The Affair

is a TV series that aired from 2014 to 2019 (or so). I discovered that it featured two actors/actresses whose work I'd admired in series such as The Wire (Dominic West) and Luther (Ruth Wilson).  I started watching it and I'm currently still in season one. 

The series explores the emotional impact of an affair between two people married to other people. A uniqueness in this series is that episodes were often divided into two parts, with each half being told from the very different perspective of characters involved in the same incident, which allowed viewers to reach their own unique conclusions based on their own personal biases. Of course, there's also the personal bias of the head writer, who admitted that the genesis of the series came out of the writer having just ended a bad relationship, so it's not unreasonable to infer that the plot includes elements of the writer's own personal story. The writer gives us free rein to speculate, she said about the series:

"there is no objective truth on this show – there’s only peoples’ truthful interpretation of what happened. And it’s up to the audience to bring their own biases and perspectives to viewing the story – to weave through the differing accounts and figure out for themselves, individually, what they believe. So, in a way, each viewer comes away having watched a slightly different show. I built the show that way, because that’s how life works. We experience things, we talk to people we trust, and we all come away with different versions of collective narratives. In the case of The Affair, what follows is my perspective on the experience."

I confess that this disclosure made me itch. So I've stopped to scratch.

Part of it comes from my enjoyment of the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, as a lot of his works explore the concept of selective memory which had its genesis in his experience with the homeless, an experience that mirrors mine in that the stories the homeless tell about themselves often deviate from the actual historical truths about themselves. But the real target of their deception is not us, but themselves. So this also draws from M. Scott Peck's (better known for The Road Less Traveled) (IMO) seminal work People of the Lie which explores the lengths people will go to avoid facing truths regarding themselves by creating a web of lies often forcing falsehoods upon others concerning their own self worth. 

And I've boiled it down to the great divide between the concepts of absolute truth and personal truth. It's been my experience that 'personal' truth is often influenced by trauma coupled with a response that includes denial. And in coming to grips with the insanity of the person who nearly ended my life by severing the anterior branch of my carotid with a box cutter, motivated by a desire to attack a 'church group whose teaching were sodomizing religion' along with a desire to drink my blood, I have embraced the concept of insanity described in the essay "The Maniac" by G.K. Chesterton in his work Orthodoxy. Simply put, those who are insane have not lost their reason, but rather, reason is the only thing that they have left. What causes the insanity is a limited universe of truth. With that limited universe of facts to draw upon, the insane can only reach the same flawed "insane" conclusion over and over. And this is possible when people embrace the concept of personal truth, which might be described as trying to avoid dealing with things that makes us uncomfortable. 
 

I can relate to that viewpoint. I embraced it when I took a fifteen year sabbatical from the real world, where I didn't work and lived off my savings until I was completely broke. My personal truths at the time I made this choice included (among others) the ideas that I was fundamentally unlovable, and that any risk could be expected to end in failure, and my talents would forever go unrecognized.

I've maintained a blog dealing with the aftermath of the attack I referred to earlier in this post. I re-read the blog in its entirety earlier this week, and damn, but (as I expressed in a blog post), I've come a fucking long way.

I've toyed with the idea of creating something similar to Einstein's concept of a grand unification theory to describe "wholeness" (whatever that means). I think I've come up with fundamental postulates.

Truth is absolute. The concept of personal truth is a response to avoid dealing with discomfort, which can be a response to some sort of pain, or the realization that something about us is displeasing. 

Discomfort is not to be ignored or suppressed or denied. This sense of discomfort is a signal to us that something is damaged and needs to be addressed.  Granted, there is needless discomfort - and that is clearly something to be avoided and or eliminated. More needs to be said about this, but not here.

It requires a lot of strength and discipline to embrace the idea that things about us are in some way displeasing, which is why few do. Those who can not are not to be looked down upon, nor is it anyone else's job to force someone else to acknowledge truth.

I think that's enough for now.