The Lectures of Mortimer Shy

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March 31, 2005

The Fourth Reader (Preliminary Notes on an Idea about Ideas)

The Fourth Reader is the one to whom one starts speaking, when one has emotionally gone beyond the people who are actually listening. Say at the kitchen table, after the dishes are cleared--and some subject has come up. One has the floor, and one is overtaken by their ideas, flooding their consciousness in such a manner that they are speaking as if to a wider audience. As if it is more imperative to get the ideas out, while talking now, than to make it clear for anyone listening. This is the incipient automatic talker in all of us, who starts drawing from some invisible power, as if supplied by an invisible . . . other.

This is the Fourth Reader who shows up in the mind of the talker, egging him on, supplying him with material which needs to be expressed. This is what makes the talker desperate (and happy), ecstatic!, and requires him to overwhelm any objections. The people at the table are going to naturally divide into two camps, forming two opinions right away as if for self-defence. They take sides, for and against the thesis. But! Is the thesis even fully stated? No it isn’t, it is just that there is a feeling of general insecurity in the air, as if our sudden lecturer had taken leave of his senses . . .

Here, a person finds themselves speaking not to the assembled, but like an orator, however shyly, however grandly, as if to someone all comprehending. This happens all the time--it is familiar--do not say it isn’t! In fact this happens every time one tries to develop an idea, express a conviction, whatever the subject. It happens to the person speaking, that they become reckless in regards to whether those actually present understand them, and they begin to express themselves for the Fourth Reader instead. The Fourth Reader is the one outside the group, not at this kitchen table, for whom one is expressing . . . the inexpressible. I mean the highly expressible, but not yet clearly organized, thesis, to which the people present might object, for one reason or another. But who cares about them--when one has the other, the Great Other Listener who I call--the Fourth Reader.

Because it seems vital for a person to say what they are saying at all cost, and they erect and begin to appeal to, a listener who is attuned to their new vocabulary, who knows what they are saying regardless of whether the actual people in the room have an understanding of it. But this Listener is more properly described as a Reader, for this is not a human listener, but a co-supplier. And it isn’t God, don’t make that mistake; even if God is there, as you can say, well God is everywhere, it isn’t God that is the Fourth Reader. Emphatically, the Fourth Reader is neither God, nor present to the scene. So we can’t be sure Who this Fourth Reader is, except to note his function as mediator, and facilitator, a human-like spirit like calling on the speaker to keep building.

And this is situational. It happens in a group, and yet I think, it has to do with the fact that the truth is always lacking the occasion. (Do I say too much?) That it seems, and it is, is impossible to communicate directly. That it is always a random evening, after the dishes are cleared, and yet it a colossal novelty, that barges into that evening when certain subjects come up. Every time a person gets an idea that inspires them to expound upon it for any length, they start talking to the Fourth Reader, who is invisibly rooting them on to express the idea. For it is a novelty, this world . . . Immediately the address becomes punctuated with the phrase, “if you see what I mean,” and the “you” being so addressed is not there, but in their mind. Because the mind can entertain a listener greater than any of us, and the speech to that invisible listener ensues.

See what happens. The people in the kitchen, they skirmish into two camps, half of them for and half of them against what is being said, or what they think is being said. And the speaker is holding forth. That makes three parties, three camps. But there is Another, and it is the one for whom the speaker is talking. There must be a fourth consciousness--by this schematic I prove it! I say it again: once an idea is presented, there are four parties involved. There is the speaker, the two possible reactions for an against what is being said, which makes three, and the Fourth Reader who comprehends the creative possibility of exploring the subject itself. For this world is in the making, friends. And this Fourth Reader is never present, for that is the situation existing when any one of us attempts to articulate an idea.

Because . . . all ideas are original.

All ideas come from nowhere, are not licensed to exist, and challenge the holder of them to speak. Once launched, it seems an opinion; and the people present take a view of it. One is for it, and one against. And the speaker is holding forth for the Fourth Reader who is always egging them on to make the thesis more impossible. For this is where we are in the world. Exploring the possibilities of a description of life never heard before.

I will go through it again. Do not try to stop me! The best or most familiar situation to illustrate the existence of the Fourth Reader is when you, or I, are speaking to others, say at a dinner table, and in trying to make a point find ourselves making that point articulate as if for another listener than those in front of us. It seems important to articulate the point regardless of how well it is being understood, and this effusive phrasing of the idea is being backed up strongly by, precisely, another consciousness, called for in the ENTHUSIASM (look up that word) that the speaker has. Already two listeners are in play, two judges upon the idea itself, and the speaker is there--these are the three at the table; but the fourth reader is the one driving the speech now. This is what is familiar, it happens every single time a person takes on a subject and then, while expounding upon it, leaves, as it were, his immediate audience behind. Becomes infatuated with the subject itself, and starts to address an audience, begins a lecture of their own making . . . doomed to originality--we are doomed--need I say it again?

Posted by mortimer at 08:41 PM | Comments (6038)

March 07, 2005

Confession Cancels the Time of Guilt

Mortimer Shy’s Address before
The SOREN KIERKEGAARD CLUB of Rochester, NY

Gentlemen: I begin with an quote from a local poet, which contains the title of tonight’s lecture, capturing in a kind of personal narrative style the essence of a thought which must be familiar to all of us.

“We were always in the middle of the mystery,
Just about to serve the coffee, and discuss
The current text of the optimistic crisis.
All I had to do, to bring the fated warrior
His headstone, and write his epitath, was
Slip in the idea of truth, or absolute fidelity,
And ignore any back-spinning rationales.
For confession cancels the time of guilt--
Which is what had you worried. Now
It’s better to let the confident monster out
On every occasion, and suffer the truth.
This is what I learned in the home stretch--
The day will come when people go wild
Defending their secret lives."

What I say, in my more deadly prosaic way is: the sole and simple reason why a person does not admit to a mistake, is that they have missed the very first opportunity, and let some time pass. Maybe only a short time, but enough so they are checked by the thought that to let the secret of their wrongdoing known to another, is to cancel the time they have lived with it, be it only one minute (one long minute!), it is somehow too late to set it square. And this pause is fatal to the conscience, which can never again quite figure out why it kept a secret. (No “back-spinning rationales” will cover it.) It can become decades, and as the time grows longer from the original transgression, the stakes of admitting to it grow greater. Eventually one is faced with the prospect of admitting that much of their life is based on a lie, a lie compounded by silence, a too intolerable confession now. For this is a truth that we fear the experience of: that “confession cancels the time of guilt”.

And it is this, the idea that one has wasted any time, having failed in the initital moment when the fault was clearly visible, when indeed someone else could have seen it had they been looking, this that stops the guilty person, more than the orginal crime itself. For it might not be too hard to admit one had made a mistake. It is only doubly hard to admit one did nothing about it. Buried it where they stood, and walked on as if nothing had happened. It is the CAREER of the guilty one that will be weighing on them, not just the original act--which may even have been quite innocent in its inception and only dubious in its effects. Like--to give the generic example most familiar in our society of bloated reputations--if one noticed that one was accidently favored in the world, and never admitted that it was falsely founded on a very slanted version of one’s real self.

To put it mildly. I have no exhaustive list of what happens here, but only shadowy inferences, speculations as to what my more infamous friends suffer. Of course I write this very pointed lecture with secret strong reference to my own personal history--that is the only record I know.

To be complicated about it, it is by no means certain that, having faced the situation of this compounded guilt, that in the confession of the crime itself, anything more than the time elapsed is erased. Comically, I say, it is not certain that one can in fact get to the crime itself, simply by confessing it. One can only solve the problem of time passing, and stand as it were once again on the brink of a new dilemma. Or rather an old dilemma--THE old dilemma. And be consumed by the question of why one accepted this situation to begin with. Everything is corrupted; now that is clear, but what was the original disgrace? Can one even see it, beyond the clouds of subsequent falsehoods?

One thinks one can only watch the time of guilt evaporate, watch the compliments and rewards and accomplishments all disappear, and still not actually get any gaurantee of being forgiven for the actual crime! This is not too complex, is it! In fact it is too horribly clear for any person capable of facing inward. If confession cancels the time of guilt, something else cancels the guilt itself. And it was for lack of knowledge of that, of course, that one originally sailed on. And yes, in most cases, perhaps, one is correct. It is mostly right to say to yourself, learn from that and don’t do it again; don’t lie, it reverberates, don’t harbor grudges, they gnaw at you, etc; all the little crimes. Fine, one can say, I won’t do that again, and appear to be clear of it.

Ah yes, but for the major cause of guilt, the long testimonial you have been receiving? Which is for most of us, sirs, the crime of accepting flattery . . . the crime of self-puffery, I might call it. For this we have, as the poet says in another place, "no recompense."

But wait! And visit again these lines from the poem I quoted.

“For confession cancels the time of guilt--
Which is what had you worried. Now
It’s better to let the confident monster out
On every occasion, and suffer the truth.
This is what I learned in the home stretch--”

Ah, perhaps it isn’t really proven at all, that confession cancels the time of guilt--for the real truth is, WE HAVE RARELY TRIED IT, confession! What is true is the fear of confession, that it will erased the foundations of false reputation, the fear that confession will inform others that you are made of nothing but flattery, it is the fear that confession in your own case will literally cancel the entire time and everything that appeared to happen in between it and the original assumption of self, so to speak. It is this fear which we live with, and which freezes us in the moment when we might have acted to clear the conscience--that is what is . . . our psychological problem.

And it is all in the imagination, where most fears and guilts are manufactured and studied! For if one actually does relent, does truly lament, it doesn’t cancel anything. But, I might imagine!, build up something rather more fit for the defense, of our "secret lives."

(Quotations from THE FATED WARRIOR, by Edward Williams, Buckwheat St. Publishers)

Posted by mortimer at 08:48 PM | Comments (2485)