A Portrait Of The Ironist As A Young Gadfly

There you go, dear readers, you finally have a portrait of the Transparent Ironist that even a Michaelangelo would have died to paint. (But of course, but of course, Michaelangelo painted only super-humans and demi-humans, and the Ironist is but human, all too human.) Perhaps the most irritating facet of his (boringly one-dimensional) personality is his persistent habit of compelling people around him, even if in an extremely subtle and disguised manner, to push their arguments one step backwards until finally they hit rock-bottom (if at all). In short, the Ironist is a gadfly : he loves to know where people come from (both literally and metaphorically), what their axiomatic beliefs are, why they are arguing the way they are, and how their past environments have moulded them into becoming who they are today.

In all of this, the Ironist is only too aware (perhaps even to the point of distraction) of how his own starting-points, childhood experiences, prejudices, traits and dispositions have brought him to the position where he stands today. Therefore, when he engages in his disreputable gadfly-exercises with people around him, it is with the desire not just of knowing them but also of knowing himself in the process, for he believes, to slip momentarily into a bit of jargon, that the 'self' and the 'other' are so inextricably intertwined that the knowledge of the first is possible only with and through the knowledge of the second. Or to echo the words of an Old Master, he says : 'May I know You, so that I may then know Myself in the very same process.' Or, yet again, the reason why I am able to ask the question, 'Who am I?', is only because You have urged and instigated me to do so with Your question, 'Who are you?'

Indeed, the Transparent Ironist has, to use the fashionable term, an 'issue' with many thinkers, both past and present. They seem to think that empathy is a problem (to be 'solved' in a somewhat 'intellectual' manner?), while self-identity is guaranteed; whereas the Ironist grapples with the opposite problem which is that while for him empathy is a basic given of his existence, his self-identity is always in doubt. Which is why everytime he is asked questions such as, 'What is your view on X, Y, or Z?', he fumbles for an answer like a little boy who has lost his handkerchief yet again but is too ashamed to admit it, but he can reply before you can even bat an eyelid to questions of the sort, 'What does A, B, or C think or believe about X, Y, or Z, and why?'

He has spent so much time trying to 'get under the skin' of other people trying (and, most probably, failing disastrously) to see the world through their eyes that he has only recently begun to realise that he has no distinctive views to call his own; at the most, what he has is a collage, a patchwork, or a mosaic built from the various fragments left over from the collapse of the monuments of the past.

Perhaps that is why his mind is a seething ocean of anarchy : he is never quite satisfied with reading a book that tells you that 'A is X'; no sooner has he finished reading that book that he begins to experience a burst of his obsessive compulsive disorder which tells him that he must now run to the library and ferret out another book which will tell him that 'A is not-X'. Some of his readers will now think that the long-awaited truth is finally out; that, at the end of the day, the Ironist is just one more demagogue or sophist, the type that can 'prove' to you at high noon that it is 'actually' midnight; that he is a 'mere' collection of discarded piles of dusty books; that he can differentiate x with respect to y but cannot integrate 'life' with respect to his 'books'.

There would be much truth in this accusation, and the Ironist would readily plead guilty to it. (Though what sentence is to be imposed upon him for this crime is a more ponderous issue.) Having done that, he shall also seek, in his usual ironic fashion, to respond to it in the following manner. If you are looking for a Yes-Man, or for someone who has a ready-made blueprint for every problem that is going to crop up around the corner, or for a person who shall unearth all the secrets of human existence and lay them bare for you on your dinner table, you would be well-advised to stay at more than an arm's length from the Ironist. But if you believe that in some cases the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and that in others, the shortest distance is actually a curve, but you are not quite sure which case is which, you shall find in the Ironist a person who has been struggling with this very problem almost all his life.

In short, then, the Ironist, the gadfly, loves to probe deeper into human beings, but never in an intrusive manner. If he senses the slightest amount of discomfort experienced by others in his gadflying, he simply lets them be and moves on to find someone else to learn from. (However, beware if he does not sense this uneasiness; he is very capable of forming fanatical attachments with people, and may just stick around with them not just for the next twelve hours but even for the rest of his life.) It is perhaps for this reason that he can 'come across' to people as that ethereal cloud that floats on high over the 'ordinary' lives of 'ordinary' men and women, flitting in and out of their company whenever he finds or does not find adequate company for his Socratic jousting. Once again, there would be some justification in this, the reason probably being that he is not usually down-to-earth enough with people. That is, he would rather ask a woman for her 'ultimate values' in life (a question that can be highly unnerving, unsettling, or irritating, depending on the person being questioned) than for her star-sign or the name of her pet-dog (even given the fact that he used to be a close reader of Linda Good(wo)man and that he remains a passionate lover of dogs). As for men, they are usually unnervingly predictable, and have nothing more to say than that they have a 30,000 dollar paycheck in the pocket, an 'awesome' deal with a client in the Silicon Valley, a beautiful girl in tow, a planned holiday to Singapore in the summer, and a great Mercedes in the garage : so the conversation usually ends there.

The Ironist has also an obsessive habit of talking about himself, primarily because, in most cases, he is well-aware of his own conscious assumptions or points of departure, and wishes to lay them on the table without keeping them too close to his chest. (That is probably what he is doing in this very post? No?) He wants people with whom he talks to know the planks on which he stands and from which he engages in his obnoxious act of firing off salvos of questions at them, one after the other with no respite. Some of them probably think that the reason why he is always filled with questions for them ('Oh, why doesn't he just shut up for once and answer my questions?') is because he is 'testing' them or 'checking' how much they know. If that is indeed what they believe, they would be rather mistaken, for the reason why he asks questions is because he wants to know what they believe, and what they believe is as much an important factor for him as what he himself believes in developing, forming, or distilling his views on any issue.

It is for this reason that in an Ideal Situation, he would wish to talk to every human being for their views on every possible matter, so insatiable is his desire to know what they think and believe. It is said of an old German astronomer that on the morning he died, the moon was still shining in his tired eyes. The Ironist himself would want to die in a somewhat similar way : someday when he is engaged in an an intense conversation with a friend over some topic, he would just wish to fall over and sink to the ground, dead. His whole life would have been one extensive embodied conversation that life could never end or disrupt, and death too could only interrupt.