DOI article:
Benjamin De Casseres, Insincerity: A New Vice
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.31249#0028
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evolved a civilization for the purpose of attitudinizing before the Kodak of
Posterity. They knew the secret of reincarnation here on earth in this present
life. In a single glance they divined the law of life, that it was all a question
of postures and masks, and they adapted themselves to that law. They are
the only people of whom we have any knowledge who had a right to the
earth. The Jews may have been heaven-born, and the Mohammedans may
have sprung from Allah, and the Romans may have come from Mars, and the
Christians may have been born of Adam, but the Greeks were planet-born.
They were out of the bowels of Pan. They posed even in Death.
To live is to lie. To act is to pose. Sincerity, strictly speaking, cannot
exist. To-day we have not the sincere and religious insincerity of the Greeks,
but we have the religious and insincere sincerity of Christianity and Judaism,
which latter attitude makes for tragedy as the former made for comedy.
It is the difference between irony and hypocrisy, the difference between the
Artificial and the Insincere as escapes into the heavens of light and air and
liberty and the Mysterious and the Serious worn as disguises by beings who
are ashamed to live according to the rules of the Immanent Lie. But some
day, Gullibus, I shall write a ponderous book called “The Metaphysics of the
Artificial and the Curse of Insincerity.” It will be profound, wordy, and no
doubt will become a classic in my own lifetime.
It is the pose, Gullibus, that makes our lives romantic and supportable.
On arising each morning, we, all of us, prepare our pose for the day. In the
freshness of the morning each being conceives an artificial and impossible
vision of himself or herself—no different from the egocentric visions induced
in the brain by opium or alcohol. The day dies and the dream—the pose—
dies with it. It is like the “morning after” of a debauch. This is the eternal
comedy of the daily tragedy—trying to make ourselves and others believe
that we are other than we are. Hypocrisy generates the beautiful in character.
The pose is the Lie Beautiful and gives reality to our ideals and ennobles our
weaknesses and imperfections by straining them to the breaking point.
Bottoms all, we conceive ourselves to be Prosperos and Don Juans. Tartuffes,
we pose as Jobs and supermen of varying degrees. If you have not your
pose you are as uninteresting as a cow. It is your artificial self that I fall in
love with.
Woman is divine and seductive because she is the liar, the hypocrite, the
artificial being par excellence. Her life is a pose and an artifice from the
cradle to the grave. She will never be understood not because she is profound
but because she is so shallow and vapory that we cannot grasp her least
thought, her least feeling, her least action. She confounds us by her multiple
poses, her thousand acts, her subtle surface-play. Divine woman! She
never means what she says, “practices what she preaches” or “lives up to
her convictions” or “sticks to her principles.” She knows that is the jargon
of bores.
Posterity. They knew the secret of reincarnation here on earth in this present
life. In a single glance they divined the law of life, that it was all a question
of postures and masks, and they adapted themselves to that law. They are
the only people of whom we have any knowledge who had a right to the
earth. The Jews may have been heaven-born, and the Mohammedans may
have sprung from Allah, and the Romans may have come from Mars, and the
Christians may have been born of Adam, but the Greeks were planet-born.
They were out of the bowels of Pan. They posed even in Death.
To live is to lie. To act is to pose. Sincerity, strictly speaking, cannot
exist. To-day we have not the sincere and religious insincerity of the Greeks,
but we have the religious and insincere sincerity of Christianity and Judaism,
which latter attitude makes for tragedy as the former made for comedy.
It is the difference between irony and hypocrisy, the difference between the
Artificial and the Insincere as escapes into the heavens of light and air and
liberty and the Mysterious and the Serious worn as disguises by beings who
are ashamed to live according to the rules of the Immanent Lie. But some
day, Gullibus, I shall write a ponderous book called “The Metaphysics of the
Artificial and the Curse of Insincerity.” It will be profound, wordy, and no
doubt will become a classic in my own lifetime.
It is the pose, Gullibus, that makes our lives romantic and supportable.
On arising each morning, we, all of us, prepare our pose for the day. In the
freshness of the morning each being conceives an artificial and impossible
vision of himself or herself—no different from the egocentric visions induced
in the brain by opium or alcohol. The day dies and the dream—the pose—
dies with it. It is like the “morning after” of a debauch. This is the eternal
comedy of the daily tragedy—trying to make ourselves and others believe
that we are other than we are. Hypocrisy generates the beautiful in character.
The pose is the Lie Beautiful and gives reality to our ideals and ennobles our
weaknesses and imperfections by straining them to the breaking point.
Bottoms all, we conceive ourselves to be Prosperos and Don Juans. Tartuffes,
we pose as Jobs and supermen of varying degrees. If you have not your
pose you are as uninteresting as a cow. It is your artificial self that I fall in
love with.
Woman is divine and seductive because she is the liar, the hypocrite, the
artificial being par excellence. Her life is a pose and an artifice from the
cradle to the grave. She will never be understood not because she is profound
but because she is so shallow and vapory that we cannot grasp her least
thought, her least feeling, her least action. She confounds us by her multiple
poses, her thousand acts, her subtle surface-play. Divine woman! She
never means what she says, “practices what she preaches” or “lives up to
her convictions” or “sticks to her principles.” She knows that is the jargon
of bores.
