By Eric Le Roy
Have you ever gazed into a circus mirror that stretched you until you looked like a tapeworm or a spaghetti noodle with eyes? Or breathed in a blast of helium and then tried to talk, sounding like an idiot from Looney Tunes, so bad that even a therapist would piss himself laughing?
These are distortions, of course, but then so is a cartoonist’s caricature, which might fix upon your teeth, ears, or nose, and turn you into a grotesque. So is the craft of the ventriloquist, who can make human small talk emanate from a wax doll’s mouth. So is the magician who can pretend to bisect his assistant with a hacksaw while the audience gasps. So is the carnival hypnotist, like the one who cast a spell on my Uncle Herbie many years ago, and fixed it so that Herbie couldn’t raise his foot from the floor, no matter how hard he tried. (Or so the story went.)
All of these distortions are of a mischievous craft built of sleight-of-hand wizardry. Melted Lego, Molten Glass, and Misdirection. Still, they produce versions of things, versions of ourselves, that present a comically demented vision of what it would be like to live in a universe gone crazy. If we really looked and sounded like this, we’d all be locked away on the 25th floor of Saint Ironwalls Institution for the Congenitively Inane and Comically Insane on the Northern Outskirts of Nowhere.
I myself have played the magician in this way. In fact, I have been known to stand in front of a looking glass and deliberately contort my face into expressions hideous enough to make a medieval rack operator blush. Just for fun. The insane monsters of my imagination.
It makes me wonder what, if anything, is the true version. Ask any self-respecting psychopath what their ‘real’ self is like, and they’ll probably smile and say, “What on earth do you mean?” If you think about it, you must admit that anything that is not standing right before you can change into something else as soon as it turns the corner or goes out the door. This includes your children, grandparents, and husbands or wives – not to mention everyone else you know ‘intimately’ or casually. Maybe we never do know anyone other than casually – ever thought about that?
Well, I am hardly the first to notice that mostly we live atop a world of surfaces. But these surfaces have seams, cracks, and tiny holes drilled by the human mind, and it is through these razor-thin ravines that the shadowy side of the human soul slips. One could even argue that without such minuscule slits, we would not be human at all. I, for one, prefer people with devils in them. This keeps the angels honest. And while the angels figure skate on the celestial hockey rink surfaces, the devils build brothels in the cracks.
Nothing is as it seems. Eyewitnesses cannot be relied on to report in tandem what they all witnessed together; there is always a different version. If you have a nasty disagreement with a ‘partner’, try writing them a letter carefully explaining your position. I guarantee you, the letter they read and take to (bitter) heart will not be the letter you thought you were writing.
The only logical conclusion I can draw from this is that my rescuing ‘logic’ is no more than a labyrinth wherein every conceivable misadventure unfolds, as well as plenty that make no sense at all. The quantum mechanics of the human psyche. Stephen Hawking must have been thinking about me.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend this morning (or the facade of a person who may now be on the other side of the moon), and from it came the question I want to discuss with you. It is especially keen in my cosmos because, among other things, I am a history teacher. In this role, the military and ecclesiastical facts and figures come second in the centuries during which they were played out. The flawed people of the thoroughfare come first.
The secret to both studying and enjoying history, I tell students mind-wandering or rapt, is not to judge the past (like a Social Justice Warrior), but rather to try to understand why people were like they were back then, and why they did the things they did. For example, most of us find it well-nigh incomprehensible why Catholics and Protestants relished nothing more than burning one another at the stake over obscure interpretations of scripture in the Bible. Both camps, armed with God’s Inviolable Truth, had no problem subjecting their semantics-based enemies to the most agonizing deaths they could imagine. All in service of God’s Love.
OK, I agree, they must have been out of their minds. I think that today. But if I do my homework, reconstruct the medieval (and to some extent Renaissance) world, so that, as if I had put on a Virtual Reality Helmet, I cast myself among them, inculcate the doctrines they held sacred, chant their Catholic catechism, or endure their protracted Protestant sermons on blazing summer Sundays (absence from church being cause for the pillory or an amputated ear), then, slowly, crouching somewhere on a rainy morning or wind-tossed evening as I slink by the leftover ashes at the base of the stake, I begin to understand.
By teaching, prodding, coercing myself and my students to try to capture the essence of past ‘realities’, I begin to figure them out. In fact, I fall under the impression (the conviction) that I know those people. Or knew them, I suppose I should say, but I use the present tense because that’s how intensely alive they often seem to me. This happens to the extent that I grow enraged by the way such-and-such a king or priest behaved. I want to chastise them, punch them in the eye. I want them to suffer the way they made others suffer. And since there is no use in despising a phantom, I hate them because they are real.
But they are not real. They are no more real than Hamlet, Emma Bovary, or Gimpel the Fool. They are but characters in a storybook, yet my own imagination actualizes them, and they begin to play an active role in my daily life, just as I labor to render them real to my students. That’s the way I teach them history: not to imagine a brilliant Catholic like Thomas More being so barbaric as to condemn Protestants to the fire – we can all clap together and cry “Shame on Thomas More” – but to become Sir More and to stand there at the edge of the seething solemnity of the onlookers and feel proud of myself for doing God’s work, and whispering to myself, “The heretic is well-burnt.”
If you can do that, you have become a most excellent history student.
But, after this morning’s conversation, an even more troubling idea came to my mind. Let’s see now, I was born on 8 May 1949. Seems like I go back a bit, but, really, it’s just a drop in the bucket. Many of my younger students weren’t born any earlier than 2015, roughly speaking. Given that, after my birth, it took me a couple of years to make sense of things, including becoming aware that I was not biologically strapped to my mother, I could say that from my standpoint, the entire history of not only the world, but the universe is nothing but hearsay. A rumor. Stuff I am told happened.
But how do I know it happened? How do I know that any of it happened? Sometimes I am swamped with amazement: the whole Roman Empire, and everything that was in it, came and went – wars and passions, a whole civilization that left behind roads and aqueducts and part of a colosseum – but where was I when those now ancient cobbles, just laid, were new? Where was I when the Colosseum throbbed with people roaring for blood? The Appian Way carries only whispers, not an empire trampling through time. Where was I? Archaeology unmasks elusive ghosts of the past, but it can never replace the people by showing places where stone captured their footprints, and ice preserved their fossils. Where was I?
And later, where will I be?
I do not say these things to be morbid or frivolous, but only because this morning’s conversation with a friend ignited in me a sudden comprehension of the fact that, for all of us, 95% of what we think we know is gossip. A Roman aqueduct can suggest an empire, and picture books and Hollywood films can recreate a bare or garish notion of it, but all of those people – populations in the bloom and flower of their days – came and went without us. Without me. I am their second-hand source. I will suffer a worse fate. I doubt there will be any such reflections designed to resurrect and make a story out of me.
Moreover, since most of my favorite authors, painters, sculptors, and composers are dead, it means that scene after scene of the most meaningful moments of my existence involve me listening to and reading the words of the dead. Their conversations, their speculations, fears, furies, debaucheries, and dirty jokes, conducted hundreds and thousands of years ago, form the bread and meat of my daily consciousness. I am with them more profoundly than with those in the rooms I walk into and out of in 2025, and when my wife calls me to dinner, I am apt to think, Wait, I must first finish this conversation I’m having with Caesar.
At night, we are claimed by dreams that don’t really want to give us back to the world. Besides, the woken world will only pitch me forth into a circus of strangers. The graveyards and the streets are equally full of the present unknowns, and yet Caesar is real because I can project on him the thoughts I want him to have (or that research informs me he must have had), and Caesar won’t argue with me. That’s what I like about him, although I make room for offhand remarks, unseemly impulses, and the fact that he is more interested in fictions of Alexander the Great than he is in me.
Sometimes my wife and I ride by a complex of tired old residential buildings with dreary balconies on which people come out to hang clothes, smoke, or contemplate the drifts of the day. The balconies are stacked, one story over the other, so that nobody knows what is happening on the floor above or below them. I know because I see them. I could explain it to them, but they might not believe me.
It is also true that if you go to the top of the tallest building in a big city and look down, the people are not real anymore: they are dots in dot-machines. Each, however, is a maelstrom of cares I will never know about.
No, if I want someone real, I must return to Caesar.
I remember having an old black and white book that showed the Earth in different positions relative to everything else. The first illustration simply depicted a street full of people. The second was from the top of a skyscraper, the next from an airplane, the one after that, I guess, from the edge of ‘outer’ space (I don’t think we had space stations back then), and on and on, until, finally, the earth was simply a speck. In that last illustration, this infinitesimal speck could only be seen with the help of an arrow.
Caption: The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan’s book, “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space,” in which he wrote: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
NASA/JPL-Caltech
In such a speck, live I. (In the illustration, follow the tinted bar going upwards, almost halfway up, and, if you look very closely, you will find a tiny, tiny white dot. That’s not a scratch on the photo. It’s us.)
Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. I live on a particle that deep space reveals – in proportion to the cosmos – to be billions of times smaller than an earthly atom. As I sit here, or make my rounds, I have no idea if all the history (recorded and otherwise) that supposedly took place before I opened my eyes to the world is an elaborate con job: pyramids and aqueducts built by clever stagehands – or the real deal. If I imagine the eternity to follow my death to be as far-reaching as the eternity behind me, then I will have to do a lot of waiting for the next segment. (When I wake up – if – they can bring me up to speed about all the latest history that I missed. The last 14.5 billion years.
To make matters worse, as I sit here today, I can only verify what I see, and it will be the same tomorrow amid whatever circle or square engulfs me at that moment. Or I can stroll along the street and watch the cars and dog-walkers pass. But as soon as they are out of sight, there is no way for me to verify their continued existence. For example, a few moments ago, my wife came into the room, did something or other, whirled, and walked out. Where did she come from and where did she go? Outside my door, she has entered a different universe that must be taken purely on trust, just as the appearance of tomorrow must be assumed the same way. As it stands tonight, there is no such thing as tomorrow.
The people I know most intimately (there aren’t many) are makeshift slabs of rounded animation. What is behind it all? Do they think what I think they think…or is it something else entirely? Do I know any of them? The people I knew in the past, did they really exist, or am I just making them up?
It is frightening, if you want to know the truth. And this is why I often talk to Julius Caesar. Not as a senator in a toga nor an elite patrician, but man-to-man. “Julius, what’s Brutus doing today?” “Julius, did Cincinnatus really live a few centuries ago, or was he just a myth, someone somebody has told you about? How can we know?”
And Caesar answers, “Hard to say about Cincinnatus. He died before I was born. Or that’s what I hear. Brutus is drinking wine in the vineyards with friends. Or so I am told. Anyway, Cleopatra has come from Egypt and is waiting in another room. I must go to her now to see if she is really there. You understand what I mean, Eric. I won’t know until I get there.”
I say, “Ok, Julius, I am sure she is. I hope she is. But, you know, Julius, maybe she isn’t.”
“Don’t say that, Eric. It depresses me.”
“Ok, Julius. Sorry.”
They are so very real as I sit here tonight. More so than they were back then, I’ve no doubt. Ah, how they come to life in my mind. Julius and Cleo, my friends of an hour.
Then I put down the book and walk away, resignedly, into a beckoning fate, a whirlpool made of capricious, inflammable oxygen – or is it to the imagination of a card shuffler at a country fair, or is it a mirror scrambled with all variations of what light and shadow have presumed to make of me?
I am a magic trick; so, I suspect, are the others. The spawn of flashing hands, the artistry of conjurors who have insinuating eyes.
