DREAMS IN A BACKWATER

PART THREE

II

(1)

THE ANIMALS

Mid-summer has now arrived here in my town, and the days have begun to grow tedious, each day being exactly the same as the day before:  sunny, bright and hot, varying only in its degree of stickiness.  Living in a third-story converted attic in this kind of weather is like living in an oven:  by afternoon it's sweltering.  I put up fans in the windows to circulate the hot air, and flop about like a limp rag from mattress to chair to mattress again until eventually I'm forced to seek relief outdoors.  Still out of work, I have, really, no place to go, nothing in particular to do.  I'll have to start looking for a job soon now – much as I hate the thought – for my unemployment benefits are nearly exhausted.  But when I go into the grocery store or drug store and see the dull look of boredom in the cashiers' eyes, when I hear them making the same dreary little jokes with the customers that I myself used to make and remember so well – about how you gotta do something after all to pay the bills and god, wouldn't you just love to win the lottery? but, oh well, guess it ain't gonna happen today and what would we do with ourselves if we didn't have to work anyway? so, well, whatever, you take care now and, oh yeah, have a nice day – it makes me dread the thought of having to return to that shuffling grind.  Not having a car, and having no particular skills or training to offer employers, the variety of job prospects open to me is limited.  Most likely I'll have to return to the same sort of menial labor I've always done, such as working in a factory or at a convenience store.  Like the old joke about banging your head against a wall because it feels so good when you stop, I'd more or less convinced myself that I enjoyed this type of work – until I didn't have to do it anymore for awhile.

However, the time for my return to that life is not upon me yet.  It being too hot, these summer afternoons, for me to stay in my apartment, and it being likewise too hot most days for me to bother with making the long trek up to the cemetery, I've taken to wandering around downtown instead.  The commercial district of the town where I live is not large, covering an area only about three blocks long and two blocks wide.  The three lengthwise blocks are comprised, fairly typically for a small town I suppose, of several banks, an inexpensive all-purpose department store, a small drugstore, a number of business offices, an office-supply store, several jewelry stores, a couple of restaurants, and one or two newsstands specializing in the sale of newspapers, magazines, lottery tickets and tobacco products.  There are always two or three empty storefronts as well, for the economy here is not a thriving one.  Intersecting these three blocks, one block to either side, are streets upon which all the odds and ends of commercialism can be found:  a movie theater, the Salvation Army store, a health food store, a movie rental store, antique and second-hand shops, fix-it shops, a bridal shop, a maternity shop, etc, etc.  And lying just beyond the precincts of this central district are the more communal and public-service areas of town:  Morgan Park, the oval-shaped, three-acre parcel of land named after the town's founder, is located here, as is the public library, various elementary schools, half a dozen fast-food restaurants, various doctors' and dentists' offices, two hospitals, the fire station, the court house, the police station, grocery stores, numerous churches, an equally numerous number of bars, and any number of older, unassuming houses that have been subdivided into apartments, as was the house where I live.  These are the various precincts and districts through which I might wander on a hot weekday afternoon.

The streets, at this time of day, are pretty nearly deserted.  The heat's simply too intense for anyone to want to be spending much time outside.  There are, perhaps, a couple of small gangs of teenagers to be found roaming around, a few well-manicured men and women in business suits hurrying from one air-conditioned building to another, the occasional shopper, and a few haphazard stragglers who, like me, are without jobs and at loose ends.  The motor traffic, too, is light:  most people, of course, are working at this hour of the day.  But as afternoon shifts into evening and people leave their jobs for home the number of cars will, for a time, increase significantly; for an hour or so the streets will be clogged with traffic.

I went out earlier today for a walk at just about this time.  I was concentrating as I walked on the practice of focusing my attention on all of my senses at once, for it had come to me earlier in the day that concentrating on any one sensory perception to the exclusion of the rest falsified to some degree the reality of my experience of the world, which consists, unless I direct it otherwise, of multiple sensory perceptions occurring simultaneously.  My experience of eating, for instance, is not just a matter of taste, but also of smell (without which the experience of taste would, of course, be greatly reduced); of sight; and of touch (with regard specifically to the texture of the food on my tongue).  It involves sensations of my body's mechanical maneuverings:  the raising of my arm to put the food in my mouth, the act of chewing and swallowing, etc.  It involves a total bodily perception of how I'm positioned in relation to my environment, of whether I'm sitting or standing as I eat, for example.  It's no single one of these sensations but all of them combined which creates the experience of "eating."  And so, as I walked about town late this summer afternoon, I strove to focus my attention not only on what I saw, or heard, or smelled, but on all the sensations that were taking place both within my body and externally as well.  In this way I attempted to focus the totality of my attention on my experiential self, as perceived sensorially (i.e. to the exclusion of analytical thought), and as located within a specific series of moments in space and time.

How strange it is, this civilization that we have constructed for ourselves, when viewed this way!  The concrete of the sidewalk felt hard and unforgiving beneath my feet, completely lacking the more subtle, textured sensations of earth and grass.  The air smelt foul with its sudden gusts of exhaust fumes – and how loud, how raucous, the noise of the passing cars were with their insistent, roaring motors, their blaring horns.  All this grew stranger and stranger to me as I walked, not least because my attention, being so wholly focused on my senses, had completely deserted the precincts of my rational mind; because of this I lost the ability to digest my surroundings intellectually, and thus to orient myself to them as I normally would.  Instead I saw the world with all the dumb shock of an animal suddenly transported from its natural environment and dumped into some wholly foreign realm.  And what could that animal make of these long, congested streets, of that endless line of cars rushing towards it with their huge, unblinking eyes, their roar and whine, their implacably hard, shiny brightness?  They moved with no natural grace, not even with the terrible, terrifying grace of a predator charging towards its prey.  There was, in fact, no discernible sense to their movements at all:  they leapt forward in one great rush and then, quite suddenly, all came to a stop – only to charge suddenly forward again a few moments later.  All this to the accompaniment of great noise and a terrible, noxious smell.  I found myself growing disoriented, for I had left myself no means of protection, no psychological tools by which I could measure my capacity for defense against their onslaught.  My muscles grew tense, my back rigid; my armpits sweated and my scalp prickled.  No matter where I turned there those cars were; and where they were not there was only a towering wall of glass and stone that offered me no refuge, no means of escape, no sense of safety, no place to hide . . .

I was, for a few moments, utterly terrified.

Being human I can, of course, reorient myself to this environment at will.  But what my experience earlier today revealed to me was just how alien this mechanized, motorized, industrialized environment is to my animal self.  I have never experienced this sort of fear when surrounded by nature – when walking, for instance, in the woods over by the cemetery.  When I'm in the woods everything is all of a piece, including me.  The tumbling rush of water in the creek, the sound of birds calling, the rapid drill of the woodpecker, the chattering of chipmunks, the wind in the trees – none of these feels anything but companionable to me.  There is, unfortunately, no point I can reach in those woods that is completely beyond the range of humanly made sounds:  in the distance I can always hear the whoosh of passing cars, the buzzing of lawn mowers, the occasional siren's wail.  These sounds strike a sense of discord in me, causing a vague sense of anxiety to my animal self.  I don't mean, of course, to sentimentalize animals by unduly anthropomorphizing them:  were I only animal, those humanly engendered sounds would, I know, soon enough become just so much background noise to me.  Nor would the sounds of nature have the same relevance, for I would not be perceiving and judging them in the same way.  And I know too, of course, that for animals, nature holds no small amount of danger:  rivers may flood, fires rage, winds turn to storm . . .  A predator might at any moment leap out from behind a bush or a tree or a rock, or come swooping down from the sky overhead.  Yet the fear I imagine myself to experience when confronting this type of danger, as terrible and terrifying as it might be, still strikes me as being qualitatively different from the experience of fear I had earlier today when confronted with the onslaught of motorized traffic.  There is, with regard to the death I might encounter in nature, a profoundly felt sense of its being part of the natural order of things.  Just as the trees, clouds, birds, insects, weeds, roots, dirt, etc. of the world of nature all give me a sense of deeply felt connectedness – because they are all things made of the same materials of which I too am made – so too would my own death, were it to be caused by some natural agent, feel intrinsically appropriate and (my desire to prevent personal extinction notwithstanding) justifiable.  The world of nature, including even its processes of death and dying, feels like home to me in a way that the mechanized, industrialized, "civilized" world never can.

It's also the case that I am tapping into two varying aspects of my "core" self when walking through town and through the woods.  When I focused all my attention on my senses earlier today, experiencing a corresponding diminishment of my capacity for normal human self-consciousness as a result, I glimpsed at the center of me a place of no-self.  I learned that it is possible to experience, however obliquely, an emptiness – an absence – within.  This added to my terror, was perhaps even the central feature of my experience of it.  When in the woods, however, what exists at the center of my sensory perceptions is the awareness of a self that is yet not self-conscious.  How can self exist without being self-conscious?  Through the process of experiencing no-mindedness (as I put it before).  The difference between the two states, both of which I've described as being due to a lack of self-consciousness, seems to me to lie in the degree of centeredness felt during each experience.  Wandering around downtown, I felt a sense of profound disorientation because I was confronted by a world towards which I sensed no truly meaningful connection; this was amplified by the concentration I placed on my sensory perceptions, a concentration so intense as to temporarily shut down my ability to analyze and correlate those perceptions (analysis being a necessary prerequisite to survival in an unnatural environment).  Thus my experience of self was scattered, lacked unity, and so became an experience of self misplaced, or "absent."  When in the woods, however, my sense of unity is never completely lost, even when I place my full concentration on my sensory perceptions, because I feel meaningfully connected to the natural world which my senses are perceiving and thus do not experience disorientation and its consequent fragmentation of self.  The demand to analyze and correlate what I perceive is, in the woods, never so great as to overwhelm my intuitive sense of a unified self; neither do I need to substitute this process of analysis and correlation for my sense of a unified self.  It is the unified self which yet lacks self-consciousness that gives us our sense of continuity, via the attachment of this "unself-conscious" self to the experiences engendered by the inner and outer senses.  It is the lack of this sense of a unified self which, I believe, gives human beings that sense of anomie which has become such a common feature of modern times.

I believe it's the presence of this unself-conscious self which gives me the feeling I've mentioned previously of reality existing in some manner as no more than a mere facade, a sort of veneer which I feel could be peeled away to reveal something quite different underneath.  I've speculated in the past that what exists underneath is a void – and, insofar as reality consists of pairs of absolutes, this remains true (the void being the antithesis of a knowable reality).  Yet it has come to seem to me of late that there is another, perhaps more interesting possibility, this being that what exists behind the veneer of reality is my own psyche.  I mean this quite literally, and might argue the validity of the idea by pointing to the fact that whenever I close my eyes, whenever I'm asleep and dreaming, whenever I have had an out-of-body experience, the landscape of my inner realm is what appears.  Might it not then be said to be a logical conclusion – or rather, a conclusion born of the experiential condition – that what exists behind the surface of reality is, likewise, my own psychic landscape?  This is not, of course, to deny any conclusions based on scientific understanding as to the substantive quality and effects of the material world, nor is it to deny the philosophic validity of objective existence.  But I now believe that the possibility of an individual's inner psychic realm existing behind the constructs of reality may lead to that point at which the subjective and objective aspects of reality overlap and influence one another.  Although I cannot claim to have anything approaching a complete understanding as to how this phenomena might work, I think this new insight nevertheless points the way to an understanding as to how the individual psyche may influence and alter the nature of objective reality.  I believe, in short, that while reality may be constructed according to scientific laws (though these laws, of course, are also constantly evolving according to the measure of our understanding), the modality of its operation is fundamentally fluid, and open, to some degree, to influence.

THE EMPTY BED