Welcome, Puppet-Master!

I have lived my life with the terror that one of these days, a puppet-master will arrive in my midst. This person, likely a lover (so the consequences can be suitably devastating) would quickly and accurately assess my inner self. “Here’s a person in desperate need of comfort. Here’s a sharp mind, afraid of her own weakness. Here is someone who has always hoped for dignity, but knows she has not the restraint to maintain it…” The puppet-master would go on, easily summing up my main character flaws and holes in logic, the same lacks that I have spent my lifetime trying to pinpoint. But the PM, looking from the outside, has no struggle whatsoever with seeing me as I am. He would then--just as deftly--figure out exactly how to dupe me, and exactly how to flatter me, and exactly how to humor me, and exactly how to keep me at bay. “First, I’ll compliment her mind, then, ever-so-subtly, I’ll make a reference to her perpetual insecurity, her little-girl-ness, and then--to show I really understand her--I’ll act charmed by her stuntedness, because I know just how much it disgusts her.” The PM’s strategies would all involve coaxing the best and worst from me simultaneously, perhaps so he can entertain himself with how absurd my paradoxes are. Or maybe he’d do this just to disarm me. When I am trotting out both my brilliance and my neuroses at once, I’ll no doubt look upon myself with confusion and even horror: how can all this exist in me at once? By keeping me in a state of perpetual--and baffled--self-reflection, the PM distracts me from trying to analyze him. He then can sit back and enjoy the show. But god knows what “the show” is to him! Is it my cleverness devouring itself? Or is it his evident mastery of my feelings; his complete conquest?

The PM might even be more sophisticated than all that. Perhaps, instead, he does all this simply to show me the hypocrisy of my ways. He sees that I am an amateur philosopher with ideas that aren’t really life-friendly, so he aims to reduce me into hysteria so he can smugly point out that I cannot follow my own decrees. But then I think to myself--what would be the point?! I never claimed to be anything but witty, genius, deeply flawed and purposely hypocritical--it isn’t as if I’ve held myself up as a symbol of purity, or logic, or austerity! How can the PM really undo me, when my whole life-approach is so wildly self-referential, so self-undercutting? I guess, because of my beliefs, the PM would take special pleasure in showing me that even the most self-effacing and vice-accepting world-views have a huge helping of corruption and sheer vanity. But why would someone as clever as the PM bother to form a relationship with me, just to show me this? What would be the point of destroying my illusion, when the PM--if he’s so clever--could simply write a tract on the short-sightedness and egotism of my type of world-view? He wouldn’t need to bother with ruining me if he could see how I would be ruined.

Once I’ve reached this point in my thinking, you’d think that the whole thought of a puppet-master appearing to undo me would fade like any other chimera born of paranoia. Not so. The image I have just presented is replaced by an even worse conception: what if there’s someone who is a natural puppet-master? Someone who, without any thought, naturally manipulates. Someone who is duplicitous by nature without any accompanying logic to give that dual-sidedness motive or meaning. Someone who is everyone’s great love and best friend, but he himself has no center, loyalty, or feelings. He merely morphs into whatever you need. But he does this not out of generosity, or out of love, but out of emptiness. He is nothing but a reflection of your desires…and his seeming answer of those desires is only an echo of your yearnings…if you were smart, you’d see the echo as proof you were indeed in an empty place.