Performances
I usually explain the now odd fact about me that I spent three years trying to “co-found” a company by saying that it was in the water at the time—an entrepreneur just seemed like apex of (sorry, I’m dumb) masculine activity, part Renaissance man, part alpha-male. But it was deeper than that. I realized two years in that I had a certain recurring fantasy: right when the business had surmounted the first, most difficult ascent, right when no one could doubt our vision or our determination anymore, right when big things were going to start happening, and therefore when it was least in my self-interest to do so, I would tell my friend and partner: “Well, we made it. Now’s my time to go.” Of course, once you realize you’re guided by the chance at a scene, there’s nothing left to do but write. Side-effect: my recurring fantasies are boring now. They’re all just giving interviews.
When a female character appears in Beijing opera, the audience knows immediately from her costume if she is a Qing Yi (a high-society woman embodying modesty and virtue) or a Hua Dan (a somewhat lower-class coquette). Every Beijing opera character falls into a timeless and pre-determined role; the drama lies not in the character’s choices, but in how perfectly the actor fulfills the role’s expectations. I find this boring, but then again I’m fully invested in the pervading belief that gives modern life both its rare beauty and its usual disgustingly absurd creakiness: the belief that nothing has its time or its place, except in the sense that the time for everything is now, the place for everything is here—if you’re breathing, it’s possible.
The trouble with a good memory is that it’s harder to outrun your own clichés. A fear of stagnation makes me chase the feeling of having forgotten my lines, even if I usually botch these moments. Sometimes, for revenge and sport, I try to make you forget yours.
Everyone is exasperating. One only dates women with the same fundamental incompatibility. Another discovers, to her eternal surprise, the same intolerable problem in every workplace. A third returns like a horny salmon to the same conversational breeding ground: what to do about this burden he doesn’t want to get rid of? In crueler moods I think we’re lucky that our friends don’t think about us too often—their forgetfulness acts as make-up for our soul. But more and more I accept that we’re all just living out some aesthetic principle that’s been assigned to us by the stars. Ultimately, the charm of a friend is not whether their assigned role is glamorous or even interesting, but whether they can play it for laughs.
In a way, there’s no such thing as a bad novel, because even the tawdriest trail of MFA droppings is, seen in a different light, a rich portrayal of a mind fettered by the day’s middle-brow aesthetics (one need only to add at the start, “X thought it was a good idea to spend three years writing the following novel:”). Apply this principle more broadly and it becomes clear that anyone claiming to be interested in “reality” is kidding themselves.
It doesn’t matter if the part is good or bad, so long as its big. “I have all the evil of the world inside me,” cries the poet, while the hurt woman at his side rolls her eyes: “No, you’re just another dumb guy.” In his fantasies society demands he wear a special outfit for the errors he’s committed, just like a widow must dress in mourning, which is not only an obligation, but also an elevation, a consolation, if not a form of advertising.
In Beijing I consulted briefly for these ridiculous middle-aged expat entrepreneurs who’d each had a big hit early in their lives, and had spent their years since trying to catch another one. Every month they seemed to shuffle a deck of industries and countries. Once it was going to be business incubators in China. Then it was a virtual mobile network operator in Thailand. Then a chain of modular shipping-container-based internet cafes in Brazil. It’s a shame that performing the role of a failure can’t be a stable, respectable profession, like becoming a unionized electrician; we need such people, if only for instructional purposes, and yet they can’t give a convincing performance unless they really believe they’re an inch away from success.
Life is unsatisfying because it’s always at once both the play and the rehearsal.