Man in a Cage

by Brian M Stableford

  Think on this.

  You have set stars in your sky as stars were set in ours. Can you conceive that it will be a civilized man who can reach out his hands into the sky and say, “These stars are mine”? Could that be a safe man, a sure man, a military man, a man of the law or . . . even this — a man of God?

  It will be a man with a storm in his being, a lust for pride and life, blood and dominion. It could never be a man who lived within the confines of his own skull, who knows what he sees and hears and feels, and all that it means, who understands the nature of the universe and the cheating of false gods.

  It will be a man who lives without himself, whose sensations are a part of an unknown pattern, who places his faith, deliberately, in false gods, idle dreams, and impossible desires.

  It cannot be a man who believes in reality, but a man who believes in destiny.

  If there are in the race of men those who can conquer the stars — and to conquer the stars, remember, the stars have to become a part of their lives — they will always be men of torment, outcasts, and barbarians.

  Dancers in the madman’s mime . . .

  You and I, Harker Lee, we pieces of Harker Lee. They can’t take the stars away from us. If we go home, we take the stars as part of us. They can’t ever put us back in ourself, let alone in our cage. Remember that, Godman, and remember the way home. . . .

  Cage of Darkness

  Me and My Shadow

  (Chapter 9 — The Final Chapter — of “The Secondhand Life of Harker Lee”)

  Schizophrenia is not something you catch, like the measles, nor is it something which happens to you, like a road accident. Schizoid is something that you are.

  What does being schizophrenic entail? It’s like being a doctor or a hero — you can’t just go out and be it, you have to have the qualifications. It’s not something that everybody can be. Maybe they could if they were shown the way, but let’s face it, it’s not something you could recommend to your friends. In any case, they aren’t shown the way. They’re shown an entirely different way, and not only shown it but forced into it at every conceivable juncture. It’s conditioned into them. The options are taken away from them. It’s not the option of being schizoid that I worry about — it’s the options that we don’t even know about.

  If you’re a beggar who makes his/her living by being maimed so that you present a particularly pitiful sight (and this is not hypothetical — you can find beggars like this on every advertising display and TV commercial in the world), then it probably makes perfect sense to you to cripple your children in the same way. In order for it to make sense, they hand you packaged vocabularies of motives and reasons. (That’s the worst — the very worst — side of the advertising strategies which are what we live by in these times. Not the capitalistic exploitation of products, but the packaging and selling of motives.) Schizophrenia is something that characterizes the ones who escape. It’s a blanket label; it’s not any one thing. The men who live out the terms of their natural life in Block C are the ultimate escapers. They’ve got away from the human condition. What a shame the human condition is a monopoly and there’s nowhere for them to run.

  You have no right to make cracks about TV commercials and advertising strategies when you write a spiel like that. What is it except a TV commercial in favor of the schizoid condition? You wouldn’t want to wish schizophrenia on anyone, now would you?

  But when you come right down to it, you see, you don’t really know. You wouldn’t wish it on the guy next door, but is that because you wouldn’t want to wish the viewpoint on him or because you wouldn’t want to bring down the wrath of the human condition upon his innocent head? You wouldn’t want to see him put away in Block C.

  Well, of course, that depends on who you live next door to. But you get the drift. In the final analysis, you just don’t know. The whole world’s out of step but Charlie, but what’s the answer? Should Charlie change step? Should the world? Should the whole damn kit and caboodle stop marching and walk sensibly? Does it really matter so much that everybody stays in step?

  But if you’re rational (well, you aren’t of course, ipso facto) you can’t even claim injustice. You can only claim that it doesn’t make sense. (And of course it doesn’t. Not to you. You’re mad. We’re not.)

  In the eyes of the social slot machine — our eyes — the schizo is a failure. He has failed to adjust to us. He has lost contact with his environment. He lacks appreciation of reality. It’s all his loss. We’re whole, not him. He’s the square peg, but we know the hole is round because we’re the social slot machine. (Do you have round slots?) Have you ever seen a square hole? Have you ever heard of a square hole? We know that nature abhors a vacuum (why did she make so much of it?) and especially a square vacuum. Absurd, no? Square holes are heresy. A sin against symmetry. We live in a radial universe, not a radical one.

  You can’t kick too hard, I mean, can you? You can’t blame us. It’s not our fault, dammit. I mean, the sun just happens to shine out of our arses, doesn’t it? We didn’t put it there, did we? You know it’s all your fault, and you get what you deserve (we call it what you need). Of course you don’t like it and you don’t accept it, and you don’t believe it. But then, you don’t believe anything, do you, poor faithless creatures? (How can you live without faith?) We believe.

  Passionately.

  Rationally.

  Naturally.

  We can’t believe that you can’t believe. Because we’re unable to believe in the inability to believe. Naturally. It’s only rational, you must agree. You have no passion; you’ve got to be wrong. That’s sabotage against humanity. You’re a traitor. A disgrace to the race. We feel such compassion for you.

  Madness is a measure of the discrepancy between you and us.

  Madness is a measure of the discrepancy between you and me.

  Me is a believer, a mask, a label plastered on your face by the social slot machine. Belief is the important component of it. Schizophrenia is a simple unit of distance, like the inch or the parsec. And that’s not a clever remark, that’s a literal statement of the truth. Schizophrenia is a unit of distance along a continuum — a dimension, if you like — that exists in a real space. It’s what lies between here and there, between you and me. Two schizophrenias would put me twice as far away. I’m not sure whether you’d be able to see me then. Perhaps I’d be too far away. Perhaps I’d be dead. But the important thing for all you wonderful people out there to remember is that you don’t know anything about space and distance. You haven’t begun to imagine.

  Here I am.

  There you are.

  I can see you and you can see me.

  But we only believe in me. We don’t think that you exist.

  I don’t believe in you.

  You don’t have to believe at all. Nobody’s forcing you.

  You don’t worry about that. You don’t have to.

  But I have a problem.

  And if I have a problem you have a problem, too. Problems drive people out of their minds. I want to drive you out of my mind. How do you feel?

  What’s so special about Harker Lee, who isn’t (I think we all agree) out of his mind? The person to ask is Jenny Segal. She’s the one who’s supposed to provide you with your copy of the answers. She’s the one who’s paid to understand. She’s the heroine who ventures alone and unafraid into the Hells and the Underworlds and the Purgatories and the Limbos (yea, even unto Tartarus) to search out the Draconian psychoses and to withstand the fiery breath of their non-sense and pierce their many-colored coats of steely armor with her golden sword of understanding and her lance of explanation. She’s the saint who has consecrated her life to chivalry and the quest for the grail of sanity.

  And she does understand. Within limits. Always within limits. (Who ever heard of understanding without limits?) The limits of her belief. Understanding is only really possible ou
tside the limits of belief, but we try. We don’t accept that last argument, of course. Not at all.

  We think you’re talking through your ass.

  We think you’re a nut.

  We don’t understand.

  And we’re damn well proud of it.

  How do you feel?

  This is what Jenny says:

  A schizophrenic is a pretender. He pretends to be what he is not, which is “real,” in the context of society’s belief. A schizophrenic suffers from a gap between his internal experience of himself and his external perception of the world only because he pretends to be what the world believes him to be (i.e., real) when he knows that he is not. The division is one of contexts. The self which exists in his own context of reality (which is unreal in the world-context) is one and the same as the self which is real in the world-context (but unreal in his own), but it appears to him to be different (and can seem so to the outside world also; hence the “split-personality” myth).

  All of this is simply not clear. It must be patched up. It must be made simple and easy to understand.

  But it’s not easy to understand. That’s the point. It’s because it’s not easy to understand that no one will even try. They have to find alternative explanations, “rational” accounts of why they don’t understand. That’s why they invented madness. It’s a cover-up.

  Then you must employ a cover-up, too. Use sleight-of-hand. Use some slick tricks and some fancy analogies. Jenny says schizophrenics pretend. So pretend. Pretend you can justify yourself. Pretend that there’s a justification possible and necessary.

  Can’t.

  Try.

  I quote:

  “Harker,” says Jenny, “you feel that the Harker Lee which the world sees (labels) is unreal. The world feels that the Harker Lee who feels that is ipso facto unreal, and a hallucination. There is a basic disagreement here. All other disagreements follow from that. The world will not recognize the point of view from which you consider Harker Lee to be real as a valid one, and vice versa. It is all too easy to lose sight of the fact that we are talking about one thing only; it seems so much easier to pretend there are two. If there are two, the problem is simple: Which one is real? But there is only one, and the problem is so much more complicated: Which context is real?

  “You deny the existence of emotions within yourself. This is not an observation, but stems from the initial dichotomy. You cannot accept the existence of emotions because you feel that they would be an attribute of the false version of yourself. If you attributed emotions to your real self, the world would deny their validity. It is simply safer to do without, to pretend they do not exist. This is the same strategy employed on both sides of the conflict to deal with the various points at issue. When in doubt, deny the existence. This is a strategy employed both by you and by the world.”

  Simple, really.

  It begins to make sense now that certain pronouns are employed in certain unusual ways in this document. Anyone who thought that was just an affectation take three demerits. The use of the pronouns is supposed to be conveying something. It’s a device for communication. Is it getting through?

  Is anything getting through?

  Now take the title of the autobiography. Secondhand? No, it’s not just a tricky title. It means that the life documented therein is derived from the world outside and is not implicit and original with Harker Lee. Anyone who thinks that he lives his life at first hand is sane. Anyone who thinks his life has been traded back and forth any number of times is crazier than I am and has my congratulations and my admiration.

  Some more things Jenny says about me, which may help just a little bit, give just that extra little bit of insight:

  Jenny says: “You play poker very well because it supports your conception of reality. Poker is you and not the false you that the world uses in its calculations. You win, partly because you are completely free from the error of belief in luck, partly because you are completely free from the error of belief in the absoluteness of the cards that you hold. When another man bets, he is either telling the truth about the value of his hand or lying about it. For you, there is no such distinction. For a sane man, a bluff is a lie; for you, bluff is reality, the way of life. The conditioning of society can only hinder a man when he enters the microcosm of a stud poker game. You have no such hindrance.”

  Jenny says: “You wear dark glasses to hide your eyes. It is a disguise you wear in argument and in all face-to-face relationships with others. The dark glasses hide the fact that the self which participates in such relationships is itself a disguise for a wholly different concept of Harker Lee. Your constant sarcasm is a similar redisguise. You disguise the intention of everything you say by making it all sound insincere. You can do this with both true and false statements because the difference is — to — you — quite irrelevant.”

  Jenny says: “You deliberately do what is not expected of you in order to emphasize the nonreality of the expectations which other people hold.”

  And Jenny says: “You can pass for sane. Especially in this day and age, when the deliberate and continual flouting of social expectations is itself a recognized and viable social strategy. You can make people accept you as a viable entity within society. You’re socially adjustable, from their point of view. They can fit you in. This gives you advantages not usually available to schizophrenics. You have a very strong personality, and you’re highly intelligent. In this day and age, when the world is so complicated that people actually expect not to understand, you awake less hostility and fear in others than you would have done at any other time in history. You can pass. And while you’re passing you can relate yourself to society in a way that few schizophrenics ever got the chance to. If only you hadn’t . . .”

  Yes, well, I did.

  There you go.

  A great opportunity wasted? That’s only the way Jenny sees it. One has to remember that Jenny, as a professional nutcracker, is very biased.

  But you’ve got to admit . . .

  Harker, this is you.

  How do you feel?

  Okay.

  You thank Jenny for what she has achieved. You would like to love Jenny for what she is and what she means to you. But you can’t. It’s a hard life.

  This is an addendum.

  You think you have a self and a body. The social slot machine states that body is self, that self is in body.

  You disagree.

  Your self is not in your body. Your self has no body. Your self is no-body.

  Your body is real in the world. It has no self; it has to be given one by the world. “I” am myself, not really a self, but an extension of body into self.

  Your self exists elsewhere, in a space in which schizophrenia is a unit of distance. That is all of space (multidimensional). Outer space (so called) is only tridimensional and is an excerpt from all-of-space.

  So?

  This is an appendix called Appendix One. I am going to leave it in my wastepaper basket, knowing that Major Chalk will come in and search it at the earliest possible opportunity, and knowing that he will not dare do anything except route this piece of paper to its proper place in my file — i.e., at the end of that most interesting and confusing of documents, the secondhand life of harker lee. I am very tempted to burn it in the grate and make Major Chalk go through the trouble of reconstituting every last word of it. I wish there was some way I could get it to the Kremlin so that he would have to go there to get it back, and perhaps get arrested, interrogated, and shot as a result. Let’s face it, they’d never believe him if he said he was only looking for an appendix to a crazy man’s autobiography. Appendix Two will probably be found flushed down the john. (That, by the way, is a lie — Appendix Two will be somewhere else entirely, but I know full well that now I’ve written it official procedure will force Major Chalk to check the drains.) How are you, Major Chalk? Keep smiling.


  Appendix One begins here.

  My passport had a photograph on the cover, and I thought that it might be useful to remind myself what I looked like, because I’m going on a long trip and I’m not sure the mirrors where I’m going will work. I reassured myself by showing the passport to the mirror.

  I’m writing this, by the way, just before I get blasted off into nowhere in titan. This particular appendix is concerned principally with advice to schizophrenics.

  I opened the passport to check that I was really who they said I was, and found that my name was most certainly Harker Lee, and that the description seemed to fit the photograph in most respects (except for height, which is really about an inch and a quarter, color, which is monotone gray, and no distinguishing marks, because there really is a most distinct white border. Please see to it, higher authority!)

  Everything is going to be all right.

  A matter of the utmost simplicity.

  That advice, now. The things you have to remember are these:

  All truth is conditional.

  That which is held to be true is that which is demonstrably true (i.e., that which can be perceived — not by you, by someone else agreeing with you — or that which can be proven by a process of unchallenged reason).

  All proof and perception is based on premises. Proof arises by the logical synthesis of ideas. Perception arises by the habitual synthesis of ideas. Both perception and proof are creative processes.

  If all flowers are alive, and if a rose is pink, then it follows logically that a daffodil is a plant. It is extremely important to grasp the principles which underlie this kind of argument, because they are in use constantly.

  It is equally true that if a cat has nine lives and if curiosity killed the cat, then curiosity is one of the most lethal agents known, and I advise you all not to trifle with it.

  The vital words in either of these logical constructions are all ifs. To say that a final conclusion is true because the premises are true is the error of commitment by belief. I should watch out for this one particularly, because we all make mistakes.