A few years ago, I received a personalized email from a co-worker. She explained how our worker’s union really needed help. They needed someone who could serve as a kind of go-between between the union and our department. She didn’t have the time for it, but she thought that I would be perfect for the role.
I decided to try it out, and took to it right away. Most of the organizers were young like I was, and their youthful passion was contagious. They were well-spoken and charismatic, especially our head steward, who seemed to be at just about every workshop, town hall, and social. I read their literature and picked up their lingo. We were the scrappy underdogs, the ones who could see the contradictions of capitalism and who understood what was at stake. The union wasn’t just an activity, it was a lifestyle. Once you learned the history of American labor and heard our co-workers’ horror stories, the political became personal. We stayed in close contact with one another, happy to come together on nights or weekends to do organizing work. We were always on call if there was an injustice that demanded action, or a fellow organizer who needed backup. We were all in this together. The silent majority of our co-workers didn’t know how dire the situation was, but my comrades and I would get through to them, one urgent conversation at a time.
When I found the union, or rather, they found me, I thought this was something that would profoundly alter the course of my life. However, a year later, I’d quit. (More on that later.) My time with the union was not really about the union. It was about union. My fantasy of love centers around being a part of something bigger than myself. As I try to put this into practice, I gravitate toward people who will tell me what to think.
A fundamental assumption of this blog is this: we enact our fantasies. (Or, to put this more precisely, the same thing that creates our fantasies also creates us.) We fantasize about what love looks like, and then we look for things in the world that resemble that. We fantasize about how to interact with that thing, and then we interact with the real-world thing in that way.
The purple people fantasy is a representation of my idea of love. Read as fiction it may have creepy undertones, but to me the purple people fantasy has always been a genuinely beautiful one.
Real love rocks my world. It splits me open and makes me wonder whether I was wrong about everything I thought I knew. Love makes my doubts and fears go away, making it a welcome relief from the crippling indecision that characterizes 99% of my waking experience. I feel that I am merely a channel for something much greater than myself. Real love is not just an exciting project. It is a beautiful and terrifying new world that I can’t un-see.
Perhaps you can see some parallels between my description of love and my description of the purple people. Like real love, the purple people were a welcome relief. They washed Crastor clean of his past, and he feels reborn. They provide him everything he needs. He does not become one of them, but he becomes their channel. They inevitably abandon him, but in one visit they have forever changed the way he thinks.
My co-worker’s email was the perfect setup for enacting the purple people fantasy. The lost child Crastor was found by a stranger who needed help. The stranger needed a go-between, and Crastor was perfect for the role. When I said yes to my co-worker, I was subconsciously saying yes to the purple people.
I completely gave myself over to the union. I trusted my new friends, like Crastor did. I was enthusiastic about learning their lingo, just like Crastor learned to communicate with the purple people rather effortlessly. In the union, things were clear-cut. Workers were the good guys, management were the bad guys, and collective action was the solution. Likewise among the purple people, Crastor didn’t have to think for himself. He knew where he belonged, and he was relieved of the burden of having to find his own way in the world.
I never decided to enact the fantasy. I was just doing what felt good. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that: (1) I have a pattern of throwing myself enthusiastically into mission-driven social groups and (2) I compulsively daydream about merging with a benevolent hive mind.
As much as I wanted to believe that the union offered the promise of real love, it did not. I only wanted to believe that I’d finally found my purple people. I was trying to recreate real love, but at the end of the day the union was just an exciting project. When I go around grasping for love, falling head-over-heels for something that seems perfect, the excitement doesn’t last. The dream falls apart. And as we shall see shortly, my subconscious has to pick up the pieces.