sophistication

Every time I finish writing a post, the other side of the coin starts to shine so brightly that I feel the need to either scrap what I wrote, or else write a second post completely contradicting it.

Recently, I wrote a post called “Projection” in which I painted myself as a smart person pretending to be dumb. But I lied. The truth is I am a dumb person pretending to be smart.

At the time though, I was just sick of people who think they are intelligent because they eat quail eggs and pretend to read Shakespeare. Look, I know who Phillip of Macedon is and once asked a man for directions to the beach in French! So find someone else to condescend on.

Nevertheless, when it comes to what matters most- practical things- I actually am an idiot. I have no idea how the world operates.

How does money work? Taxes? Automobiles? How do people hook up in bars? Or walk into a dark alley and come back with a bag of drugs? Why is Ryan Gosling considered sexy? What clothes make you seem intelligent? What expression should you make when a friend tells you she is gay?

Why do people visit gynecologists? What papers should be filled out on a regular basis to not get arrested? Can you pour unused paint down the drain? What do you do with the body when someone dies? How can you safely flatter someone without accidentally offending them at the same time? (Hint-don’t complement them on their second chin.)

How do you change oil? Buy a house? Choose the right moment to pepper spray a stranger? Should you scream if a man leaps out of the bushes to grab you? What lines does a person have to cross to officially be a pervert? How do you activate a phone so it will call people? Or keep yourself from going unconscious under fluorescent lights?

What are you supposed to feel when you go to a U2 concert that makes it worth 200 dollars? Why should you travel to see the Eiffel Tower rather than admiring a telephone pole? How do you buy a plane ticket? Will the stewardess ask you for identifying information? How do you get that identifying information and what sorts of identifying information will you need to acquire it?

Even people on welfare amaze me with their worldliness… how does a person get welfare? What offices do they go to and what do they say to the officers? I imagine there would be so many forms to fill out and hoops to jump through that it would be just as easy to get a job at NASA.

I don’t know why I have trouble with these sorts of things, but no matter how much effort I put into increasingly my worldly intelligence, it doesn’t seem to help. For example, I can’t seem to memorize my address and zip code no matter what I do. I even made up a perverted song to help me remember it, but somehow the song gets scrambled in my head.

And being dumb (in a practical sense) worries me a lot, since I frequently feel my survival hanging by a few thin threads. And so I devote a lot of energy to “practivizing” myself but it never seems to help. For every little skill I gain, two slip out the other side.

Being practical is probably a state of mind, more than a set of skills & facts. So how can I get into this mindset? By carrying country stones in my pocket? (Stones are practical, aren’t they?) Eating dry wheat toast? (The texture seems practical somehow.) Wearing more brown colored clothes?

I think that last idea is the most practical of all. Brown is such a practical color. I used to have the idea that a person could become more practical by dressing up like a potato while singing songs about them, but now it seems to me that simply wearing a brown shirt would be a much more practical approach. Or perhaps a simple brown ribbon, tied around the wrist.

Although you probably hear the word “projection” being thrown around a lot, if you are like me (or at least the person I was until yesterday) you might not have a clear idea of how psychological projection works.

I vaguely saw projecting as the act of imagining others to have qualities they don’t actually possess. But what I’ve realized is that projecting is more about actively trying to dissociate from a specific part of yourself, which you then try to see in others. But seeing this quality in others is more of a side effect. The heart of projection is trying to detach from a part of yourself.

Another aspect of projection is that you don’t realize you are doing it. And while it is easy to imagine other people doing things unawares, it can come as a shock to realize you have been doing this yourself.

Yesterday, I experienced this shock when I became aware of a projection I have been carrying on throughout my life. I realized I have always tried to divorce myself from being in any way intellectual, educated, or sophisticated. Instead, I would project these traits onto others and feel in awe of their cosmopolitan qualities, despite the fact that they would frequently be people less “cultured” than myself.

This may seem like a strange aspect of oneself to project, since many people view sophistication as a desirable quality. Astrologically, though, it makes sense. There are a few factors in a person’s chart that determine which parts of themselves they desire to offload onto others. For example, the qualities of any planet opposite to Venus at the time of birth, will tend to get projected. I was born with Venus opposite Jupiter, who rules higher education, philosophy, wealth, and the high brow parts of a culture in general. Therefore, I would want to see scholarly, urbane qualities in others, but never in myself.

I grew up wealthy and as a child my identity was the smart, intellectual one, which never made me feel especially cute. Perhaps this is why I dreamed of being an uneducated hayseed from the country. When I first read Rousseau, his glamorization of the Noble Savage went straight to my heart. I wanted so badly to be that natural, lovable person, uncorrupted by human culture. And it seemed to me that poor people were somehow closer to Rousseau’s ideal.

Eventually I began trying (subconsciously) to associate myself with everything the opposite of the wealthy world I knew. My favorite wine had to be Boone’s Farm, Strawberry-Kiwi. I tried to read harlequin novels and listen to cheesiest forms of country music. I attempted to become a secretary, a stripper, a worker at KFC. Some of which are noble jobs, but to the culture I came from, they were shocking and inappropriate choices. Especially secretary.

It was probably this same projection which caused me to move to West Virginia. I remember as a child how Kentucky (where I lived) was generally ranked second to last in everything. This made me proud. But West Virginia was always dead last in education, wealth, etc, which made me jealous. Being in last place made West Virginia pure. Beautiful.

And the more I convinced myself that I was, in fact, a rube, the more I would take pleasure in being wowed by the wealth and sophistication of those around me. If someone spoke a few words of another language, attended an art gallery, or took a plane ride to another country, I would be floored with admiration. Impressed. Delightfully intimidated. Feelings that gave me an almost sexual thrill. It made me feel warm and rosy to be a nothing, looking up in astonishment at someone else. Again, this was happening subconsciously, at the reptile level.

Over time, the projections grew more extreme. At first, it took a person’s trip to Africa to impress me. Eventually, their trip to the Olive Garden would do the trick. There was a point when I came close to being institutionalized for mental retardation, while just a few years earlier I had been getting scholarships to Ivy League schools. So why did I feel such a desperate need to separate myself from the gloss of education and wealth? What was I trying to gain?

I don’t know. Maybe I felt more feminine and lovable as a simpleton. Maybe I felt restricted by my identity as a smart person. One drawback to being tagged intelligent is that you can only keep that label by expressing ideas that other people find intelligent. While for me, the ideas closest to my heart usually fall into realms which society finds fruit loopy, or sometimes just too far our and individualistic to be considered at all.

Maybe I felt confined by growing up wealthy. When your dinner chairs are valuable antiques, you can’t paint purple polka dots on them when the mood strikes. No one glues dinosaur figurines to a brand new Mercedes. It always seemed as though “the poor” had more options for how to express themselves. Of course, now I see things differently. Whimsical life choices are far more appealing when money is all around. When you are really poor, you don’t want to glue dinosaurs to your car.

Or it could be that we project aspects of ourselves as a response to external pressure. Another person convinces us to leave parts of ourselves behind so he can feed off them. After all, my obsession with being lowly made me eager to give away anything of value that I did possess, and to treat those around me like nobles. Maybe there were people encouraging me.

Causes aside, it is easy to see the damage this sort of projection can cause. Of course, people can project their “negative” qualities as well. If, for example, someone has a testy planet like Mars or Pluto opposite Venus, they will tend to see anger, hatred, and manipulation in those around them. Nonetheless, these projections are still damaging to the one doing them, because we can’t project our aggression onto someone else without giving them our power and agency as well.

So, that is all I have to say. My hope is that by sharing my longstanding pattern of projection with the wide and faceless world, it will be harder for me to keep doing it! 🙂