Autopsy on a dream
Reflections and recollections on the discovery you're not going to reach the stars or even the moon
0. You’re standing at the bus stop as the bus comes, looking for your bus pass. You search pockets and wallet compartments with frustration. At a particular moment, this frustration flips into something else. Previously you wondered how long it would take you to find it, and how much of a fool you must look flailing around for it, but as of that instant, the nature of your problems transforms. You now know you won’t find the pass. Of course, it doesn’t stop you from searching for the pass, but your search has a fully different character. We need a word for the moment of this flip, the figure-ground reversal of hope and defeat.
1. Many years ago: I am in professor Paul Griffith’s office. I have just told him that I try to write two thousand words a day. “That’s too ambitious” he replies. “But Bertrand Russell wrote two thousand words a day”, I reply. He looks at me with gentle humor. There is no malice in his words, but there is certainty “You are not Bertrand Russell”.
2. In Terry Prattchet’s discworld novels, it is remarked that million to one-shots almost always work. In astonishing defiance of reason, kindness and prudence we teach our hearts the same thing. I’m sitting in my office, newly 33 when, perhaps for the first time, I alieve that I’m not going to make it as a writer. I have long believed that I am not going to make it, I’m not a fool, but mostly I did not alieve it. I knew the odds were too long, but I felt I would succeed anyway. We spoil our own hearts, and then we beat them.
3. Ages. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 46. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, 28. Sufjan Stevens, Illnoise, 30. Leonard Cohen Hallejuah, 50. Jesus Christ, The Sermon on the Mount, 32. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (yes that is his best work), 30. Have you spent hours on Wikipedia doing this too? Googling late bloomers and the like? It’s one of those weirdly specific things that turns out to be a very common experience- like worrying that your dead relatives are watching you masturbate.
4.I look down at a referral for a patient in front of me. She is 57 years old. Her conditions include “urinary & bowel incontinence, schizophrenia, PTSD, agoraphobia, anorexia nervosa” and a dozen more. Her medication list has no less than 22 items and is evenly divided between Tolkien elf names, and what I can only assume are the names of dead-dread gods (why would you call it Cephalexin???) She has come to us for treatment of her osteoarthritis of the spine, accentuated by her weight (approximately 400 pounds). I call her, determined to get her into our clinic at once. I am even convinced that maybe getting her booked in is the reason I was born. I get her answering machine twice. I finally speak to her, she explains we can’t schedule the appointment too close to the anniversary of her mother’s death, since grief will distract her. My heart is breaking, but it’s nothing against the shivers in her voice. The only happy emotion I can find is pride in her for staying alive. I book her in and finish up the call. Then I get back to worrying about the fact that I’ll never be an accomplished author, vanitas, vanitas.
5.A few months before this, I am browsing the internet when I see some people talking about my blog in a forum. One of them mentions that it had “saved his life more than once” referring, I think, to my posts about OCD. I am confused and humbled. I am with friends, and I show them what’s on my laptop screen like I am a kid with a puppy and show and tell. I have forgotten, more or less, by evening.
6. I hate myself for the kind of myopia typified in 4 & 5, but I’m far from the first to observe that hating yourself is just another form of vanity. Musing over the fact that hating yourself is just another form of vanity is also another form of vanity, and reflecting on that is another level of vanity again, so on and so forth up a conceited ladder to a pointless heaven of self-absorption. Nothing for it but to stop worrying about how vain you are and try and do some good.
7. Even at 33 I am already noticeably dumber in some respects than I was five years ago. Much worse, I would estimate time goes 40% faster. That’s an absolute minimum.
8. As I write this, I think about how a gifted prose stylist would regard these scratchings, I can’t imagine they’d see them well. “Well fuck them’”, I resolve, “They’re the freak, not me”.
9. The thirst to create drives out the thirst to know, and the thirst for fame drives out the thirst to create. Once, before all these when I was so young as to scarcely remember, there must have been the thirst to see.
10. “Unhappy is the land that needs heroes”. Well sure, but imagine, as is sometimes posited in fiction, that there was a genuinely final confrontation with evil. Good, represented by some hero or small band of heroes, triumphed. After that life was to be wine and cake, but with no glory. Can you imagine how bitterly so many people living in that world would resent our hero? All the more bitterly, because bitterness is most bitter when it can’t show itself. All the more bitterly still again because bitterness is most bitter when all morality and convention says it should instead be gratitude.
11. I think it’s interesting to imagine what the life of our hero -the last hero- in the above situation would be like. For example, he might spend the rest of his days walking as if the ground might fall from underneath him, in fearful recognition that many people must be seeking an opportunity to reverse the reputation they had grudgingly given him. On the other hand, perhaps she would enjoy the pleasure of being a tyrant as well as a hero. She might gloat, internally, that she was the one who had prohibited heroism, while greedily drinking the remaining supply. I hope not, but then again, heroes often aren’t good people.
12.
(*) A few details have been changed to triple safeguard anonymity.
Autopsy on a dream
Wow. This hit uncomfortably close to home. According to "The Master and His Emissary" by Iain McGilchrist, those with a desire to become "heroes" or "great" in any sense are dominated by the left hemispheres of their brain. The left hemisphere prioritizes competition and "getting ahead", while the right hemisphere prioritizes true understanding and "harmony". In some sense, the history of great individuals is a story of very ambitious people letting their right hemispheres do most of the heavy lifting of actual thought and discovery.