Consensual reality

Consensual reality is the shared version of events that people continually repair by turning away from what unsettles them. In Lionel Essrog’s account, that repair is neither stable nor impartial: a tic can rupture ordinary social understanding, yet the people who witness it may quickly forget it, leaving the person who disrupted their expectations both exposed and unseen.

A social reality that heals

Lionel describes consensual reality as fragile and elastic, able to heal almost as quickly as it is broken. His image is not of a fixed public agreement but of a process: people encounter something difficult to absorb, then restore the familiar account of the world by withholding attention and memory. The striking feature is the speed of that restoration. A disturbance can dominate a shared space and still leave little trace in the recollections of those present.

This idea emerges from Lionel’s observation of a man on an Atlantic Avenue bus. The man, a black man in his sixties, made long, groaning belches from the back of the bus, timing them for moments when the other passengers faced forward. There were fifteen or twenty riders. Every sixth or seventh time, he added a farting sound. His timing could make the noises seem like an elaborate performance, but the passengers knew where they came from: they hummed or coughed reprovingly, stopped turning to look, and avoided one another’s eyes. Their refusal to look did not end the episode. It allowed the man to continue without interruption, joining the sounds into longer phrases.

Lionel reads the behavior not simply as an attempt to provoke attention but as a compulsion, a tic associated with Tourette syndrome. He allows that the man himself might have understood it as childish or attention-seeking, particularly if he had never been diagnosed. The distinction matters to Lionel’s account: what the passengers can dismiss as bad manners may be an involuntary behavior, while their shared response makes that interpretation easier to avoid.

Attention, refusal, and forgetting

The bus episode makes social attention an unstable measure of visibility. At first, the noises turn the man into the center of the riders’ awareness; their startled glances confirm that the disruption has registered. Once they deliberately stop looking, however, he gains room to continue. Refusal of attention both rejects him and makes the performance less interruptible. The group’s gesture does not resolve the encounter so much as help its members resume their ordinary passage through it.

Lionel expects the other passengers to remember little of the episode a few minutes after getting off at their destinations. The noises had filled the bus, but the passengers were already engaged in forgetting them. In this reading, collective memory is not a neutral record of what occurred: it is part of the social repair. The passengers can have heard the sounds and recognized their source without incorporating either fact into a lasting account of the ride.

That pattern gives the concept its uneasy double edge. The disruption is real, and its source is legible to those who witness it; yet recognition does not guarantee lasting acknowledgment. The shared world restores itself not by disproving what happened, but by allowing the incident to recede. The man’s apparent conspicuousness and his subsequent erasure are therefore connected parts of the same process.

Lionel’s own experience of invisibility

Lionel extends the observation from the bus to his childhood at St. Vincent’s. He doubts that the other boys, including the three who later joined him as Minna Men, directly remembered his bouts of kissing. He believes he might have forced them to remember, but that any such recollection would have been grudging: the compulsion was too much for the boys to encompass then, and would remain so anywhere. The comparison makes the bus passenger’s experience more than an isolated example. Lionel recognizes in the passengers’ retreat from attention a social response he had encountered around his own behavior.

By the time Lionel was twelve, his compulsions included reaching, tapping, grabbing, and kissing. The kissing could be startlingly physical: he might lunge, surround another boy with his arms, and kiss whatever part of the boy he reached. After the compulsion passed, he was left to explain himself, defend himself, or flee. He tried to describe the act as a game, but his account of the period also shows how little that explanation could contain. In the shared reality of St. Vincent’s, the behavior was difficult to absorb, and its meaning could be pushed aside rather than understood.

The kissing, Lionel suggests, became forgettable partly because his Tourette syndrome soon appeared through hundreds of other behaviors. Through Frank Minna’s rough endearments, some of those behaviors became associated with Lionel’s public identity as a Freakshow; the kissing was buried among them and gratefully forgotten. The sequence complicates any simple opposition between being seen and being ignored. Lionel could be marked by a conspicuous collection of traits while one especially difficult compulsion disappeared from other people’s recollections.

The concept’s human stakes

Consensual reality names a collective accommodation, but Lionel’s examples show that the accommodation has unequal costs. The passengers regain an ordinary bus ride by looking away; Lionel’s fellow boys can leave an intolerable episode unremembered. In both cases, what has been excluded remains part of the experience of the person whose behavior provoked the response. Forgetting may soothe the group without changing the condition that made the encounter disruptive.

The idea also gives Lionel’s narration a particular authority and limitation. He understands the bus passengers’ small gestures because he has lived on the receiving end of social discomfort, and he distinguishes visible behavior from the assumptions people may attach to it. At the same time, he does not claim access to the older man’s private understanding; he marks that uncertainty while insisting on the compulsion he recognizes. Consensual reality, as the passage presents it, is thus not simply a shared truth. It is a fragile agreement maintained through attention, avoidance, and selective memory—and its apparent stability can depend on making the person who disrupts it easier to overlook.