The Pigeon: an essay
In the summer of 1998 I was living in sin with a woman who was taking undergraduate art classes at the local extension of the University of Texas. The art labs were open all night, for students to use the materials and equipment in the procedures of their assignments. One night, while watching her work in the printmaking lab, I dabbled away the time reading the community posting board which is a common identifier of the university hallway.
A sign asked for participants in a psychology study in exchange for five dollars. Earlier that semester, we had hocked the microwave for grocery money. Five dollars was beer for the both of us.
Within a few days, I was sitting in an isolated classroom with perhaps seven other participants; all young, caucasian men.
Before each of us was a small board that exhibited maybe twenty indented holes. Aside the board was a tray of perhaps a hundred metal pegs. Our assignment was simple: within a given amount of time -- say, thirty seconds -- we must place three metal pegs in each hole using only our non-dominant hand.
The timer started, and we each commenced with the assignment. Some would grab three pegs at a time and place the grouping in each hole. Some chose to place one peg at a time in each hole until three had been achieved, and moved on. Other methods presented themselves.
At the end of the given time, we were asked to stop and to place any pegs we may be holding back into the retaining tray. A young woman went to each desk, recorded our results, and took some additional notes which were unknown to us.
We were thanked for our help in this study, and were handed a survey to fill out: to give our personal impressions of the study and our efforts in the exercise. We were each handed a five dollar bill while our completed surveys were collected.
A young woman approached the front of the room and explained the nature of the study proper,“We are researching how men view their abilities in relation to men of other races.”
The peg exercise was, therefore, a red herring. It was the detailed questions on the survey that were the true excercise, and, yes, a few questions did ask us how each of us felt we had performed the task in relation to, say, how hispanic or black men might perform the same task. There were enough bogus questions on the survey as to throw us off of figuring out the nature of the study, even in the eleventh hour.
Bait and switch.
Midnight Cowboy was advertised as a film about a jolly Texan going to the “Big City” to seek fame. But it delivered a film about loneliness, gender, desperation. Likewise, the car in the newspaper has, upon visiting the dealership, been “sold just an hour ago.” But, there is another car you will love over here and it’s just a little higher in price.
Misdirection bears the badge of “the swindle” -- magicians, salesmen, hustlers -- but would do well to have its name cleared from the trenches as it is the method of true education. The ‘hot date’ was billed as a visit to the movies, but weren’t you thrilled to find that all she wanted was a kiss goodnight? And so it goes. We learn by having the rug pulled out from under us; by having Toto reveal the timid old man operating the levers behind the curtain. The journey did conclude with the Wizard as hoped, but what we were really seeking was knowledge, much to our surprise. We got that too, but had to first be coaxed: hence, the glorious Wizard.
The monster at the end of the book is you.
The bait and switch is the nature of so much honest commerce that we fail to recognize it. People want to feel good about themselves, and it is a particular widget, a specific service -- cleaner carpets, closer parking spaces, a kiss goodnight -- which is here for us to achieve that. We don’t so much want cleaner carpets; we say we want pleasure.
By contrast, remember that appliance you bought that proved to be a lemon? Remember how reluctant you were to tell anyone? To do so is to admit that you, the intelligent consumer, had failed, and, by extension, that you had purchased that exact product to feel better about yourself and that it had not done so. Upon the third visit to the store for repairs, we had to admit a painful truth: it was not only the physical product which was faulty, but it was a defeat for a portion of our feelings. The appliance was a representation of an emotional investment and here it is, broken. Just so, the carpet will get dirty again, and we knew this when we called the cleaner.
We react by concurring that “we’ve learned something” from this experience. We confess that all is not lost and we go about tweaking our defenses so as to avoid getting hurt again. For it is ultimately peace that we all seek, as consumers, as lovers, as voters, as spiritual beings, as students of life.
We work not because we like to stay busy (though we might). We work to put food in our bellies, to take our partner to the film, to get the air conditioner fixed. And yet, at no point during the job interview -- the audition -- can we say so. It is the mode of legitimate commerce, at the outset, to avoid saying the truth (“I like a challenge. I like to work hard”). To do so is accepted, rewarded. You got the job.
Our favorite sports team will, of course, lose. This is why we have a favorite sports team at all. But to celebrate the wins is the bait. And it always has been. We drink to forget our troubles, and yet it is the drinking that is our trouble.
The actor steps on stage and claims to be King Lear. He has to be, because everyone came to see his story. But, he is not King Lear, and he doesn’t need to tell us his story. We know his story. He is going to affirm, through metaphor, that we each are powerless. To recognize this is both disarming and moving. It’s the germinal cause for liturgical experience: communion. Hence, the theatre, the cathedral. For it is God who can show that our hopes can be dashed, and to have them dashed is the point of hoping in the first place. That there very well may be no God is the most tragic joke on the human heart and has the potential to awe, no less, than piety itself. Meanwhile, our tithe buys us time with the holy.
They say you must pick your battles, and to battle entropy in a search for contentment is our life’s work. And we know it.
We vote for the person who said they’d lower the taxes, though we know this will not happen. It never has. The emotional investment is to affirm, for the sake of our own health, that everything “out there” spins without our own personal involvement. When taxes get raised, we recognize the inevitable; that we knew so ahead of time and so chose to be disappointed. And yet we did vote. To confirm our fears. To give up the ghost. To be at peace in the end.
