A Musing on Authorship versus Infliction
Here's to life lived amid TOTEs and flags, pants and diapers, masks and shrouds
WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME you took a stand against gravity or argued with a thunderstorm?
The last time you rallied against wearing clothing in public?
On No Pants Day? Even on No Pants Day people wear pants, even if it’s underpants, cap’n.
In a very real sense, clothing is the “fabric of our society.” Look at all the purposes we make of it:
The physical thing itself:
1—Physical protection—think warmth, health, and safety
As a vehicle for any number of add-on or “bonus” meanings:
2—Personal privacy—according to custom
3—Signification—of social status, identity, affiliations, conformity, nonconformity, formality, informality
4—Ornamentation—style, self-decoration, artistic expression
IT’S TRUE—SOMETIMES HUMAN BEINGS FORGET not only the meanings we assign to physical things (or to nonphysical things like symbols), but also the purposes that gave rise to those assigned meanings. Or even that we were the assigners.
And this assignment of meaning, and our forgetting of its authorship, often applies to clothing.
For example, who makes you wear clothing in public?
Is it you?
Or is wearing clothing in public something you just understand to do as part of being in our society, without anybody having to remind you to do that or enforcing you to? Is it simply a widespread social understanding, a general expectation, a custom that no longer needs to be reexamined? Something no longer worthy of your notice?*
In other words, it isn’t you who “makes” you “have to”? It’s “society”?
But don’t you tacitly agree to the policy, the protocol, the practice?
Well, if you agree to it, even tacitly, then it isn’t really a have-to, is it?
But, you say, you can’t not agree, because there are consequences. Things like, a man can show his bare torso in public, while a woman faces public censure and arrest for the same. But it follows that, to the degree you own the authorship of your experience, you own some authorship of the related consequences.
LET’S SAY THAT NOW, TODAY, YOU DISCOVER that somebody “outside yourself” (the government, perhaps, or another person in your community) is telling you to wear a specific article of clothing—let’s say a mask—that wasn’t part of the existing custom and practice yesterday. Definitely not the usual pants.**
Under purposes 2/3/4 above—the domain where you add meaning to the facts—someone else’s “telling you to” might seem to fly in the face of your personal expression, your identity, any feeling of entitlement you have, your sense of freedom, etc. However, under purpose 1—the domain restricted to the straightforward utility and existence of the physical thing itself—a “telling you to” is simply a conveyance of factual information, without any added (assigned) meanings or ulterior intentions.
As you can see, these two very different domains—perceptual perspectives—only seem to overlap. There is inherently no meaning-making in the first domain; and that’s all there is in the second. People in one domain or the other, unable to comprehend both domains as domains—domains each entirely discrete and not in conflict with the other—will likely end up at cross purposes without realizing it or knowing where the conflict lies.
Accordingly, it behooves those in the first domain to recognize that those in the second domain (2/3/4) are not receiving the “telling you to” communication in the objective light from which it was transmitted, and therefore to work toward getting on the same page—at least in terms of agreeing on send-and-receive modes.
And those in the second domain (2/3/4) might be wise to recognize that if the frame of reference of a communication or a thing is solely factual (that is, coming from the first domain), then it can be regarded the way gravity is. It makes no sense to pick a fight with it. Its factualness can be accepted and presents no threat of harm; it’s just information. And information, like gravity, can be adjusted to and made wise use of for one’s own benefit. Or it can be dismissed. But if it’s valid, then, like gravity, it will have its own actual/factual consequences.
Back to authorship versus infliction. The question becomes:
Is it useful to assign this meaning (this internal add-on)
to this (external thing) at this time?
Even if you have forgotten it, you’re fortunately the author of the meanings you assign. You’re always at the helm. You own your own meanings.
__________ *As I understand it, a TOTE (test/operate/test/exit) is a program loop that never gets revisited (reexamined/rebuilt/restructured/reconceived) once it demonstrates it can achieve the intended result; it gets exited and then treated as a unit or module, a sum no longer regarded in terms of its parts.
**Without belaboring the obvious, surgeons, construction workers, Mardi Gras–goers, Halloweeners, and skiers routinely utilize masks, so clearly the object itself isn't inherently objectionable.
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