By Eric Le Roy
Soul
Mine is a fishbowl
standing by itself on a table
by the edge of a dusty road.
Once I thought,
how round, how clairvoyant,
how full of eyes,
this aqua, these minnows!
Wanderers pass
from many distances,
the tired or wild.
They wash their dust-caked hands
in me, and now
the water is a cloud.
To such a murky soul I have slowly come.
(The Ruins of the Nightingale)
If I so much as suggest that the old virtues of self-reliance, willingness to assume responsibility for our actions, and the integrity and humility to accept blame when we are wrong
( and know we are), are still important, I will be dismissed as an annoying ‘traditionalist’, a tiresome old misery who wants only to complain, and a Luddite at heart who just can’t deal with the technical wonders and entrepreneurial insights of the New Reality. (Or Realities, as the case may be, since we live in a ‘multitasking’ world now).
So my task today is not to carp about things beyond my control or lament the gyrating fluctuations of a world where Speed is God. Of course, I can shout my contempt for the superficiality and fakery of much of modern life – at least where affluence is the straw that stirs the drink. I can assume an air of superiority and denounce the pretentiousness of those whom I recognize as hollow and phony; I can laugh (with justified cynicism) at junk the engines of marketing make appear, not just desirable but essential; I can deplore not only the violence but now the terrifying randomness of it, which assaults the world as I write today.
Mass murder just for the hell of it. Unbridled rage at the sound of a pin drop. Virulent Hate generated by a mere difference of opinion. Unless I am losing my mind, all the above seem to be on the increase. Exponentially, to use a current buzzword. As hyper-aware as I am (having lived for a long time) that all the things we call good and bad have always existed – in our nations, cities, neighborhoods, and homes – I find myself confronted by a plainly posed dilemma: Is the world getting worse, or am I getting worse?
How can I speak of honest self-assessment if it is my own perceptions that are failing, fading like birds in the dusk, and if I myself am drifting into a false sanctuary based on self-deluding judgments which, in the end, are only the extensions of my own moral and spiritual disintegration?
But, you see, I said it, didn’t I? I’ve done it again, haven’t I ? – using anachronisms such as ‘moral’ and ‘spiritual’ instead of more ‘progressive’ terminology like “belief system”, “self-actualization”, “empowerment” and “agency”. Despite myself, I am inviting scorn for dredging up words that hint at old dogmas, suspicious language perhaps concealing, OMG, racist and sexist tendencies. (How exactly they might achieve this dubious end, I have no idea, but I know that the trick can be done.) Could it be that I am so fascistic as to postulate the possibility that in this world there might be Truth instead of just truths?
We live in a spoiled, self-indulgent society which has taken the commendable impulse to resist absolutes (for defining key elements in our lives) to a now disconcerting extreme; presently, no one is held accountable for anything, because there are so many safeguards against accountability, so many escape hatches that allow scoundrels and ethics-lepers of all stripe to take refuge in victimhood, that very often the plight and rights of the real victim are subordinated to the claims of victim-status made by the perpetrator.
A primary case in point is that of the young Ukrainian woman stabbed to death by an African American man on a Charlotte transit train. A lot of the garbage coming from liberals and people of color focused their attention on the unfairness with which the murderer had been treated by a system that blithely ignored his ‘cries for help’. (He was a 14-time loser and had served years in prison.) The same refusal to assign guilt based purely on evil intentions (Nope – it was ‘society’s fault’) will prove true of the Charlie Kirk assassin. He’ll cop an insanity plea, and it will fly. He will be viewed as a victim of the ‘nazi’ regime of Donald Trump, a good kid with a transgender partner, who cracked under the pressure and succumbed to an urge, over which he had no control, to carry out a lethal act.
The sheer heartlessness of their actions will be relegated to secondary status. The Fact that they had time to reconsider, to wonder, “What am I about to do, and WHY?” will be downplayed, and these abominable losers, even though subject to legal consequences, nevertheless will be somehow viewed as innocent victims in the eyes of those whose politics support such a repulsive conclusion. That this mentality is even tolerated, let alone praised by the mainstream media, is a true sign of a ‘civilization’ that has civilized its way out of being civilized. Our society has become a dystopia, not of Nazi Dictators, but rather of chronic malcontents and compulsive ‘demonstrators’ with bottled water in one hand, a book of memes and slogans in the other, and who knows but maybe a deadly weapon in their backpack.
An Empty Culture of Spiritual and Ethical Invalids who think the police who protect them from harm are ‘stormtroopers’.
I am not saying, Go to Church. Nor am I crying out for Law and Order (although we clearly need more of it). I am not trying to turn back the clock to enact medieval punishments (well, maybe I am), nor am I trying to reduce complex ethical and psychological issues to the level of a drunken sailor discussing condoms with an equally soused bartender. What I am saying is that, as never before that I can imagine, even in the history books that describe carnage after carnage through the millennia, has there been a time of such colossal uncertainty between simply right and simply wrong.
And with the swift advent and mercurial development of AI, we don’t even know how to define ‘human’ anymore, because technology is turning us into homo sapien + AI-directed robot hybrids. Raging debates are happening over the question: “What is a ‘woman’? This, after a million years; this, a question that the cave people of the Paleolithic Age – of both sexes –could have answered with a grunt and a snort.
Instead of lucid answers to basic questions, however, we are now confronted with a blithering blizzard of academic-corporate-IT-marketing jargon and a gale of ‘choices’ that leave us bewildered, like what happens when too many rats are crammed into a single experimental cage.
Phones with a thousand apps, ice cream shops with a thousand flavors, dating and hook-up services with a thousand faces, hundreds of dicks and a smorgasboard of pussies on display, pop-up ads like popcorn jumping on your screens like an attack of swarming piranhas, all packed into a Culture of Noise and Light that never shuts up and never fades to black. For who can handle Silence and Darkness? We are terrified of it.
We live in a world where everything is available and most of it is fake. Does this matter? For that is the question: as long as we’re having fun – or pretending to – does it really matter? Who cares what it all amounts to as long as we’re getting plenty of it from all sides and it keeps us from dwelling too much on the underlying darkness just out of reach of our tolerance level, but ever lurking – a bleakly grinning, sneer-shaped void beneath an avalanche of things and more things?
What is my problem with all this? The problem used to be that I thought I could change it. Then, realizing the futility of that, I learned to hate it. But slowly, like something grinding to a halt deep in the soul, I feel myself drifting into the realm of I don’t care anymore. Why, and what is it? I have always….cared. So what is the source of my weakening, what is the nature of my indifference, which sometimes resembles, I guess, the way a person feels who is somewhere freezing to death, experiencing the numbness slowly blocking and boxing off his fingers and toes, ankles and forearms, thighs and shoulders, advancing to claim the brain and heart? What silent armageddon has taken place in me, defeated me, and left only a wasteland of worsening disdain for all that ever was and which I was part of? Or… is it insight? Epiphany? Have I been favored by the gods, belatedly, so that now I can scream “Ahhhhh-Hahhhhh !!! I get it! I gettttttt it!!!??
Have I become a mean-spirited clown in the wake of it all? Or have I become a modern stoic? Or has part of me gone craven and chosen an early death?
The first time I began to notice this was after I had been teaching students online for a while, long enough to not only meet a lot of new people but also get to know them, I imagined. Some have remained long-term friends, but you can only hang onto people for so long, and it is the general run of the business that they all go away sooner or later. But two things stand out: (1) the abruptness of some of the goodbyes; (2) even worse, the residual feeling that you never really knew these people.
They were phantoms. For one thing, unless they sent photos (a lot of them did), you only ever saw them from the upper torso to the top of their heads. It’s hardly theater in the round. So you never got a real sense of their physical dimensions. Probably, it’s a lot like an internet walking tour of some remote city like Timbuktu or Kabul. The camera guides you down the streets, but you aren’t really there, and that’s because a crucial element is missing: the senses.
It’s how we really experience and share life. You can’t smell cyberspace. You can’t taste the breath of a pretty female student through a screen.
Of course, there are miracles, the main one being that without the internet, you never would have met these people in the first place. So one can’t bitch too much about that, can one? Yet, just when you think you know them, or are beginning to know them, their needs or circumstances change, and they smile, say thank you, and click themselves away into forever and ever. Call me a sentimental fool, but something in me dies a little when an internet phantom that I liked a little – or liked a lot – simply becomes an abstraction, a flurry of shattering pixels diminishing instantaneously on a screen, and then… nothing at all. Did they really exist? Do they really exist? Or was it all make-believe?
But it does one thing for sure: it teaches you to say goodbye without too much fanfare and fucking around. There is a sanitized finality to seeing these faces crumble into nothingness. Frankly, it hardens you. It makes you see things – and people – as perhaps they truly are: merely emblems, characters in dreams you have had over the years, that for a moment or two sprang to life. Ohhh, how real some of them seemed! Worthy of your full attention! More than worthy of your love !! But they were only actors and actresses, screen shots from eternity, and they were always designed to depart like lanterns in a forest or ships at sea that flicker out or turn into stars.
At times, I wonder if I myself have really been here. Or was I only a dream? If so, whose?
It may seem odd to have begun a paper talking about morals, ethics, and unwarranted self-esteem – and end up where this one seems to be going. But what I am getting at is that you can care and not care at the same time. And it is very, very important to master the side of yourself that doesn’t care. Not caring – in the way that I mean it – has nothing to do with just not paying attention, or gazing at the wall when you should be listening – I am trying to express it as the discipline of detachment, of seeing the passing world with a smile and a sigh. For one like me to acquire anything remotely resembling such stern serenity has taken years. And not ‘caring’ in this light doesn’t mean I do not care.
Detachment is the best medicine for a world that worships self-esteem.
Learning to say goodbye is a craft, and the apprenticeship involves managing the levers and knobs in yourself. But you don’t take a hammer to the equipment; it’s probably ‘operator error.’ Hello was always meant to be the pretty twin; goodbye, the leftover one we live with. It’s because, after all the invitations of the sun, sudden turns of the body followed by meaningful looks from inscrutable eyes, we enter a sundown of our own.
And, so in planning my retreat from the frenzy of life, I also hope to leave behind what I know to have been counterfeit. It’s not defeat; it’s not capitulation; it’s not running from the boss. More like surrender to a monastery where detachment fills the solitude. The beauty doesn’t go away; it redefines itself in stoical grey. It’s as if some gaudy, lavish, somewhat pompous prince with long golden locks, sheared off his hair until he was bald, undid his precious robes and exchanged them for a rough gray smock, and left the castle and the palace ballrooms for a little stony cubicle on the side of a mountain. Of course, meditation has never been my forte. It’s worth a shot, that’s all I’m saying.
I will still be me. Weaker in the body but maybe stronger in the spirit. There is a kind of invincibility that one attains then. It doesn’t hurt anymore. The fear is gone. There is no hatred, and sometimes, like mysterious static, a dream or two will come, like a naked woman in the room, but finally, you know it was only nostalgia. You have trimmed away the million choices that danced before you as flickering brochures, or silver rings in a pawn shop, or a bright establishment where they have 1000 flavors of ice cream ‘just for you’.
Dispossessed from that, you live amid the grey-winged moments now, and each one seems like a thousand years.
To me, this is how you take responsibility. Little by little, you work at shedding most of the vices you wallowed in over the course of life, and, as the foreman of your own workshop, you should strive for a finished product, well-shaped and polished. If you mess it up, there’s no need to run out and murder someone else. Sit in your cell. Look at the mountains. Breathe in the sky that permeates your lungs, fresher than any cream, bluer than any eyes.
