by C. P. Boyko
“Bad!”
“Uncomfortable?”
“Well yes, our fears aren’t necessarily bad, though they can make us uncomfortable, but that’s okay because our comfort zone is what? Everybody!”
“Comfortable!,” Margo and Brad shouted along with everyone else, but with a sarcasm that was detectable (or so they believed) only to each other.
“That’s why they call it a ‘comfort zone,’ folks,” Ethan deadpanned. “It’s comfortable. And our fears and our dislikes are signals of discomfort, but discomfort is useful, isn’t it. It shows us the limits of our comfortable zone. Like we said on day one: The mind can’t make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven—sorry, Milton. What you like is what you like, what you hate is what you hate. If you hate broccoli, and who here hates broccoli, show of hands? Yeah well, welcome to the club, ha ha. If you hate broccoli you don’t say to yourself: Gee, I sure wish I liked broccoli, then I could eat a lot of it!”
Brad murmured in his Ethan voice, “I sure wish I was gay, then I could have sex with all those beautiful men!”
“Okay,” Ethan was saying, “so the unconscious mind, which is made up of your dreams and your fears both, your unconscious mind is the master holding the leash. That’s why we never get far. Unless we let go and let our master lead the way, we’re only going to succeed in choking ourselves on that leash.”
He had them write down seven “definers,” or critical moments in their lives, then analyze whether they had acted as the dog or as the master. Had they run off incontinently towards what they thought they wanted, or had they pursued their true desires? Had they done what their intellect said they should, or that which their heart said they must?
This distinction was incoherent to Margo. Why should the two necessarily be at odds? Why couldn’t her conscious, rational decisions at least occasionally correspond to her unconscious wishes? In fact, wasn’t the process of decision-making, of thinking a matter through from every angle before acting, wasn’t this precisely the way the conscious part of the mind figured out what the unconscious mind, or the whole self, wanted? She put up her hand.
“Sorry Ethan, and everybody, but forgive me if I’m wrong here, but don’t you sometimes do exactly what you want to?”
“Sure. That’s what we mean by pursuing your true desire, Mar, acting with your true self.”
“But what I mean is, don’t you sometimes want to do just what you should do? Don’t you sometimes want to do what is right? Doesn’t your … dog sometimes go the same way as your master?”
“Can I answer that Ethan? Well Mar, the way I see it is last year for example I set this goal for myself? That I would make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars?” There were perfunctory murmurs of recognition; Lottie mentioned this figure almost every time she spoke. “Well I didn’t achieve it and I’ve been trying to figure out why. Now it occurs to me that one of my definers was this business deal I got involved in. I won’t go into the details,” she said, then went into the details. “Anyway the point is, and Ethan correct me if I’m wrong here, but wasn’t that my conscious mind choosing to get into that deal because I wanted it too badly? Wasn’t that my dog running off ahead of my master? Like, instead of letting two hundred and fifty thousand dollars happen, I was making it happen?”
“Excellent, Lottie.”
For not the first time that week, Margo felt like she was drowning in some invisible fluid. “But what if the deal had worked out?”
Ethan and Lottie stared at her blankly. She turned to Brad for support. He gave her a steady, compassionate look, as if she were some crazy but lovable aunt who should be placidly tolerated. She hated him at that moment.
Later, at lunch, however, he agreed with her. “It’s dumb, all right. Because if your unconscious desires are really unconscious, you can’t ever know what they are. You can say anything is your ‘true’ self. I came to this thing because I have a problem with commitment. Every time I meet a new girl, I think she’s the one I want to commit to. But which is the true me: the one that sleeps around, or the one that wants to settle down? Should I be trying harder to be happy with the girl I’m with, or should I be trying to find the person I’ll be happy with naturally, easily? Does settling down mean settling? Should I force myself to stay with a girl even after I get bored? Is that what love is? But then what if I meet someone new, someone—hypothetically speaking—intelligent, attractive, mature. Someone I can talk to. Should I just ignore her, pass her by? What if this is the woman I’m supposed to be with? But maybe I’m just fooling myself. Maybe this is just my way of wriggling out of the old relationship. But is it even possible to make yourself be happy with someone?”
Margo was disturbed by the intensity with which he asked these questions. This was not just rhetoric. He seemed to expect some answer. She felt as though he were petitioning her for advice, and did not like the implications. The word “mature” had stuck in her mind, and to combat the flattering possibility that he was flirting with her, she decided to take offense: He thought she was wise, knowing, experienced! He thought she was old!
“Oh, what the hell do I know?” she said. “I’ve never been happy, not really. Not for any length of time. Anyway, who wants to be happy? Have you met a happy person lately?”
“I don’t know. Ethan?”
“Exactly. Happy people are morons. Morons are happy. Anyway, forget all that hogwash about your true self. You don’t ever know how anything’s going to turn out. All you can do is think it over and then do what seems right. Do what you want.”
“But how do you know what you want?”
She looked at him. What did she want? How could she know? What test could she perform? Introspection was a myth; her consciousness, like her eye, could never be its own object. Her self—that dim, immeasurable, unlocatable, forever forward-facing, outward-looking self—could never know of what it was made. She could only judge her desires retrospectively: whatever course she finally took, that must ultimately be the one she had most wanted to take. Thus her behavior was an infallible record of her desires. It was, then, in other words, impossible to act contrary to her own wishes. For even to try quite conscientiously to do so was to make acting-contrary-to-her-own-wishes itself her wish! At that thought, she almost heaved a sob for all the pleasures she had denied herself, all the paths she had not taken, throughout her life—because had she taken them, they would have, by that very fact, been that which she had most desired. But no, that made no sense. Because, by the same logic, she must have desired the denials more than the acceptances.
What did she really want? If the only way she could assess her own feelings was by reviewing her actions, then no one could know her less than she did, because she, unlike others, had to rely on memory, on photographs and mirrors, to get glimpses of herself. And why should she feel such loyalty to a stranger? It didn’t matter at all. Life was a map without wrong turns. She could do whatever she wanted!
Agh, but what did she want? She couldn’t use her past as a guide, for even if she could detect there some pattern to follow, she would only be condemning herself to doing as she had always done. This would only prove Jim Bird’s tenet, that we cannot change ourselves.
“Whatever you do,” she blurted at last, with a smile she did not have to measure out in advance, “whatever you do, that’s what you want.”
Brad laughed. “But what to do?”
That evening after class she went up to her hotel room and called Bertie.
He didn’t answer. She realized with a start that he probably wasn’t home from the shop yet. This prosaic explanation seemed disproportionate to the momentousness of her act. She had finally broken down and called him—and he wasn’t even home. How was this possible?
Her voice was still on the answering machine. She did not leave a message.
FRIDAY.
The next night she was sitting at her assigned table in the banquet room, scrunching up her napkin and getting unobtrusively drunk, when John came ove
r and asked her to dance.
She had been in a good mood most of the day. She felt, as she supposed she always felt at the end of a seminar, that her life was going to be different from now on. This feeling was not attributable to anything Ethan or Jim Bird speaking through Ethan had said. Rather, two thoughts from her conversation with Brad the day before kept returning to her. The first was that whatever she did was what she wanted to do. The second was that she had never been happy.
And if you’ve never been happy, said her mind gloatingly, what makes you think you ever will be happy?
Okay. She would never be happy. She was incapable of it. This thought, curiously enough, made her feel quite content.
A placebo works because we expect it to work; that is, having swallowed it, we can stop fighting, or fleeing, or shrinking from the pain. Blake once said that, “He who binds to himself a Joy / Doth the winged life destroy”; and we could perhaps add, “He who thrusts from himself a Pain / Doth invite the same again.” Just as chasing after happiness is the surest way to lose it, running from unhappiness is the surest way to bring it on. Margo, by resigning herself to her unhappiness, no longer had to fight it.
And since she would never be happy, no matter what she did or who she was with, there was no reason not to go back to Bertie—with whom she was comfortable, and about whom the worst that could be said was that he loved her unconditionally, and would not object, would perhaps not even notice, if she gained twenty pounds eating strawberry ice cream and cuddling with him on the couch in front of the television.
She wallowed in the idea of herself as fat and lazy and hedonistic—and alternately in the idea of herself as fundamentally, inescapably miserable. That morning, she slept in, was late for class, slouched into the room with her hands in her pockets, mumbled an incoherent (and insincere) apology, did not raise her hand when she had questions or objections, took no care to smile with her teeth, and, in short, enjoyed hating herself thoroughly.
But then in the afternoon, as a feel-good valedictory activity, Ethan had them write compliments and stick them on one another’s backs. Margo’s equilibrium was disturbed first by the fact that she could find so many kind things to say. She had felt all week like an outsider, alone with her doubts and her criticisms and at odds with the group. She realized now that in many ways she felt only respect and admiration for her classmates. When she had first arrived on Sunday night she had, as if by default, been irritated by how sane and healthy, how effortlessly normal, everyone looked. By “normal” she did not mean happy, she realized, but something more like unconfused, coherent. Unlike herself, everyone here seemed to have figured out long ago the knack of being themselves. Like characters in a play, other people were incapable of acting out of character. They did not dither or second-guess themselves (or if they did, it was only characteristic of them). Now, however, five days later, she was more impressed by her classmates’ imperfections and uncertainties. Some of them, she had learned, were grappling with real problems. Louise was being tormented by an estranged teenage son; Carla was fighting for custody of her five-year-old daughter; Sonja was trying to balance motherhood, work, and an incipient romance, all without guilt; Shelly couldn’t get in an automobile again after an accident and had lost her job; John was trying to find a passion that could replace the career that he had been forcibly retired from. Margo felt that her own obscure, obsessive worries (what to do with her teeth!) were trivial next to theirs, and she found it easy to write heartfelt compliments for each of them.
She was even more disturbed by the comments that she received. Not because they were negative—they were all, if anything, embarrassingly positive—but because they were so consistent. The same adjectives and phrases kept reappearing. The composite image that they conjured up was, startlingly, of a woman not so very different from the one that Margo aspired to be: strong, outspoken, courageous, opinionated, independent …
But somehow this did not please her. Once, she and Bill and the daughters had been playing Adverbs, and Bill had done an impersonation of her. He had acted “Margo-ly” or “Mommily” by rubbing his hands together a lot and concluding all his sentences with a fruity “… I think.” It could not have been less vicious, but she was deeply offended by this caricature of her. She had not realized that she rubbed her hands together when she spoke or that she said “I think” more often than anyone else. These were mild, inoffensive mannerisms to be sure, and perhaps she should have embraced them; but once she was shown them they became conscious mannerisms—that is, affectations. Thereafter, whenever she caught herself rubbing her hands together, she felt that she was doing an impersonation of herself.
That afternoon, too, she felt ridiculous, as if she’d been praised for playing a part well—instead of just being herself.
She had already been asked by Brad to dance, and had said no. Feeling guilty, if also a little flattered, by his hangdog look, she had explained herself expansively.
“Dancing these days is all improv. You just get out there and do whatever you feel like, with or without a partner. But when I was young”—she pulled out this phrase with a defiant absence of irony—“we danced to a script. You had to learn the steps first, but at least you always knew what to do. And then you could perform. There’s no performance in this kind of dancing,” she said, gesturing with repugnance at the few people twitching and jerking solipsistically around the dance floor. “It’s either meditation or … showing off.”
So Brad had gone off and found someone else to dance with—a blonde girl from one of the other connect groups whom Margo had not noticed before. Watching them, she was flabbergasted by the extent of her bitterness. This was the archetypal story of her life; this was the hell she had created for herself: to be always looking in from the outside; to be always waiting in the wings of life, never to be onstage. She could of course change her mind, go and ask Brad for that dance. But she could not be the sort of person for whom that would be the natural choice. She could never be the sort of person who would have said yes in the first place. She saw her limits but now was no longer wallowing in them. She hated herself keenly, and hated all the world, which at that moment seemed to her to be made up entirely of dancers.
Now John was asking her to dance. It was a slow dance; she would not have to improvise. She was surprised at how strongly she wanted to say yes, just to spite Brad.
“I’m sorry, John,” she began, then stopped herself. She crumpled up her napkin and threw it into the middle of the table. “Will you hold that thought?”
She strode across the room. The vast banquet hall was a glittering ice cavern, and she skated across it. Though she might fall, she couldn’t hurt herself: she would only slide off whatever she collided with … She was drunk.
Jim Bird was talking to one of his connect group leaders, but she spoke anyway.
“I’m sorry to interrupt here, but Jim … well, shit—how would you like to dance?”
He looked up at her with confused eyes, a mouth unsure whether it should smile or not.
“I’m sorry,” he said at last, “but I don’t actually really dance.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said with dour self-pity. But by the time she had recrossed the room she was remembering her tone differently. That’s what I thought, she’d said—but joyously, almost triumphantly, as if she had scored a point against him.
I would, said Nietzsche, only believe in a God who knew how to dance.
She danced with John, then found Brad and danced with him. She drank some more and fussed with her napkin. She ate chocolate brownies. She shared a cigarette with Brad in a stairwell or a parking lot. She had a long conversation with Lottie. She discovered a new way to dance: she moved until she did something that felt silly, then repeated that movement methodically, rhythmically, and made it her own. In the bathroom she wiped off what remained of her lipstick and laughed at something someone said. She would die one day, she supposed. She still missed Bill. She loved her daughters; she had no
regrets. She liked herself, and wanted to change. She was happy, and she made a list of resolutions on her napkin and stuck it in her purse. Her ears were ringing. Brad shouted in the elevator. His breath was warm. Life was a piano, but the keys were out of order. She was paddling an iceberg. Healthy self, heal thyself. She laughed at the boyish reverence with which he took off all her clothes.
But she was only pretending.
SATURDAY.
The physicist Schrödinger (unlike Jim Bird, I do not think Nietzsche is the only show in town) once put forward the idea that consciousness only accompanies novelty. To the extent that an organism already knows how to do something, or has developed a routine of reflexes or habits to deal with a known situation, to that extent it is unconscious—as when we walk or drive down a familiar street without even being aware of our surroundings. Only when some new element, some differential, pops up, demanding to be dealt with in a new way, are we fully awake. The world around us fades from consciousness as we learn how to deal with it.
But not knowing how to deal with the world is, to say the least, distressing. Consciousness, then, is distressing. According to Schrödinger, the most aware individuals of all times, those who have formed and transformed the work of art which we call humanity, have always been those who have suffered most the pangs of inner discord. “Let this be a consolation to him who also suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been made.”
The basis of every ethical code, he goes on to say, is self-denial; there is always some “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” placed in opposition to our primitive will. Why should this be so? Isn’t it absurd that I am supposed to suppress my natural appetites, disown my true self, be different from what I really am?
But our “natural self”—what Jim Bird calls our “true self,” “living self,” or “underself”—is just the repertoire of instincts and habits we’ve inherited from our ancestors. And our conscious life is a continued fight against that unconscious self. As a species we are still developing; we march in the front line of generations. Thus every day of a person’s life represents a small bit of the evolution of our species. Granted, a single day of one’s life, or even any one life as a whole, is but a tiny blow of the chisel at the ever-unfinished statue. But the whole enormous evolution we have gone through in the past, it too has been brought about by a series of just such tiny chisel blows.