Changes Pt. 1: Brevity (I)

Even eternity, it seems, is brief.

-Peter Straub, On Morality And Change, afterward to Sandman: Brief Lives by Neil Gaiman

Yesterday was telling me about memory. That’s how I’d describe it, at least, if I believed in mysticism. Whatever interest I followed told me about memory and forgetting, our curious bicameral brains, and the sense of wonder. The three, it seemed, are pretty well linked. I would assume what happened is that I latched onto the idea and and began weeding it out of everything I read and heard. Or else it’s all coincidental. I found these in reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (and distilled in Peter Straub’s afterward), in Michael Pollan’s The Botany Of Desire, and in listening to Radiolab. I’ll talk about all three by and by. I also ate many cookies yesterday, apropos of nothing.

Brief Lives, the 7th volume of Sandman (which I am reading in the bookstore in my free time), is all about beginnings, endings, changes, and Death.

In this volume, a lawyer named Bernie Capax, formerly an acquaintance of both the Marquis de Sade and Sigmund Freud, is killed by a collapsing brick wall moments after savoring the memory of the particular and distinctive way mammoths smelled. When he finally understands that he has, after all this time, come to the end of his life, he turns in search of approbation to the attractive, black-clad, slightly punky and slightly slovenly figure before him, one of Gaiman’s most inspired notions being that Death looks something like the young Chrissie Hynde. I did okay, didn’t I? he asks. Fifteen thousand years – that’s not so bad. As ever, Death is sensible, matter-of-fact, and frank, and replies: Bernie, old man, you just got the ordinary deal – you got a lifetime.

So every life, being no more or less than a lifetime, is brief; every life, being brief, is equal. Attorney Bernie’s last words are the disappointed protest “Not yet…,” are a wail of disappointment. What is a brief duration (and any duration is brief) is to be embraced, valued, reluctantly surrendered. Only the mad and the stupid throw their lives away.

-Peter Straub, ibid.

In another, earlier story in the series, Death and the series’ protagonist, Dream, agree to let a 14th century man named Hob live for as long as he wants to, seemingly out of curiosity. He and Dream meet in the same place every hundred years to see what Hob has learned about life, and whether he’d like another hundred years. At one meeting he is wildly successful, and a later one he is destitute and miserable, but he always re-ups for another century on earth. Near the end of the story, 600 years have passed, and he still can’t imagine he’ll ever choose death. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Even in an endless future, I feel the present would still mean the most to me. Outliving everything… I hope it would make the present more precious, knowing better than anyone how absolute and inexorable an endings is. But at the same time, doesn’t familiarity render everything common? What Hob’s story questions is whether wisdom is found in eternity.

Wisdom is a matter of recognizing that nothing stands still, that everything is hurtling toward its own conclusion. Wisdom is the celebration and the memorialization of the temporal. (So wisdom consists of the ability to observe, “This is a beautiful day.”) [...] Of course, the truth is that no one likes change. People in hell not only refuse to leave it, they invite you in, too. Even people who have blasted the other lives that touched their own blasted lives proudly declare in old age that they would not change a thing – all that cursing and screaming was their life, by God, and it is not possible to imagine any other. Change introduces unpredictability, uncertainty, a universe of disorder. Right before an amoeba splits in two, it says to itself, uh uh, no way, I ain’t gonna do that, nope.

-Peter Straub, ibid.

If in a thousand years you have seen everything twice or more, the only thing that can change anymore is you. If the observed does not change, the observer might. Though I’m not sure the world truly stays the same, but perhaps, given enough time, we’d see the margins within which it changes, just how far it is likely to go in any given direction. Maybe that’s where the wisdom comes from. Maybe it comes from testing your own margins.

And maybe it comes, trite as it always sounds, from the tiny moments, when held.

The Indefensible Apathy (I)

I’ve oftentimes heard the argument that someone eats meat because whatever the argument against it, they don’t care. I get this argument a lot because somehow people, once they know I’m a vegan, think that I’m being vegan at them. That my diet is an affront to theirs. That I’m politically vegan.

And I am, I guess, but not more than I’m a pacifist  at them. I tend to use Hope’s stance, “I’m not going to start the debate about meat, but if you start it, I will win it.”

People have used the argument many times in defense of vegetarianism, “if slaughterhouses had glass walls we’d all be vegetarians.” Which is ludicrous; there are people employed in slaughterhouses aren’t there? The places aren’t run by Judas cows. The idea is that the world is populated entirely by bleedings hearts, but most of them don’t know they’re bleeding hearts.

First off, I do not defend vegetarianism. Vegetarianism and veganism are each an inaction; it is a food you choose to not consume. If a chicken would peck on my door and lop its head off, it might be rude of me not to eat it. And it is true that avoiding meat and meat products is a pain in the ass. But I see no sense in having to defend an inaction where there is no real reason to take that action in the first place. I put the onus on the meat eater: an animal is killed so that it may end up on your plate. Defend yourself.

There are a series of arguments here. One is that vegetables are also alive, something has to die unless you photosynthesize, what’s the difference between an animal and a plant? This takes the stance, I assume, of the divine spark that is in all living things, and as an atheist I exempt myself from that. A plant possesses no central nervous system, and if we believe that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, I can’t find any evidence of consciousness in a brainless form. I see no evidence that they feel pain or fear. I read a book that said they’d found a way to measure the consciousness of plants, and proved that plants feel pain, but it contained no documentation, and when it started namedropping leaders in the Church Of Scientology I stopped reading. Plants are alive by the classification that we call something alive, but I see no argument for sentience.

Someone once argued to me that no one can know anything about the world; everyone’s perspective is different, which means there is no objective reality, which means there is no objective morality, so fuck off with morality completely. We can’t even be sure anything really exists. These conversations usually happen on the beach around a bonfire and involve brandy and/or spliffs. To this I say: then why do anything? If we say the world is possibly an illusion, then there are only two ways to interpret that: assume the world exists as we see it, acknowledging it might not, or assume that it does not exist as we see it. Option One means live the same way we did before. Option Two means curling up in a room and assuming absolutely nothing exists. You don’t get to say the beef patty exists because it makes you happy and choose to assume the suffering that it came from does not.

Some people claim that fish don’t have feelings. Aside from the idiocy there (who the fuck proved that? what did that test look like? who the fuck funded that research?), does the inability to feel pain mean you have no right to life? There are occasionally humans with no pain centers in the brain, who can’t leave a controlled environment because their body won’t feel discomfort in a warmer environment and consequentially won’t sweat. Obviously these humans deserve to live. And accepting the unlikely argument that a fish feels no pain, if you attempt to kill a fish in a way where it is aware its life is threatened, it will rapidly swim away. It can very clearly show a desire to go on living, and exhibit that, if not pain, it can feel fear. Do we only preserve life to avoid pain?

And once my father argued that he knew in his heart that a human has a soul and an animal does not. And as soon as he can give me any substantive way to define what a soul is and who has one, I’ll give credence to the argument.

But all these arguments can be dispelled much more succinctly, because they’re all the same argument. They’re an attempt to poke a hole in the defense of vegetarianism, the same way fundies try to disprove evolution. None of these is an argument in favor of meat consumption. The question goes unanswered: an animal is dying so that you can eat it. Why?

And there is only one answer, which is “I like the taste.” There’s no longer any reasonable argument for the health value of meat. A vegan has a 4% chance of dying of heart disease, while a meat-eater has a 50% chance. There is no vital nutrient gotten from meat that can’t be gotten from a plant, and if gotten from a plant there is less fat, less cholesterol, lower acidity, and so on. “I like the taste” ultimately comes down to a euphemistic way of saying “I do not care about the suffering of animals.” This is the only real argument in defense of eating animals. An animal dies unnecessarily for a human’s pleasure in eating it because the human does not care about the animal’s suffering.

If a murderer says on the stand that they killed 15 people because they simply felt no empathy for those people, we still send them to jail. This is not K-Pax (“every living thing in the universe knows the difference between right and wrong”). If we felt we could trust everyone’s heart to be their guide, we wouldn’t write laws.

Now: I’m making an argument against meat-consumption, but that’s only because it’s most often on my mind. But my real stance is this: morality cannot be a question of emotions. We can’t say that something is ethical because it “feels” right or unethical because it “feels” wrong. The fact that I’ve never met anyone in Iran and therefore feel no empathy for Iranians does not justify bombing Iran. I may spend days or weeks or months not giving a shit about animals, but I won’t eat meat at those times, because emotions aside I can’t defend it.

I am saying that apathy is never a defense. I am saying this: we must always and at all times be rational beings, and base our code of ethics on that. That’s why every homophobe in the world should support gay marriage, because the marriage ban is indefensible by any rational argument. And it sure as hell is why we should stop fucking bombing people, please and thank you.

Dead, with Possessive Pronouns (H)

Jack writes:

There’s no denying that in some sense I ‘feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness. I’ve read about that in books, but I never dreamed I should feel it myself. I am sure H. wouldn’t approve of it. She’d tell me not to be a fool. So I’m pretty certain, would God. What is behind it?

Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job. But that’s not the whole of the explanation.

I think there is also a confusion. We don’t really want grief, in its first agonies, to be prolonged: nobody could. But we want something else of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom with the thing itself. I wrote the other night that bereavement is not the truncation of married love but one of its regular phases–like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) we accept the pains as a necessary part of this phase. We don’t want to escape them at the price of desertion or divorce. Killing the dead a second time. We were one flesh. Now that it has been cut in two, we don’t want to pretend that it is whole and complete. We will be still married, still in love. Therefore we shall still ache. But we are not at all–if we understand ourselves–seeking the aches for their own sake. The less of them the better, so long as the marriage is preserved. And the more joy there can be in the marriage between dead and living, the better. The better in every way. For, as I have discovered, passionate grief does not link us with the dead but cuts us off from them. This becomes clearer and clearer. It is just at those moments when I feel least sorrow–getting into my morning bath is usually one of them–that H. rushes upon my mind in her full reality, her otherness. Not, as in my worst moments, all foreshortened and patheticized and solemnized by my miseries, but as she is in her own right. This is good and tonic.

The dead have no preferences, so what could we possibly owe them? But the dead and my, your, our dead are two very different things.

Sense Memory I (H)

On the way to work last week, I saw a bird on the ground. Small, olive green, lying dead on its side. I went inside, got gloves, and went to find a place to bury it.

I found a tree stump with an overhang. I put it under there, and put leaves–only dry ones–over it’s body, excepting the head. I told it I loved it, and that it was safe, and it wished it well on it’s journey.

I’m a materialist. I think post-mortem organ donation should probably be compulsory. But if someone found me on the dead on the ground, I’d like to be put under the lip of a tree stump.

That said, I don’t think the dead have rights. That entire negation again: there is no one to have a certain right. There is no such thing as a dead person–just being, and nothingness.

Love, Blood And Rhetoric (I)

We’re more of the love, blood and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can’t give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They’re all blood, you see.

-The Player, Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

It’s funny the way your mind works when you aren’t looking. When I was very young, for some reason I knew that people died, but I thought it was only us. I didn’t know that all that lives will die (…except turtles…). When my dad told me that, no, one day my dog would die too, that’s what shattered me.

Rewatched Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead yesterday. Inexorable, terrifying, unbearable… sometimes someone needs to take the piss out of death.

For those who don’t want to watch til the end:

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. Must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Love, blood and rhetoric. I guess that’s what they say, there is only sex and death. And talking about it.

re: Sick Days & Coming Out (H)

I know all too well the feeling Delany talks about. It’s the earliest feeling I can remember having, and, in that way, perhaps the most basic part of me. As a little kid, I used to cover my ears and sing and jump up and down anytime I saw an ambulance or heard a siren, because it made me think of death and brought on the panic. And that “If I should die before I wake…” lullaby scared the shit out of me. I woke up at 5 AM this morning soaked in the knowledge of of the nothingness of death (thanks, Nick, for picking up my call!), I walked around India seeing it around every corner and woke up with it almost every night. I can be in it for minutes at a time, sometimes sparked by something, sometimes out of nowhere.

One shrink told me that mind-numbing fear of annihilation is something little kids develop as a sort of defense mechanism against suicide. Another said it echoes some sort of feeling of social disconnection. As if looking non-being in the face could be anything other than fucking terrifying, as if the terror needed some secondary explanation. Funny, the only time I haven’t had it was when I was actually suicidal for a time in high school.

Ian, I could offer you, again, the Philip Larkin poem, “Aubade“, but there’s no solace there, and I pick honesty over solace. And there is no honest solace for the void. The closest I can come is to quote Christina Middlebrook, from Seeing the Crab: “The surest way of being is having been.” But that’s not nearly good enough for me. There is distraction; desire is one of the most consuming, and therefore most effective, distractions for me. And there is the creature comfort of other bodies, touch, voices, love that make non-existence seem less possible. But they only make it seem so. Even when you cannot imagine it, it is terribly real.

I’ve had break-ups so painful that I’ve thought: in some ways this would be easier if the person had died–less confusion, less questions. Never wishing death on an ex, just thinking that it’d be simpler in some ways. I don’t know if the thought is true or not. I get a glimpse of what that would be like: I see myself waking every morning for months with the thought, “He isn’t.” Not he isn’t waking, just he isn’t. I get caught in a repeat of negatives: he isn’t, there isn’t even a he to not be, nothing.

The only sane response I can think of is to study aging, figure out how it works, and figure out how we can stop or at least slow it (to quote Pablo: “To live long enough to live forever”). Or, if you’re not scientifically inclined, at least make a shit-ton of money and give it to people studying aging. Walking in the desert in Arizona, talking about life extension, Patrick said that we’re optimistic; he defines optimism as the ability to endure desire. Really, anti-aging is not different than most other kinds of medicine, which are aimed at improving and lengthening human life. It’s simply going more directly for the same thing.

Yes, I require constant learning, yes I feel it compulsory to do something that benefits people, but that, my friends, is why I’ve picked biomedical research as my path to those things.

Sick Day (I)

I’ve been sick this weekend. I’ve been in Rhode Island for a year and a few months; this is the fourth cold I’ve gotten in that time. In the same length of time in California before preceding the move, I did not get sick once. Being sick again after being so chronically healthy before puts my mind in odd places.

Sometimes I watch Ze when I get sick:

When I get sick I start scripting the video tape that I’m gonna leave behind when I die. Sometimes imagining that even makes me cry. Both hurting and happiness make me feel more alive, but as I get older it seems that hurting’s the low hanging fruit.

I remember my best friend, Julie, when we lived together in Oakland, and every time she’d get sick she’d be afraid of death. She got something really rugged one time, moved into my room and didn’t leave the bed for three days except when I’d help her down the stairs for the bathroom. Lighting the candle under dish after dish of tea tree oil with the little monkey statuette candle-holder I’d gotten her for Christmas when I was too broke to shop anywhere but Twice As Nice. She sucked through half a bag of cough drops in those three days. I had to keep reassuring her that this wouldn’t kill her.

Samuel R. Delany said:

Daily – sometimes even two or three times a day – I would undergo a moment’s heart-pounding panic, as I realized that, someday, I would die… that, indeed, I would have to live through the last few seconds of my life and make the transition into permanent infinite nothing. (For all my religious upbringing, the consolations of heaven never seemed more to me than myth or metaphor – possibly, I suspected, a radically misplaced one.) At its best, this panic would last two to five seconds: if I were walking down the street, it would make me swallow, or perhaps speed my pace. My heart would hammer, twice, three times. My breath would grow rapidly shallow. These attacks were total – and almost blinding. When they lasted only a second or two, I was basically all right – once they were over. A four- or five-second one, however, could make me halt and lean against the wall of a building. I might even have to sit on a stoop. There were periods in my life when these attacks would last ten, twelve, or even fifteen seconds. At such a length they left me physically devastated. When they lingered that long, I might even cry out in the midst of one, or have to lie down for half an hour afterwards. Sometimes I speculated that, should one ever last as long as a minute, I would probably not survive.

-The Motion Of Light In Water, p. 46-47

The idea of death has gotten more and more impossible for me as I’ve gotten older. When I was a child and I’d learned enough about astronomy that I knew one day the sun would burst into a red giant and consume the Earth, I lay on the floor of my room with my arms out and tears running down my face, trying to hug the entire planet because someday it would be gone. When I’d get scared about dying, my mom would say that I don’t have to worry about it for a long time; my mom was never very good at comfort. Long compared to what?

Julie’s best friend died in elementary school from complications during heart surgery. She had a weak heart, but that’s not what killed her. It was the doctors.

I knew a guy, Zane, who died a few years ago. He had the most advanced lung cancer the doctor had ever seen in a twentysomething; he’d been smoking over a pack a day since he was 12. He was about my age when he died. My friend Micah, an atheist, said for the first time he knew, somehow,  that when he died he’d see Zane again.

As I give up the last shreds of the spirituality I’ve always clung to, I’m trying to face the idea of nonbeing. And I can’t. How can a being even conceive of not-being? The human memory doesn’t begin working until some months after birth; as long as we have had memories we’ve known that our existence preceded them. It leaves us with a sense of having-always-been. There was a time before I was here; I can’t fathom it.

The deaths that do assault me are the deaths of other living things. The atheists who say that there is no reason to believe in morality are the worst kinds of atheists. If you say that this tiny, fragile life is all any living thing ever gets, than causing pain of any kind is just insufferable. It’s impossible; it cannot be imagined. I don’t know how any atheist can eat meat, can justify that a cow raised for beef came into being, spent its entire life in a pen so narrow it couldn’t turn around, slept in its own shit, and was slaughtered as an adolescent. At which point it simply ceased to exist; that was everything there ever was of it.

My dad sent me a link some months ago to this commencement address by Steve Jobs. Jobs says that your eventual death is the greatest motivator, something necessary to life. It’s important that we die so we make use of the time we have. Well what a sweet and simple and reductive fucking sentiment, Steve. Have you ever once really tried to imagine simply not existing? Do you have some comforting image of an afterlife where you’ll hang out and wait for all your buddies to one day join you?

I can’t imagine my own death; it doesn’t send me into a panic. It’s the deaths of others I can’t stand to think of. Always facing outwards, I feel tremendous sorrow when I think that I might outlive a loved on without ever embracing the thought that their consciousness still exists somewhere. There’s the comforting idea that time is just another spacial dimension and maybe we can move freely through it, that our lives are like a few squares of sidewalk and there’s nothing stopping us from stepping back into it after death. But while there’s no reason this couldn’t be so, there’s no evidence to suggest it either. There is no evidence at all, for anything.

I feel such tremendous guilt sometimes. I’ve never felt in any way like I was destined to be human. I think of the thousands of insects that have died on the grill of my old van, how many nematodes I winked out of existence by eating lettuce, even guilt for the bacteria my body is killing now. They may not have a consciousness anything like mine, but it was all they had, all they’d ever have. It’s sometimes impossible to take the idea, that so many deaths are unavoidable, while placing so much stock in postponing my own.

And I can’t feel it completely. I can only feel myself brush against the magnitude of it. It’s just not something the brain is built for; it’s built to keep existing. If evolution is all about avoiding death, why would we evolve a mechanism for accepting it?

The only nonreligious friend I know who said he didn’t fear death was my old roommate Kean. I said “I can’t stand the idea of nothingness.”

He said “Really? I think it sounds peaceful.”

I hope to hell he’s right.

Slug Says (I)

Slug on writing:

Excuse me, my friend, is that your pen?
Is it cool if I use it to duel with my skeletons?
Is it proper for me to use it to prosecute these people?
Is it wrong for me to caress it against my ego?
Can I use a ball point just to make my small points?
Are these mechanical joints anything like hollow-points?
Old fashioned number two when I need that shit quick and steady,
But that’s assuming I ain’t chewed off the eraser tip already.
If I touch a felt-tip, believe I’m ’bout to make hell flip.
Computer friendly only ’cause that deadly bitch helps me spell shit.
Scribble, for the you, the me, the she and the politicians,
Aerosol to the wall, write it tall for all the vision.
Yo, he wrote it in jail, she wrote it in Braille,
I wrote that shit, named it, recorded it, I got one for sale.
And if I truly feel I got something to show ya,
I pull out a blank sheet of loose leaf and draw it out in Crayola.
I’ve grown to keep an extra utensil in my sock,
And I’ve been known to mark it on the sidewalk with chalk,
Most times I write with a pen, sometimes I write with a buzz,
And if I ever go gold, I must have wrote that shit in blood.

-Multiples No.4 (Write Now)

Slug on sorrow:

If I could ask you one question I’d ask where you went,
You could teach me a lesson every time I got bent,
But the alcohol don’t make me forget about it all,
Doesn’t matter the season, the leaves can still fall.
They slipped hidden messages within the cards that were dealt.
I understand myself and all the sorrow I felt.
For as simple as I am, how’d it get so complex?
Got me studying the margins and disregarding the text.

I open the curtains and listen to the traffic go,
But I still get nervous each time a piece passes Go.
The residue is thick and the memory fails,
I still laugh because the path feels a lot like a trail.

If I can run through the woods and speed like the light,
I’d find the answers to why and be back by tonight.
if I could fly through the fog and look at this rock
I’d figure out how to keep hell off of my block.
But as it stands I stay content
Trying to be the magic man and pay my rent,
And wishing that Bryan would turn me on to the secrets he sought,
While we keep burning the dawn just to keep the day hot

-The River

Slug high on life:

From a head full of pressure rests the senses that I clutch,
Made a date with Divinity, but she wouldn’t let me fuck,
I got touched by a hazy shade of God, help me change,
Caught a rush on the floor from the life in my veins.

So fuck needles, fuck smoke,
Fuck lines that make the sinus choke,
Fuck chasers and trails, fuck raves and rails,
Fuck hangovers, fuck hallucinations,
Regurgitations, mandatory sentences and UA tracing
Blind my insight and dull the common sense,
Give me inhibition, kill the superstition and the confidence.
Built the tolerance, now it’s more that I consume
When it boards up my room, the world’s whores will croon
In unison.
Unify the eulogy, autopsy pages read euthanasia,
i.e. irony.
But here I be within a pool of my drool,
Sedated, windows dilated, comatose, life overdose.
Tell Jacob Miles to keep it wild style,
I promise I’ll smile,
And check the floor, God’s got nice tiles.
Tell Jacob Miles to keep that shit wild style,
And I’ll smile,
And check the floor, God’s got nice tiles.

-God’s Bathroom Floor

Slug on why write anything?:

I’ma write it for me, and if you like it that’s love,
And if you don’t, that’s life, ’cause life don’t like Slug.

-Deer Wolf

Aggression/Revenge (I)

In 1945, George Orwell visited a POW camp in Southern Germany as the war was winding down. His guide was a Viennese Jew, who took it upon himself to brutalize and humiliate the captured SS officers. Orwell writes:

I wondered whether the Jew was getting any real kick out of this new-found power that he was exercising. I concluded that he wasn’t really enjoying it, and that he was merely—like a man in a brothel, or a boy smoking his first cigar, or a tourist traipsing round a picture gallery—TELLING himself that he was enjoying it, and behaving as he had planned to behave in the days he was helpless.

It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian Jew for getting his own back on the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler régime. But what this scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing S.S. officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting. It is said that when Mussolini’s corpse was exhibited in public, an old woman drew a revolver and fired five shots into it, exclaiming, “Those are for my five sons!” It is the kind of story that the newspapers make up, but it might be true. I wonder how much satisfaction she got out of those five shots, which, doubtless, she had dreamed years earlier of firing. The condition of her being able to get close enough to Mussolini to shoot at him was that he should be a corpse.

-George Orwell, Revenge Is Sour

It seems to me that revenge is only satisfying to the people aren’t party to it. Some 300 million of us are told “someone bombed us; we bombed them back.” Ah, good! Philosophical rectification. It is much easier to feel satisfied if no on you know was killed and no one you know went overseas in order to kill anyone else.

I think our wars today are predicated on that emotional distance. It’s easy to get people worked up by thoughts when they don’t have a stake in policy. People will condone the war because it is unlikely to affect them. I don’t think anyone would have accepted the “evidence” against Iraq if this were the 1940′s and we were all going to spend 5 years drinking artificial coffee and eating carob bon-bons (“here’s a fuzzy image of something that might be a weapons facility, now donate your iPod to a soldier”). Even the anger I feel at the Bush administration is a philosophical one that I have to work myself into; I haven’t had to see what’s been done. I’m sure that’s why our protests aren’t impressing anyone.

If someone punches your face you may well punch back, and if we can call that “revenge” then justice is done instantly. If someone has traumatized you then aggression might be among the emotions that assault you at whim (along with acute anxiety and terror). I think only the pathological can truly sustain aggression; aggression is momentary. I don’t think a logical mind can maintain it. It serves an immediate purpose, and if adrenaline isn’t used it makes your hands shake. It will eventually fatigue the body until it gives way to exhaustion, physical and emotional.

I think this is another way that people are punished by their sins: seekers of revenge will never be satisfied by it. It can only make you miserable.

Addendum: Laughing in the Dark (H)

Another example of someone making humor out of devastation. Comedy out of tragedy without time… That’s a feat.

And while we’re talking Bob Flanagan: