No Ideas But in Things

I came late to the world of driving automobiles.  I grew up in New York, where it was a point of massive pride not to own one.  Of course, I drove other people’s cars in college, and never thought about getting a license.  Every now and then I’d hurtle down the Hutchinson Parkway in a rusted-out pink beetle with a broken 8-track that belonged to a girl named “Meat.”  But mostly I putted around safely in surrounding neighborhoods.

But when I moved to Louisiana in 1985 to take a job teaching Hamlet and Tacitus at a small Methodist college, I knew I needed my own wheels.  So having been tutored more tolerantly than I deserved by a young Russian graduate student, I got my license and ended up buying a Bicentennial Cutlass Supreme in Shreveport with a monster V8 engine and a Confederate flag decal on the rear window.

Over the years, as I’ve gotten older and stodgier, I’ve noticed myself getting angry from time to time at people who do stupid shit in their little metal rolling boxes.  You know who I mean: the people on their cell phones who forget there are other people on the road; the people who race down the highway shoulder and then push into the legal lane at the last minute; who don’t use their turn signal when it would be convenient for others to know What They Are Going to Do; who tailgate for no reason at all except to wave their member at you, allegorically speaking, like a college football pennant; and yes, the ones who sit passive-aggressively at the green light waiting to make a left turn and never move out into the intersection, until there’s only just time for them to make the turn when the light finally does turn red.

Understandably, I would devise deft little ways to wreak revenge on these turds.  But mostly they were in my mind and stayed there; my hypertrophied superego would keep me from returning fire.  I was a civilized person, an ethical person, an easygoing person – not an angry old man.

At one point my frustration with drivers grew to the point that it became a recurring subject of my weekly psychotherapy sessions.  Together my therapist and I would explore the various narratives that coursed through me in a split second while I raged outwardly against the thoughtlessness, narcissism and just plain knuckleheadedness of the American people.

I eventually came to understand (actually it took about three seconds) that I was taking their behavior “personally,” and that it was both illogical and self-destructive to do so.  Etcetera; etcetera.

This therapeutic paradigm of how to think about my interactions with shitty drivers held sway for a few years.  Every time other people drove like maniacs or imbeciles, I would try not to take it personally.  I would try to be at peace with it.  I would try to Zen it out.  Sometime I succeeded; I far more often failed.  But the therapeutic model had a lasting impact: guilt.  Every time I felt anger toward another driver, I would think: I have failed to be well-adjusted.  I have failed to live with compassion.  I have failed to evolve.  Guilt – at least I got something out of it.

Then one day a strumpet red Ford Focus turned a corner like it was the Batmobile, drove up to within a foot of my rear bumper and stayed there.  I was doing 35 in a 30 mile per hour zone.  I did not enjoy the driver’s behavior.  I did not approve of it.  And I took it personally.

So I hatched a plan.  I happened to know, since this was my turf,  that about a quarter-mile ahead there was a spot where cars would be parked on the right-hand side of the road – aka, the right-hand lane.  My nemesis was driving in the right-hand lane, and I in the left.  What he didn’t know was that he would be unable to stay in the right lane because of the parked cars.  And there was a line of about 15 cars behind me that would make it difficult for him to change lanes.  So I drove at a speed that would lure him into thinking he could pass me on the right, but then I sped up so that he couldn’t.  He met up with the parked cars, had to slam on the brakes, and was unable to get into the left lane for another minute, by which time I was long gone.

Petty, you say?  Absolutely.  But incredibly satisfying.  (Imagine me pumping my fist privately as I whizzed down the road.)  Things don’t always go as planned, and it’s really sweet when a plan comes together.  And yet, of course, elation was quickly followed, and swallowed, by guilt.  How could I do such a thing?  It was so unBuddhist.  So unevolved.  So childish.

As it happens, I’ve been making natural history documentaries for a few years now, and so I’ve spent a lot of time looking at animals.  It won’t surprise you to learn that there’s a lot of aggression in the animal world.  Some of it is over food, some over territory, a lot over mating rights.  Some of it, though, is … just because.  There’s no food, space or nooky at issue; there isn’t even a question of dominance within the group.  It’s just because … that’s one of the things animals do.  They wrestle, they compete.  They jockey for position.  I don’t know for sure that what animals do can be called “fun,” but let’s do it anyway:  They have fun; they play.

So as I was mulling over this fact, I suddenly stopped feeling guilty.  I realized that this primate’s long effort to keep from being upset by other drivers had been totally misguided.  Mutual aggression was natural; keeping the peace was not.  I had won a battle against another alpha, and I hadn’t had to shed a drop of blood to do it.  There was something primordially familiar about the feeling.  For a second there, it felt like my very chromosomes were cheering madly.

There’s no way out of it: Evolution carries a price tag. 

We’ve all seen the part of the movie where the hero finally has the villain dead to rights and in his sights and is on the verge of blowing him away because of the distasteful things he’s done.  The villain is egging him on, usually saying something like “Do it!  Do it!  Finish it!  You can’t, can you?  You don’t have what it takes!”  His partner is saying something like “Karl, don’t.  If you pull that trigger, that’s just what he wants.  Revenge doesn’t accomplish anything.  You’ll be no better than him.  Just give me the weapon, Karl.”

And Karl, a bead of righteous sweat glistening on his brow, face twisted in rage, does the right thing: he gives his partner the weapon and walks away.  Meanwhile, the villain screams in agony at not having gotten Karl to give in to his baser urges.

The moral of the story is: We all want to get back at those who have done wrong, especially when the wrong takes the shape of in-your-face aggression, whether it’s chopping up the co-eds or obnoxious tailgating.  But we need to bottle that impulse up.  Because, after all, where will it end?

We’re allowed to fantasize about revenge, but we’re not allowed to act it out.  Evolution carries a price tag.  Just ask the Eloi.

Now the wall between thought and action is a barrier close to the heart of modern psychotherapeutic man.  It’s fine to imagine raping and pillaging if you don’t actually put on your Attila the Hun hat and do some.  It’s acceptable to be shaking with rage if you don’t stuff Herbert in the wood-chipper.  The corollary to this is the oft-repeated chestnut that our inner feelings are immune from criticism.  We cannot be blamed, or indicted, for having a feeling, only for doing something.

This distinction has done a lot to save marriages, I’m sure, as husbands across the land say to their wives, “I didn’t say you looked like a 10-dollar whore; I said, I felt as though you looked like a 10-dollar whore.”

Oh boy.  The subjectivization of humanity.  It’s like playing freeze tag and having your foot on “base.”  You’re safe for the moment because you have created a space where the usual rules don’t apply – where you can’t be tagged.  Many modern marriages sink or swim depending on whether they can utilize this linguistic safe zone to keep conflicts from escalating into bare-fanged frenzy.

We do this kind of thing in order not to offend, in order to keep the peace, to stay married.  To dull the pain that comes when two actual people go to war.  It grows from the conviction that “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”  We are weak, we are vulnerable and sensitive.  Unprocessed exposure to other people is unbearable, especially those whom we have invested with some power over us by identifying them with a person important in our early lives, like a parent.  The rage we would feel at a spouse who told us what they really thought could only end in physical violence, or at the very least divorce.

That’s the implicit argument for “processed reality,” a softening of a person in order to accommodate the other’s fragility.  But this is at best only a finger in the dike, because its deeper effect is to erode mutual respect.   It devours our manhood and womanhood.  It eats a marriage like termites would, from the inside.

Prefacing our statements and actions with “I feel that” places an iron wall between us and reality.  It is pusillanimous of us.  It trivializes us all.  We become someone not to contend with.  If I am someone who believes your behavior is dishonorable, and I say, I feel you have behaved dishonorably, then I do not embody my mind, my character, my life.  I do not live in my life any longer.

“I feel” is a flabby version of “I think.”  All it means is: Don’t get mad at me for saying this.

A difference that relies entirely on the grammatical subordination of what should have been an independent clause is, as Mr. Spock might observe, really no difference at all.  It’s a trick, a con, at best a euphemism.

So I was back to square one.  I could no longer defend my thoughts and feelings as walled off from action and therefore insusceptible to ethical judgment.  If I wanted to cut off that car and send it tumbling into a ravine, I might as well do it.  Okay, this is an exaggeration, but you get the point.

Marcus Aurelius said we should live our lives as though in a glass house through whose walls everyone could see.  Everything we do should be something we wouldn’t mind others knowing about.  That alone is integrity.  I’d shift that somewhat to say that in many cases if we truly think something we should do it.  If we don’t, we are digging our spiritual grave.  I’m aware of the obvious moral exceptions.  But morality is a slippery fish, precisely because it is based on ideas.   We are not the idea we have of what we should be.  We never will be.  We are more than that.  Whatever we can conceive is smaller than what we are.

The idea of who we should be can, under certain limited circumstances, offer us a goal toward we can strive.  But far more often it is simply a whip whose effect (I won’t say purpose)  seems to be to keep us inauthentic.  We beat ourselves silly over the ways we fail to embody our ideals, but the truth is that we fail to understand the nature of ideals.  Ideals such as “I will make myself thin,” “I will write every day,” “I will be more environmentally responsible,” “I will be less loud,” etc., put all the focus on what our minds can create and not on the unyielding thusness of what is.  Think of the huge number of self-help books on the market.  The seminars.  The DVDs.  The web sites.  The Oprah segments.  There is a gigantic industry dedicated to the notion that we can change what we are and do so that they will conform better to an idea of what we should be and do.  Think of every person you’ve had a conversation with lately.  Think of how much time, money and effort are put into making our actual lives more similar to an idea we have of ourselves.  The person we want to be.  The person that, if we can just be him, will make us happy.  Maybe we even call this our “true” self.  But the very idea of a “true self” is just … an idea!  The actuality of who we are – that we barely know.  What we think we know most clearly about ourselves is how far we fall short of the idea.  The therapeutic paradigm guarantees that the thing we are the most intimate with is our failures.  But these are only failures when compared with our idea of success.  Without the duality, there is no failure.

Diaries used to be filled with accounts of things that happened.  Now they chronicle the history of our painful dissatisfaction with ourselves and our progress in reshaping our lives.  A significant shift.

For this reason, we are a nation of “cases.”  Each of us has his own “problem,” and it is our life’s work to solve it.  This rips us from the world, and the world from us.  It makes a healthy relationship with work impossible.  Like Stein’s Oakland, there is no there there.  There is only here, which is to say “not there.”

Integrity is the opposite of an ideas-based philosophy of living.  Integrity, as old-fashioned as it sounds, means that there is a wholeness of identity and action.  We are what we do.  To have integrity in this modern world is actually to be a kind of hero.  In past eras, it may not have been, but every age defines heroism differently, and ours requires a hero who rejects the pervasive gulf between thought and action.  To do so requires courage, because no one really wants to hear another’s truth.  No one wants someone to distinguish clearly between negotiable and non-negotiable opinions and be unwilling to preface the latter with the words “I feel.”  Because that forces us to behold a stark reality:  Some chasms there are no bridges for; some words can’t be taken back; some differences can’t be talked away; and as a result, we may have to be entirely alone in the world.

The truth is that we are alone in the world, and we’re not.  But to be not alone in the world, we must be alone in it.  Thus Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet:

But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are life-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of every sort, for since it preferred to take love life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.

The essay, as its name suggests, is the hound chasing the fox.  Montaigne, the father of essayists, writes, “I do not depict being, but rather passing.”  This piece, with all its ideas, depicts the movement from ideas to something else.  It is a kind of memory, which is to say a caress or hint of perfume from something absent.  All of me is still in that car, wanting to crush my opponent.  All of me is here at my desk, yearning for wholeness.