AS A WRITER

Writing teaches you to express yourself in words. When it (and thought) become too serious (heaven forbid)), expression is diverted to the senses. My writing has actually gotten more serious and full-time because the world dictates that being too sensory can be inappropriate, and being too physical can be illegal.

Hence, two things happen: First, writing becomes dry and dull when it’s the only channel one has. Second, I suffer physically for it. The eyes are the first to go, then the neck and back, an “un-purged” spleen, then, heaven forbid in the future, the prostate. A veteran writer can be spotted in public: He’s hunched over, wears glasses, keeps his head down in thought, looks preoccupied, mutters under his voice, avoids confrontation, and despite appearing friendly and sociable is deeply private, sensitive, and withdrawn. It’s the profile of an artist even as that risks the stamp of a bad stereotype.

As I face “all the above,” I still spend lots of time at my computer. Hours facing the blue light have only increased in my mid-seventies. The flesh weakens but thoughts constantly hatch (semi-conscious thoughts, notions, fears, impulses, knee-jerk reactions, memories, small epiphanies, Damascus moments). My response to myself is that I have “no life.” But it fails to bother me anymore since I’ve never really had one in the first place. I don’t even know what it means. The problem has in any case been won over by a kind of complacency. In other words, who cares? One never misses what he’s never had. It’s a deal I made with my private “light bearer” (Lusi-light, fer-bearer) long, long ago. – As for complacency, author Roger Lipsey once wrote, “Few thinkers … seem to have any further taste for the uncertainty of conceiving new ideas and the painfully diplomatic procedures associated with the exchange of ideas.”

Words are wonderful – worth a thousand pictures. But they’re not the answer to everything. For those who think they are, in a world that encourages that notion, there’s no shortage of them. But nor is there a shortage of repression, sublimation, denial, violence, and ulcers. Which is why words alone do not a panacea make. Many logorrheas feel like they’re in straitjackets. – Salvador Dali would have a field-day with this: a painting of displaced body parts walking across an apocalyptic landscape, words draped over bombed-out buildings. Titled: Portrait of a Muted Culture.

In another world, the body wants to work and play, to exhaust its primordial essence. But we were taught long ago that this was “uncivilized.” Only the ignorant and uneducated sweat openly. Ever since The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, we’ve striven to reach the status of sitting all day, pushing papers, and/or (today) pushing keys. Hormones have been deprioritized and forced to take a back seat in the name of progress. But we’ve learned that this also doesn’t work. Even the “flannel suit” guy knew this.

So, now we go to gyms and workout facilities to “balance” our needs. But that doesn’t work either. Why? Because anxiety (and anger) must be dealt with at the moment they surface – extempore. This is the dilemma. They can’t be put off until “after hours” and in “appropriate” places. Nature doesn’t work that way. When a day’s anxiety is held off until the right hour (or day) in a gym, the result is just a double-negative. We end up anxious/angry and exhausted. Hence, we resort to other “remedies” like alcohol. – Alas, timing is everything, and society does not condone “frissons of temperament” – catharses and emotional spontaneity. My prediction for the future: The workplace will one day work it where employees can address “body-mind” together. We won’t even recognize it.

As for “sitting” as I do most of the time, I fall into the nonfiction camp (as a writer). I’ve never found much interest in things that never happened. There’s enough drama and adventure in the real world, and my characters and themes actually exist. In nonfiction one learns history and follows narratives at the same time. Novelists and fiction readers will have my throat for having said this.

Another writer, Geoffrey Wolff, once said that nonfiction is about “tak[ing] facts in, quietly manipulat[ing] them behind an opaque scrim, and display[ing] them as though the arranger never arranged.” I find this artfully disingenuous. I think that if the writer listens intently enough to what’s happening, and understands the drama beneath all the “opaqueness,” there’s nothing to manipulate. It’s not about rearranging information but finding what’s being said underneath “the scrim.” It’s getting to a deeper truth. It invents its own narrative without cheating and actually rivals “fiction” without being fictitious.

It’s about addressing what’s also been called a “transubstantiation through words.” Chekhov, Joyce, and others knew this. If one has to resort to manipulation, he’s already lost his “edge.” A New York Times Book Review once described Chekhov as a “spiritual genie – Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” as he captured what existed under the words. – On the opposite end, there’s the danger (again) of complacency, of resting too much in manipulation. Another writer, Cesare Pavese, called it “a deficiency whose penalty is a perennial adolescence of the spirit.”

Words, words, and more words – and fancy phrases. I could go on forever in this vein, but those waters only get darker and deeper. At this juncture I try to peer over the edge and not fall into the abyss. I confess that I can’t fall much anymore. At the same time however, how else does one avoid complacency and its trappings?

Writing is a “series of permissions you give yourself,” said Susan Sontag. It’s also an exercise on what we want to read, since reading is what inspires writing. We write what we want to read, but no one writes it, so we write it so we can read it. That makes us grow as readers and writers. I look back on some of the entries I started with here, and I’m not same person. At the same time feelings and views haven’t changed, only the manner in which they’re expressed, and through a wider lens.

“To write is to sit in judgment of oneself,” Sontag also said. To be creative is to scrutinize everything we take comfort in. Once again, the red flag for complacency. The other side of that is, as Dr. Samuel Johnson said, “What is written without effort is … read without pleasure” – insipid, dull, mere chatter – information without an “aha!” Hence, for myself, the mix of anxiety and pleasure to constantly reread and edit. I look at who/where I was in a first draft, and I worry, “OMG, is this how I think? That’s the anxiety part. The pleasure part is knowing I can delete it and deny I ever said it.

“Giving permission” and “sitting in judgment” is really all about putting the ego aside. One has to get out of his own way. And what a visual tableaux that instills (move over Mr. Dali). I fantasize about a psychodrama session between “self” and “no self.” Both sit in chairs facing each other in a psychotherapist’s office. The one insists on control. The other rejects all notions of control. The latter has the additional burden of validating itself as it must stop even controlling its own existence. “I’m here to proclaim that I’m not here.”

The ego is the master of deception. It never really disappears anyway. All it can do is get out of it own way enough to witness (“sit in judgment of”) a river of energies channeling through, and the body becomes a conduit. – In other words, “the session” becomes a spinning existential delirium. The writer is there, but he’s not there.

This also puts a different light on the idea of self-expression. When one dies in the creative process, what exactly is the “self” one is speaking about? Who is the self doing the witnessing? Is it real? Suddenly we deconstruct; or rather, deconstruction starts up by its own momentum. There is what Irish novelist and playwright William Trevor called the “non-autobiographical imagination.” Many of Trevor’s characters tried just as much to escape themselves as to preserve themselves. Writers do the same thing. But escape isn’t flight as much as a place to see from a different angle all that we thought was us. The “self” is as much on display as any character. Kasimir Malevich once wrote in a poem, “I search within myself for myself… I search for my face … I strive to incarnate myself.”

Editing is both painstaking and pleasurable. It’s chipping away at a block of marble. Somewhere inside the marble is a form waiting to get out. It’s never a Michelangelo, but it does (occasionally) show the serendipity of lucky strokes by an amateur’s chisel – smooth contours and difficult curves. What I’m not gifted with is seeing the completed form before it leaves the marble. They say Chopin and Mozart could hear an entire symphony in their heads before even putting it to paper, every instrument, every sound. Writing it down was then mostly a tedious bore, “yesterday’s news,” and they’d hire interns to do the grunt work. Michelangelo hired students to draw all the outlines on the Sistine Chapel before even climbing the scaffold.

Personally, I prefer the “portrait” metaphor. Writing is much like applying paint, line, shadow and light on a canvas. Moods and abstract thoughts are sfumato and mosaics; hard facts are minimalist, Cubist, Constructivist, Vorticist. And, it’s not done until “it’s done” (or done enough). But again, I don’t really know where the colors, lines, and shadows take me until I have enough together to actually see something.

They say creativity is letting the imagination, the unknown, guide us. Just imagine how fast that phenomenon happened in the minds of Chopin and Mozart, if they indeed “heard” whole symphonies before writing them down. A genius gets so far ahead of himself that he’s behind himself, pushing himself to go faster. Thus, he’s his worst critic and often goes mad. The shadow of himself never leaves.

Meanwhile, I’m mostly a work in regress, though things somehow pan out in the end. Two steps back means a half-step forward since there’s no repeating the last step. Sisyphus carries his rock, and I lumber along with a passion that never goes away but never reaches where it wants to go. It’s the monkey on my back telling me there’s always a higher ledge above. It never shows itself, but there it is. I look up and my neck and back spasm.

On the other hand, I look down to where I’ve been and can almost see a newly minted version of myself. Things have improved, whatever that means. Wisdom may not automatically confer better writing, but at least it informs the process. I’ve discharged a shitload of ideas here and through the years. Thank the gods those ideas never stand still.

Some of those thoughts and ideas seem quaint now. Others continue to haunt me as they’ve morphed into bigger thoughts and ideas. What’s also morphed is a more expansive playing field on which to engage them and more words with which to understand them. Words have extraordinary power in that respect. An illiterate man can expend tremendous energy and time trying to get just “one” idea across. Until, one day he discovers a word which magically conveys that idea accurately and all in one breath (this is what dictionaries are for). Then having used that word, he uses his surplus strength to find another word that takes him even further into another thought, thereby raising his consciousness, his literacy, maybe even his intelligence. One thought enables another, and then another. One day he’s clear-minded, and his intelligence helps to further the human condition. He’s not just more intellectually literate but emotionally/spiritually literate. – Whatever happened to children told to learn a new word everyday? And not just to read, but to question what they read (with more words)?

And then, another discovery. The deeper he goes, the more he realizes there are no discoveries, that anything he says has already been said, just with different words. This was Einstein’s observation. From that point on, then, writing becomes more like poetry – the manner in which a thought is conveyed instead of the thought itself. This doesn’t mean that the writer writes less, but simply with more brevity and substance. More gets packaged in the space of forty characters. The greater economy of space, the fewer the words it takes to say more. This also does not mean that he writes less in general. In fact, he writes more about more things, because the creative process is self-generating.

In the end, it seems that all writing is autobiographical, even inside a “non-autobiographical imagination.” It’s done by means of standards we set for ourselves, and then also talent, as limited as it is. It’s that “portrait of myself” set against backdrops, scripts, light and shadow, and most of all colors as they mix to create even more colors. For many of us, writing is the only access we have to ourselves and the only window opened for others to see into us. We’re “supposed” to be open books. But some are more open than others.

And so, as a book, a message to ourselves: Try not to get dog-eared, and avoid being used as someone’s coaster. We put ourselves through the ringer enough of the time. Words are all we have. Where we put them deserves good binding and a hard cover.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

CIORAN and FRIENDS

In times like these (which means “all times”) it’s the heroes who rescue us from the depths of depression and futility. They lift us up even if they’re only figments of our imaginations, products of a creative license we can’t resist – in which case it doesn’t matter anyway. We need a voice that pulls us out of the slough of despond. We have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

The whole notion of the hero archetype comes to us from so many angles, at so many levels. Heroes become anti-heroes and cowards, anti-heroes and cowards become heroes again. They speak different languages to so many seemingly unrelated subjects; yet the words and concepts they use return us to the same themes in the end. Below, I’ve attempted to bring together several who spoke from different levels and in their own voices to show how they drank from the same wellspring of consciousness.

My own heroes are on a carousel – meaning, they rotate ’round without any consistency. The two heroes that have come around most recently have been, first, Fernando Pessoa (written about earlier) and Emil Cioran (also buried here, somewhere). Cioran is coming around again. Pessoa is most mysterious and fascinating, but Cioran has his moments. One was Spanish, the other Romanian. One lived only 57 years, the other 84 years. One spent his entire life in Spain, the other moved to Paris (where learning French was like “putting on a straitjacket”). That confession alone, along with passages like the following, are what make Cioran a kindred soul.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is more evil in the world.

Every life is utterly peculair and wholly unimportant.

I am simply an accident. Why take any of thie so seriously?

The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something – anything.

The abundance of solutions to the aspects of existence is equaled only by their futility….

Intelligence flourishes only in the ages when beliefs wither, when their articles and their precepts slacken, when their rules collapse….

The mind… is threatened at every turn by the things it rejects. Often abandoning attention… such a mind yields to the temptations it has sought to escape….

The solution offered by our ancestral cowardice are the worst desertions of our duty to intellectual decency. To be fooled, to live and die duped, is certainly what men do. ¹

Cioran’s intention was to polarize readers, not to lend comfort or inner peace. He was a “contrarian” by temperament. Christopher Hitchens was the last contrarian I ever read about. With reservations he accepted the tag. He also likened it to other terms: “The noble title of ‘dissident’ must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement…. The same problem arises with ‘freethinker.’ [It is] probably a superior one since it makes an essential point about thinking for oneself. The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks. ²

Cioran saw what he saw and never held back. He also went, as Hitchens would put it, “too far outside the box” in which case he encountered serious criticism, which in turn earned him the added tags of “troublemaker” and “malcontent.” It’s the malcontent who confronts the lie and the hypocrisy running the engines of progress. Unbeknownst to him, it also earns Cioran the honorific of hero.

He addresses the pitfalls and horizons of real tragedy. Which inevitably, for Cioran, led to the Christian ecclesium. Tragedy has a transcendent function. It rises above the simple “other half” to comedy (dark to light, evil to good). It leads to a kind of death which wise men have always preached and religions have consistently failed to grasp. It is, as Richard Sewall said in The Vision of Tragedy, “the condition of pain and fear spiritualized.” It is “man’s first attempt to deal creatively with pain and fear.”

Cioran wrote: “If Jesus had ended his career upon the Cross, if he had not been committed to resuscitation – what a splendid tragic hero.” But the Church ended that by giving him “followers” and a “halo.” “Nothing is more alien to tragedy than the notion of redemption, of salvation and immortality…. there is no extreme unction in tragedy.” As for prayer: “When we reach the confines of solitude, we invent… God, supreme pretext of dialogue. So long as you name Him, your madness is well disguised, and… all is permitted. The true believer is scarcely to be distinguished from the madman, but his madness is legal. ³

What impressed me most about Cioran was his brutal honesty. He said, “Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.” He saw only facades in this “age of optimism” and in those who took life so seriously. “Only an idiot could think there was any point to any of this.” This is why the only honesty he found was with people facing their darkest moments. “I am a friend with people only when they are at their lowest points.” It’s the only time when we’re willing to remove our masks and be completely honest with one another. In that sense, “Anyone who doesn’t feel himself to be in exile has no imagination.”

Critics have foolishly called him a suicidal nihilist. But he took the same trajectory as Camus, despite the pointlessness to everything. In other words, having no reason to live, there’s no reason not to live either. The only intelligent recourse then is a kind of detachment from so much seriousness. “It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself…. Only optimists commit suicide.” Cioran died in 1995 at the age of 84.

Pessoa brought the rhetorical tone down a notch, and with him we enter a space of another kind of heroism. Still sharply philosophical, but less shrill and high-pitched. Pessoa’s sentiments are Cioran’s but said in another vocabulary (and without a terrible translation from French into English).

On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it’s still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there’s something understandable….

Metaphysical theories that can give us the momentary illusion that we’ve explained the unexplainable; moral theories that can fool us for an hour into thinking we finally know which of all the closed doors lead to virtue; political theories that convince us for a day that we’ve solved some problem, when there are no solvable problems except in mathematics…. May our attitude towards life be summed up in this consciously futile activity….. There’s no better sign that a civilization has reached its height than the awareness, in its members, of the futility of all effort….

We are death. What we call life is the slumber of our real life, the death of what we really are. The dead are born, they don’t die. The worlds are switched around in our eyes. We’re dead when we think we’re living; we start living when we die.

The relation that exists between sleep and life is the same that exists between what we call life and what we call death. We’re sleeping, and this life is a dream, not in the metaphycial or poetic sense, but in a very real sense….

The very act of living means dying, since with each day we live, we have one less day of life remaining.

We inhabit dreams, we are shadows roaming through impossible forests, in which the trees are houses, customs, ideas, ideals and philosophies.

Never finding God, and never even know if God exists! Passing from world to world, from incarnation to incarnation, forever coddled by illusion, forever caressed by error….

Never arriving at Truth, and never resting! Never reaching union with God! Never completely at peace but always with a hint of peace, always with a longing for it!

And now, let’s bring the tone down yet another notch, and we enter the spaces of politics and pedestrian life. We also meet Marx and a very odd bedfellow, George Carlin, both who addressed the hypocrisies of politicians and governments. In this context, Carlin presented us with what he called “the great American bullshit story.” We’ll begin with him. There’s nothing like a comedian to turn the idiom into plain English. He gave us the whole nine yards (of bullshit) we live with every day.

The land of the free, home of the brave, the American Dream, all men are created equal, justice is blind, the press is free, your vote counts, business is honest, the good guys win, the police are on your side, God is watching you, your standard of living will never go down, and everything is going to be just fine! Lies pounded into our heads from the time we were children.

Carlin reminded us: “They tell kids to read. Instead, they should learn to question what we read.”

From there we enter the realm of “rich and poor.” The real argument isn’t between right and left, but between democracy and oligarchy and the hypocrisies at ground-level. Some hard facts bring us right to Marx: The COVID pandemic actually produced 131 new billionaires. How did that happen? New monopolies, insider trading, payoffs, fraud, and inheritances. Seven hundred forty-five people who were already billionaires got 70% richer by the tune of $2.1 trillion. While 88% of Americans needed lower drug prices, 84% needed more Medicare coverage, and 73% (still need) paid medical leave.

Enter the raw statistics Marx warned about over a century ago, what he called “basic values.” In 1998, 64% of Americans were confident their children would enjoy a higher standard of living. Today it 21%. In 1998, 59% thought having children was important. Now it’s 30%, In 1998, 31% thought money was important. Today it’s 43%.

In a Wall Street Journal poll the question was asked, “Do you think the economy will get better?” Only 15% said yes, 47% expects it to worsen. Next question: “Are you happy?” Only 12% are very happy, 56% are occasionally happy, and 30% are almost never happy (a new low since 1972). Next question: “Are you confident life will get better for the next generation?” In 1998, 64% said yes. Today it’s 21%. Lastly, “Is college worth it?” In 2013, 53% said yes, 40% said no. In 2023, 42% say yes, 56% say no.

There’s a “spiritual Marx, just as there is a “spiritual atheism,” just as socialism is the completion of democracy, not its negation. The quintessential Marx is about human happiness, community, justice, liberty, and civil rights. As Terry Eagleton wrote, “There has never been a more staunch champion of women’s emancipation, world peace, the fight against fascism or the struggle for colonial freedom than the political movement to which his work gave birth. Was ever a thinker so travestied?” ⁴

What ties these individuals together, creating their own fraternity, is a very unpopular “troublemaking,” menacing, and “freethinking” honesty. We all constellate our worlds differently. We align our stars to make sense of them. This includes grouping unlikely figures who matter to us. These just happen to be five individuals who, for myself, join to confirm the rarest of ethics, that of confessing what we dare not speak (or admit).

I come back to Pessoa again. “We inhabit dreams, we are shadows roaming through impossible forests, in which the trees are houses, customs, ideas, ideals and philosophies.” In other words, we live in a forest we planted ourselves. Now we’re lost in it. But it’s also a dream of our making, and we’re the purveyors of that dream, the architects, builders, and destroyers. In one sense then it comes down again to who our heroes are, and why – the ones who can see the forest for the trees, who see things from a distance, and shout the truth from the clearing. They are the quintessential contrarians. If they were any less, they’d just be more trees casting more shadow than light.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

1E.M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012).

2Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian (New York: Basic Books, 2005), pp. 1-3.

3Cioran, p. 86.

4Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2011). p. 239.

THE VISUAL CLICHE

If you were asked to visualize planet earth as one “snapshot” image, what would it be? I personally see a globe spinning round ‘n round with skyscrapers sticking out like spikes on a sea urchin. And as we close in on any one skyscraper we sink deeper and deeper into the human condition. Most of all, however, I see visual displays of human activity following prescribed (tested, approved) habits and patterns.

These patterns are predominantly visual because we are a visual people. Eighty percent of our sensory acuity is centered in the eyes, which means eighty-percent of everything we experience is defined as a visual interpretation. Even words and abstract concepts are primarily “seen” (in the mind’s eye). Imagine how different the world would be if we were auditory- or olfactory-wired. The last olfactory-oriented culture I read about was a stone-age Brazilian tribe (now extinct of course, thanks to our interference). Its tribesmen could smell urine on a leaf from 80 feet away and tell you what animal it was.

Eventually, what happens with the most common sensory information is that it gets organized. Organizing then categorizes which then sub-divides, etc. What comes out in the end is information ranked according to utility and usage. In other words, a visual culture will use specific images over and over as long as they’re effective. When they no longer function they’re discontinued and others replace them.

And what are the ones seen everyday, the ones that hold everything together like seams on a garment? First, what I see isn’t seen but heard first – cliches we hear so often that we know what people are going to say before they even say it. Even a new thought isn’t new. Words couch them in sounds which makes them compatible with our own thoughts which sound like our own thoughts. We say, “Oh yeah, that’s right.” Most is regurgitated redundancy, tautology, predictability, and very dull. The perfect place to see this in action is the Six O’Clock News. Young people all dressed up reading scripts, heaving copious amounts of noise fitting a required mindset, deportment, psychology, and social image. They’re the exemplars of a visual universe – walking, breathing cliches.

It reminds me of a classic photo taken in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Homeless people are camped out under a huge billboard showcasing The All-American Family – white, middle class, rosy-cheeked, prosperous, smiling, in a new car, driving across the fruited plains of America. The message was that the world sitting beneath it, homelessness, poverty, wasn’t real at all. The real America was what the billboard says it was. Homelessness was an illusion caused by those who simply did not strive hard enough. In other words, their predicament was their fault. Sound familiar? It’s the GOP’s traditional response to the poor. The real America was prosperous and happy – and very white. In years to come, this was a lie that would eventuate into a cliché no one could possibly believe anymore.

A second cliché I see everyday is the armor we wear, clothes meant to distinguish between social classes. They have their practical uses, but clothes have always been about status. What makes that a cliché now is that those distinctions don’t work anymore. The three-piece suit is now “compromised” with tennis shoes, and women combine jewelry with spandex and sweatpants. More diverse jobs require flexibility for everyone. But more than that, clothes no longer shield one behind a facade of economic prosperity. The guy in the suit is now often seen in the unemployment line, while the guy who looks like he sleeps in his car leads a start-up company with 30 employees. The upwardly mobile individual still tries to “look” the part, but the cliché weighs in and he no longer seems to give a shit. Comfort and practicality now trump style and visual status.

A third cliché is the automobile. The most visual show of status of all, other than the home and maybe our “shoes” (at one time they “made the man”). What is now chic is no longer big and powerful. Second, the company president now rides a bike. Third, the new car has been forced to humble itself to the economics of climate change. The millionaire waits to electrically charge his vehicle, while the blue-collar worker buys a new car with an over-extended credit card, filled with five kids on his way to another temp job.

A fourth cliché is our food – once touted as the healthiest in the world. Social class in our society for a long time was measured by the brand names we bought and how much we paid for them. Now, from a heath standpoint alone, “good” food isn’t hardly good anymore (processed, grown abroad by Monsanto, questionably “organic,” mass-produced for “shelf-life and cosmetics,” etc.), while nutrition has plummeted for everyone. In other words, if anyone is getting sick, we’re all getting sick. It crosses all socioeconomic lines. If a vitamin supplement or baby food proves toxic, it’s toxic for every family. The lie about nutrition and “the best” are now cliches. The more we claim “the best,” the less we believe it, and the sicker we get.

A fifth cliché is education. We’ve hidden behind academic credentials for so long that the presumption of “knowledge” has worn thin. Some of the most “ignorant” people are our wisest sources of guidance, while too many PhDs are some of the dumbest people on earth. I’ve personally known people with a “kite-string” of PhDs dangling from their names who (to quote an old movie-line) “couldn’t find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight.” Our society is finally seeing this. The pipe-holding academic in his tweed jacket no longer holds the cache he once had in the minds of young people. Young people are replacing old people, minorities are replacing white teachers and bosses, and people with “technical” degrees (or no degree) are speaking out and exposing old stereotypes. Knowledge is not wisdom, and information is not intelligence.

Other cliches are more subtle but just as palpable. These are snapshots we collect in our brains which we hardly notice but which steer us along nonetheless. In other words, stereotypes: the mailman, the TV host, the mother and her stroller, the pop singer and the microphone, the doctor in his white coat, the biker and his tattoos, the “jock” and his rough attitude, even Madonna and Child. Each evokes a flash of recognition. And here the psychology deepens with respect to patterns.

Patterns become cliches with what psychologists call “predominant modalities.” Too much of a cliché induces fantasies and “pictures in the mind’s eye” … shaped by an available vocabulary of images.” Cliched images induce daydreams with “normative overtones,” etc. – This, by the way, is exactly what advertisers do – “short-circuit the consumer’s mind through vivid, pictorial appeals to fundamental emotions.” In other words, they shave off what’s stale and keep what plucks the strings of desire. — Pictures also have twice the power of persuasion than words. Words invite conflict and criticism. They can also only treat one thought at a time. But pictures deflect criticism, thought, and convey several messages at the same time.

All that said, even advertisers (the media) have become cliched. Some images appear so often that they cancel themselves out. They’ve already part of the the culture’s visual vocabulary and assume what’s called the “social history of the imagination” – i.e., an archived imagination. Like religious icons, they’re supposed to present new and transcendent ideas and products. But they don’t. Even shock techniques no longer work because nothing shocks us anymore.

This morning I watched a documentary on the subject of “AI.” What struck me was when a completely artificial, non-existent duplicate of a man said, “It’s an exciting time to be a replica.” What did that really mean? Did she (it) sense that people are tired of their own mirror images, sounds, and behaviors? That we need reinventing? In other words, to be ourselves but with an added “creative” (risk-taking) dimension? Is this what AI is really all about? To escape ourselves by becoming ourselves a la remade? Soon, the image-replica will know more than we do, and (s)he will answer that question. (S)He will probably say, “You were boring, cliched, and so predictable, so we just had to take over.”

One psychologist was unconsciously prescient about AI while speaking about daydreams. He said daydreams are basically rehearsals, “trial actions for a practical future.” The cliches of an era, especially “if paraded and repeated before the public eye,” force us to reinvent ourselves for the future (“AI”). Enough said. It’s becoming the answer to the problem of ourselves, of being too omnipresent in our own company. We are, quite literally, wearing out our own welcome.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

LYING

“The formula ‘Two and two make five’ is not without its attractions.” – Dostoevsky

Politicians are liars. Successful ones simply lie well, bad ones keep their day jobs. When they win over an electorate, lying becomes not only legitimized but a new “low bar.” They make it okay and even quasi-ethical. The truth becomes that which is simply persuasive, needing no evidence to back it up. It persuades while incentivized by self-interest. Self-interest then pivots on how well he couches it in other lies. Following his lead then makes it okay for everyone to follow suit and actually feel good about it.

It reminds me of why George W. Bush was so popular with Republicans, a man so incredibly stupid that (outside the GOP) he was a national embarrassment. Then it dawned on me that this was exactly the reason why. He brought stupidity out of the shadows and said “hey, it’s okay to be dumb, let’s celebrate!” (enter Joe Six-Pack). But what was most alarming wasn’t that alone but seeing how many Joe Six-Packs there were on the horizon.

Since the Bush years, the levels of stupidity have only grown deeper and wider. Today, it’s a political party all its own (an offshoot of the GOP). Stupidity regurgitates daily as if its leaders actually compete for first prize. Eyes roll, people clear their throats and look away, but then agree to smile and, despite themselves, call it reasonable thinking. The more outrageous, the better. Joe Six-Pack is listening and gives a “thumbs up.”

On the surface we lie to intentionally mislead those who simply expect the truth. We lie so that people will form beliefs which are untrue. The habit is so common that it’s reached an existential crossroads. Just consider the terrain. Martin Amis described that terrain as it’s grown since 2016 (with Trump’s arrival):

Cynics will already be saying that these two ‘diseases,’ chronic dishonesty and acute vaingloriousness, are simply par for the course. In recent years the GOP has more or less adopted the quasi slogan ‘There is no downside to lying,’ (itself a clear and indeed ‘performative’ tall story: how can we devalue truth, and devalue language, without cost?)…. [Trump’s] pathological narcissism, his poor old NPD, will become unrecognizably florid and fulminant, as he nears the ‘ultimate aphrodisiac’ (H. Kissinger) – namely, power. ¹

That was in 2016. Today, lying is even more a part of our DNA. We lie about everything. We expect it and are actually shocked when someone volunteers an excess of honesty. It’s like being shocked when someone helps an old lady across the street or returns a wallet that isn’t his. Lying used to fill the rests between all the notes. Now it is the notes.

And now, add to that yet another dimension: AI (artificial intelligence) and computer graphics (e.g., PhotoShop), and we have lying squared (or cubed x4). We don’t know if those doing the lying are even real (another lie). Strangely, it seems not to even matter as long as the original lie still floats. – Meanwhile, “we” float in a vacuum where there are no moorings tied to anything. We’re lying to ourselves without knowing it, because we don’t know if what we’ve become and believe is even real.

Small lies feed big ones. Big ones depend on small ones. From childhood we learn that “little white lies” are harmless, that they even “help” keep order – especially if no one is harmed by them, It feels right when no one factors in the person being lied to. “Half-truths” are accepted for the same reasons. The most damaging however are lies “by omission.” These are the lies told by leaving out information that “give away” incriminating facts. We say “He didn’t ask, so I didn’t say,” and “I didn’t say more because didn’t want to hurt her feelings,” etc., to justify a deception. Even the reasons for lying are lies.

So lies compound each other in the manner of a pyramid. And eventually we all get around to the lies that reach subconscious depths. These are the most dangerous waters to wade in, as sooner or later they lead to shifts in our sense of reality. Sanity requires a bedrock of information we can depend on. But what if we discover that even they are lies?

Lying is by its nature an unwillingness to cooperate with others, also an unwillingness to trust. It condenses the lack of trust and trustworthiness into a single gesture, the failure to understand and an unwillingness to be understood. To be understood gives parts of ourselves away we want to keep secret, lest we lose power and control over others. Hence the “personas” we carry around which (we all know) are masks and diversions. ²

The line between lying and deception is vague, which also blurs the guilt around both. We use metaphors, slogans, and catchphrases cleverly in ways that employ half-truths. For example, I can say “I’m in Chicago” when I’m only there figuratively, in spirit. “I’m the best cook in town,” is an exaggeration but allowed nonetheless. Both delay and avoid the guilt of reckless exaggeration.

Add yet another curve ball: Cameras. They are now “everywhere” peeking into our private lives at every moment. This may seem unrelated to the problem of lies, but it’s not. They probe to ensure that people stay inside certain lines of conduct and behavior – which then indirectly include thought. Thoughts are then where lies are born. In other words, the system keeps a “visual” on thought patterns, reactions, and beliefs which exist to “keep order” in the manner it alone prescribes. Hence, the excuse of “security” – another euphemism for public (thought) control. The “order” it speaks about (at its core) is neurological and synaptic. We’re a culture deluged in illusions and lies, now monitored and recorded.

Cameras are part of a system which takes away our autonomy, our will to think freely. In his book Lying (Four Elephants Press, 2013), Sam Harris wrote: “[D]ishonesty not only influences the choices [we] make, it often determines the choices [we] can make…. Every lie is an assault on the autonomy of those we lie to.”

So, as we lose our autonomy, we simultaneously deprive others of theirs and their right to think freely. – Meanwhile, all of this (loss of autonomy, fear, mistrust, paranoia) gives politicians the power they need, since a people in fear are a people easily controlled. Virtually anyone can step up to the plate and claim leadership skills. Lastly, loss of power makes us insensitive and callous (just like Mr. Demagogue) toward the suffering of others. It immunizes he and his government from scrutiny as they proceed to exploit other cultures and nations. ³

The penultimate question then becomes, what would life be like if we resolved not to lie so wantonly? The easy answer is, at least economically, the system would collapse. Markets depend on deception and white lies/half-truths every single day. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to sell us what we don’t need. On a more personal/social level, it would push too much of ourselves into full view. We would become different people and strangers even to ourselves. It would tap into levels of psychology we are simply unprepared for. “Breakthrough” (for some) would mean “breakdown” (for many).

We therefore live in a world where shame and remorse are branded into us. Too much honesty requires integrity. Integrity means “soundness” and “incorruptibility.” Add to that dignity, which means “a state of worthiness.” To be filled with both would obviate the need to lie. – But (and here’s the pathological factor): We include deception and lying as necessary components of integrity and dignity. Integrity/Dignity are prefigured by a set of lies about who we are. Everything after that sits on quicksand.

Here is where it also gets ugly (and deeply existential). It’s when we look in the mirror at night and know the lies we keep. It’s what keeps us in states of mild depression without knowing it. We are layered in various states of guilt and shame. – Guilty is feeling bad about something we’ve done. Shame is feeling bad for something that we are (which cuts deeper). Both are now so normal that we hardly notice. We simply opt for drugs and food to feel better.

We’re expected to get over it and just live with it. It’s called “growing up.” After all, it’s the “human condition,” the “social contract.” It’s part of life. To therefore break out of that straight-jacket is to betray the human secret. In which case then you’re on your own with your own survival skills. That is, you don’t fit in. On one level we may say that “honesty is a gift we give to others.” But at the same time, too much honesty will kill you. “When you see the Buddha on the road, kill him.”

In the end (and the beginning), life is a series of such games. That’s all. It’s a euphemism for, faite de mieux, a long series of lies. There’s no avoiding them. Which means the final/penultimate lie would be in regard to the seriousness of it all. If it comes down to being so powerful that it kills us, then we’ve lied to ourselves for too long. Because we’ve lied about the “bedrock” of this whole existence in the first place, which we thought was substantial. We’ve ignored the reality that lies depend on there own bedrock of “givens” (more lies).

All of which finally cut through a thick haze of illusion in the end. My preference would be that we play with our lies in the manner of those at King Louis’ masquerade ball. And why not? It would keep it all above board and in the spirit of self-deprecating, self-disclosing (dry) humor. It’s the direction we should all be going anyway. To go in another direction only gives more power to the lie, and suffering replaces the humor. We take ourselves much too seriously.

Question: What happens to the lie (its energy, character, power, intent, direction) when we take ourselves lightly?

© 2023 Richard Hiatt

1Martin Amis, The Rub of Time (New York, Vintage Press, 2017). p. 43.

2One of the healthiest parodies of this, treated like a public confessional, where people laughed at their own hypocrisies, was the medieval masquerade ball. Yes, it was a “mask holding another mask,” but the game was celebrated for what it was. It was a celebration which is not seen today, perhaps for the fear of what it might expose. Also virtually absent are humor, levity, and self-deprecation. People actually (seriously) believe they are their personas, even more than those who were at court during the reign of Louis XV.

3Author Lewis Lapham was brilliant at remaking government into what it really is: More like a television show than a political institution, a series of tableaux vivants staged against the backdrops of patriotic themes and monuments, whose primary theme was pleasing “its sponsors” and an audience at the same time. The trick, as always, is protecting the interests of the station managers and sponsors while “sustaining the illusion of popular sovereignty” and “proofs through the night that our flag is still there.” Governments are the flagships of our most profound lies. They rewrite history everyday, at will, simply to sustain themselves.

NIETZSCHE

There are a thousand examples proving how religion becomes its own poison. It’s an old argument. But it keeps returning because we unfortunately derive our moral guidelines from religion. And to the extent that religion practices, conceals, and justifies its own brand of hypocrisy, those guidelines follow the same blueprint. Our social norms and politics feed off what the scriptures say. Hence, we live in a feedback loop of tremendous contradiction, deception, and confusion.

I can think of no one who exposed those hypocrisies more than Nietzsche (current-day heroes excluded). Being trapped in his own religious environment (his father a Lutheran pastor, being a theology student, having lived in a monastery, etc.), it’s no wonder that his gut instincts used that background as a springboard. He was going to become a minister, but after just one semester he dropped out, completely disillusioned. He was also a poet and an amateur composer. His mind was expanding in ways not exactly welcomed in the Christian community or academia.

Nietzsche made his views loud and clear and he took no prisoners. In general, his argument was this: He saw the Church filled with thin-skinned figures afraid of asking for what they most obsessed about. They hid behind stained glass and scripture, lacking fortitude. Hence, the only alternative was to make a virtue out of cowardice. Envy was one of the “deadly sins” (a very big one). But instead of facing it (the natural desire for sex, power, status, etc.), they decided to “protect” themselves from it. He called it “slave morality” or sklavenmoral. Church leaders knew exactly what they were doing. Instead of using envy as a teacher to learn from, it was easier to simply condemn it.

And so, they fashioned a creed denouncing all forms of envy and “praising” the arts of denial. As it all came out, sexlessness became “purity”, weakness became “goodness”, submission to people one hates became “obedience”, and not being able to take revenge became “forgiveness.” Christianity, for Nietzsche, became a giant machine of organized contradictions. It made a virtue of lies.

This rings so incredibly true today. How many of us cringe at the huge chasm between our instincts and the interdictions about instinct dictated by some moral authority? The rules don’t work because they are lies marinated in deep denial. They don’t make the world better, just horribly repressed and angry (one consequence being priests perping on boys, parochial schoolteachers – nuns – being cruel and abusive). Hence also the reason so many have left the Church in the last fifty years, especially Catholicism (the Vatican forced to plead for money from the Third World) – which is also what convened the “emergency” meeting of Vatican II in the 1960s and its aggiornamento.

It also explains why Americans gravitate to political demagogues who validate that anger and the urge for revenge. They also gravitate to anyone owning up to their anger in the spirit of a confessional. Once, when a panel of high-minded moralists pontificated to an audience about forgiving their enemies, it was Christopher Hitchens who smelled the stink of hypocrisy. When it was his turn to respond, he said “I hate my enemies, and I wish everyday they were dead!” After a moment of silent dead air, the audience erupted in applause. He broke the rules and set the old morality on its ear. – Another “confession” came from the late George Carlin who said, “I don’t have pet peeves. I have major, full-blown psychotic hatreds!,” also winning thunderous applause many times over. It was letting the badger out of its cage, if just for a couple hours on a Friday night – glaringly honest and most definitely taboo. It’s also no wonder why Bill Maher chose to name his late-night show Politically Incorrect.

Speaking of Friday nights and alcohol, it’s just another area where the grains get crossed. The same voices preaching to us to “just say no” (remember that stupidity?), to “be responsible,” to follow the rules of “moderation,” etc., are the very voices that drive us to drink. The message is clear: No one has ever been honest about envy and desire. The Church is afraid of both and runs from it. Hence, so do the politicians. So do teachers, scout leaders, coaches, mothers and fathers.

Today, a very “intoxicated” public is facing that down like never before. A majority still choose to ignore it, deny it, repress it. But it’s a losing battle. Eventually they will have to confront their own moral contradictions. Meanwhile, they themselves go home and deal with it in their own ways – ulcers, drugs, alcohol, sex, OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorders) – in discreet privacy, of course.

Another example stems from my youth. My father was a country doctor in a small town. One day he took me aside and asked me what the “nicest” people in town all had in common. After confessing not knowing, he said “ulcers.” The adults had them, but he also saw their children “preparing” for the same condition down the road. Conflict skills are passed down. – Kindness is a virtue, and it’s definitely in short supply. But it becomes toxic when used to shield honest emotions (which is not real kindness). The only way to show authentic kindness (untouched by denial and envy) is by “facing one’s true feelings up front first, gestalting them, resolving them, thus taking away their power. What’s left, after wringing the towel dry, is calm compassion and humility which then also manifests through forgiveness. One is kind to others because, for the first time, he is kind to himself. – Alas, this is still a language seen as unorthodox and strange even today. Many follow “scripture” instead. To be sure, tt’s a work in progress.

Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, already addressed this. He contrasted the Greek archetypes Apollo and Dionysus. In it he said that what is best known today (then in 1872) was the contrast between the Apollonian need for “proportion” and the Dionysian instinct for breaking through “all restraints.” In his later years, he witnessed the door being closed even tighter on Dionysus. Princeton University professor and author Walter Kaufmann wrote, “In Nietzsche’s later works the Dionysian no longer signifies the flood of passion, but passion controlled … the latter being associated with Christianity.”

And so, what’s the lesson to take away from envy? Nietzsche said to own it. He said there was nothing wrong with envy as long as it was used to guide us to what we really want, and don’t want. Every person who makes us envious is a “teacher” of what we can become – or – what not to become – good and evil. He called this following a path of “solemn dignity.”

Nietzsche went on to say that the slack caused by religious hypocrisy could be taken up by philosophy, art, music, and literature (i.e., culture). All of which provided the kinds of catharses desperately needed in society. An enormous gap could be filled between what was talked and what was walked. What would then go away was the romance, mystery, mystique, and seduction of what we don’t have and don’t need. – Unfortunately again, this is still a very tall order today. As Carlin once again said with great candor, envy is what keeps the economy going. Without it, “everything would stop,” he said. So true.

Nietzsche said that “democracy” unleashes great torrents of “undigested envy.” He also said that atheism leaves us without a corrective kind of “moral guidance.” Here is where I (Hitchens, Amis, Dawkins, Harris, Rushdie – not to mention Spinoza, Einstein, Orwell, Russell, Sagan, Hume, Lucretius, and countless others) part ways with the great German thinker. It’s our belief that we are congenitally moral. In other words, we already know right from wrong, good from evil instinctively, without the need of a moral/divine “dictator/supervisor.” Without God society continues on, it organizes, it plans and structures itself. We still love our children and punish evil. And in many ways, (without God) we are even better off, since more people have suffered and died “in the name of God” than for any other reason in history.

To be sure, this is not the same as giving the boot to spirituality. Spirituality here transcends “God” as something “external” and “above,” which dictates to us (about envy among other things). Spirituality takes on a whole different meaning.

As a lover of animals, I can say that the lessons of envy are no better taught than by our “lower” friends. They have the advantage of nothing dictating to them about right and wrong. Instinct alone guides them. There is no self-consciousness to interfere with or obstruct straightforward and honest “desire.” We watch them fight, seduce, fuck, feel anger and jealousy, right up front. But then we watch them deal with success and failure. Time moves on and what is at first an idee fixe over one particular thing (food, a mate, territory) becomes the stuff of learning. The male of a species will fight for a female out of desire (even envy), and he will continue to protect her. But eventually it’s no longer about desire. It’s about survival. Everything changes. Minus strings and ulterior motives, nature teaches them to evolve out of desire. Envy becomes “dangerous.”

Animals also separate humans into two camps. Those who “get” this lesson, and those who don’t. Those who don’t (as I observe them) generally also don’t connect with nature very well. All they see generally are “dumb” animals and environments waiting to be “used.” Envy enables the justification for sports hunting and exploitation. Nature is seen as “below” them anyway, so what’s the problem?! The other rationale is that it allows envy to carry on. As Carlin said, markets in envy continue to thrive: You see a neighbor with a boat, and you want one too! – It’s a disease a Navajo Elder once called the “I wannas.” – “I wanna this, I wanna that!!”

Speaking of animals, it was a horse being beaten to death in the street that took Nietzsche over the edge. He ran out, caressed it, began weeping, and cried “I understand you.” In those days such behavior was clearly a symptom of madness. Today, that “madness” is seen more and more as a sign of moral/spiritual balance, of being simply humane – an “empathic” response to suffering. Millions today would have done exactly as Nietzsche did.

How strange. To be “envious” of someone who taught about the dangers of envy. His honesty shattered the veneer of protocols, taboos, censures, and most of all the hypocrisies behind the so-called virtues of “purity,” “goodness” and “obedience.” Color me insane too in the presence of institutional hypocrisy (stupidity, hubris, religious entitlement) when it leads to the suffering of animals and the desecration of all things natural and good.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt .

THE LION and the THORN

People with conscience, or consciousness, are completely overwhelmed with the world today. It’s simply too much to contend with. They go out and do what they do to correct things, but it’s like a latter-day Androcles helping an injured beast. You pull the thorn and realize you’ve stopped suffering at one level, but you’re also on a huge playing field of suffering everywhere.

The healer has several options. He can hope the thorn’s removal will have a ripple effect and, in the spirit of the Upanishads (“When a blade of grass is cut, the whole universe quivers”), the world will heal in a small way. Second, he can simply accept that he’s helped one poor soul and expect nothing more. Or third, he can know he’s only helped one soul but hopes that, deep down and private, maybe it will reverberate back to himself in some small karmic way. In other words (with “one” and “three”) he nurses an expectation.

Do we not extract a thorn somewhere every single day? The fear of the lion’s bite is the fear of too little compassion but also too much. The world is simply not open to very much compassion, even when it says it is. Even when it says we’re all here to spread compassion. The claim is bogus because there’s so little of it, and/or because even large waves of compassion are laced with expectations (subtle, unconscious) which isn’t real compassion at all. Love isn’t love when you expect a return. Anything authentic cannot be measured.

Ironically, the one institution that grapples with expectation more than anything is religion. Even in the rhetoric of love and forgiveness, there’s the subtle (or not so subtle) expectation/hope of redemption from something “higher.” The pressure is always on to do good, avoid evil, and walk a straight line in the spirit of “mindfulness,” grace, and agape (unconditional love). But for that service a Christian anticipates the gates of heaven and life everlasting. A Muslim gets his pearl bracelets, silk and brocade, servants, concubines and camels from Allah. Hindus get svargam where “divas, sages, and noble souls reside,” etc. The only opportunity one seems to have in avoiding the trappings of expectation is through apostasy and finding one’s own understanding at a deeper level (despite the trappings of religion). It transcends religion. It’s like the artist whose creativity takes him beyond his art. His craft is just a vehicle to reach somewhere else.

The lion shows up in a myriad of ways and times. Each time we have to decide: Is the thorn more important than the repercussions for helping? It seems like a ludicrous argument, but the mind loves to simplify what is truly complex and difficult. There’s always a repercussion which we infuse into it. To see a refugee suffering and begging for help has “political” repercussions. Helping an injured bird interferes with nature’s plan and endangers the nest. Helping an old lady cross a street causes a traffic accident for which you are to blame. When someone reacts simply out of instinct and pulls the thorn, (not considering the danger) he’s a hero. If the lion bites, his heroism is in question, and he could even be called stupid for trying to help. Ask a military veteran who has known combat, and he’ll know exactly what you mean, Heroism is a luck of the draw, most always blind and fortuitous.

The Androcles story, since Aesop, includes several versions. A runaway slave takes shelter in a cave which happens to be the home of a wounded lion. The slave sees that it has a thorn in its paw. He removes the thorn, and the lion befriends him. Later on the slave is recaptured and sent to Rome. The lion is also captured, caged, and scheduled to be part of the Circus Maximus, thrown into an arena with humans. It’s the slave’s turn to fight the wild beast, and the lion he confronts happens to be the one he helped. Instead of fighting, the lion shows affection and protects him. The emperor (Caligula in theory) is amazed by the “power of friendship” and decides to pardon he and the lion. Both are set free together (uncharacteristic of Caligula).

But there’s a much later version involving a mouse. A mouse decides to take refuge in the lion’s den. It accidentally awakens the lion from its sleep which angers it. The lion is about to kill it when it reminds the lion that its death would be unworthy prey and would only bring dishonor. The lion spares the mouse. Later on, the lion is captured and caged by hunters. The mouse hears the lion’s cries in the distance and decides to free it by gnawing through its ropes. The previously freed mouse frees the lion. The weak and small saves the strong and proud.

In this version the story is reversed. The lion isn’t the wounded victim. But the weak and vulnerable saves the king of beasts who is netted and trapped. Here, compassion from the mouse is reflective and retroactive. His action isn’t sparked by instinct but memory. He sizes up the situation and decides to act. There’s the sense of paying off one’s obligation to the other, settling scores and finding closure. – Again, the metaphor nails the moral question of what’s right in any number of similar situations. A friend needs shelter, a nation calls you up for military duty, you find someone’s lost money, you find litter on the road, a wild animal is found wounded, a grandparent needs homecare, the earth is polluted and choking to death. – How do you respond? How much do you respond, and why?

Here the sense of obligation is pressed against the memory of favors and gains. And something is tragically missing when one walks by and pretends not to see what is clearly wrong. But we do this all the time. We simply hide it behind the curtain of abstraction and lies (by omission): “I give at the office,” “I give to a homeless shelter,” “I belong to PETA.” The television which allows us to “voyeur” at tragedy from a safe distance keeps it surreal or comfortably unreal. Hence, we’ve already pulled the thorn from the lion’s paw without even knowing the lion, without even entering its den.

Then there are the games we play balancing the ledger with ourselves. I can ignore the homeless today because I helped an old lady across the street yesterday. I killed a human being during the war, but I’m a peace advocate today. I stole $20 from a friend, but I bought him dinner last night. It’s a devil’s wager: If I do this, I’m absolved from that. Again, expectations.

We normally stop, if only for a few seconds, to assess the pros and cons of helping – versus – the guilt of not helping. We measure the effects of pulling thorns. It’s more than assessing physical danger. It’s looking out for “Number One” just prior to jumping into the fray. It’s our strongest instinct rearing its head – self-preservation. True “selflessness” then plays cat and mouse with “self,” in and out of those moments of helping. In other words, “self-consciousness” plagues us in nearly all situations. We step aside and measure our responses. After every act of selflessness we reflect on our actions because we see ourselves tugging on both sides. Except during the act itself, we try to deny that we’re watching ourselves.

They say that every act is first of all an act of selfishness. It’s a response to what is again our strongest instinct. The thorn we remove from another’s hand may someday be our own hand. Helping the lion may be pure altruism on the surface, but it’s not at the level just below it. We help others to preserve ourselves. But is that still selflessness? Is there such a thing? At what point does selflessness shift to self-consciousness, then to selfishness? Meanwhile, ulterior motives hang over us like a Damocles sword.

Every day is a journey of wounded paws and gnawed ropes. We leverage the pros and cons of who to help, when, how, how much, and for what reason. At other times we set aside reasons and simply act, and then reflect (filling gaps and voids with reasons/explanations). “Why did I do that?” – But reasons fail to suffice. We “forget” ourselves, only to return to ourselves. We pass through moments that transcend even religion.

We can only hope that what doesn’t kill us makes us strong, that swords become plowshares and thorns become olive branches. — At the end of each story the meek lead, every ending is a beginning, and we’re even further away from knowing ourselves – but closer to Being who we are. Thanks to the accident, our supreme ignorance, and serendipity. Some see it as a kind of “painful beauty” which is also called grace.

In the language of dreams, every character we meet is an aspect of ourselves – parts of us speaking back to us, trying to get to know us. We all own Caligula, the lion, the mouse, and their captors. The world is our Circus Maximus. Only by being a mouse can one know the weaknesses of a lion and the lion’s strength of a slave. Most of all the “Buddhist gift” of a wounded paw.

© 2023 Richard Hiatt