"We all wish we were from someplace else"

This is going to be a little abstract.

How different are these two scenarios:

1. A writer has been given your personal information—your name, where and when you were born, which schools you went to, your religious belief or lack of it and so on—and has been asked to create a personal mythology for a character with your name and experiences.
2. You decide to review your life with the intention of coming up with a personal mythology.

At first glance, the difference seems blindingly obvious. The writer can only research the sorts of things a person in your place might remember whereas you know exactly what you do remember. You have a direct and authentic access to your experience that the writer can only guess at.

There is a sense in which that is true. Maybe you went to a high school where most of the kids were fans of hard rock music and wore jeans, T-shirts and workboots but you were a member of a tiny subculture whose members wore tweed jackets, grey flannels and ties and insisted on antiquated spellings such as "grey" and "shew". The writer would almost certainly miss this detail and thereby get everything wrong.

On the other hand, even rejecting the dominant culture of your school, you would have been very much influenced by it. And you have almost certainly forgotten much of what you experienced. What you remember comes in the form of stories that you and others have told over and over again and those stories often (almost always) don't match the verifiable facts of your life. What we wanted, what we felt compelled to say, in response to the two scenarios I posted above was a special and direct access to "the real me". It would seem that the most we can really say is that the person who actually lived the life will have a much better idea where to look for clues and will know of many more such clues than the writer researching their character could ever have.

The final problem is that your experiences might be a barrier to what you want to achieve. You have psychological barriers and self deceptions that stand in the way. The writer might well be more open to possibilities you are currently cutting yourself off from for no good reason.

"Here, you're an honorary"

The quote immediately above and the one in the title of this post are from the unnamed "gentleman of the rails" who visits the Whitman homestead in the first season episode of Mad Men named "The Hobo Code". The theme is freedom. But what is freedom? When we're in captivity, we, like the bird in the cage, can only imagine that freedom is a world without bars. But freedom is not freedom from but freedom for a purpose. Freedom from is empty and unsatisfying.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue.

This is one of my favourite quotes. Marx, who missed the full significance of his own point, sees that to change yourself is to learn another language. An existing language.  And learning another language is a long and arduous process.

The process begins for Dick Whitman with the flashback in "The Hobo Code" and it begins with a language. In a move that Wittgenstein would have loved, the hobo teaches young Dick only four symbols:

• A pie that symbolizes that the food is good here.
• A set of teeth indicating that a vicious dog lives here.
• A sort of sickle that means a dishonest man lives here.
• A stick woman that means tell a sad story.

As Wittgenstein would say, "Conceive of this as a complete primitive language." That means that understanding this language means knowing how to use and respond to these expressions.

As Wittgenstein would note, we are already functioning at a high level here. To get even this primitive language, we must know a whole lot. Just the literal use of the expressions requires us to know what a "dishonest man" is and why it would matter that he lives here. Young Dick only learns these things in this episode.

We might also think about the metaphorical extension of these expressions. Good food and scary dogs are concepts that a child can readily understand. They can also be extended. Likewise, we can see how an adult might see potential benefits in gaining a  woman's sympathy that a child might not immediately grasp.

A dishonest man lives here, however, is in a different class.

Rejection

The episode, interestingly, begins with Bert Cooper telling Don, "I know what kind you are." He elaborates on that by saying he believes that Don is, "Productive and reasonable and, in the end, completely self-interested" and "unsentimental". Bert is suggesting that Don's personal mythology is much like the views of Ayn Rand. Don rejects that and the rest of the episode shows us why. His personal mythology is that of the Hobo.

All rebellion begins with rejection. Don rejects his mother. He doesn't accept Adam as his brother. He tells the hobo, "Ain't you heard, I'm a whorechild." At least according to the flashbacks, his biological mother was a prostitute who died giving birth to him. There is a huge problem here, though, because no child can have a flashback to his conception and birth. Later, his adoptive mother will become an actual prostitute. His father, who dies, is replaced by "Uncle Mac" who is not his uncle but his adoptive mother's pimp. He remembers Uncle Mac as having been kind to him.

Don's whole life is about a rejection of his mother. Father figures are a bit trickier. That his father is dishonest is clear but so, in different ways, are the replacement father figures—Uncle Mac, the real Don Draper, Bert Cooper and Conrad "Connie" Hilton. The only honest father figure in Don's life is the hobo and he only has a brief brush with him.

To return to the point I make at the top of this post, that encounter need not even be "real" in the ordinary sense of the world.

As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up,
knelt down before him, and asked him,
“Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus answered him, “Why do you call me good?
No one is good but God alone.
You know the commandments: You shall not kill;
you shall not commit adultery;
you shall not steal;
you shall not bear false witness;
you shall not defraud;
honor your father and your mother.”
He replied and said to him,
“Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth.”
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him,
“You are lacking in one thing.
Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor
and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
At that statement, his face fell,
and he went away sad, for he had many possessions.

To embrace one thing is to reject others.

I'll stop here not because this is a complete thought but simply because I must stop somewhere.

This meditation was inspired by the eighth episode of the first season of Mad Men. The title of the episode was "The Hobo Code". There will be more such meditations coming.