coldhearted scientist وداد

I am too intellectual, it is said. That is a problem because the intellectual can never be personal, and the personal is what counts. I am hiding my face, and I ought to reveal myself.

I disagree. It was my original intention in these pages to be as ethereal as Le Colonel Chabert. Cybernetic words do float in the ether, after all. And this is a complaint I have received before. I have been too intellectual for a child, too composed for a graduate student, too intellectual for a professor, too composed for a woman, and so on. All of these analyses are based upon fallacies. The more interesting analysis was made by a friend some years ago, who said I had given these sorts of comments greater consideration than they deserved, and I had paid a great price for it.

In any case, this site reveals a great deal if you actually read it. Yet it wears a mask, by specific design. The Delegado Cero also wears a mask. I got a comment recently on personae and masks, not to the blog but to its e-mail address, from someone who clearly understands voice and persona. “People love a mask,” said the comment in part, “but they also want to claw it off and see your face.”

Another commentator noted that I was sincere “to a fault.” This was very interesting. Americans seem to associate composure and insincerity, and composure and elitism. Yet I have found that speech from the heart is in fact calm and lucid, and the people with the hardest lives are often the most dignified and composed.

On television, moments of “sincerity” happen during crises. The witness who breaks down on the stand and reveals the true murderer. The family whose true strengths, or true troubles, are revealed when the bright surfaces of their lives are scarred by disaster or death. We know the plotlines.

I am not convinced that all life needs to imitate this form of art. I have found that the emotions associated with crises are not necessarily the “truest” or “deepest” the characters in question have.

Sincere to a fault. This would explain why insincerity always takes me by surprise. I do not expect it because I do not imagine it. My eyes grow wide. I grow yet more earnest.

How did I become sincere to a fault? I would say it has early roots: a you’ve-got-to-be- kidding, but-then-again-you-are-the-authorities type of response to an often contradictory reality. By becoming yet calmer, and yet more earnest, I hoped to bring some feet to the ground.

This did not work as intended, but it did keep me centered, which I liked. And yet I never wondered if there were a sincerity differential at work, if anyone were engaging in thin theatrics, or if I were sincere to a fault. This was a strategy of resistance, but not of liberation.

I made a vow as a small child, having raised a serious issue and having it discounted, since I was considered “too young” to have actually perceived what I had perceived, named it as I had done, and duly protested in an articulate manner. I will never be cold to anyone in the way these people are being cold now. I will never discount anyone’s pain in the way these supercilious people are discounting my pain now. This vow grew into one of the paths upon which I grew sincere to a fault.

On television, we are taught to think in terms of archaeology, discovery, revelation, and then to fit the new material into a familiar paradigm. In the sculpture studio, we also brush off the dust and cut into the stone. We are not, however, concerned with our detritus, or with sparks shot off in the yard.

Neither are we in the biology laboratory, removing the entrails of a bird. To the contrary, we are sculpting to uncover the true and inviolate work of art which lies in every granite block, each one different. And what you see now is my truest face.

Axé.