ever could: to become a thermometer was to fail in a very special way. We knew deep in our bones that this failure was far worse than showing up to a test unprepared. It was failure in the form of betrayal, a betrayal of our potential and, therefore, our greatest gift, our selves. Between influencing and being influenced lay an unbridgeable chasm, one you didn’t want to find yourself marooned on the wrong side of. The deeper implication was also clear, given that we were listening to a recruiting agent for the Presbyterian church: on one side lay heaven, on the other, hell.
This talk was a mental splinter for me—it slid right into my cerebral cortex, where it sits to this day, embedded alongside the innumerable other times I was urged to be myself, to let my little light shine, to dance my own dance, etc. And together they coalesce to form a mother lode of shame, a massive vein of self-abasement I tap whenever I find myself caring what other people think of me. Whenever I try to manipulate someone’s impression of me during a routine tête-à-tête or parrot an opinion I filched rather than formed myself or deploy a mannerism that doesn’t fit my manner or when I succumb to an ad campaign or feel the nauseating tug of brand loyalty. Whenever, in other words, I let the “out there” infiltrate, and so corrupt, the “in here.” It is in these moments that I feel farthest from myself and most like a fraud. That I doubt, down in my guts, the very credibility of my existence. Lo! I am become Thermometer. My mercury rises and falls with the environment or according to the sick climatological whims of a powerful and self-possessed Thermostat. And so, alas, I’m bumped out back to the sad bunkhouse of inauthenticity, where the furniture is made of particleboard and pleather, where of a Friday evening my sad sack amigos and I are forced to share nacho pizza and drink Sam’s Cola while watching late-career Spielberg flicks, and where, because the place is kept colder than we’d like, we must don sweaters of ersatz angora. On they swarm, the collywobbles. . .
I know it might seem like I’m getting a little loosey-goosey here, carelessly conflating authenticity and influence, but it’s impossible to talk about one without the other, and that’s borne out by a quick glance at the history of the idea, or at least a couple branches of its family tree. Authenticity got its teeth into Being as part of a massive cultural shift that took place during the mid-to-late eighteenth century. Ta-da! Romanticism. The Phil 101 story here would go something like: as our faith in traditional avenues of significance and meaning (e.g., the Good and God) eroded, we were cast back upon ourselves. We turned inward, acquired a sense of inner depths, became “individuals”—and this was a real brain buster for me, learning that there was a time when we didn’t consider ourselves thus. Under this new way of thinking, moral salvation was no longer achieved through religious or philosophical institutions but through intimate contact with yourself, through the passionate embrace and experience of your own existence. Rousseau was the first person to popularize this idea. He called it “the sentiment of existence.” Other folks chimed in, too, and it’s from a man named Herder, ironically, that we get the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. This frees us to discover and articul
ate and live according to whatever it is that makes us unique. But freedom of this magnitude, as the saying goes, isn’t free. Because now the discovery and articulation of what makes you you is also a duty. Fail to do so and you effectively miss out on the point of your life.
No story would be complete without a compelling antagonist, of course, and this awareness of ourselves as individuals grew alongside our awareness of other individuals, alongside the emergence of that faceless mass, the public. And so our endeavor is hopelessly complicated, because the more we’re exposed to the thoughts and feelings of others, the harder it is to suss out those thoughts and feelings that are only our own, and so the more we’ll worry about being sullied, tarnished, influenced. “The anxiety of influence,” Bloom writes, “is strongest where poetry is most lyrical, most subjective, and stemming directly from the personality.” Imitating another person, plagiarizing someone else’s way of being, caving to some societal pressure, conforming—these are new cardinal sins, the penance for which is a zombified existence, a form of living death. It is in this spirit that we understand Wallace Stevens when he says, “I am not conscious of being influenced by anybody and have purposely held off from reading highly mannered people like Eliot and Pound so that I should not absorb anything, even unconsciously.”
Another wrinkle here is that our inwardly generated authentic identities depend on being recognized. And in order to be recognized, we must submit ourselves to the assessment of other people, to the public. Here’s an illustrative snippet from The Simpsons:
HOMER: Maybe if you’re truly cool, you don’t need to be told you’re cool.
BART: Well, sure you do.
LISA: How else would you know?
Exactly. How else would you know? One needs to be affirmed in one’s authenticity. Authentic selfhood is worked out and achieved in relation to other people. This is the constant tension under which we must now negotiate our identities, because not being recognized as authentic is another form of failure. This is the paradox at the heart of the ideal of authenticity: “Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds,” Emerson wrote. And of Bloom’s theory: “The poet is condemned to learn his profoundest yearnings through an awareness of other selves.” Wherever a person broods over the number of likes a selfie got, there lies the paradoxical ideal of authenticity. It lies wherever an indie band derides another indie band for its newfound popularity. Wherever an experimental writer champions his obscurity in one breath and bitches about how no one understands him in another, there it skulks, heavy-footed and husky-breathed.
Navigating all this can be treacherous business. Here’s an e.g.: I once wrote a short story that took place at a famous tennis match. When I showed it to James, he had a few faint words of praise, but went on to say that the story reminded him too much of Wallace’s work and therefore he couldn’t properly respect it as art. Be yourself, he advised, find your own voice. I’d unknowingly invited the easy dismissal that familiarity encourages, even demands, and so was crushed. This alone was enough to keep me from showing my writing to anyone for years. The risk of losing, of failing, was too much for me to handle, so I preferred not to play the game at all.
IX.
There are only a handful of decent public courts around Portland, ones whose surfaces aren’t webbed with cracks and whose nets don’t sag like ruined elastic waistbands, and your more serious players have searched them out. The result is that Scott and I end up seeing a lot of the same faces about town. And every so often, after a session, a member of the group taking our place will compliment us on our strokes. It’s another subtle form the competition between us can take: I’m sure Scott believes they mostly mean his strokes, while I believe they mostly mean mine. Either way we’re grateful for the attention—it affirms us in the absurdity of our ambition. The interactions will typically end there, but every so often someone will ask for our phone numbers, try to set up a session. My phone’s full of contacts filed under the last name Tennis. Ross Tennis. Ry Tennis. Chris Crazy Hair Tennis. Farhad Tennis. Vinny Tennis. And then there’s Tennis Father.
Tennis Father is a lithe and wiry Serbian who can always be found on the court with his two daughters, who I’d guesstimate are nine and fourteen. His MO is he’ll hit with the younger one while the older plays sets against boys and girls from the area high schools and colleges, as well as select men and women from the Community of Decent Courts. But then he’ll let the younger girl go off and do her own thing and he’ll cross his arms over his racket like he’s embracing it and he’ll watch the older daughter play. He cuts an undeniably martial figure, standing there, one that makes you think he probably goes around the house correcting everyone’s posture. Often after a long rally or an unforced error, he’ll call out unsolicited instruction or admonishment, and always in a brusque and barbed Serbian. She’ll bark back, too, also in Serbian, throwing her arms up or swatting her racket at the air between them, and for a while they’ll go at each other with the verve of an Eastern Bloc Itchy and Scratchy. It’s worth noting that while they bicker, her opponent has to stand there just dumbly waiting, bouncing the ball or peppering it against the fence or whatever, until they’ve exhausted themselves and she’s ready to play again. She doesn’t seem as embarrassed by this as you’d maybe expect and what irks me is that she never raises a hand in apology, never acknowledges what a bleb on the ass the hiatus must be for her opponent.
One afternoon Tennis Father stopped Scott and me after a session. He wanted to talk about how they were no longer allowed at the local youth academies. The coaches and the rich parents don’t want his daughter embarrassing their kids. Not to mention that they were all liars and cheaters and worse. Could we believe that, in order to beat her, the coaches had encouraged their kids to cheat? We tsk-tsked with feigned sympathy, sure there was another side to this story. But what this amounts to practically is that he has to rustle up hitting partners, anyone he can find to challenge her. He nodded toward the court and asked whether either of us would be up for a match. Scott begged off, but I surprised myself by saying sure, why not, and gave him my number. “I call, I call,” he said, in lieu of giving me his. Days later, when my phone buzzed “Unknown” and the voice on the other end sounded like a KGB interrogator, I almost hung up. It was next to impossible to understand what he was saying.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I said, the phone some nine inches from my ear. “Who is this? I’m hanging up.”
“Tennis Father,” he said. “Tennis Father!”
We settled on a date for the following Sunday and at once the jitters alighted. I hadn’t played competitively in ages and now wondered how my strokes would hold up under pressure. How well would I execute? What should my game plan be? Would I be tempted to resort to a lesser form of the game, to become a gutless pusher, a chickenshit moonballer, and in so doing invite shame upon not only myself but the sport of tennis, too? I tried to calm myself by asking, over and over, WWRD? (What would Roger do?) But that mantra proved a fruitless remedy and my nerves only redoubled. Why had I agreed to play in the first place? Part of me thought that maybe I was doing it for the story. Tennis lore is full of yarns about how, as kids, Andre Agassi and Serena Williams and other greats had opened industrial jars of whoop-ass on the players at their local clubs. Was this my chance to play someone bound for the tour? For greatness? But maybe something else was percolating, something that had to do with submitting myself to the game’s rigid schema of win vs. lose. Maybe all along I’d been cutting my nose to spite my face. No matter how good my strokes got, no matter how much they might resemble Roger’s, wasn’t I dooming myself to a lesser form of the sport by not competing? Wasn’t I, in this way, an inauthentic tennis player?
On the Friday before the match, I met two former students for happy hour, guys who had, after graduation, interned at the little magazine I work for. They were readying themselves for their great reverse migration back east, home, where they planned to enroll themselves in the workfo
rce and begin their own careers in writing and editing and publishing. They’re among my all-time favorite students, mostly because they led me to believe I had something, however meager, to offer them, which is to say that they allowed me to feel like I’d influenced them. And I can hardly own up to the cliché without squirming, but they reminded me a little of myself, eightish years back.
We gathered our discount cocktails and took up around a picnic table on the back patio. The fellas weren’t interested in talking about anything but Wallace. Back in class I’d had them read “Federer as Religious Experience,” the original version, and now they were chasing the dragon, deep in the brambles of the Project. They were bent on reading everything he’d written, most of which was now available between covers or, if not, readily accessible on a host of websites and blogs. One had recently finished Infinite Jest—and oh, how relieved I was that he didn’t refer to it as IJ—and the other said he was two-thirds of the way through. They wanted to know had I read it? Wanted to know what were my favorite parts? Wanted to know had I come across the guy online who re-creates its most famous scenes using Legos? Wanted to know what was my favorite Wallace book? Was I one of those people, you know, who claimed only to be able to stomach the nonfiction? And what did I make of the book about infinity? They’d heard there were mistakes, ones that undercut his putative standing as a math wunderkind. Would I see the movie that they’d read about?
Though the sensation’s grown less keen with age, less pointed and gaggy, I still feel I slip into an electrical storm of paranoia whenever someone asks me about Wallace. It’s as though I stood accused of some unspecified crime (Indebtedness? Inauthenticity? Influence?), the punishment for which is a manner of spiritual nullity or irrelevance, some obviation of being. And listening to them moon over his work set off the old alarms. “Danger. Danger.” Small comfort though it admittedly is, it pleased me to discover in my research that strife and tension are the very soil out of which that word authentic shoulders forth. One of its Greek roots is authenteo, which means to have full power over—though also, interestingly, to murder. And the other’s authentes, which denotes not only a master and a doer, but also a perpetrator, a murderer, even a self-murderer. To have full power over is the limit case of influence. And suicide’s an interesting, if extreme, metaphor for the deferral of self that happens when you find yourself under the thumb of another person.
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