On Inception, Marina Keegan, & Sally Rooney.
I've never seen the movie Inception. Or I guess that's a partial lie: I watched, like, the first part, half asleep, with a group of friends in a dumpy dorm living room one night freshman year of college. I remember almost nothing, except this lingering image of Elliot Page and the dude (Leo?) walking along the street while the world gets built up around them. As their field of vision expands, so, too, buildings plop themselves on the ground. Like unfolding one of those pop-out Hallmark cards. I imagine that if you have seen Inception, you probably hold this image still in your mind as well.
"But as I watched him smile back at me and zip his coat, I saw everything in the world build up and then everything in the world fall down again." That's the last line of a New Yorker fiction piece by Marina Keegan (tragically published posthumously) in which (spoiler) a girl's hookup/boyfriend dies, and when she reads his diary, her perception of their relationship is altered. Keegan's last line, to me, has two explicit meanings. When someone dies, your relationship to them is destroyed and reimagined, your longing for their empty ghost crowding the nostalgic cycling of your memories with them. Your world together can no longer hold the same shape that it once had. But in Keegan's story specifically, the diary she reads—filled with honest unfiltered internal monologues—provides insight into a dynamic that releases her from the prison of her own interpretations. It couples her memories with her deceased boyfriend with his record of their time together—a level we hardly ever reach with someone.
It makes me wonder—can we ever reach such a level level of honesty without peaks into diaries? Do relationships exist that achieve such two-mindedness? Speaking your mind is hard for fear of the awkward shift in the dynamic to follow. The elephant in the room gone, there isn't its protection. But in a post-therapy evolution, that transparency could be the norm. Would it be unhealthy? Protection around our innermost feelings is a shield that even our most intimate companions cannot, nay, should not, fully know. Could maintaining some fantasy of a person, even a close companion, be necessary to maintain the line between the you and the me?
I recall Sally Rooney's Conversations With Friends, whose first couple of scenes introduce the narrator Frances as self-consciously self-involved. As she recounts her dynamic with her ex-girlfriend and current best friend, Bobbi, she weaves what she says into what she thinks Bobbi is looking to hear, and interprets Bobbi's cues as instructive to how she should proceed. An obsessive attuning and subsequent modulation according to the moods she perceives in others. One cannot know another person's thoughts, of course. But there's comfort to the intimacy of thinking you can. The hope that together, you are producing some telepathic knowledge.
In college, my Professor Lauren Berlant had us define the "atmosphere." I still remember Professor Berlant's description: the atmosphere is in a room before you step in, created by everything—the people, objects, air, affects. And when you enter, it changes. The atmosphere is a constantly-shifting, collectively held experience. As such, it is created as much through the said as the unsaid. Body is language. Our minds are creating a communal sensation even if it's in silence.
In other words, we collaborate to create our experience with others continuously, through our shared presence. It is that deflation—of the standard energy level that your friend typically possesses (which you know because you have a history)—that passes to you, and you sigh too. You sense for both of you the exhaustion from your day together, and find comfort in knowing how to proceed. It is the excitement you bring to a conversation about a new book, knowing that the excitement will transmit to those with whom you share it. It is the learning a new part of a person's history, and having that fit perfectly with your knowledge of them already, yet explain a new side of them. It is the sitting in a cafe across from a close companion, both half-working, half-distracting the other, feeling the buzzing of stories you cannot help but relate. The joy of sharing—not necessarily for advice or comment, but just to have it live in the other. There are the worlds we build up with others, the landscape unfolding as we create our presence, just two pals like Elliot and Leo.
References:
Marina Keegan, "Cold Pastoral" (September 27, 2012), https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiT9-S2oYD3AhWmkokEHb8LD-UQFnoECAkQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fbooks%2Fpage-turner%2Fcold-pastoral&usg=AOvVaw26M-BANo_50yYR8IG2x12W.
Sally Rooney, Conversations With Friends, Hogarth (2017).
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