by Steve Toltz
“You didn’t. How many times have I heard you say, ‘Fuck the system’? Well, that’s all I’m doing. Fucking it.”
Pity us, the children of rebels. Just like you, we have the right to rebel against our father’s ways, we too have anarchies and revolutions exploding in our hearts. But how do you rebel against rebellion? Does that mean turning back to conformity? That’s no good. If I did that, then one day my own son, in rebellion against me, would turn out to be my father.
Dad leaned forward as though about to confess a murder he was particularly proud of.
“Well, if you’re going out to put your soul on the open road, I’d like to give you a warning,” he said, his eyebrows arching unattractively. “Call it a road warning. I’m just not sure how to word it.”
Dad put his thinking face on. His breathing became shallow. He spun around and shushed the couple at the table behind us. Suddenly he proceeded with his warning.
“People always complain about having no shoes until they see a man with no feet, then they complain about not having an electric wheelchair. Why? What makes them automatically transfer themselves from one dull system to another, and why is free will utilized only on details and not on the broad outlines- not ‘Should I work?’ but ‘Where should I work?’ and not ‘Should I start a family?’ but ‘When should I start a family?’ Why is it we don’t suddenly swap countries so that everyone in France moves to Ethiopia and everyone in Ethiopia moves to Britain and everyone in Britain moves to the Caribbean and so on until we have finally shared the earth like we were supposed to and shed ourselves of our shameful, selfish, bloodthirsty, and fanatical loyalty to dirt? Why is free will wasted on a creature who has infinite choices but pretends there are only one or two?
“Listen. People are like knees that are hit with tiny rubber hammers. Nietzsche was a hammer. Schopenhauer was a hammer. Darwin was a hammer. I don’t want to be a hammer, because I know how the knees will react. It’s boring to know. I know because I know that people believe. People are proud of their beliefs. Their pride gives them away. It’s the pride of ownership. I’ve had mystical visions and found they were all so much noise. I saw visions I heard voices I smelled smells but I ignored them just as I will always ignore them. I ignore these mysteries because I saw them. I have seen more than most people, yet they believe and I do not. And why don’t I believe? Because there’s a process going on and I can see it.
“It happens when people see Death, which is all the time. They see Death but they perceive Light. They feel their own death and they call it God. This happens to me too. When I feel deep in my guts that there’s meaning in the world, or God, I know it is really Death, but because I don’t want to see Death in the daylight, the mind plots and says Listen up you won’t die don’t worry you are special you have meaning the world has meaning can’t you feel it? And I still see Death and feel him too. And my mind says Don’t think about death lalalala you will always be beautiful and special and you will never die nevernevernever haven’t you heard of the immortal soul well you have a really nice one. And I say Maybe and my mind says Look at that fucking sunset look at those fucking mountains look at that goddamn magnificent tree where else could that have come from but the hand of God that will cradle you forever and ever. And I start to believe in Profound Puddles. Who wouldn’t? That’s how it begins. But I doubt. And my mind says Don’t worry. You won’t die. Not in the long term. The essence of you will not perish, not the stuff worth keeping. One time I saw all the world from my bed, but I rejected it. Another time I saw a fire and in that fire I heard a voice telling me I would be spared. I rejected that too, because I know that all voices come from within. Nuclear energy is a waste of time. They should go about harnessing the power of the unconscious when it is in the act of denying Death. It is during the fiery Process that belief is produced, and if the fires are really hot they produce Certainty- Belief’s ugly son. To feel you know with all your heart Who made the universe, Who manages it, Who pays for it, et cetera, is in effect to disengage from it. The so-called religious, the so-called spiritualists, the groups that are quick to renounce the Western tradition of ‘soul-deadening consumerism’ and point out that comfort is death think it applies only to material possessions. But if comfort is death, then that should apply most profoundly to the mother of all comforts, certainty of belief- far cushier than a soft leather couch or an indoor Jacuzzi, and sure to kill an active spirit faster than an electric garage door opener. But the lure of certainty is difficult to resist, so you need one eye on the Process like me so that when I see the mystical visions of all the world and hear the half-whispered voices, I can reject them out of hand and resist the temptation to feel special and trust in my immortality, as I know it is only the handiwork of Death. So you see? God is the beautiful propaganda made in the fires of Man. And it’s OK to love God because you appreciate the artistry of his creation, but you don’t have to believe in a character because you’re impressed by the author. Death and Man, God’s coauthors, are the most prolific writers on the planet. Their output is prodigious. Man’s Unconscious and Inevitable Death have co-penned Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha, to name but a few. And that’s just the characters. They created heaven, hell, paradise, limbo, and purgatory. And that’s just the settings. And what more? Everything, maybe. This successful partnership has created everything in the world but the world itself, everything that exists except for what was originally here when we found it. You get it? Do you understand the Process? Read Becker! Read Rank! Read Fromm! They’ll tell you! Humans are unique in this world in that, as opposed to all other animals, they have developed a consciousness so advanced that it has one awful byproduct: they are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. This truth is so terrifying that from a very early age humans bury it deep in their unconscious, and this has turned people into red-blooded machines, fleshy factories that manufacture meaning. The meaning they feel becomes channeled into their immortality projects- such as their children, or their gods, or their artistic works, or their businesses, or their nations- that they believe will outlive them. And here’s the problem: people feel they need these beliefs in order to live but are unconsciously suicidal because of their beliefs. That’s why when a person sacrifices his life for a religious cause, he has chosen to die not for a god but in the service of an unconscious primal fear. So it is this fear that causes him to die of the very thing he is afraid of. You see? The irony of their immortality projects is that while they have been designed by the unconscious to fool the person into a sense of specialness and into a bid for everlasting life, the manner in which they fret about their immortality projects is the very thing that kills them. This is where you have to be careful. This is my warning to you. My road warning. The denial of death rushes people into an early grave, and if you are not careful, they will take you with them.”
Dad stiffened, and his tempestuous face sent me torrents of inexhaustible anxiety while waiting for me to say something complimentary and obedient. I stayed mute. Sometimes there’s nothing as snide as silence.
“So, what do you think?”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
His breathing got loud, as if he’d just run a couple of marathons with me on his back. In truth, his speech made an impression on my mind so deep, a surgeon could probably still make out the grooves. And not just because it planted a seed that would eventually make me distrust any feelings or ideas of my own that might be viewed as spiritual, but because there’s nothing more distressing or uncomfortable to look at than a philosopher who’s thought himself into a corner. And that was the night I first got a good, clear look at his corner, his terrible corner, his sad dead end, where Dad had inoculated himself against having anything mystical or religious ever happen to him, so that if God came down and boogied right in his face, he’d never allow himself to believe it. That was the night I understood he was not just a skeptic who doesn’t believe in a sixth sense, but he was the über-skeptic, who wouldn’t trust or believe i
n the other five either.
Suddenly he threw his napkin in my face and growled, “You know what? I wash my hands of you.”
“Don’t forget to use soap,” I said back.
I guess there’s nothing unusual about it- a father and son, two generations of men, growing apart. Still, I thought back to how it used to be when I was a kid, when he carried me on his shoulders to school, sometimes right into the classroom. He’d sit on the teacher’s desk with me balancing on his shoulders and ask the shocked kids, “Has anyone seen my son?” If you compare times like that with times like this, it just makes you sad.
The waiter came by. “Can I get you anything else?” he asked. Dad stabbed him with his eyes. The waiter backed away.
“Let’s go,” Dad snapped.
“Suits me.”
We pulled our coats off the chairs. A crowd of haunted eyes followed us to the door. We walked out into the cold night air. The eyes stayed in the restaurant, where it was warm.
I knew why he was upset. In his own paradoxically neglectful way, he’d always made a significant effort to try to mold me. This was the first night he saw clearly that I wanted nothing to do with his mold. He saw me spit inside it, and he took offense. The thing is, education was the first great battle of our relationship, our continuous duel, which is why he always vacillated between threatening the public school system with arson and abandoning me to it. By leaving school of my own volition, I had made a decision that he couldn’t. That’s why he gave me that speech: after all the confused and contradictory lectures Dad had bombarded me with over the years, on topics ranging from creation to gravy to purgatory to nipple rings, wherein he tried on ideas as if he were in a dressing room trying on shirts, he had finally let me hear the core idea on which his life was based.
What neither of us knew then, of course, was that we were on the verge of another scarcely credible sequence of disasters that could be traced back to single events. They say endings can be read in beginnings. Well, the beginning of this ending was my quitting school.
***
So why did I really quit? Because I always wound up sitting next to the kid with the baffling rash? Or because whenever I walked into class late, the teacher made a face as if he were defecating? Or was it simply the way every authority figure was so scandalized by my behavior all the time? No, on second thought, I quite liked that; one teacher’s veins throbbed in his neck: the height of comedy. Another one turned purple with rage: a zinger! Back then nothing was funnier to me than outrage, nothing got me feeling lighter or bouncier.
No, if I’m to be honest, all those irritations only stuck me in a grinding hell of dissatisfaction; no reason to walk away from that, that’s just regular unhappiness a person is lucky to have. My true motivation for quitting school began with all those pesky suicides.
Our school was pushed as far up against the eastern seaboard as possible without actually being in the water. We had to keep the classroom windows shut to avoid the distraction of the roaring sea below, but on summer days the stifling heat left us no choice but to open them, and the teacher’s voice could hardly compete with the crashing of the waves. The school buildings, a series of connected red brick blocks, were positioned high above the water, on the edge of the Cliffs of Despondency (“Cliffs of Despair” was already taken by a bleak cliff-face a few beaches around the headland). From the end of the school oval, treacherous paths led down to the beach. If you were disinclined to take the paths, if you were impatient or you didn’t want to brave the steep descent, or if you despised yourself and your life and saw no hope for a brighter future, you could always jump. Many did. Our school averaged one suicide every nine or ten months. Of course, youth suicide isn’t uncommon; young men and women have always been sneezing to their deaths from various influenzas of the soul. But there must have been some mythical hypnotic call drifting through those half-open classroom windows, because we really had more than our share of kids propelling themselves through the celestial gateway. Not that there’s anything unusual about teenagers calling it quits, as I said, but it’s the funerals that wear you down. Christ, I should know. Even now I still dream about one particular open casket, one that might not have happened if I hadn’t had to write an essay on Hamlet for my English class.
Hamlet’s Paralysis
by Jasper Dean
The story of Hamlet is an unambiguous warning of the dangers of indecision. Hamlet is a Danish prince who can’t decide whether he should avenge his father’s death, kill himself, not kill himself, etc., etc. You wouldn’t believe the way he goes on about it. Inevitably, this tedious behavior sends Hamlet mad, and by the end of the play everyone is dead, too bad for Shakespeare if he decided later he wanted to write a sequel. The brutal lesson of Hamlet’s indecision is one for all humanity, although if your uncle has murdered your father and married your mother, you might feel it is especially relevant.
Hamlet’s name is the same as his father who is also called Hamlet and who died unpleasantly when his brother poured poison in his ear. In his ear! Not nice. Clearly, sibling rivalry was what was rotten in the state of Denmark.
Later, when his dad’s ghost beckons Hamlet to follow him, Horatio advises against it in case the ghost tries driving Hamlet insane, which he does, and Horatio also notes that everybody looking down from an unprotected large height thinks about jumping to their death which made me think, Good, it’s not just me then.
In conclusion, Hamlet is about indecision. The truth is, indecisiveness affects us all, even if we are one of those people who have no trouble making decisions. In other words, impatient shits. We suffer too. Waiting for someone else to make a decision, for example, in a restaurant when the waiter is standing right there is among life’s greatest horrors, but we must learn patience. Tearing the menu out of your date’s hand and shouting “She’ll have the chicken” is no way to combat this affliction, and it certainly won’t get you sex.
That was it. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when my English teacher, Mr. White, failed me. What more could I have expected from him, or from any other of the sluggish educators who haunted that school? I can see them even now. One teacher looks like all his vital organs not only have been removed but are being held for a ransom he can’t afford to pay. Another looks like he entered a party two minutes after everyone left and can still hear their laughter tormenting him from down the street. One sits there defiantly, like a sole ant who refuses to carry a bread crumb. Some are as cheerful as despots, others as giddy as idiots.
Then there was Mr. White: he was the teacher with the small patch of gray hair that sat on his head like the ash of a cigarette, the one who often looked like he’d just glimpsed his future in a single-sex nursing home. But worse, he was the teacher with the son in our class. OK, you can’t plan for happiness in life, but you can take certain precautions against unhappiness, can’t you? At the beginning of every class, Mr. White had to do roll call. He had to call out his own son’s name. Can you imagine anything more ridiculous? A father knows whether his own son is in the room or not, surely.
“White,” he’d say.
“Here,” Brett would answer. What a farce.
Poor Brett!
Poor Mr. White!
How could either of them stand it, to have to suppress their intimacy to the extent where one pretends daily not even to recognize the face of his own kin? And when Mr. White growled at the students for their stupidity, how did Brett feel to be mauled by his own father like that? Was it a game to them? Was it real? During Mr. White’s tirades, Brett’s face was too emotionless, too frozen- I’d say he knew as well as we did that his father was a petty tyrant who treated us students as though we had deprived him of his vital years and, as revenge, predicted our future failings, then failed us to prove himself prophetic. Yes, Mr. White, you were unquestionably my favorite teacher. Your awfulness was the most comprehensible to me. You were the one visibly raging in pain, and shamelessly you did it in front of your own child.
He handed me back my Hamlet essay with a livid face. He actually gave me a mighty zero. With my essay, I’d made a joke of something that was sacred to him: William Shakespeare. Deep down, I knew that Hamlet was an extraordinary work, but when I’m ordered to complete a task, I find myself straining dumbly at the leash. Writing garbage was the form of my petty rebellion.
That night I made the mistake of showing the essay to my father. He read it squinting, grunting, nodding- basically, as if he were lifting heavy timber. I stood beside him, waiting for approval, I suppose. I didn’t get it. He handed it back to me and said, “I read something interesting today in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Did you know before the Egyptians embalmed their pharaoh, they took his brain out? Yet they expected him to reemerge later on down the centuries. What do you think they imagined he’d do there, without his brain?”
It had been a long time since my father had tried to educate me himself. To make up for abandoning me to a system he had nothing but contempt for, Dad routinely dumped piles of books in my room with little Post-it notes (“Read this!” or “This man is a motherfucking god!”) pasted onto the covers: Plato, Nietzsche, Cioran, Lawrence, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Novalis, Epictetus, Berkeley, Kant, Popper, Sartre, Rousseau, and so on. He seemed especially to favor any writer who was a pessimist, a nihilist, or a cynic, including Céline, Bernhard, and the ultimate pessimist-poet, James Thomson, with his darkly frightening “The City of Dreadful Night.”
“Where are the women?” I asked Dad. “Didn’t they think anything worth writing down?”