Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  How could he take such a bold step against a doctrine that had been in place since the fourteenth century? Surely, the impossibly difficult times dictated such a phenomenal political risk. But also the idea of the body, the fleshy corpus of the person, had by 1861 undergone a radical leavening, making it much easier for even a person so committed to freedom as Abraham Lincoln to hold the individual human being in such low regard. He not only could but had to sacrifice the soldier to the war, the person to the nation. We do not think of Lincoln as a failed dictator, striking out on his own and rewriting the law to suit his own rules. History sees him in just the opposite way. Lincoln stands in history as the great emancipator: interested less, perhaps, in individuals than in groups of individuals—slaves, for instance, or freemen, or Negroes—but nonetheless an emancipator.

  But he laid the groundwork for someone who stands so far from Lincoln, President George W. Bush, who in the course of holding so-called “enemy combatants” at the secret prison in Guantánamo, Cuba, dispensed with the writ of habeas corpus in a de facto way. But if Lincoln seemed to care more about something called “the nation” than the individuals who made up that nation, then Bush shared a good deal of that same attitude. Bush, too, seemed to care less about individuals, and much more passionately about classes of people: terrorists, enemy combatants, members of al-Qaeda, Islamofascists, evangelicals, neocons, and on and on. In some significant ways, with no real direct connection, of course, Lincoln paved the way for the behavior of that other war president, George W. Bush. Indeed, in several speeches about the alleged war on terror, Bush used Lincoln’s impulsive move as a precedent for his own actions during the war.

  Lincoln made it easier for Bush, because by attempting to suspend the writ, Lincoln just naturally acted on the assumption that the body, the flesh that constituted the person, no longer held the same kind of importance as it once did. And that gradual erosion has reached its peak, I believe, in our own period. While torture recognizes the existence of the body, at the same time it seriously denigrates its importance. Or at least it reduces the complexity of the person to one feeling—pain. Torture knows the human body only in that one intimate but singular way. And so the one who tortures—literally the one who “twists” or “torques”—turns the screws until he hears those magic sentences that will render his work worthwhile and, at the same time, grant the victim his or her freedom.

  Lincoln had the overwhelming experience of the Civil War, which focused the country’s collective attention on the human body—but on its utterly transitory nature. War simply cheapens life on both sides—enemy and ally. War, in general, rests on a fundamental irony—it requires able bodies but, at the same time, it must treat those bodies as utterly dispensable. The Army corps devolves into the Army corpse. People die, but the war must go on, to its ultimate conclusion—which in modern terms means something other than victory. This distorted logic usually goes by the name of sacrificing for one’s country, or, more commonly, patriotism; it sometimes, more elegantly, gets expressed in lines like “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” That’s of course Nathan Hale, just before his execution by the British, in 1776. History knows him as the ur-patriot—the executed ur-patriot.

  The Civil War in particular had at least as one of its goals the abolition of slavery. That is, in great part the states fought the war over a crucial issue: Would the country ever conceive of the Negro as a whole person? If we can see that human beings, their very beings, were fast fading in importance in this period, think then about blacks. For the most part, as we have seen, the country saw and treated them as something far less than human beings. Native Americans fared no better. By the time of the Civil War, the cavalry had either cleared out or wiped out a good majority of America’s indigenous peoples.

  The conclusion to the Civil War brought its own national—international—hero, a star who earned a fortune on the stage, William F. Cody. Cody became of course one of the most successful mass entertainers in history, with the stage name Buffalo Bill. Onstage, he re-created battles against the “Indians,” with the white folks always in triumph, guns and rifles always besting bows and arrows. For those who thought about it, Buffalo Bill gave audiences a taste of technology over the vernacular. Such a lesson was not lost on the usually acerbic journalist Russell Baker, who asks: “Is there a more relevant historical figure for a nation that marches off to a televised war promising the audience a spectacle of shock and awe?”24

  Again, Russell Baker, reviewing several books on Buffalo Bill, makes the point that some historians see “the Cody show as a metaphorical expression of the late-nineteenth-century American psyche, with its brutal urge to domesticate what white Americans saw as a hostile wilderness.”25 How can we talk about the disappearance of the human without talking about the absolute decimation of the American Indian? How can we talk about the disappearance of the human being without talking about the many ways that the country had for making the Negro disappear in the nineteenth century—as slaves, as so-called freemen, as runaways, as maroons? In the century before, remember, an African person got divided up, three-fifths of a Negro worth one whole white person.

  The eighteenth-century Lockean idea that, as citizens, we possess inalienable rights acquired through negotiating the social contract, gets expressed in that key founding document of the Republic, the Constitution, which gets implemented in the nineteenth century through an articulation of civil and legal rights. On one level, the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 60s represents a great failure of the imagination. If this nation had accepted Africans as human beings when we first brought them to this country in 1619, we would not have needed the civil rights movement. But now all of us—everyone, black and white—have been reduced to an articulation of a series of rights.

  A recent issue of The New York Review of Books carried an essay about torture, which the paper printed with no author’s name, but simply the byline Human Rights Watch.26 In an odd configuration, a worldwide rights group is writing about the denigration of incarcerated Iraqi prisoners in a prison named Abu Ghraib, and other prisoners confined by the United States military in the foothills of Cuba. How international and how vulgar that conglomerate of nations and peoples sounds. The essay devolves into rights and obligations contained in the Geneva Accords. It focuses on humane treatment, and turns on whether this country ever resorts to torture. Without anybody, or any body, present, we have now moved to a place in the modern world where we can have reasoned and intelligent discussions about the methods and aims and results of torture.

  Everything I have been arguing in this book about the waning of human essence, the draining away of the intrinsic meaning of the human being, came to the fore during those four agonizing years that Americans fought against each other in the backyards and on the farms and fields of what was then the discordant and not very tightly united collection of states. 27

  In this regard, we should count every person in uniform as the Unknown Soldier, both during the time that person is alive and in that person’s death. Serial numbers, standard haircuts, uniforms—all those things designed to erase a person’s personality contribute not just to the leveling of life in the military, but to life’s cheapening, as well. Notice that newspapers like The New York Times keep a daily tally of GI deaths in the war in Iraq. Americans took to the streets to protest the continuation of the war when the death toll reached three thousand. The country saw very few demonstrations when the number reached the next benchmark: four thousand United States military men and women dead. But why not a protest, even though it would take an inordinate amount of time, for each and every death? What if we did that for every Iraqi man, woman, and child who died in this years-long fiasco? The corpus easily settles into a corpse, and no one much notices anymore. Oh yes, there is grieving and mourning, but that has become so ritualized that the observing rules, the Ars Moriendi—the art of dying—are more significant than death itself.

  As the machine i
nvaded the medical world more and more aggressively over the years, it pushed death through a series of dizzying changes. By the time we reach the twentieth century, a person has great difficulty understanding death—or life, for that matter—at all. I want to end this chapter with two recent examples of that kind of strangeness. In the first, death occurs without the slightest trace of a body or a corpse. In this instance, death gets negotiated in a courthouse, and a judge must first establish the fact that the person actually lived. Once he establishes that fact, the judge must then immediately declare the living person legally and finally deceased: life and death in the same instant. Every bit of this is a figment of the legal imagination—and we not only believe in it all, but act on it, as well.

  In the second example, surgeons remove the heart from a human being for the duration of an operation, while the person, of course, is still alive. During that recess from his major and vital organ, the person considers himself dead. The doctors operating on him, of course, can hold no such idea, and consider him, while in a totally altered state, also totally alive. Once again, we see life and death occurring at the very same instant. In the context of contemporary medicine, an out-of-body experience means something radically different from any such version of that experience in the nineteenth century.

  I begin with the first example. In just one month’s time, Steve Fossett, a billionaire adventurer, went from somebody to no body. In just thirty days, Fossett’s sixty-three years of living got totally erased. Search parties could not find him; no one knew where (or how) he and the plane he was flying had so thoroughly disappeared without any trace whatsoever. This happens periodically: We read about someone lost in the woods. People search, but with no luck. And then the question arises: How long do we wait before we call off the search? That’s a question that really means, of course, How long do we wait before we declare the person dead? But Fossett’s disappearance—he was a man of some prominence and certainly of some wealth—added another level to the usual pattern.

  The only obituary to appear in The New York Times for February 16, 2008, announced the death of billionaire adventurer Steve Fossett. It described how he disappeared in September 2007 on what he called a two-hour pleasure flight from the Flying M Ranch in Nevada, in a single-engine two-seater plane elegantly named the Citabria Super Decathlon. He took off by himself for just a quick look-see of the surrounding desert and mountains, he told his friends, but he never returned.

  Fossett and his plane completely disappeared. Search parties, scouring the wild terrain around the California and Nevada border with both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, could find no trace of the wild man everyone knew as Steve Fossett. Family and friends finally had to conclude that the person they knew as buddy, as father, as husband, had met some untimely end. The search continued for weeks and weeks. No one could find him.

  So, in November of that same year, Fossett’s wife, Peggy, petitioned the court to have her husband declared dead. She needed to, for in order to settle their sizable estate, Peggy Fossett had to somehow establish her husband as officially and forever dead—as no more. And thus on February 15, 2008, Judge Jeffrey A. Malak of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Chicago, heard evidence from Peggy Fossett, as well as from the rescue workers, and reached a verdict. In a single sentence, Judge Malak killed off Steve Fossett forever by declaring him legally deceased, in the root sense of the word, meaning “to go away,” “to depart,” “to leave.”

  The judge asked no questions about Fossett’s description—how tall he was, how much he weighed. He did not need to know where he lived, or how old he was, how he behaved, or how he laughed. Judge Malak may not have been even able to identify Fossett in a lineup. His physical appearance mattered not at all. Fossett had become a legal issue, a problem that had to be solved.

  Even though no one had a corpse, even though everyone knew he could no longer possibly still be hanging on to life, the family needed to confront those two categories, life and death. And the only way they could do it was through legal dictum, in this case through a circuit court judge. That person, speaking through the office of the Illinois legal system, would have to make the crucial declaration. Notice that Judge Malak stands in a different relation to death. He, too, will of course someday die, but the office will continue: “The king is dead; long live the king.” Government officials enter death differently from the ordinary citizen.

  When there is no longer any person named Steve Fossett around—no embodiment of that personality, that is—when there is no longer any body around, the court provides the one officially sanctioned way to die in the twenty-first century. Reporters at the Washington Post debated about when to run the obituary, and also about where to run the notice. One reporter said that if the rescuers had in fact recovered the body, the Post could have run the news of Fossett’s death on the front page. But without a body, the editorial staff decided to relegate Fossett to page thirteen, along with the other dead souls. Here is an example of habeas corpus taken in its most literal sense. For us moderns, we must have the body, but it remains many times out of our grasp.

  In a logical but absurd extension of the professionalization of death as it first began to make itself felt during the Civil War, people undergo death today in such strange and outlandish ways that only writers, it seems, can capture their bizarre nuances. For instance, when Larry McMurtry underwent quadruple bypass surgery, he speculated on what had happened to his personality during the time the surgeon had removed his heart and placed him on a pump—a mechanical heart. He recounts his journey to the other side, or to the very edge of the other side, in a slim book titled Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond.

  Listen to McMurtry—not in his own words, really, but as you will see, as his own words. Notice, too, in this account, that surgeons can in great part perform their intricate, highly technical work on McMurtry because of a simple nineteenth-century invention, anesthesia:I was one person up until the morning of December 2, 1991, at which date I had quadruple bypass surgery. . . . When I woke up from the operation, after about twelve hours in deep anesthesia, I began—although I didn’t realize it immediately—my life as a different person—my life as someone else. I am still struggling, more or less, to reconcile the two histories, to go back to being who I once was, rather than the seriously altered person that I became.

  A mechanical contrivance, an H. G. Wells kind of contraption known as a heart-lung machine, interposes itself between McMurtry, the public persona, and that interiorized, tiny McMurtry—that quiet little recluse, the homunculus that is his “self”—responsible for guiding the entire sixty-year-old enterprise known as Larry McMurtry the Western writer. During the time the operation takes, there is no Larry McMurtry, only a facsimile, a shell on the operating table, ready to assume the personality of the old self. McMurtry reflects on such a condition in the most profound way: Does my personality after the operation exactly match my personality before the operation? Here is McMurtry again:In choosing the operation I did the correct, the intelligent thing, but it wasn’t the passionate thing, and I did it without conviction. I came out of it with a sense that we are now, indeed . . . able to leave our basic functions, for quite long stretches, to machines. The question is how long we can hand over these functions without, at the same time, relinquishing our personalities, and our spirits, too. The personality might slowly elide until it is no longer recognizable or regainable as itself; it may cease to be the personality that goes with a particular self.

  What happens next may be even more extraordinary. McMurtry, historian of every mote that ever swirled in a Texas dust devil, goes horror on us, as he slides into the passive voice and the past tense: A huge succubus has sucked out his very soul. “I think of the heart surgery now mostly in metaphors of editing,” he writes. A surgeon has revised his organs—appropriately, it seems, since McMurtry has constructed his sense of self out of an accumulation of texts. He has read his entire life, he has written his ent
ire life, and in recent years he has bought, collected, and sold hundreds of thousands of books—rare and otherwise. Suddenly, he finds himself constitutionally unable to read and unable to write. He picks up books, even familiar ones, and tries to read them but the words hook up to no external reality. He picks up his 2H pencil, but it’s just a dead stick—he can shake nothing out of it. Literacy has abandoned him, because his very being has been so much fabricated out of texts.

  As McMurtry “lost sight of himself,” as he puts it, literature, too, turned invisible. His self absconded with literature because, for him, they are one and the same. “The self that I had once been had lost its life”—a feeling that compels him to write, in a most ghoulish, walking-dead way, “The thing, more than any other, that convinced me I had in some sense died was that I couldn’t read. I went to my bookshops but could not connect with the books. . . . Reading was the stablest of all pleasures, and now it was gone.”

  Somehow, somewhere, someone had punched McMurtry’s delete button. For years and years, McMurtry, the man of letters, simply vanished. When he finally gets his love of books back, and it remains a mystery how it actually happens, the prod comes as a message from the other side. Practically four years to the day after his heart attack, McMurtry suddenly recalls a passage in The Sun Also Rises, the first edition, and he turns to that book on his shelf. It isn’t that his love of literature miraculously returns, but rather that a reassurance returns, born of something strikingly human—quirky, sloppy fallibility. Oddly enough, a mistake reconstitutes his love of letters—the thumbprint of mortality—what Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” of a work of art: “In the fourth year I recovered my interest in the rare-book trade, something that has been a fascination for most of my life. My memory for bibliographic minutiae returned. Once again, I could open a copy of The Sun Also Rises and turn automatically to page 181, where in the first issue, ‘stopped’ is spelled ‘stoppped.’”