PERFORMANCE AROUSAL II
Previously I wrote about performance arousal in the sense of doing something visible, like speaking or acting with an audience, and getting turned on by it. Now I want to think about a different kind of performance arousal, the adrenaline that comes from living up to expectations, one’s own or that from others, whether in sports or as part of a profession, or some other venue. It is about arousal that comes from a successful performance.
This is very hard to talk about to someone who has never experienced it, someone who has always been a loser and has no idea of how to approach success. I used to see it in kids all the time. They didn’t know success, even when they saw it in others. Their arousal came from refusal and attack. They are otherwise flat, dead.
Even being a success is not free from problems. What any culture considers a successful performance can change — sometimes abruptly — and often responds to the “talking dog” double bind. “Good performance, considering who he/she is.” Being successful means being vulnerable and even tempting attack, maybe aimed at who one “is” rather than the actual performance.
The newest twist being talked about is “imposter syndrome” when one can’t accept one’s own success, demonstrably real as it may be — a promotion, a degree. My own “imposter syndrome” is not feeling deserving of people who want to praise and befriend me. I think they are after something, not their trusting intimacy and affection. People think that the cure is to force such relationships on me, which makes it worse. They never get that this “deficit” makes my total focus on writing, a certain kind of writing, possible. This culture wants to compel everyone to be attached (in love) to other people, so the observers and recorders can treat them in quantity as categories instead of alone. It’s for efficient merchandizing and for politics, which is a form of merchandizing. Targeting silo by silo.
This is in part what causes me to be in sympathy with “Indians” — particularly on reservations. Everyone wants to be able to say they are friends with an “Indians” rather than with this particular person, so no “Indian” can entirely trust overtures of friendship. They have a fainter fetish for “writers” and “poets.”
This is all first rate material for novels and non-fiction analysis. TV series, etc. What affects one person also affects the others in that set both in judgement of that individual and in terms of how to define success. This new set of acquisition points developed in the time that empires were built and forced the knowledge that cultures, complete and dynamic, exist all over the planet — often quite different from what is known and lived in by one individual.
With a background in sculpture, one is sharply aware that for every shape there is a negative version in the mold against it. Therapists conventionally try to make the person (the shape) fit the mold, to show the client that they are making assumptions at odds with what the culture asks. This can become coercive. And if the counselor or physician assistant is fresh out of college trying to mold an older person with a lot of life in the past, it’s hopeless.
I have not heard of anyone who offered the service of finding a culture where a particular person might fit, whether it is a sub-organization or setting within the country or somewhere else on the globe. Many others, on their own, have found a pocket of people or a whole country where they fit, where their natural being is not challenged by circumstances. This is a live issue particularly in the US in regard to gender performance.
And it’s another issues that rez folks must struggle with because few people who didn’t grow up there or live there for a long time have any real idea what it’s like. Nor is Mayberry USA any clue to what Valier is about. TV is the Great Misleader.
The culture keeps changing — it is dynamic. Not only is a mold pushing on the person, but also the mold that was once comfortable can change to distressing. I remember the man who said that all his life he had been careful to use restraint with women, to be faithful to his wife, though he desired the young, the lively, the admiring. Then the culture changed and those women were quite willing, no longer up tight about sex. But, alas, too late for him.
Women who are so indignant — justifiably — fight against this change as hard as the old white high status men fight against young gifted energetic people of color. The old white high status men thought compliant women were part of their entitlement. The women thought it was a sorry criminal extortion, but a way to become a “success” on cultural terms. Both individuals and culture need to change to re-secure the meaning of achievement, progress, pride.
Sometimes a change is small and sometimes big to the point of impossibility. Sometimes the change seems silly, unjustified. Most of this doesn’t show up in “rule of law” except as motivation. The media is interested but — unlike our governments just now — run by a one-mold management. Nevertheless, I like “Law and Order UK”, the English version of the respected US series. Acorn.tv. The show does a good job of turning over the issues from different points of view. The actors are the best of the BBC repertory members.
Many of the dilemmas are between social classes rather than immigrants from another culture. Most of all, the solemn bewigged decorum of the English, while still preserving the performance arousals of all concerned — cops, lawyers and accused — makes a story easier to watch.
