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WEEDS

I was reading a book the other day in which the following sentence appeared:  "Each of us wants to get in touch not so much with the harsh rebel, the self-destroying outsider, as with the wild and seductive troublemaker we keep locked up inside."  The words brought me up short.  I started to wonder:  What is it that causes some people to become outsiders – and why should it be that outsiders so often become "self-destroying"?

Upon reflection I decided that no one takes to this path through choice.  On the contrary, everyone longs to fit in, but some of us simply do not; everyone yearns to be accepted, but some of us simply are not.  If we don't have this longing, this yearning, then we are not merely outsiders – we are outlaws.  The difference that makes the outlaw lies in his or her indifference to the social order, or outright antagonism towards it.  The difference that makes the outsider lies in those character traits which put him or her at just enough variance with social norms as to make acceptance difficult to come by; the attempt to achieve it, and the self-distortion this attempt so often involves, sometimes exacts a high price via self-destructive behaviors.  But . . . does it have to be so?

The only self-destructive behavior that I continue to indulge in is my tobacco habit.  I've been a smoker since my late teens; thus cigarettes provide me with a tangible sense of continuity in the definition I give to myself, a definition which proclaims, via the evidence of what has now come to seem to my mind to be an essentially self-negating habit:  "I cannot help being who and what I am.  I cannot help it; and if I cannot be accepted for who and what I am, then I will, I must, sooner or later destroy myself."  For the outsider, this claim amounts to little more than a sort of childish tantrum, tantamount to the threat of the would-be suicide:  "Love me or lose me!"  For the outsider turned outlaw, it's a manifestation of revolt against the unreasonable conformities insisted upon by society, a revolt that becomes rage turned inward because it has not yet found any other way to express itself.

I go out to buy a pack of cigarettes.  It's nighttime, and although it is spring the nights are still chilly, so I put on my flannel jacket before leaving the apartment.  I walk the four or five blocks between my house and the nearest store quickly, without really looking at anyone; my shoulders are slightly hunched, my eyes lowered, my head tilted downward.  I have noticed that, since I have been out of work, I have more and more often been adopting this withdrawn attitude when out in public.  I have stopped shaving altogether, and my beard has grown shaggy.  Likewise my hair, which I've not bothered to get cut for several months now, looks unkempt.  I've noticed that people are beginning to throw me curious glances.  I don't seem to mind.

Leaving the store, cigarette pack in my pocket, I turn the corner and start heading for home.  As I do so, my eyes light upon a young man walking towards me.  He is perhaps six feet tall, with curly brown hair, and is maybe five years younger than I.  He wears a jacket against the damp chill, his shoulders are hunched, his head tilted downward:  when I see him, he is lighting a cigarette.  He smokes furtively, putting the cigarette up to his lips several times in rapid succession and exhaling quick little puffs of smoke.  Feeling my gaze, he glances over at me.  Our eyes meet briefly as we pass.

I cross the street, walk down to the next corner, and then turn right.  When I reach an alley halfway up the block, I pause uncertainly.  I've warmed up now and suddenly feel that I don't want to go home yet:  I've got itchy feet, and decide to just keep walking awhile.  So I turn down the alley, heading back in the direction from which I'd just come.  I'm moving quickly now, all geared up and full of energy; but when the alley I'm traveling intersects with another, I stop dead in my tracks for a moment and look all about me, as if searching for something.  I have no particular object in mind; it's just an impulse that grips me unexpectedly.  I cross the intersection and continue walking faster still, only now I find that I'm looking about me everywhere as I walk – looking intensely, almost frantically.  As I approach the main street I see, strolling up it, the young man I had passed just a few minutes before.  At the instant I see him, I realize that it's he I've been looking for.  But why?  I stare at him a few seconds – he's still hunched over, still smoking his cigarette – then force myself to look away.  He's on the opposite side of the street from me.  I turn onto this street and begin walking in the same direction, still throwing him the occasional furtive glance.  I find myself worrying as I go along that if this man notices me looking at him and recognizes me as the one who had caught his eye earlier, he will think that I've backtracked on purpose in order to make contact with him.  But I have no such desire.  When we get to the corner, each of us on our separate side of the street, I immediately cross.  Once having done so, I glance quickly behind me.  The other man has crossed to the corner I've just come from and is walking away from me.  I turn and start off in the opposite direction.

Halfway down this block I come to another alley and turn up.  When I reach the main street one block up I check for traffic and then hurry across, intending to continue up the alley on the other side.  Just as I reach the curb I look up and notice a man standing out on his front porch.  The sight of him startles me – I'm generally observant as to my surroundings, particularly when it comes to the location of other people – but this man, I can see, has been watching me for some time without my noticing.  I don't speak to him, though normally politeness would have caused me to at least offer a nod in greeting.  The fact is that I don't even want to look at him again, though I can't quite say why.  My one glance has revealed a middle-aged man with wavy red bangs hanging down over a broad, slightly stupid and (though this may well have been my imagination) slightly sinister looking face.  A lit cigarette dangles from his lips.

The alley I go up now is very dark; there's only one streetlight lit far away at the end.  To my right there is a long row of dilapidated looking wooden garages, then some small houses; to my left are the backyards of the houses which face out onto the main street.  These backyards are hidden in deep shadow.  In one of the yards up ahead of me I spot the silhouette of something strange, some shape – I can't tell exactly of what, but it catches my eye.  I can't make out if what I'm seeing is human or not, and continue to stare at it fixedly as I walk.  A sudden puff of white billows up from the silhouetted shape, like a puff of smoke coming out of an engine.  But I still can't make out for certain what the shape is – some sort of a machine, perhaps?  When I pass at last under the streetlight I steal a look to my left and glimpse the figure of a man leaning against a fence.  He is smoking a cigarette.

I continue to walk for another half hour or so, but no one else attracts my attention.  In fact, though there were surely many other people about – the hour was not late – these three people were the only ones I seemed to notice at all.  But I did more, of course, than merely "notice" them:  my attention had been riveted upon them.  It was as if they had each been brought into the foreground of my awareness, magnetizing my eye, for some specific purpose.  In fact, strange as it may sound, I feel quite certain that this is so.  I feel as if the same thing has happened here as happened in the robbery attempt at the convenience store – that life has somehow arranged itself specifically in order to bring me a message.  But the message in this case is more complex, more difficult for me to interpret.  These three men that I've seen would seem to be functioning as mirrors of myself, each one penetrating a little more deeply into the truth of who I am as an "outsider" turned "outlaw."  The first fellow provides a mere surface reflection:  of my behavior, how I walk, dress, comport myself in public; of how I use smoking as a gesture of rebelliousness towards society (smoking currently being so far out of fashion as to be tantamount to an anti-social behavior).  Attracted to this man, yet also wanting to deny the attraction, I sought to escape him only to have my attention drawn to a second man, the red-haired fellow standing on the porch.  He reflects a somewhat deeper level of my psyche:  in fact, his slightly stupid, slightly sinister face appears to conflate two separate yet connected meanings.  On the one hand, he is emblematic of a sort of "stupidity" I see within myself, a stupidity which allows me, against my better judgment, to indulge in the self-destructive behavior of smoking.  On the other hand, he represents a certain callowness I see in other people, a callowness which I feel is responsible for turning the world into an almost unbearably ugly, insensitive, and inhumane place in which to live – a callowness I rebel against in part by smoking.

Perhaps it's only my own egotism that makes me rail so furiously against what I see as carelessness and lack of sensitivity in others.  I too am a part of humanity, and it may be that the anger I feel towards towards other people is in reality an anger I feel towards myself.  Perhaps it's this anger which provides the real clue as to why the outsider and the outlaw sometimes self-destruct.  Still, there is much that is good in humanity, and if it should turn out in the end that there is not enough total goodness to save us from ourselves, it would mean nothing more than that we were an experiment of nature which failed, or that we represented but one stage of an evolutionary process which, encompassing goals much larger than any single species' survival, simply did not find in the human species the requisite ingredients necessary for success.  If our species creates conditions which it cannot itself survive, then we will all have been revealed to be "outlaws," indifferent, or even antagonistic, not towards society, but towards the whole earth, towards all of nature – and thus, ultimately, towards ourselves.  Should this turn out not to be the case, however, then the outlaw will have been revealed to be simply someone who manifested the behaviors of a psychological imbalance characteristic of certain specific individuals, but not the whole of humanity.

All of which leads me, ironically enough, to the third figure I saw, the man leaning against the fence.  He is the most mysterious of the three, being a figure of shadows.  As such, he apparently acts to embody some meaning as yet unrealized in me and is thus, perhaps, representative of some untapped potential I hold within.  But I am in a quandary as to how to realize that meaning and thus manifest whatever latent potential he represents.  That I must continue to insist upon my status as a figurative outlaw against society seems clear:  I will not, at any rate, permit myself anything less.  But if the egotism which fuels this insistence, like the egotism that fuels so many of humanity's attitudes and behaviors, may serve self-negating and destructive purposes, does it not also contain an impulse for self-preservation?  If, in turning my back upon the ills of society; if, in the process of trying to save myself I am careful not to sacrifice what is good in humanity, then perhaps I may also gain the capacity to lend aid to another engaged in a similar endeavor, and so be given aid in return.  Perhaps I may even be somehow enabled to lend my defenses to this beleaguered earth.  I do not know.  I can only travel this path of mine in slow, groping steps, and hope that the answer will be revealed as I go along.

As to smoking, I cannot even now quite bring myself to give up the habit.  If this means that I share in the destructive egotism of humanity, then I must acknowledge that.  If it means that I am not yet able to give up my sense of outrage and desire to revolt against the conformities forced upon me by society, then I must bear responsibility for that.  I can only hope that I, along with the rest of humanity, will someday evolve to a point at which such self-destructive responses are no longer necessary.  Towards this end, I continue to ponder that image of the lone man smoking a cigarette as he leans against the fence, and to ask myself:  What new possibility does he portend?  And as I leave him, this figure of shadows, to melt back into the darkness from which he came, I wonder:  What will he – and what do I – now become?  I know that I must somehow try to understand him, for if I leave the riddle of this shadow-self unsolved, I risk leaving an integral part of myself behind.

UNTITLED