Leftover Salad
“Does anybody want this?” my son asked while waving a cling film clad bowl at me and my wife, “If not I’m going to blend it up and make spaghetti sauce.”
He just pulled leftover Mediterranean salad from the fridge: fresh cherry tomatoes, lovely hearts of palm, zippy pickled hot cherry peppers, sweet bell peppers, black olives, a nice mild olive oil with white balsamic and a hint of not so mild garlic, sweet basil and oregano with various herbs, and pale green cucumber slices that every right thinking person knows are really just bulk filler.
“Yeah I want that,” I thought to myself, “it’s delicious and loaded with good stuff.” For an instant I even wanted the cucumbers.
And then I remembered that yesterday when the salad was fresh I passed. Earlier today my eyes fridge surfed over it with a shrug. In a moment my attitude toward the salad changed from nay to yay. I wanted to take it and gobble it down, despite a strangely dissonant certainty that I greatly prefer freshly made pasta sauce to salad. Even the cucumbers!
Mimesis
Fresh pasta sauce tastes delish. Day old salad, not so much.
Weird. How did this happen?
Rene Girard’s ghost piped up. “You’re mimetic. You have no desires of your own,” he said, “you borrow them from your neighbors then think they are your own. You gotta give that shit up. Bad mimesis leads to conflict.”
Girard was right. I only wanted the salad because my son said he wanted it first. Mimesis: we want by imitating our neighbors. We want what they have or want, or what we think they have or want. Girard’s primary insight is this, that mimetic desire is the defining characteristic of all humans. Mimetic means imitative. We have no thumotic desires of their own, but we cannot exist without them, so we copy our neighbors’. He calls his insight Mimetic Theory.
If mimetic means imitative, why did Girard not coin the phrase ‘Imitative Theory’? There are two answers and they both boil down to this: nobody knows what it means. First, the word ‘imitative’ sounds familiar but ‘mimetic’ exotic. The nice thing about exotic words is that we know we do not know them, so we are willing to forego gut feelings and learn what they actually mean. Secondly, Girard lived in the world of elite academia where anyone will believe anything so long as it is incomprehensible.
You might think to yourself, “What a load of nonsense! My desires are my own, not second hand borrowed doohickeys! Eating and breathing and sleeping and what-not.” (If you are not thinking that, wouldn’t you like to? Everyone else is.) Girard means thumotic desires, not animal desires. All the cool kids know what ‘thumotic’ means. I’m sure you know, or at least you desire to know.