Psychology and Other Stories

by C. P. Boyko

  The same is true of the individual. At every step, on every day of our life, something of the shape that we possessed until then has to change, to be overcome, to be deleted and replaced by something new. The resistance of our primitive will—shouting, “Do what’s easy! Do what you’ve always done!”—is the resistance of the existing shape to the transforming chisel. For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time. Deciding what to be, becoming what we are, is a true continued self-conquering.

  *

  What the age-old debate over free will boils down to, it seems to me, is this: Can we sometimes do what is hard, or are we condemned to always do what is easy?

  The materialistic determinists, men like the famous philosopher who kindly wrote that introduction to James R. Bird’s book on Nietzsche, believe that we always do what’s easy. We are physical systems, and physical systems always follow the established routes. Clocks do not run backwards, water cannot run uphill, and a neuron firing in our brains can by no effort of its own pull itself up by its bootstraps and act counter to its habit. It does what it’s supposed to, what it has always done.

  I do not know much about the brain. I know that neuroscientists like to eulogize it as the most complex three pounds of physical matter known to exist in the universe—but always with the implication that it’s still just a lump of physical matter, that we are still just fancy machines. (As Nietzsche put it, “The living being is only a species of dead being.”)

  But it seems to me that the material determinists want to have it two ways. We are our brains, they tell us; and (therefore) we are in thrall to our brains.

  But if we are our brains, then we are not in thrall to our brains. You cannot point to one piece of our brains, one neuron among billions, and, noting how regularly and unimaginatively that piece behaves, thereby disprove unpredictability or imagination on the larger scale. It would be like pointing at my arm, which moves every time a certain pattern of electrical impulses reach it from my brain, and saying, “Your arm is not free to move or not move; therefore you are not free”—when I was the one, each time, who freely decided to move my arm in the first place. It would be like pointing at a soldier who always follows orders and concluding that the general has no power, or that the movements of the army are fatalistically determined.

  The patience of the bricklayer (as a poet once said) is assumed in the dream of the architect; the obedience of the soldier is assumed in the freedom of the army. We think with our whole brain, and we need our individual neurons to follow orders predictably and reliably so that we can call up ideas or memories or biases or vague feelings or pros and cons whenever we need them. But what the whole system is going to do with all of that material, what the universe in your skull is going to produce or conclude or decide after mixing all those things together for a while, is astronomically unpredictable. Our decisions, our free choices, are nothing if they are not the fruit of deliberate thought. The more that we need to think about something before we act, the more parts of ourselves brought into play in making a decision, the more chemicals that get put into the beaker—the less certain the result, and the freer our will becomes.

  I am the most complex three pounds of physical substance known in the universe? Okay. That sounds about right. That, to me, satisfies my requirements for a robust notion of a freely willing self. To me, a vast tumultuous physical system in disequilibrium but churning itself towards some unforeseeable state of temporary or relative stasis is a very good model of free will.

  Sometimes, it is true, one desire or drive or motive will be much stronger than the others; it will be no contest. But do we really want to say that I am (as the famous philosopher puts it) “doomed by determinacy” to leap into traffic and snatch up my child? Wouldn’t it be truer to say that I am acting in this situation with my full self, my true self? Maybe some decisions aren’t really decisions. Maybe a lot of the time we go around on autopilot. Often our choices are obvious. But often they are not. That is when, as Nietzsche says, our various semi-independent drives must fight it out for supremacy. Consciousness is a battleground. But what we must remember, if we are not willing to foredoom the outcome, is that in any large enough street brawl even the underdog can win.

  How does this happen? How does that one small part of ourselves whispering “No, do what’s difficult, do what’s right” ever emerge victorious? I think it is not through strength, but through perseverance.

  Not enough has been said about the width—or rather, I should say, the thinness—of free will. We only ever act in the moment. But most of the decisions we make in life—whether or not to have children, whether or not to change one’s career, whether or not to leave one’s spouse—are ongoing decisions, spanning weeks, months, or years. Even the deceptively simple decision to give up strawberry ice cream, for example, must be remade continually—basically, every day for the rest of your life. No matter how fiercely you ball up your fists, clench your teeth, and simply WILL, once and for all, with all your might, that so help you God you will never eat another spoonful of strawberry ice cream ever, it is not enough. It cannot be enough, because there is no once and for all. There is once, and then there are all the other onces.

  Here’s another way of saying it: There are no big chisel blows, only many, many tiny chisel blows. Carrying out a resolution is like memorizing a poem, or learning to play the piano. It cannot be done in one single burst of will.

  Once, many years ago, Margo was acting in a play. She came out of a wardrobe change, stood in the wings, and began to shiver violently. She was wearing a slinky, insubstantial evening dress, and the theater was cavernous and cold. Or perhaps she was nervous. In any case, she had about five minutes to get ahold of herself before her cue. When rubbing her arms and visualizing tropical climates didn’t work, she finally, in frustration, just willed herself to stop shaking. It was good that she had five minutes; she needed that much time.

  Her will at first did not have the slightest noticeable effect. She was not surprised: surely she could not decide not to be cold; it was an unconscious reflex, beyond her control! But she didn’t know what else to do, so she persisted. She tried to remember what her body felt like when it wasn’t shaking. She tried to focus on her breathing. No effect. She closed her eyes and moved her thoughts down into her twitching muscles. Stop that, she told herself. Be quiet. Calm down. Nothing. Unless … Maybe she felt something. Maybe her left arm had, for a moment, shaken a little less violently than the other? She concentrated on trying to reproduce the effect. That alone took a full minute; and a minute, if you have your eyes closed and are attending solely to what is going on inside your body, is a long time. It is also a very long time to be continually applying willpower. It is a lot more difficult to will gently but persistently for five minutes than it is to will in any number of isolated bursts, however ferocious.

  But it is the only way to make yourself stop shaking.

  Our momentary decisions are like one-night stands. They can lead to a lasting commitment—to a resolution—or they can be thrown out in the morning. One night, in other words, counts for almost nothing; it is what you do the next day, and the next day, and the next, that matters—and no one day matters more than any other.

  Margo, returning to her own room Saturday morning, found in her purse the napkin on which she had so cavalierly scribbled all those resolutions, and was disgusted with herself.

  Jim Bird likes to talk about the self as an iceberg. The small part floating above the water is your conscious, “striving” self; the large, invisible part below the waves is the unconscious, “living” self.

  Deceived by the apparent smallness of our “selves,” we mistakenly believe ourselves to be highly mobile. We think we can do anything, go anywhere. We have an idea, we dream of a goal, and all we have to do is put the plan into action! We paddle this way and that but, strangely, we never seem to reach our destinations, or even get much closer to them. This is because our lower, larger,
invisible selves are always, unbeknownst to us, being pushed around by hidden currents. Only our underself really knows where we’re headed, and it is sheer folly to fight it. At best, we will only wear ourselves out. At worst, we slow ourselves down, impede our own progress, or even deflect ourselves from our proper course.

  In other words, we can’t change ourselves and are foolish to try; but if we’re not careful we might do just that: We might deflect ourselves from our proper course.

  We can deflect ourselves from our course. It is not easy—we are paddling an iceberg!—but it can be done. And it requires, above all else, that we believe it can be done. Without that belief, we will never bother to pick up the paddle.

  I want to end this story on a positive note. Most readers find blatantly uplifting stories embarrassing, just as most people I know are too cynical about happiness to let themselves be happy. But to hell with it. I want to do something different.

  For what it’s worth, this is what I think: I think Jim Bird is wrong. I think we can change ourselves. I think who we are is, to some small but not negligible extent, our choice. I think, or want to think, that when Nietzsche said, “You will become what you are,” he did not mean that your character is predestined or already decided. I do not think he meant that you will always be the same. I think he meant that what you are tomorrow (what you will become) is dependent on what you do today (what you are). But what you do, what you choose, what you are today, that’s up to you.

  I’ll admit, it’s kind of a burden, this freedom. It means that you’re responsible (to some not negligible extent) for making the life that you want. It means that you’re the author of your own story—or, anyway, that you have at least a modicum of editorial input.

  And writing stories is not exactly a lot of fun. It’s tedious, laborious, and usually unrewarding. And the worst part of it is that you’re all alone. I mean, you have to decide everything for yourself! You have to decide what to write and how to write it. You have to decide what not to write. You have to decide what is good and what is bad. You have to create your own scale of values. You have to figure out what kind of story you want to hear and then you have to tell it. Nobody else is going to do it for you. You’re your own boss and your only employee. You’re the architect and the bricklayer. It’s all up to you.

  I’ll be honest: it’s not easy. In fact, I hate it.

  But then, as Emerson said, “Everything good is on the highway.”

  In other words: Do what’s hard. Do something different.

  PART IV

  SIGNAL TO NOISE

  Presently a nurse came downstairs and delivered him a message.

  “Miss Warren asks to be excused, Doctor. She wants to lie down. She wants to have dinner upstairs tonight.”

  The nurse hung on his response, half expecting him to imply that Miss Warren’s attitude was pathological.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  HE WAS SEDUCING ONE of his competitors’ wives when the deputy prodded him through the bars with a lawn dart. Instantly J. Jerome Singleton was on his feet, denying by his posture that he had ever been asleep. “Good,” he grumbled, “now maybe we can get some goddamn thing straightened out around here.” He smoothed the creases from his yellow sport coat, straightened his red tie, and dragged a comb back through his hair. He was appalled to discover that a fuzzy ruff had formed at the back of his head, as happened when he had been a few weeks without a haircut. His joints popped audibly; flashes of pain startled him, scurrying through his body like vermin through underbrush. I must be ill, he thought; I’m too young to feel this old. In fact, he was seventy.

  From some obscure principle of pride or self-preservation, he avoided looking around him or at the two men who escorted him down a hall and outside to a parking lot where a white van was idling in the blue glow of dawn. He did not remember where he was; and though his eyeglasses were in his breast pocket (his right arm was numb from lying on his side in an unnatural position to protect them), he did not, for some reason, put them on.

  The men jangled as they walked. Janitors or caretakers, he surmised: only the lowliest of employees carried keys or tools. Powerful men travelled light. He remembered a day in New York when he had lost his wallet, and how it hadn’t mattered: doors were still held open for him, bills were still signed. Of course they were. A man’s power comes not from any piece of paper, but flows forth from his status, his reputation, his very identity. The president of the railroad needs no ticket to ride.

  He patted his pockets now for his wallet, his glasses, his comb—tickets he probably would not need, but was nevertheless glad to have.

  Something about a train ride threatened to remind him of something—something unpleasant. Something about New York; something about Katy … Like a boy who swings his bat once, misses, and declares that baseball is for sissies, Singleton rummaged for the memory for exactly one second, then gave up.

  The janitors put him up front and sat on either side of him, handling him with ironic deference, like an expensive package that they resented having to deliver. Apparently they were intimidated by him, without knowing exactly who he was. They did not work for him, then. They must be the competition’s janitors. So he had been sent for.

  “Let’s get something goddamn straight,” said Singleton. “I’ve got no gripe with you two. You’re just doing your job. A man’s got to follow orders. Man who doesn’t follow orders—hell, I’m the first to see he gets thrown out on his ass, and forget the pension.” He did not like being between them like this; he liked to face the man he was talking to, liked to look him in the eye. “You boys doing your job, doing a good job. All right. I’ll tell your head honcho that myself. But,” he said, grasping about for something to criticize, something that would explain his irritation and unease. Just then the van hit a pothole in the road, giving him the impetus he needed; he went on, shaking his finger at each of them in turn, “It’s this goddamn approach that’s all goddamn wrong. Ain’t no way to do business. Waking a man in his—” He shied from that thought. “No class, no respect, no goddamn consideration,” he concluded.

  His escorts had been warned by the deputy that this little old man could be violent and was surprisingly tough. They therefore decided (with perhaps dubious psychology) that the best way to avoid provoking him was to avoid talking to him altogether. So, as they piloted him through the gauzy morning to their headquarters, they chatted instead about baseball stats.

  Luckily, Singleton was too puzzled to become properly offended. Like any good American, he followed the game religiously; indeed, he had once come very close to successfully buying a major league franchise. But he recognized none of the players’ names they mentioned. They must have been following the goddamn farm teams.

  Years later, the story as Douglas Singleton told it to himself was that his father had left them no choice; that, in the words of the commitment papers, he had become a danger to himself and to others; that he needed help.

  At the time, however, the story seemed to be less about his father than about the factory. The year-ends had come back and things were worse than they’d predicted. Brockmighton was threatening to pull out, and Douglas thought him capable of dumping his shares at a loss out of spite. If that happened, the bottom would fall out—that would be the end. Meanwhile, secretary number three had handed in her resignation for no good reason; that runt Patterson was inciting the union again for no good reason; and the sesame seed people had decided to jack up their prices, for absolutely no good reason—just because the old contract had expired; just because they could.

  And now, on top of everything, his father thought it was a good time to go mad. After fifteen years of yawning through board meetings and drooling harmlessly onto his blotter, J. Jerome had suddenly decided that he was the only man who could turn things around. He began coming to the factory on Fridays, hanging around the assembly lines, and placing mysterious long-distance phone calls from behind closed doors—through which his rapid, haranguing bellow
could nevertheless be heard. He was working on a plan, one of his big ideas. All Douglas had been able to discover was that it involved the purchase of one hundred and fifty thousand barrels of sheep dip.

  “Sheep dip?” asked Bennett, the factory’s lawyer. “What the hell’s he going to do with a hundred and fifty thousand barrels of sheep dip?”

  Because Singleton senior, who had founded Singular Soda Crackers forty years ago, had never technically resigned as president, Bennett knew that any deal he entered into with the sheep-dip people would probably be upheld in court. The lawyer had great respect for the law; and if the law was on Jerome Singleton’s side in this matter, he secretly felt that right and reason must be on his side too.

  “Who the hell knows what he’s going to do with it!,” Douglas screamed. “He’s out of his fucking mind!”

  Bennett said thoughtfully, “Of course, if that were really true, things might look a little different …” And he went on to describe, in the neutral tone of a professional offering a footnote of only professional interest, the view the law took of the mentally deranged.

  So it happened that Douglas visited a psychiatrist.

  “The thing you must, I think, keep in mind,” he began, “is that my father has always been a difficult man to get along with …”

  In that time and in that part of the world, it was possible to commit a person to a psychiatric institution without their permission—indeed, without their knowledge—if two family members and a psychiatrist could agree that commitment was desirable. Conveniently, the law did not stipulate that the psychiatrist must observe the allegedly deranged individual in person; and while a few guns-for-hire may have made a comfortable career of signing every commitment request sent their way by lawyer friends acting on behalf of rich clients, most psychiatrists, in that time and in that part of the world, were more scrupulous.