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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Impostors : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Paradoxically, there is no more reliable source of credibility than the fear that one is a fraud. My friend John, who, like me, teaches college English, is particularly and quite vocally committed to this argument. Unless someone occasionally wonders whether or not the professional jig he dances, however deftly, is up, he is simply not to be trusted with his station. In fact, John maintains, we are all of us impostors; integrity is a matter of not succumbing to one's own pose. (Heed the warning label on the package: Be advised-- swelling is common.) Even as we accept the prize, the promotion, the appreciative batter of glad hands, we must not neglect our daily dose of chagrin. However much worth is urged upon us, we should always be subdued by the prospect of exposure and if we rise, rise with our heads held low. Actually, I am rather fond of the word "impostor," from which I detect the scent of dinner theatre. You know the sort of play I mean: one of those conventional whodunnits whose doer's undone by the timely revelation of the detective-hero. "That man, the man who calls himself ‘Uncle Basil' … is an impostor!" he booms accusingly, detonating gasps from the rest of the bewildered cast. Just enough artifice to seem quaint, but not so much as to put you off your feed, as dinner theatre by definition demands. Somehow, in retrospect, we realize that the clues were right in front of us all the time, apparent as the silverware. An impostor? Obviously. We knew it all along. Unfortunately, certain literature leads us astray when it tells us that we may be remade entirely each day like the disheveled beds we dream in and desert the memory of ourselves altogether. George Orwell's narrator in "Shooting an Elephant" pondered how one "wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.' But notwithstanding the metaphor, there is no denying that the next morning would find Orwell's sahib shaving the same stubble from the same chin. Similarly, when Kurt Vonnegut opened Mother Night with what he asserted to be the moral of the novel—"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be"—he was only half right. While we must take pains to resist our own prevarications, it is because they are likelier to deceive than determine us. To correct the impression that one's intrinsic self may be burked or buried without a trace, consider The Wizard of Oz. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain," thundered the bloated, floating head, through which subterfuge the wizard hoped to keep his littleness hidden. Had Orwell and Vonnegut been accurate, Toto would have nosed out nothing more than a distracting flounce of drapery, for there would have been no disappointing center to refute that imposing circumference. Yet even in the absence of an undisciplined dog, there will be some inevitable slip, some peeking through the seams of our seeming so. Ultimately, the fumbler will emerge from the appurtenances he crouches behind. No one over five is really surprised that the wizard's wizardry is solely a product of public relations. Outside of expensive special effects, authentic magic has always been hard to come by and accomplishment an occasion to inspect the deck. Maybe it began when as children we saw Mom post our latest drawings on the kitchen cabinets, drawings whose quality came from mother-love alone; and as she proclaimed our giftedness to dinner guests, we came to question her taste in everything from then on. Even as they guarantee our advancement, we sense that letters of recommendation are formulaic—their authors merely tweaked the templates in their hard drives to suit the institution we're after and left all the old adjectives intact. We doubt the positive reviews in the Times, thinking them more advantageous than true, while the real proof us is in the pan. Downing the heady wine of success, we know that everyone else does not get drunk when we do. For the sake of the sober, we sober up; and if we do occasionally gush, we gush on guard. To his credit, John does not exempt himself from his own philosophy. A successful college professor by most standards—he has earned promotion at a university prestigious enough that its name does not contain a compass direction—John regularly effaces himself with the diligence of a teenager treating his acne. He asks his students to refer to him by his first name, feathers his office door with cartoons that playfully denigrate his profession, and often quotes his most humbling student evaluations. At times, his humility is so extreme as to seem a sort of hubris all its own. "Look," he says, "I never kid myself," and in saying so, he implies that you, too, would do well to be consistently in on your own joke. If commencement ceremonies teach us anything, it must be that our allotment of pomp far outstrips our circumstance. The cardinal sin is swagger. For we know deep down that we are getting better mention than better but unmentioned men. Sir Edmund Hillary may have planted the flag and the fable in the British papers, but his virtue came by virtue of Tenzing Norgay, the inconspicuous Nepalese guide who helped to make Everest surmountable in the first place. The videotape report on ESPN proves that the winner of the Iditarod actually finished twelfth, only after his pack of forgotten dogs had crossed the line; afterwards, heaped in a drafty kennel, the dogs did the only valid gasping there was to do. Research shows just how seldom renown is founded or vanity fair. Modesty must stay the best of us—it is what makes the best of us the best of us--who in our guilt-ridden, sleepless nights secretly count ourselves among the sheep we count. Now I am not counseling legal counsel to abandon his clients in the throes of Latinate courtroom debate because he has suddenly come down with an inconvenient case of shame. Having binged on improper fractions, irrational numbers, and empty sets, a given mathematician may be prone to purge, but not, I trust, to cut all sums permanently from his diet. Let the surgeon who wonders mid-bypass if, career-wise, he has taken a wrong turn, who plunges his hand up to the wrist in an open bowel and, following W. H. Auden's instruction, stares, stares, in that corporeal basin and wonders what he's missed, delay his contemplation for later, when he's washing off the blood. John is quite right when he says that hesitation marks the exemplary professional. But that does not mean he should cancel his appointments or fail to meet his office hours. He should not let his clients, patients, or students founder without him in the hall. |
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