Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  ONE | What Is Life?

  TWO | When Death Died

  THREE | A Couple of Sarahs Later

  FOUR | No One’s Dead

  FIVE | There Is Only Life

  SIX | Coney Island and the Mind

  SEVEN | The Draculated Cat

  ENDNOTES

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Copyright Page

  For two dear friends,

  Lew Ellenhorn and Al Schwartz

  INTRODUCTION | Pictures at a Deposition

  God himself, who has disappeared . . . has left us his judgment that still hovers over us like the grin of the famous Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.

  —JEAN BAUDRILLARD, EXILES FROM DIALOGUE

  EDGAR ALLAN POE and Arthur Conan Doyle created two of history’s most memorable detectives: C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. Detectives so captured the imagination in the nineteenth century that writers borrowed the word sleuth, which originally referred to the dog that did all the nose work, the bloodhound, for that new superhuman, the detective. Those two nineteenth-century sleuths, Dupin and Holmes, came up with solutions for the most intricately plotted crimes—mostly acts of grisly murder. But the greatest crime of the century took place, over a period of time, right under their highly calibrated noses: the slow and deliberate disappearance of the human being.

  The clues were shockingly evident. At the very outset of the century, the scaffolding of religious belief that held human beings in their elevated position collapsed. People no longer knew who they were, or what they were. Over the course of the century, the idea of the human being changed radically, and took with it traditional human sensibilities. Science and philosophy tried to resuscitate the human being, but to no avail. And then, the rising corporations—oil and railroads—took charge of everyday life. Armies of professionals followed, defining our lives for us and telling us what would make us happy and healthy and handsome.

  This book examines the radical transformation of the matrices of living. The story of the resurrection of Christ redirected people’s attention in the most fundamental ways, collapsing the two extremes of birth and death through the power of theology and imagery—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. No longer could ordinary people imagine those two events in the same way. From its inception, the Church defined the human experience. Then, just after the middle of the nineteenth century, with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the Church lost its grip. And the human being underwent a new and radical redefinition, evident once again at the fundamental levels of birth and death. The coming of Christ gave way to the coming of science.

  In the end, the human being that history had known for so many centuries simply disappeared. Such a profound loss makes any horror not just possible, but plausible. It alone does not produce holocausts, but it makes thinkable and thereby doable wholesale human slaughter and extermination.

  Niall Ferguson opens his book The War of the World by pointing out that the “hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in modern history.” But the victims, in particular eleven million Jews and Romani and homosexual men in Germany and Eastern Europe, whom the Nazis reduced to mere numbers in the wholesale and systematic operation of death called the “Final Solution,” died, for the most part, out of sight. What remains are various Holocaust museums, an assortment of documentary photographs, relics, and a raft of films. Periodically, the names and stories of actual victims or survivors will surface in the news. For a brief moment or two, the general public will applaud their fortitude and even their heroism. Elie Wiesel will periodically step forward to receive another award, while a few nuts hang in the back screaming that the Holocaust was a hoax. But what persists, above all else, is a number: eleven million. As a stand-in for monumental horror, the world focuses on that staggering number, eleven million. It has become a catchword—shorthand for the attempted extermination of an entire people.

  In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, human beings do not die. The Nazis did not see humans when they looked at Jews, but rather vermin and cockroaches. They saw a multitude of pests in desperate need of wholesale extermination. Following that same tradition, in the more recent past, we read of entire villages of Vietnamese “pacified”; Tutsis and Serbs “ethnically cleansed”; men, women, and the youngest of children in Darfur and Chad “lost to religious strife.” On September 11, 2001, Muslim extremists flew their airplanes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, their intense hatred of those symbols of American might forcing them to convert the human beings inside the buildings into mere incidental objects—into poor and benighted “capitalist dupes.” We read about entire Iraqi neighborhoods of insurgents “eliminated with all deliberate speed,” and of suspected al-Qaeda members whisked off in the middle of the night in black helicopters to destinations unknown, in a program with a name intended to hide its brutality and terrifying finality: “extreme rendition.”

  In that shadow world—and the word shadow runs through this entire book—death leaves its mark through body counts, body bags, collateral damage, friendly fire, fragging, benchmark numbers—and, most recently, through the rising scores on video games with names like Operation Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom. How did we arrive at a state of affairs so catastrophic that fathers, sons, husbands, wives, daughters, lovers, and friends—the rag and bone of human existence—could have collapsed so conclusively into images, pixels, ciphers, ghosts, gross numbers, into the palatable euphemisms of death? Why does virtually every loss of human life now resemble that frightening model of anonymity from the inner city, the drive-by random assassination, where, once again, victims do not die but get “dusted,” “wasted,” “popped,” or “blown away,” and nobody is responsible? Under every hoodie, we have begun to believe, lurks a hoodlum: a case of our own fear turning us into racial profilers at the level of the street.

  We walk our neighborhoods unarmed, most of us, but still feeling trigger-happy. We drive the streets feeling somewhat safe, but still shaking in our shoes. Ghosts haunt us in the airport and at the supermarket; they stalk us on the sidewalks and in the shadows. Just past the edges of our well-tended lawns, a clash of civilizations, a war of terror, rages endlessly. We live in fear, and come alive in anger. How did we lose our substance and our identities so immaculately? Where have all the human beings gone? In short, when did we stop caring?

  A good many historians say that most of the world, and especially Americans, move through history suffering from a case of “historical amnesia.” People too easily forget the last disaster and lose track of the last atrocity. But we do not forget because of some bout of amnesia—because of some blow on the head or because of too much alcohol. Something deeper and more radical eats away at us. In a sense, we have been programmed to experience “amnesia.” Despite the insistence from Freud that the pleasure principle drives people’s behavior, everything around us encourages turning aside from tragedy to just have a good time.

  Some critics argue, Well, the numbers are just too overwhelming, the scale just too huge, for anyone to even begin to feel the pain and shock of death. Forty thousand die in a mudslide in Central America, another sixty thousand in a tsunami in Indonesia, perhaps one million or more in Darfur, and tens of millions of human beings from AIDS worldwide. I say the numbers matter little. Something more basic shapes today’s attitude toward such a ghostly way of dying. Beneath those euphemisms of death lies a grim reality; but to really see it, we first have to hold in our minds the concept of the human being as something vital and crucial. Human beings first have to come fully alive for us, before we can consider
them dead. (In order to truly fall asleep, we must first come fully awake.) And, for a great many people, living seems just too confusing, too remote, or, worse yet, too difficult. The “isness” of being eludes us. A life is easy to come by, but living seems to remain just out of reach. We owe this strange state of affairs to a legacy we inherited from the nineteenth century.

  Something new started in the nineteenth century: For the first time, people “had” lives. Which meant that they were in possession of an entity that one professional or agency or corporation could then manage and direct. Life existed as a concept outside of being alive, or simply living. One could objectify “life,” analyze it, make plans for its improvement. One could even redirect its course and redefine its goals.

  President George Bush marked the first anniversary of his inauguration, on January 20, 2006, by reinforcing a national holiday called the National Sanctity of Human Life Day. (Note: It is only human life here that we celebrate; other animals can agitate for their own special day). The proclamation reads, in part, that on this day “we underscore our commitment to building a culture of life where all individuals are welcomed in life and protected in law.” If that sentence makes any sense at all, and I am not convinced that it does, then the sentiment sounds like something churned out by an ad agency announcing the arrival of the latest model car, one that comes complete with a lifetime guarantee. But as odd and bizarre as the proclamation sounds, it describes our current condition, where phrases like a culture of life and welcomed in life look like they might refer to something significant, or describe some actual reality, but on closer inspection point to nothing at all.

  In 2008, after two years into its movement for sanctity, the White House made slight changes to the proclamation: “On National Sanctity of Human Life Day and throughout the year, we help strengthen the culture of life in America and work for the day when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law.” The White House, in order to display its much larger ambitions, had added “and throughout the year.” No more one-day sanctity for this administration. The White House also replaced the phrase “building a culture of life” with the more realistic “work for the day when . . . ” (President Bush may have found it hard to talk about building a sanctity of life after so many years of killing civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.) And finally, whereas the 2006 proclamation made reference to “all individuals,” two years later the president had lowered his sights to focus instead on “every child.”

  Perhaps abortion activists on both sides feel free to argue the question, “When does human life begin?” because we are so unsure, these days, of what or who is human, and what or who is alive. A great many of us, I would argue, have a difficult time knowing what it feels like to be alive. The minute we get out of bed in the morning, we confront a barrage of advertisers and professionals just waiting to sell something to us, prescribe something to us, and repeat some durable commercial mantra in our ears. To ask the question, “When does life begin?” lays bare a conception of life as something mechanistic, a process that supposes a millisecond when a switch gets thrown and that certain something called a “life” begins. Ironically, under those artificial conditions, people acquire a life from which, inevitably, all living has been drained. In the eyes of the commercial and professional world, we walk about as nothing but bipeds fitted with monstrous and greedy appetites. Who can satisfy us? No one, it seems, even though many keep us enticed and tantalized and fully distracted. But, again as the advertisers instruct, we must keep on trying; we must keep on buying and consuming.

  We pay a stiff price for the erosion of human essence. Today’s wholesale torture and killing almost everywhere we look has been made easier because of the erosion of human sensibilities in the nineteenth century. Although no one talks about this, when members of the CIA torture prisoners, they no longer torture actual human beings. A radical shift in the nature of the human being, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, emptied ordinary people of their philosophical and psychic essence; and in the end made this task much easier. I locate this shift, in great part, in the collapse of the Great Chain of Being and the subsequent birth of evolutionary theory. I also point to other eroding factors, like the rise of the machine and the explosion of a capital economy. I give a name to this peculiar phenomenon of loss: the disappearance of the human being.

  Loss at such a basic level produces a disregard not just for other human beings, it appears, but for all living things. According to the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, by the twenty-first century’s end half of all species could vanish, resulting in what he calls the Eremozoic age—an age of hermetic loneliness. One way that we might begin to reverse such an unthinkably dangerous and tragic course is by understanding the disintegration of the human being—disembodying in its broadest sense—that began in the nineteenth century. In its power to shatter traditional meaning at the most basic level, the nineteenth century marks the beginning of the modern condition and carries the seeds for the consciousness associated with postmodernism.

  As people began to lose the certainty of their own sentience, nineteenth-century philosophers, artists, and the new social scientists took as their task the recalculation of what it meant to be a human being. Professionals in the emerging academic disciplines and in the laboratory sciences tried to define the basic qualities of humanness, to locate the core of human essence. It is hard to talk about the nature of experimentation because so much of the modern apparatus of science comes into being just at this time. Even the word we take so much for granted, scientist, to refer to the person and the concept, does not enter the English language until about 1840; and even then the examples intrigue and baffle. This citation from Blackwood’s Magazine, for instance, gives one pause: “Leonardo was mentally a seeker after truth—a scientist; Coreggio was an assertor of truth—an artist.” A difference in manner or attitude or style, it seems, is enough to separate the artist from the true scientist.

  As I hope to show in the following chapters, the close connection between science and art makes sense. The human body, in all its forms and permutations, states of aliveness and shades of decay, took on the same kind of fascination for various kinds of emerging scientists as it did for poets and writers. London physicians began dissecting cadavers, many times before large audiences, and pursued their slicing and chopping at such a furious pace that members of a new underground profession, grave robbers, came to their aid. Under the spell of the late Luigi Galvani, the Italian physicist, doctors all over Europe and in America tried their skill at reanimating the recently dead. Parisian high society gathered at a newly opened institution, the morgue, for extended evenings of gawking, gossiping, and sipping wine and champagne. Americans ate their summer dinners on the great green lawns of cemeteries in the 1830s.

  Effigies, mannequins, automatons, wax models, talking dolls—the ordinary person grew hungry to gaze at the human in all of its disembodied, lifeless forms, and to render it in all its horrendous beauty on canvases and on the pages of novels and poems. Madame Tussaud, who thought of herself as an entrepreneur and artist, showed two lavish and detailed examples, fashioned in perfect detail out of wax, of the period’s iconic image “The Sleeping Beauty.” (Were we all just waiting for the right kiss, to be aroused from our slumbers?) People began to view the body as something detached and clinical, as something removed from themselves. They went to operating theaters to look at flesh investigated, probed, poked, and sketched. The body, like life itself, turned into something that people “had.”

  As the human being disappeared, ghosts and shades began taking their place; and they mouthed off—making their presence known with shouts and murmurs, screams and curious clatterings and bangings, from this side and from the beyond. Fictional characters, too, filled the pages as shape-shifters. Some characters made their presence known as invisible beings. Others walked the city in their sleep or in their half-awake state, while still others prowled under the influence of the full moon. They hovered, l
ike Christ on the cross, off the ground, neither fully on earth nor yet in heaven, pulled between this world and the one beyond. Characters fell into comas and trances and drifted into a special nineteenth-century state called “suspended animation.” Real people succumbed to hypnotic suggestions; others fell into deep trances. And in the world of fiction, still others moved about as specters, poltergeists, zombies, shadows, and doppelgängers. They lived in coffins, loved in graveyards, and, most powerfully, took up residence in the popular imagination.

  Edgar Allan Poe embraced every last weird creature—those barely half-alive, those trying to come to life, and those fully disembodied. For him, every house was haunted; every soul was tainted. Each of his stories seemed to explore with a kind of otherworldly delight some paranormal part of the age. Poe rose to worldwide prominence as the poet of death and the macabre. Only America, in the darkest part of the nineteenth century, could have produced such a writer.

  To see his spirit up close, I mention only one story here, the satirical “The Man That Was Used Up: A Tale of the Late Bugaboo and Kickapoo Campaign,” which Poe published in 1839. In it, he recounts the story of a rather stout military commander, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, who gets torn almost completely apart by battle. On meeting with the unnamed narrator, Smith reconstructs himself, part by part and limb by limb, ending with eyes, ears, toes, teeth, and tongue, until he stands before the narrator, Poe tells the reader with piercing irony, “whole.” (The general’s character resembles that ambulating machine from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R., a creature so strange and so foreign that Čapek had to coin a new word to describe it, a robot.)

  Poe published that story before he reached thirty years of age; but he was prescient. The traditional notion of the human being got used up. It was a thrilling, liberating idea—anything was possible—and, at the same time, a hopelessly depressing one. What would people finally become? Who were they? How could they be reconstituted? More important, what would finally become of each one of us, the heirs to that nineteenth-century seismic shift? Could we find someone to put all our Humpty Dumpty pieces back together again?