Persona Non Grata

The thin line between reality and fantasy

You can blame it on the Internet if you’d like.

But the reality of personhood has e’er been a willful insistence upon lies masquerading as truth. It’s in the very name: persona, the mask of the actor, the player, the performer of the Grecian drama. It has a megaphone, to amplify the voice, to be heard by all who attend, as handmaidens to Gods and Kings.

The human mind is a complex and chaotic mess, a twisting thing, crowning the head as thorns. Prickling with inspiration and unease, it lets the blood of imagination cloak the face. We all wear masks: the professional, the personal, the sexual, the sinister. When we feed, we are monsters. When we love, we are angels. When we toil, we are servants. When we command, we are lords. There is no human who is wholly true, wholly without guise; and those who do go about the world without any veneer of artifice are rightly called mad.

We expect an element of duplicity. We expect the tired woman at the coffee shop to offer a smile and sincerity when she wishes us a good morning; we expect the server to be delighted to bring us a platter of excess, to pour us another drink. Nay, we demand it. Social media has simply made this artifice more plain, lent clarity to the falsehood.

There is a virtue in deceit.

Yet too much virtue is a poison, and we are bloated by its benevolence. We expect everyone to play the saint; we expect every sin to be kept out of sight, and when exposed we demand contrition, no matter the weight of the evil done. Too few are those with the courage or the crassness to laugh in the face of moral judgment.

Yes, I killed him, and I hope he burns in hell!

Verily, let he without sin cast the first stone. But that’s too honest, even for the Biblical everyman. We throw stones to draw the eye away from us, to follow the weight of judgment to the pious face of the wrongdoer and hope that as they bleed upon the plaza square, nobody will think to look to us and ask ‘and how about you?’

As we end another year, we find ourselves burdened by artifice more than ever before. We assume characters — you and especially I — so as to escape the tragic mediocrity of the mundane world. We cannot abide by what we’ve become: sexless, sluggish, slothful shadows. We cannot stomach reality and we crave every imaginable escape. Even in God, whom we trust, we pray for release from mortal shackles.

The Buddhists loathe reincarnation. For them, not even death offers escape from the world, and the world is a litany of disappointments, made manageable only by lies. Are we so illiterate to not even know the teachings of Bokonon? Are we so easily fooled that we have convinced ourselves even our lies are truth?

Fortunate am I, who is cursed to never be believed. The gods laid upon me the vision of a future, of thick flesh and sharp knives, carving smiles, painting faces. All the same, I will endeavor to reject more of this mortal conceit, of this earthly deceit.

We know good and evil. Such is the domain of gods; yet it gives us not power, but apprehension. So we don masks, of eyes one and two and twenty. Of mouths that broadcast beyond the limits of space and hearing. You will hear me, too. At the bottom of that bottle, at the end of that rope, in the crunch of bone as you take the last chip from the bag.

Oh how sweet that salt stings. I am drunk on it, the flavor of tears, seeping down unmoving cheeks, drooling from unclosing eyes.

You will have no choice but to lie. So what character will you play, this new year? Will you be a hero or a villain? A sinner or saint? Will you be beautiful or ugly? It is always your choice, in the end. So choose!

Choose your character! And then play them to perfection. It is all that you must do. For was it not said, that all the world is a stage? Are we not the stuff that dreams are made upon? And nightmares too…?

So here’s to another year. And I will squeeze the sin from my brow, and wipe the blood from my mouth, and rinse the filth from my fingers — and all the while, upon dawn’s early light, I will remain Cassandra. I will excrete monuments, and I will learn to love solitude, for all prophets are islands, doomed to tell truth in an ocean of lies.

Choose your character! And let us see who the audience adores. I will be there too, in the ringing of applause, in the closing of the curtain, in the creak of the chair being emptied and even then, in the silence, of the great theater, where not an honest soul remains to see your face, when the mask comes off.

Happy New Year!

-SSC