Profundity

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tells us that “The very foundation of all human interaction is misunderstanding.”

I have never read Lacan, and likely never will. While I mostly remember this quote through this tweet, it is to my uninitiated ear a resoundingly true statement. We cannot truly know the other, nor can we understand the self, at the least not completely.

I bring this up in the context of a, not debate, but perhaps a discourse, that I have had with myself and others over the years. The core of this discourse is that I fear I lack emotionality, but cannot express to others the contours of my position. I am not unfeeling, I am not cold, I am just detached, someone who is only able to intellectualize feeling. I lack a particular profundity of emotion, a missing layer of being able to turn comprehension into reaction.

It can be broken in fleeting moments, the cold shock of embarrassment or slight welling behind my eyes of sorrow. But only when caught off guard, it seems.

I will reference another cultural work here, and again it is one I have not seen: the 2005 film Equilibrium. I know of it, partly for its invention of gunkata, a martial art that is exactly what it sounds like, and for the portrayal of Christian Bale in a long trenchcoat and detached personality, in what I have joked is an unintended middle chapter between American Psycho, his previous role, and The Big Short.

The reason to bring up Equilibrium is the analyses of the film that I have seen in terms of its use of emotion and masculinity: the society of Libria claims to be devoid of feeling, that feeling causes the war that predates the film’s plot, but the emotions present are clearly shown: it is a society that reflects masculine emotion, reflects anger and distrust and fear of the other and self. Being moved by art or alive to the world around oneself is a dangerous path, and cannot be tolerated, lest the powder keg ignite.

This piece is not about connecting that portrayal of society to the modern manosphere or the emotionality present on the online right. I’m sure that already exists, and if I recall the episode of Kill James Bond! about it does go into such detail. This piece is about the pervasive connection I have to that theme. The only things I can often describe being able to feel are the Librian emotions: distrust and anger, sure; but overall the pervasive dullness. When I mention lacking profundity, what I mean is the experience of intellectualizing nearly all stimulus into semantics. The inability to be awed. If I can think my way into, out of, or through anything, then they all feel like nothing.

The question, then, to bring it back to Lacan, is whether this is actually true or able to be understood. Have I reached a point of understanding myself, or has it been conducive to believe this regardless of its veracity? When I try to explain it to others, do they see a person who is struggling with emotionality, or a case of reaching an enlightened middle ground? Is my situation enviable to someone who feels they feel too much?

An obvious path to interrogate this through is lived experience. Did I simply cry all my tears as a child, when I still had a remaining worldly innocence? Was it a traumatic event, despite the fact that I don’t consider any events in my life such (though others disagree)? Is it the years of dysphoria, so vast that I have lost the capacity to intellectualize it? Covid? 5G? Mothman? I can not say.

A theme in Equilibrium is the capacity of art. Sean Bean’s character quotes Yeats. Posters and the Mona Lisa are discovered contraband. A value of these is that they break Bateman’s ability to remain distant, they draw him to them. I wish I could experience the same. I find art interesting, but rarely sublime or lasting. I can recall only 3 pieces of cultural production that have moved me to tears. One is understandable. A second is so embarrassing I cannot possibly reveal it (the capacity for embarrassment is pervasive), the third is because I was scared of the zombies in Call of Duty as a kid. Those were all at least a decade ago.

I have hit a proverbial wall a number of times in this piece, the train of thought that connects all of my words to the page suddenly losing steam. Because, truly, how do you explain this feeling in a way that feels meaningful when the very capacity of feeling is the question?

Perhaps you know, or feel like you implicitly understand. But if you did, even if you did, how could truly explain it?