SNOWSTORM - The Raveonettes (link)
I listened to this song yesterday as my boyfriend drove me through a snowstorm from Ottawa to Toronto. It reminded of Michael Chabon’s essay “Faking It”, perhaps the one I was most affected by in Manhood For Amateurs:
Later, after we had made it safely and without incident up and down and through ice and rain and snowfall that was at times blinding, my wife told me that she initially thought I was dangerously insane when I proposed driving to Idaho Falls through a blizzard. But then she heard something in my voice that reassured her; she’d seen something in my eyes. I looked as if I knew what I was doing. And though I gripped the wheel with bloodless hands and prayed wildly to the gods of the interstate trucker whom I carefully tailed all the way to Idaho, in the backseat the kids calmly watched their videos, and my wife studied the map and gossiped with me, and none of them knew or suspected for a moment―for I never betrayed, by word or deed, my secret―that I was in way over my head.
Earlier in the essay, he describes the broader masculine virtue of pretending to know what you’re doing:
“To keep your head,” wrote Rudyard Kipling, “when all about you are losing theirs”; but in reality, the trick of being a man is to give the appearance of keeping your head when, deep inside, the truest part of you is crying out, Oh, shit! Perhaps in the end there is little difference between keeping one’s head and appearing to do so; perhaps the effort required to feign unconcern and control over a situation itself imparts a measure of control.
That kind of half-faked steadiness feels related to a masculine virtue I’d like to cultivate more, something in the direction of emotional risk tolerance, away from avoiding conflict and rejection, towards trading safety for ending up with a good life. There is a game theory scenario called a stag hunt about the conflict between safety and social cooperation. Two hunters must decide, separately, whether to hunt a hare or a stag. The hunters know they can only catch a stag with the other’s help. The hare is a safer choice. However, if both the hunters accept the risk of trusting each other, and choose to hunt the stag, their cooperation will be rewarded. This scenario is also called the trust dilemma, which reminds me of this quote from Lois McMaster Bujold, one of my favourite authors: “the question a romance plot must pose, and answer is not 'Do these two people get together? ' but rather 'Can I trust you?’” In real life, I feel like that question can only be answered cooperatively, and I wonder if faking confidence is, at times, a form of cooperation.
Melting my heart,
- Tessa