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The Eisenberg Principle
By admin | July 10, 2011
Two weeks ago, having a glass of wine with a friend I seldom see, I found myself summarizing the past year of my life in one of those oversimplifying thumbnail sketches that make you feel like a bad Hollywood pitchman for yourself. As I compared and contrasted my various writing gigs, trying to keep it short and snappy, I concluded by saying, “So I guess the High Sign is probably where I let the most of myself show through.” “Yeah, maybe a little too much,” my probably-ought-to-be-ex-friend replied cryptically. This is the kind of vaguely hostile, Underminer-y comment that tends to make me laugh uncomfortably in the moment and change the subject, only to sit bolt upright in bed later that night and demand of thin air, “What exactly did you mean by that, my good man? Because you must have meant something, and I’d very much like to know what it is you did, in fact, mean!”
Because of my friend’s puzzling putdown, I didn’t post a ‘This Week in Me’ column last Friday; somehow, the mere idea that this person might be reading the site (something which, by his own admission, he rarely does) made me feel self-conscious, as though whatever I wrote would only serve to ratify whatever his unspecified negative opinion might be (the High Sign is too confessional, too narcissistic, whatever. Dude, it’s my website — what’m I supposed to write about, this week in you?) But in the week since, trying to obsess my way out of this mental hole (good luck with that strategy!) I found myself re-reading this passage from one of my favorite texts, the short story “Days” by the great Deborah Eisenberg. You don’t really need any context to get it:
“The man who gave me a hard time at the track has established residency in my mind. I discover that just as he exercises power over me, so I can exercise power over him. The man in my mind may have a low opinion of me, but I can have a low opinion of him, too, if I so choose. I can have a low opinion of his low opinion of me as well. Also, I notice, I can have a high opinion of his low opinion of me, an opinion that according to this very schema is worthless. I amuse myself by raising and lowering him in my estimation and by combining in various ways, and then distinguishing between, him, his opinion of me, me, and my opinion of him.
It seems that an opinion of someone is not a serious matter.”
In the merry mind-fuck that is my inner life, the wisdom of this passage ranks up there somewhere alongside that of the Sermon of the Mount. So in an Eisenbergian spirit, I have duly recalibrated my opinion of my friend’s opinion, and am now ready to continue with a brief roundup of this week (and last) in me: