by Steven Sills
Chapter 20
Childhood Quiescence, and More of the Boy Drugged but Functioning
But I have digressed. My goal is not to discuss the battles that will happen but, from personal experience, the battles that were, even though conflicts past, present, and future, in elements of the self, the self as a whole, and all things greater at least in scope, albeit perhaps not in purpose (the smaller being more diffused than a grain of sand on the beach next to the latter but perhaps animals and human animals in particular having a unique consciousness that the universe lacks), seem part of the same war which, like sperm cells compelled into a marathon, are part of this natural coercion to cull and eliminate the weaker of competing alternatives of the smaller to form a more perfect nexus to the larger (the cells to tissue, tissue to the organ, the organs to the organism, man to society, society to the ecosystem, the world of ecosystems to a solar system, the solar system to the galaxy, it to the universe that is one organ, perhaps, in this malevolent entity called god). The real insignificance of our being would drive any sane man insane or to the allure of suicide if, foolishly, he were to contemplate it fully, and thus man, like all animals, preserves himself in prevarication, preforming all acts that will bolster and bring comforts to the self and to make the self feel immortal and purposeful. Indubitably, man like any creature has instincts or cellular reactions, vague cellular impressions—I am averse to use the word knowledge which implies words—awareness that has been his bequest from perhaps two million years of continual inheritance since the time of Australopithecus104; and of them is a sense that one cannot live alone away from society and that he must be interlinked with family, even though both are imperfect institutions and can easily lead to his detriment. Instinct, however, comes to us as a conditioned reflex of the best behavior for the best outcome, and thus they are not morality any more than casino owners are moral just because they happen to know the probabilities of various outcomes.
Whether made to feel as an immobile cockroach seated motionlessly, by his mandate, on my father’s stool, or without any warning, especially during nightly self-studies or when at work on the farm (sometimes observed by my father and other times, when he was employed elsewhere in construction projects, cowering unobserved in the clods of the field, inanimate as they were), I would experience petit mal seizures, or something of this nature, to which volition was snuffed out and in the vacuum all other familiar forms became figments of alterity, morphing from the real and palpable to representational abstractions as though images in a movie with no particular meaning and of little substance. Thus, I, an indentured servant of biology, stolen from my grandparents, was becoming used to the vile, the mean, and the discombobulated. And for over a decade, due to the diagnosis of a doctor at a local clinic which was never given a second opinion, I was declared an epileptic and given an overdose of cheap sedatives that allowed me to be even more docile to the captors, not that medication of Dilantin and Phenobarbital, prescribed widely at the time would have been much better (Caesar, presumably an adult at the time, gaining control of his rather intense epileptic fits by reclaiming his own mind105).
And, under the influence of these drugs, as I began to habitually forget where I placed my belongings, the sadistic games of the father and sister biumvirate (triumvirate if one were to include the doting mother, still fused and clinging to the child in a tug of war against growth and age that mutate and spoil all human dolls while despoiling them of their owner, who either from reasons of keeping solidified the materialistic marital bonds, indifference, or not knowing what to do, looked down or askance, no longer even occasionally asking them to stop their “put downs” of me) became worse. Scared to stand, to sit, to put on socks, trousers, and shirt, to part my hair, to be around them, to be scolded for going into my “cage” in my retreat from them, only the books I checked out from a library, that which Descartes said were an “interview with the noblest men of past ages, who have written them, and even a studied interview, in which are discovered to us only their choicest thoughts”106 saved me. Well, that and religion. Religious lies do save a person from suicide, something Russell107 and Dawkins108 neglect to mention.
And soon, I was relegated to the discomfiting realm of shadows by this queer conflated force, with a mother’s enjoyment of me, love that had burgeoned at my reappearance into her life steadily declining—a woman, also a material creature, not wishing to oppose the material basis of her existence provided to her by her husband. Still, for them, I was a dull and obedient shadow rather than an imbiber of experience and knowledge, and this was what they wanted to have. And yet, although there is no doubt that my animistic thought process was intensified by the tractability that occurs when under the influence of this combination of medicines, herbal and otherwise, I hardly regret the wish to save every insect caught in a window sill, or so many times sitting on a doorstep with a cat on my lap afraid to get up out of fear of disturbing the creature. Compassion, as both commiseration and gentleness, even if half-real in that which is to a large degree imagined, is wherewithal to appreciate the grandeur of life; and any time I resent so many years of my mental capabilities stymied by this force, I try to remember that as cleverness was sacked from me, the prowess for being humane was enhanced. In learning what Rousseau109 said about cleverness procured in linguistic faculties and ownership of property corrupting a man’s innocence and appreciation of all sentient creatures, this conviction is redoubled all the more.
In any case, scared to move or not move, to stand or sit, to talk and be sociable or totally reticent, intimidated in his guffaws and his enjoyment of getting me “riled” with all behavior, no matter what it was, to be excoriated, and with my sister a four star general in his wars of sadistic derision, I didn’t kill or even think of harming these two reprobates, and to a large degree that should be ascribed to the influence of the medication that without it could have brought me into the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno110, an inferno of compunction as painful as perennial flames. It is a reminder how impossible it is for us, mortal creatures, to know the good and bad of anything in this realm. What seems as the worst of all fates is often quite serendipitous.
Also, inevitably, the boy in the man, as when I take the vastly overcrowded canal boats to the center of Bangkok finding therein, not wanting, every imaginable deformity and each physically challenged person begging on and under pedestrian overpasses. Whether such visceral pain should exist at all when at best it only forces me, the witness, to drop coins in a cup and has no power to alter physical reality and provide redemption for the object, still this feeling, if I manage not to succumb to aversion, that anodyne of not consciously registering even when seeing, it is better than nature or the universe in the abstract which renders none at all. I may be a physical being struggling against other forces of life, with immune system a killing machine against bacteria and the entire organism consuming other animal and plant organisms it deems “food,” something that cannot claim itself a moral being, but I am not as vile as nature itself. There, within, is compassion for sentient beings, an antipathy for what nature does to others, and a sense that had fates been different I might have been what they are, but the first, if not all three, are found in all mammals and perhaps in all animals great and small, so it is hardly a human virtue. And as humans destroy the ecosystem for their own pleasures and fruition, it is doubtful that they are any more moral than the ichneumon wasp that lays eggs in a caterpillar with the larva hatching and devouring the host which they reside in or a fly in the Hawaiian islands that deposits her maggots into a cricket’s back ending its life in a similar fashion to that of the caterpillar.
Increasingly, I rode my bicycle to empty desolate spots—to bleachers of an empty fairground or an open meadow where the god of such sacrosanct trysts and assignations allowing peace of mind waited for me. And here, in the communion of deities unsubstantiated by the senses, for what little time she granted it,
I had freedom from maternal governance, and was in communion with a self-fabricated sense of being loved by Buddha. So, from what has not been repressed or forgotten in order to forge a forward looking being spilling into the future, I will tell my tale. I, no different than you, smell piles of burning leaves in my Bangkok surroundings that transport me through a time warp, most disconcertedly and contrary to all wishes to do so, of being a boy jumping in lush piles of leaves raked by my grandmother yet to be burnt. I too go to Thai desert shops to taste similar tasting comfort foods despite not wanting to think back onto the past at all. And a stodgy colleague acting like a grammar Nazi teacher, reminds me of my eighth grade teacher, Miss Privy Privia, when I finally got a scholarship to go to school, and of my father calling her up to reproach her for forcing me to stand with face toward the hangers of a coat rack—the past the present, and the present the future.
So as I force you by the hand leading you down the sidewalk of a life that you never chose to walk with, the worst thing I can do is morph into a canine defecating deliberately at your feet; and yet words are a form of defecation, so all I can do is just see that you are more entertained than sullied; and thankfully, as you are reading this philosophical treatise, proving that you are rather hard up for entertainment, entertained by so little, or are an intellectual voyeur gaining pleasure from such exhibitionists—yours, your kicks, a proclivity of intellectualizing life as trudging through another man’s filthy thoughts, which is as spiritual as life gets. Thus, I do not need to expend too much effort in that entertainment. All I need is to be myself, and this is what I offer to you, the best that I know it myself, a child who suffers in silence.