The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  After long hours of training for a walk, a moment comes when there are no more difficulties. It is at this moment that many have perished. But in this moment I am also not afraid.

  If an exercise resists me during rehearsal, and if it continues to do so a little more each day, to the point of becoming untenable, I prepare a substitute exercise—in case panic grabs me during a performance. I approach it slyly, surreptitiously. But I always want to persist, to feel the pride of conquering it. In spite of that, I sometimes give up the struggle. But I do so without any fear. I am never afraid on the wire. I am too busy.

  But you are afraid of something. I can hear it in your voice. What is it?

  Sometimes the sky grows dark around the wire, the wind rises, the cable gets cold, the audience becomes worried. At those moments I hear fear screaming at me.

  To imagine that one evening I will have to give up the wire, that I will have to say, “I was afraid, I met Holy Fear, it invaded me and sucked my blood”—I, the fragile walker of wires, the tiniest of men, will turn away to hide my tears—and yes, how afraid I am.

  On the ground I profess to know no fear, but I lie. I will confess, with self-mockery, to arachnophobia and cynophobia. Because I see fear as an absence of knowledge, it would be simple for me to conquer such silly terrors. “I am too busy these days,” I’ll say, “but when I decide it’s time to get rid of my aversion to animals with too many legs (or not enough legs—snakes are not my friends, either), I know exactly how to proceed.” I will read science reports, watch documentaries, visit the zoo. I will interview spider-wranglers (is there such a profession?) to discover how these creatures evolved, how they hunt, mate, sleep, and, most importantly, what frightens the hairy, scary beast. Then, like James Bond, I won’t have any problem having a tarantula dance a tarantella on my forearm.

  The Body Language of Fear

  The inner motion of fear is a thick book of old tricks that brims with almost invisible, almost silent improvisations—that’s why it cannot be anticipated. Those who let themselves be brushed by that trailing shadow see their linear path transformed into a vertical whirlpool that carries them, in slow motion, into an abyss of angst.

  The body language of fear is contagious. The body language of fear is devious. Before you feel it, strings are tied to your limbs. You are a puppet being made to dance. All spins and whirls, you never actually see the body of fear, only its shadow. The shadow of a doubt. It may glide behind you like a stealth hovercraft, tiptoe like a fox, or slither like a coral snake. If it runs out of deceptive moves, it will invent one on the spot.

  Atychiphobia, the fear of failure, often focuses on the physical. That type of fear will do anything to block your path. It is responsible for the hesitation that delays some free-soloing rock climbers hundreds of feet above the ground from grabbing a tiny handhold during a crux move; it is determined to prevent them from continuing their ascent.

  The Taste of Fear

  Yom asal, yom basal. The Arabic proverb is true to life: “One day honey, one day onion.” Honey is sweet and good, onion pungent and bitter. We taste both at once when our lips glue to the cup of fear.

  There are signs. The good, the sweet, is what happens when a thought makes us salivate in joyous anticipation. The bitterness could be the acid taste blending with adrenaline on our palate just before we throw up in panic. Combined, the two opposite elements form a displeasing mixture that is hard to identify because nothing tastes quite like it.

  The Music of Fear

  It is a mistake to expect the music of fear to be like the soundtrack of a bad horror movie, door creaking, bat wings flapping, and the backward whispers of ancient Greek. At times the song of fear resembles rattling laughter. At times fear speaks in a devious tongue that transmutes your entire being from ears to toes into a frozen sentence from an unknown dialect that no one understands.

  The music of fear is a deceptive blend. It may overlap a nice melody with a tune of an opposite style, an ice melody, like a radio stuck between two different channels. (For example, take a throbbing composition from Stephen Kent, the non-aboriginal master of the didgeridoo. Mix it with a musical opposite, say, Klaus Nomi performing his “The Cold Song.”) The irritating potpourri you hear is akin to the music of fear. The more you listen to it, the more it dulls your senses—think of the Pied Piper, think of the mermaids serenading Ulysses—it lures you to surrender your sanity. At that point, fear is often so close, it sings while leaning against you. Then it starts to walk away. And you, already deaf, follow its song. You follow its meandering path to your doom.

  The music of fear acts like the flute of a snake charmer I remember from Jamaa el-Fnaa square. From the first moment of fright when the lid of the wicker basket is removed and the cobra emerges, Marrakesh tourists are led to believe the snake’s undulations are produced by the melody. In fact, having been hit on the head by the flute so many times, the cobra follows the subtle movements of the musical wooden stick, not its notes. The snake is not dancing for you, but avoiding corporal punishment out of fear.

  How to resist being hypnotized by the central element in a portrait of fear; or for that matter, being swallowed by a larger-than-life moment of dread? Assemble weapons to destroy fear. Start by reacting to fright not by burying your head in the sand but by burying your mind in knowledge; then follow with specifics.

  How to Disrupt the Body Language of Fear

  Before my high-wire walk across the Seine to the second story of the Eiffel Tower, the seven-hundred-yard-long inclined cable looked so steep, the shadow of fear so real, I worried. Had there been an error in rigging calculations? No. I had just forgotten how high were my expectations, how mad I was to have conceived such a project. On the spot I vanquished my anxiety by imagining the best outcome: my victorious last step above a cheering crowd of 250,000.

  If imagination does not work, turn to the physical side of things. Give yourself a time-limit ultimatum: start counting! Yes, choose a number—not too high—and when you hear footsteps on your porch at 3 a.m., unfreeze your trepidation by whispering to yourself, “At ten, I open the door! One, two, three, four . . .”

  A clever tool in the arsenal to destroy fear: if a nightmare taps you on the shoulder, do not turn around immediately expecting to be scared. Pause and expect more, exaggerate. Be ready to be very afraid, to scream in terror. The more delirious your expectation, the safer you will be when you see that reality is much less horrifying than what you had envisioned. Now turn around. See? It was not that bad—and you’re already smiling.

  How to Eliminate the Taste of Fear

  Use your intuition as well as your tongue to test the air. Since the taste of fear is hard to recognize, as soon as you taste something odd, unknown, strange, spit it out without a single thought and step on it with the sole of your shoe and grind it into the ground—like people do with a cigarette. That will short-circuit the chemical process. Do not look at what you’ve done; just move on.

  Sometimes, to confuse us, fear transforms taste into odor. A smell by association can usher in anxiety and lead to phobia. Some people react drastically to the smell of fire; they think total destruction has already started. My brother dreaded the smell of garbage. He associated it with the kind of decomposition that invites final decay and death. He saw nonexistent rats gather, he heard them plot an invading plague, he smelled the annihilation of humanity. I pulled him into the nearest vegetable garden and served him a premeditated show-and-tell on a different kind of garbage, compost. I convinced him of the benefits of such a mixture and made its odor positive. I forced his mind to run off with a different association: the smell of rebirth, of growth, of the Garden of Eden. He is now cured.

  How to Silence the Music of Fear

  Never cover your ears. On the contrary, face the music and explore its layered construction. Sometimes you will recognize more than two musical pieces overlapping. No matter, note after note, extract the silences that fell inside the staves. Once the silences are
caught, walk away with them swiftly and peacefully. You’ve just rendered fear speechless by altering its voice. You’re done. You’re safe.

  One more weapon. When an inner howl assails me, the wild longing to flee an alarming situation, I counter the chorus of fear by amplifying it to the extreme. Distorted, it then exudes a single voice. The voice of courage, which I let scream at me because it makes me stronger.

  Lastly, the Ultimate Weapon of Fear Destruction, Valid for All of the Above

  When you’re about to shrink with fear, instead do what the peacocks (and many mammals) do: frighten fear by enlarging your silhouette. Blow yourself up—mentally—feel unbreakable, wear self-confidence like a rhinoceros its carapace, appear immortal. Deadly fear will immediately run away, its scythe between its legs.

  To fear in life is human. And difficult to avoid. And a rude awakening each time. If it seizes you, be proud of your fifteen minutes of fear. Like when you were about to jump from that ten-meter-tall high-diving platform and, well . . . had second thoughts. You forced yourself to go anyway—and it felt like suicide. You had the choice: disgrace or suicide. And, bravo, you chose suicide—your victory.

  To live in fear of what’s about to happen is for many people today—owing to our current political situation—a reality.

  But to live in fear, period, is a horror, a torture. You have forgotten fear was the culprit, and you have been obliterated, replaced by a shameful black hole, which breathes—or not—in your stead.

  This evening—outside, a murder of crows darkens the air with its flying formation, announcing the storm of the century, the end of the world—this evening, to live in fear will be my definition of death.

  Thomas Powers

  The Big Thing on His Mind

  from The New York Review of Books

  It would be a grave mistake for anyone trying to understand race in American history to overlook the novels of William Faulkner. Beneath their literary complexity can be found the clearest statement by anyone of the core abuse that has driven black/white conflict since slavery times, but first you have to pass a test. Faulkner’s French biographer, André Bleikasten, who devoted his life to understanding Faulkner, obviously passed the test himself, but it cannot have been easy for him. Bleikasten presents his readers with many examples of the test, but the one that seemed bluntest to me, impossible to mistake or ignore, emerges from an evening at Princeton in 1958 when Faulkner met J. Robert Oppenheimer. Both men were celebrated, Oppenheimer for building the first atomic bomb and Faulkner for writing the novels that won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949.

  Oppenheimer, when in the mood, could talk to just about anybody about anything, but Faulkner found conversation difficult with strangers; a bare yes or no was often all he could manage. Oppenheimer said he had recently seen a television play based on a Faulkner story and asked what Faulkner thought of television as a medium for the artist.

  “Television is for niggers,” said Faulkner.

  This is the test: Are you prepared to believe that the Faulkner who said that might also have something important to say about black/white conflict in American history? The test was probably easier for Bleikasten because he was French, because he studied the books before he studied the man, because he was interested in literature, not history or sociology, and because at the beginning of his life Bleikasten did not yet understand that for many white southerners nothing changed with the end of slavery except slavery.

  Bleikasten’s long devotion to Faulkner began with a happy accident. In July 1962 he was nearing thirty and needed a safely dead writer of important novels in English for his doctoral thesis. He was close to committing himself to D. H. Lawrence when Faulkner died after falling from a hard-to-control horse in Virginia. Bleikasten devoted most of the next forty-five years to Faulkner, beginning with the novels, which he treated exhaustively in a book called The Ink of Melancholy, first published in 1990 and now reissued. Friends asked, why not follow the novels with a biography? Bleikasten resisted. “There are five already,” he thought. “Why a sixth?” But then an editor at a small French publishing house “harried me gently for months until finally I gave in.”

  Bleikasten’s book on the novels took decades, the life about three years. It was published in France in 2007 and won three big prizes. By that time he was already mortally ill with cancer, and he died in 2009 before talk of an English translation had gone anywhere. His wife Aimee took on the task, which was completed by Miriam Watchorn with the help of Roger Little. The result in English is heavy in the hand but the book marches with narrative vigor, the result principally of Bleikasten’s clarity of thought. His points are never softened or simplified. Photographs capture Faulkner’s wary reticence, and Bleikasten gets the rest. In 1949, Faulkner told the critic Malcolm Cowley that he thought a bare-bones epitaph would be enough: “He made the books and he died.” Bleikasten puts the books first, too, but he sees things in them that the life helps make visible.

  The big facts of Faulkner’s life were place and time; he was born in Mississippi in 1897, when the eleven states of the old Confederacy were enacting anti-black Jim Crow laws to exclude African Americans from public life. The intent of the laws was reinforced by white mobs that brutally lynched blacks for real and imaginary crimes. They weren’t just hanged but were often tortured as well.

  Bleikasten notes that during one five-year period of Faulkner’s childhood, 1903–8, more than eighty African Americans were lynched in Mississippi, including one in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford. The victim was Nelse Patton, charged with murdering a white woman with a straight razor. A mob broke into the Oxford jail with the help of local boys, including Faulkner’s friend John Cullen, who were boosted through a window so they could unlock the door from inside. Patton was shot dead, castrated, attached to a car that dragged him through the streets of Oxford, and finally burned. Faulkner, who was eleven at the time and lived barely a hundred yards from the jail, wrote about the Patton lynching in two of his books, Light in August and Intruder in the Dust.

  The world of Faulkner’s childhood was obsessed with race. Faulkner was born lucky, since he was white, but his family held no great place in Oxford. A feckless farmer in Faulkner’s short story “Two Soldiers” is described as always behind; “He can’t get no further behind,” a son remarks. Faulkner’s father was like that. He failed in business repeatedly and was fired from his last job as comptroller at the University of Mississippi when he refused to contribute to local politicos. Faulkner’s grandfather had been a bigger man locally but was disgraced at the end of his life after he ran off with some Oxford town funds and “a beautiful octoroon.” The pride of the family was Faulkner’s great-grandfather, who had fought in the Civil War, built a railroad, and was shot dead in the streets of Oxford by a former partner. Just as remarkable was the great-grandfather’s huge popular success with a Civil War novel called The White Rose of Memphis, which prompted Faulkner at nine to say, “I want to be a writer like my great-grand-daddy.”

  The young Faulkner was a compulsive reader in childhood and did well in school but drifted out of college before getting a degree or knowing how to take the next step. He was short—five feet four by Bleikasten’s account—and awkward with girls. His two early loves, Estelle Oldham in Oxford and Helen Baird in New Orleans, both abandoned him for men who were better bets. But Estelle’s first marriage foundered, and she married Faulkner when he asked again. Faulkner told a friend, “They don’t think we’re gonna stick, but it is gonna stick.” Why he wanted to marry her is a mystery. Both were alcoholics and had nothing else in common. When a daughter was born in 1933 (after the death in infancy of a premature baby girl named Alabama), they quit having sex and tormented each other for the next thirty years.

  Bleikasten stresses the fact that Faulkner was a storyteller in both senses of the term. He loved writing complex stories of “the human heart in conflict with itself” (a phrase he used in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm in 1950), and he c
ompulsively embroidered the bare facts of his own prosaic life. Writing later about the months he lived in New Orleans in 1925, Faulkner claimed that he supported himself by

  working for a bootlegger. He had a launch that I would take down [Lake] Ponchartrain into the Gulf to an island where the rum, the green rum, would be brought up from Cuba and buried, and we would dig it up and bring it back to New Orleans . . . And I would get a hundred dollars a trip for that.

  Nothing about this story was true, but just as remarkable is where he told it—in an American lit class at West Point in April 1962, about two months before he died.

  Yet bigger lies were told about his eventless months with the Royal Canadian Air Force; after the war he limped from imaginary machine-gun wounds suffered, he claimed, in aerial duels over the fields of France. Faulkner was still in flight school when the war ended, was never sent to France, was never wounded in combat as he claimed, and never even took up a plane alone until years later. Whether he lied to woo girls, or because he was desperate for distinction, or for the simple fun of it is hard to say. But Bleikasten is blunt about Faulkner’s fabrications and writes that “he lied to his parents, his brothers, his friends, and later his son-in-law, his mistresses, his editors, his colleagues in Hollywood, and his doctors.”

  In time Faulkner told fewer tall tales and had the deeper pleasure of constructing elaborate fictions in prose. He seems to have been following the example of his friend Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans, whose mornings-only writing schedule in 1925 appealed to Faulkner. “You’ve got too much talent,” Anderson warned him. “You can do it too easy, in too many different ways. If you’re not careful, you’ll never write anything.”