#interpersonal dynamics

DC Dark Week Prompts 2024

Use these daily prompts to stoke your insidious ideas. See how many individual tiles you can cross off your card, or try and conquer a sequence. Post your cards at the end of DC Dark Week to show off your progress!

Day 1 - Body Horror - May 5th Day 2 - Consent Issues - May 6th Day 3 - Interpersonal Dynamics - May 7th Day 4 - Reprieve - May 8th Day 5 - Power & Control - May 9th Day 6 - Graphic Violence - May 10th Day 7 - Otherworld - May 11th 

The timing is bad (work, flare-up, life stuff, deadlines etc) but I need the thoughts I had on my last reread of The Picture of Dorian Gray off my chest.

Textually, Dorian's portrait is not alive. It may be an ever-updating record of Dorian's choices, analogous to what we now call a living document, but it's still an object. It's not a victim or even a witness, only a piece of evidence. He's done terrible things to so many people, but the portrait isn't one of them.

I can still read the book the way I first read it when I was much younger, when I went in already knowing to some extent the author's intent and what makes it a work of gothic horror.

Back then I knew that he wasn't writing about helplessness, but about a young man with agency choosing time and time again to make the most psychospiritually corrosive choices. Though the pain Dorian causes others is an important window into what is evil, ultimately it's a book about evil, not a book about pain. And it's a damn good book about evil.

Now, though. Now I have so much more experience with evil than I did when on my first read-through. Back then my one abusive parent was the only true horror I knew, but now I've seen the insides of so many caustic systems and rotten institutions and the people who collectively make them work that way. I've met dozens of Lord Henrys myself and probably read about another thousand or so in the news and the uncountable would-be Dorian Grays who channel them.

More importantly, I've seen the damage done, the pain that bears witness to evil. I've known the Sybil Vanes and Basil Hallwards of the world, and though I've seen plenty young and innocent in their graves just as in the book, I've seen so many more live to bear the emotional and psychosocial scars those wounds leave when they don't kill you.

And yes we're all a little bit Dorian, everyone's done something that would make their portrait sneer at some point, but we're all a bit Sybil too, injured by the wrongdoing of others. We're all a little bit Basil sitting in front of someone begging them to be better, to stop making choices that hurt others, and just like Basil more often than not all we'll get for our trouble is to be the next one hurt.

So on my latest reread, something sucker punched me: if the portrait had feelings, how much it would hate him for what's been done to it. And though the portrait doesn't have feelings, the real people Dorian makes an impact on bear his cruelties by proxy just as much as the portrait does.

Our most callous choices do not leave lasting marks on only our own selves. They do real and lasting harm to others: others' bodies and brains (which are really one and the same thing), others' hearts, others' lives. You can etch the lines into someone else's face or take the light of hope from their eyes without ever meeting or knowing them.

The supernatural forces which govern Dorian's portrait protect him from what he's doing to himself, but the emotional damage he inflicts on others is still visible in THEIR faces. He still leaves his mark on the world and on the people he's wronged.

We can almost draw a line through each of the characters from Henry down wherein each one's relative agency diminishes as their own goodness or innocence within the narrative increases.

1. Dorian had many, many choices, and with mildly coercive influence from Henry he made all the cruelest ones.

2. Alan (the chemist who helps Dorian conceal a murder) was blackmailed with a terrible fate, and he knowingly did an evil thing under duress.

3. Sybil's brother James didn't strictly NEED to swear revenge for what was done to his sister (indeed there's a lot of discussion about misogyny and the disposability of women who were seen as having "lost their virue" to be had, some of it potentially damning to James himself), but there was zero chance of anyone facing consequences for it any other way.

Just as we see so often in real life recorded history and in our own time, James' tale of revenge ends anticlimactically for him because he's a working class labourer, while Dorian's life takes the novel-worthy trajectory because he's of high enough social class for it to happen.

4. Sybil did nothing wrong, yet Dorian had the power to destroy her life, and he chose to use it. Her only share of agency was whether to live the life of suffering that remained to her or to die. Dorian may not have killed her with his own hands, but her suicide was a murder on many levels. Just as her brother could've been a protagonist in some other novel had he more status and means, she could've been a protagonist in some other story if her virginity weren't the sole cornerstone of her future.

4. Lastly, Basil actively tried to do the right thing, using what influence he might have had on Dorian to try to stem the flow of horrors, but was basically talking to a wall. Despite being of about the same social status as Dorian and Henry, Basil's voice had so much less impact on events than Henry's that you almost beg him to turn and run for his life instead.

The shock hit me the exact moment Basil asks Dorian to repent all he's done, because without realizing it, up until that point I'd been seeing myself as Dorian.

When I read Picture half my lifetime ago I did not put myself in any one character's shoes in particular, though at 16 I was perhaps even more egotistical than I might be now. The connection had nothing to do with seeing oneself as a main character or not; it was about seeing myself as having been warped by life.

"How can I repent sins that aren't mine?" I thought, and only then did I realize that wasn't a thought from the mind of Dorian, Alan, James, Sybil or Basil. I'd been seeing myself as living flesh and bone and brain that's been used the same way the portrait has.

Dorian's portrait ages prematurely from the choices he makes about his own body, but you don't have to be shallow or ageist to agree that it's ugly. Before any of the youth and conventional beauty captured there is ever diminished, the first change- the one that appears after his first cruel and selfish act- is to the expression he wears. The smile of a young man who hasn't yet crushed or destroyed anyone turns to the sadistic, leering grin of someone who has, and who leans into the power rather than into the potential for remorse.

The Machiavellian socialite of the portrait isn't me, but that sense of losing my innocence to someone else's choices is.

The parts of my personality that I find most unpleasant to look at- the tendency to take refuge in despair because hope is painful, the way I sometimes indulge in misanthropy so that the bitter truths of the world we live in can hurt just a tiny bit less to acknowledge- you can't cultivate those in a person who has as much power and privilege as Dorian Gray, but they have just as much potential to be used as justification for behaving in ways that protect or empower oneself at the cost of others. Simply having less access to the levers of power does not absolve us of our capacity for evil.

Maybe that's what Sybil Vane would look like if she'd lived to see her 30s, resentful and sad and, above all, defeated. Or if I'm being more honest about my place in the exploitative structures of colonialism wherein we live, maybe that stress-worn face of resentment and resignation in the mirror is akin to what Alan looks like after another ten years of desperately holding onto the secrecy that keeps him from being skewered by the deadly homophobic institutions of his time- bought at the price of complicity in murder.

“but that means you've never been with anyone else!? how can you know he's the right person??”

“how can you be monogamous for so long at such a young age!?”

i don't know how to adequately explain to these people that 1) these questions are weird and invasive and 2) no one else has ever wanted me.

when i use point 2 to shut them up they get all sad and look at me with pity or straight up don't believe me but like what the fuck else did you want me to say? you're looking at me, someone who has always been fat and queer and awkward and weird and you're asking why i haven't dated?

I like being right about the facts I know. I don’t really need to be perceived as being correct, I just want the things I believe to be factually accurate.  So technically, I “need to be right all the time.”

The distinction manifested in an argument I had a few months back, that made a lot more sense when I reflected on it from the outside. I had made a claim to a friend about something in linguistics (”Latvian is a Slavic language”), and she corrected me. Now, I’d remembered reading that it was, so now I had someone who was confidently telling me I was wrong.  So I wanted to know and pulled out my phone and looked it up, because there was a good chance that I was wrong here and I wanted to be right! (by updating my knowledge). And learned that it was technically a “Balto-Slavic language” (which was the source of my confusion) but it was clearly in a different branch than just the pure Slavic languages.  When I mentioned that, she got really mad at me, in a way that seemed really disproportionate to me at the time.

When I got home, I realized that what she saw was another asshole guy pulling out his phone when challenged and wanting to prove himself correct despite her being an expert in the subject. Who then honed in on a technicality, which proved how he was technically right the whole time.  That’s a familiar and toxic dynamic, and I hate it as well. But it hadn’t occurred to me that it’s what it seemed like I was doing, because in my head, a subject matter expert had just told me I was wrong, and so it gave me an opportunity to learn something new, fix what I knew, and then be right again. But from me, this reads as some combination of “correctile dysfunction” and “mansplaining” (especially if I’m trying to talk myself through a chain of logic out loud).

And, I didn’t super look into it, but from what I saw it seemed to have, like, stuff on argument structure and logical fallacies and that kind of thing. Which I think is about what I would expect from something like it.

Argument dynamics are a thing I kind of think about a lot at least on a background level, because tumblr and stuff. Which makes me wonder - are there courses and materials like this that talk about the other kinds of stuff I tend to notice, that I think I don’t usually see mentioned places?

(Some examples, not in an organized fashion because I don’t have them that way:

A big one is like, what people are bringing to the argument that they don’t actually say in the argument. (Or, on the other end, what people are likely to read from it, that isn’t said in it.)

One major example is ‘what people mean when they say word X’.

Another one is connections-to-other-things, often by affiliation. So, I could say something using the jargon of a particular group and by this be communicating my association with that group (and some amount of their angles/viewpoints/approaches/other opinions.) Or, someone could read me saying something commonly associated with some other opinions on a different topic, and think I likely share that opinion. (And I could know about this and be communicating accordingly).

Another is earlier foundations of the ‘why’s’ of things someone might be saying, or conversely the fact that they haven’t given thought to them. (Like ‘this person subscribes to divine command theory’ and such).

Another big one is personal stuff - ‘if thing X is done, this would be bad for me’, or ‘people who want thing X done have been really horrible to someone I care about’, etc.

Another one relevant to connection/affiliation is things like ‘people who say thing X are disliked, I am afraid of that happening to me’. etc.

(And I think when I do see the concept of ‘things brought to the argument but not said in it’ brought up, it’s usually just ‘well that’s not good’, which I think is missing a lot of things. Like, a lot of this is too much information if you start trying to stick it in explicitly, or we don’t have good communication technology for actually doing so, or that’s too much for people to do. Some of it you kind of can’t stick in explicitly by definition. Which can still have negative effects etc (and totally does), but it’s considerably more complicated than ‘tell people not to do it’.)

i mean, it’s probably a better one than “latch onto whatever presumptions you first think up about other people’s motivations” or “publicly speculate wildly other people’s motivations, based on scanty data”

but still. given familiarity with ducks, if something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…