What would we do if we didn’t constantly hide our inner child?
I recently read in a psychologist’s article that there is no such thing as an “adult”. “Adults” are just an invention of “adults” to pretend they are. In truth, all human beings are children of different ages.
From about the age of ten you learn to lie and pretend, later you can eventually hide your childish desires and urges and give others the impression that you are acting for other reasons: for altruistic, emphatic, humanistic, compassionate, selfless, charitable, altruistic, generous, magnanimous reasons. But in truth it is about your own advantage, even if this can only be achieved through complex camouflage maneuvers and clever chess moves.
Ever since then, I have enjoyed imagining what my fellow human beings might be thinking as they stroll through everyday life with the mask of innocence and a slight smile.
A plump bank clerk in a gray suit is standing next to me in a bakery, staring at a piece of chocolate cake. He wants to snatch it from the display and put it in his mouth whole so he can swallow it whole. The cumbersome process of ordering, paying, packing, carrying home, unpacking, putting on a plate and then eating is driving him crazy. He looks around, notices the other people around him and realizes that he has to take the second path. Aggravating.
A fat older woman is sitting on a small plastic bench at a bus stop, her bottom is so big that the second seat next to her is difficult to fill. A little further on, a thin, middle-aged man is standing staring at nothing. He’s seething inside, he’d like to drive the fat woman off the bench, preferring to push her aside until she falls off the bench and lies there, stiff on her side. Unfortunately the bus is coming.
A lady with fine city clothes would like to pay for a bottle of champagne at Edeka. She goes to the cash register. On the way, a boy of about twelve rushes over and stands in front of her at the cash register. She wonders if she could hit him over the head with the bottles from behind. But then the whole mess, the excitement, the time delay, she doesn’t want that either. Her jaws paint with hate as she looks at Louis Vuitton adverts on her smartphone.
A fat old man climbed onto a three-meter board in a swimming pool. He would like to jump, but youngsters are playing around in the water below. He imagines jumping on the youngsters with an ass bomb and having them all drown as punishment for their carelessness.
What I like best is the idea that all adults suddenly could no longer lie, that everything came out unfiltered. What would then be happening on the streets: a total madhouse, a guttural primal swamp, one big mess, a gigantic screaming and hitting and screeching and eating and pissing and drinking and puking and bawling and hitting and taking away and pooping and hooting and drinking again.
Almost like in Cologne at the carnival.
The civilized behavior is just a trained farce. Beneath the thin milky skin of the surface lurks the raw beast of man, convulsing convulsively, roasting on his own hormones, aggressive, hungry and horny, ready to smash anyone who gets in his way.
Author photo by Kerstin Behrendt
This and other images are by Rocko Schamoni here orderable.