Certainty: Parts 1-3

 

Part 1:

I'm a good lover, I'm an even better hater. Some of us carry a lot of resentments, and it's very easy to deposit them when you have an entire virtual space at your disposal: you can count yourself a king of infinite slop.

But hatred is easy, blaming others is easy. If you want an answer to a question, it was always easy to find one regardless of its truth, but in the era of the internet you can be convinced of something wrong within a literal three seconds.

The struggle is for the truth, the struggle is for the patience to find it, the struggle is to not quiet all the doubts on the path to your search, a struggle made doubly hard by the unfortunate certainties upon your path to the wrong answers.

The point is to doubt, the point is to question, and the point is to not cease the questioning once you think you've found the answers. You'll inevitably get things wrong along the way, but the biggest certainty is that certainty is the most lethal force in the world. Doubts kill us slowly, certainties can kill us all at once.

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I've felt my body being un-right as un-right gets for a young man, basically for as long as I can remember, and finally I think I know the reason. I just got a diagnosis I've long suspected: for a decade I thought I had a heart condition. Nobody really believed it. Last year I found out I had hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. I was told it was a benign form. It's not. This week I was told the condition is serious: even a little more serious than I thought it was. Not necessarily lethal, but roughly the same as finding out you have MS or stage 1 or 2 cancer. I may be here in 50 years, I may be gone tomorrow. For the moment, I mean to do as much with whatever time I have as the healthiest man alive.

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I saw Bob Dylan two weeks ago at Wolf Trap. I'm not really a Dylan person. I respect the game, I respect how he still tours at 85 all the time and is still writing really good songs, but he's not for me.

But after the concert two of my best friends informed me why he's been touring non-stop since the year before I was born: he views stopping as death. He may be onto something: Dylan has a mission, he has a reason, and he keeps going year after year, lasting through all the seasons of life, all the seasons of his reputation, all the seasons of personal difficulty, all the seasons quality in his writing and performing. Motivation helps when you get 1 billion dollars in intellectual property, record sales and merch, but that wasn't enough to motivate nearly every other rock star the same way.

The moment I heard that, I resolved to write every day of my life. For years I've felt my body being un-right as un-right gets for a young man, and finally I think I know the reason.

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Here's the worst thing about dying now. I'd get the smallest funeral I'd probably have in the history of my life. At my father's funeral he got nearly 500 on the week before school when everybody was away. Had he died a few weeks later he'd get 700.

I'd get a couple hundred: they'd mostly be my parents' friends and contacts. Some from my brothers. But from me? Well, there was a time when I'd get a hundred or two of my own, but that was the DC days, the early Baltimore days. I'd be lucky to get 50 or 60 now. I'd be consoled that more than 100 would genuinely mourn me, but I doubt they'd be able to haul ass to the funeral in two days (can you? Pleeeeease?).

But at this point in my life, most of my friends are in other towns and we talk online. The vast majority of my Baltimore friendships have gone the way of all flesh. Maybe they're busy, maybe they don't like me, maybe I don't like them. I never quite figured it out and I never quite fit with a bunch of cycling hipsters and rock geeks who drink as much in their 40s as I did in my 20s. How do they keep it up? Well, apparently they don't have heart conditions.

They're good people: better perhaps than I, but they are so fucking certain of the ways of the world. I am not, and their security makes me insanely jealous. It will give them long lives of relative calm. Paradoxically, I was kept around by many of them for the negativity of my tongue: they seemed both scared of me and to find it very funny. I never made any secret of how little we had in common and how stupid their 'ways' were, and somehow, they seemed to enjoy it.

But they were never really my people, and eventually many of us tired of each other. It is a terrible thing to contemplate the end in your mid-40s, not knowing whom your people are, knowing that there aren't many people you leave behind that miss your constant presence.

Perhaps this is the legacy by which I can keep them company after my absence. Maybe they'll find me a better friend when they don't have to deal with me directly.

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My Zaydie, like my father, was a witty but difficult man: unlike me, who is as easy as a summer breeze. He wore a suit and watch to everything because to him, that's what a businessman does. He would obsess about his clothing, obsess about social slights, and obsess about his funeral.

I'm sure the main thing is that he didn't want a small crowd. But I think he also didn't want a Rabbi talking all the time about Hashem.

Unfortunately he had a subdural hematoma at 59 after falsely being told he had a heart attack and falling out of his hospital bed. They sent him home and he literally screamed in head pain until my med student uncle yelled over the phone for him to be readmitted to the hospital. He was never the same: aphasic, slurred, and just as difficult. He lived another thirty years, twenty compos mentis, and said it would have been better if he'd died.

I am not only in danger of heart events but also brain events. I certainly fear sudden death or the pain of a heart attack, but I suppose I fear a stroke more. I can deal with physical debilitation, I may even be able to deal with slurred speech, but the idea of a compromised brain is more than I can fathom. Some of us write so we may not die. I can deal with anything so long as I have the ability to write, words or music, but take away them both and I will be very short for this earth.

Zaydie was not frequent in his use of humor by the time I knew him, but he had his moments. When his and my father's business partner died, the Rabbi talked only about Hashem and not Mr. Goldman at all. Zaydie's comment to my father? "If Goldman had been there to see his funeral he would have died."

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Part 2:

It is so easy to be jealous.

Easier still because I sometimes think I'm a kind of Forrest Gump whom through no great achievements of his own got connected to some of the most consequential organizations in America. As I never tire of saying: I went to homecoming with Haley Stevens (I did not, however, 'stick it to her.' ... ... I stand by this joke). While in college I worked as a journalist under people who are involved deeply in the Washington Post and ABC News along with a relative who is a macher at the Associated Press. I've had multiple friends with positions in the White Houses of Bush and Obama, and multiple acquaintances who were deeply involved in Trump investigations. Acquaintances are Ivy League professors, literal hundreds of acquaintances and friends who studied at Ivy League schools. Many friends are now at the very top of their professions in law, science, medicine, business and engineering. In a college acting class I once ran a scene with someone who's now a B-list Broadway star and was in a theater program with someone who seemed to enjoy my company who's now a B-list Hollywood director.

None of this is extraordinarily connected for any person. It is, however, extraordinary for a person of lifelong underachievement. I was as smart as any of them, but learning and emotional debilitations prevented me from reaching for the stars they took for granted would always be there.

For years, decades even, the bitterness was overwhelming, and it's still there. Perhaps it will have contributed in some small part to shortening my lifespan. I was smart, I was capable, I had every gift except the gifts of organization (and height...), and feel like I've done nothing with them. I'm sure I could have tried harder, but the despair and terror of the difficulty was so very intense.

I heard I was smart too often when I was young. It was the worst thing I could have heard, and now I watch the world pass by and I cannot help but howl to myself about the rotten hand I was dealt and the still rottener way I played it.

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One of the certainties of life: when the mind suffers, the body suffers with it, and the older I get, the more the body takes over from the mind.

I wish one could describe the extent of major anxiety and depression to one who hasn't experienced it, but I fear no one could. People say that the experience of illness cannot truly be recalled in moments of wellness, and just like I doubt a person with migraines could explain migraines sufficiently to someone who has not experienced them nor can the experience be completely recalled in moments without their presence. In the same way I doubt a person who has experienced major depression or major anxiety can recall exactly what it's like in the moments when they are not that way because the mind which would recall it is experiencing flight from precisely that state.

In the same way, I can only recall a general state of what depression and anxiety is, but I cannot recall the specific experiences of it. It would be impossible, and it would be furtherly impossible to describe it to those who've never been to those countries. They are pains that are deeply physical, alter one's sense of time and space, alter your sense of movement, alter one's perception of literally every life event and maintenance. It is a literal alternate body within the body. A second person, a shadow self, whom you become under moments of pressure.

What one does know is that you do not truly recover from it. Like diabetes, like MS; like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, once you're in, you're in: permanently altered, your life is defined by managing it, and you know with absolute certainty that sometimes, these black dogs will win.

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What's there to do but bear witness: witness to joys, witness to suffering, and witness to mistakes?

Not just to the mistakes you've made yourself, but to the mistakes others have made. Your shit stinks just as much as ours does, and every time someone claims that they have answers, my eyes glaze with the same anger you feel as all our raised hearts take over our atrophied brains. But the reasons are inevitably reciprocal, maybe your lives, dear readers, were simple enough that answers felt easy to ascertain: mine has not been. Simple explanations are luxuries reserved for the entitled.  

I am not certain of much, but I am certain of the presence of a snake oil that grips people's minds like predatory worms. Each person peddling them becomes both victim and perpetrator, addict and pusher, mentors who turn their pupils' brains to pulp. This mush is called ideology. 

Ideological certainties are insults, moral insults to the universe's most sublime forces, and intellectual insults that devolve ostensibly smart human beings into sniveling rodents. 

Lots of ideologues say that every belief is an ideology, they tell us that to even be anti-ideology is to be ideological. Quite so. The human body also has 50 benign tumors for every one that kills you. Ideology is designed to be the cancer that kills the body, and once the body is dead, the ideology promises resurrection. 

The irony is that often the ideologies do provide a type of resurrection, but it's a resurrection for a far off people we've never met. Europe fought for democracy for 200 years, They got it, but somewhere around 150 million people had to be killed. Meanwhile, the place that enjoyed the easiest fruits of European efforts was here in the good ol' US of A. 

America fights now for equality: racial, gender, sexuality, perhaps even class. Somewhere else will doubtless get the equality America wants for itself long before we do, but we're just at this fight's beginning, and the price tag could eventually well exceed 150 million.

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I could describe the ideological silos through which we all live, but we all know them. And we all pretend to bemoan it even as we're kind of in love with them. Liberals often want to shun conservatives to protect their way of life, conservatives often want to crush liberals to protect theirs. Socialists? Well, they don't even have residual attachments to any part of America. They just want to just bring the whole thing down so they can build some grandiose dream in its place. And libertarians? Well, they just want to bring the whole thing down...

And it doesn't stop at politics. Tech bros have this strange dream of an innovation paradise where businessmen are free to innovate free of regulation and heedless of consequence, many of which will inevitably be disastrous. Academics and artists have dreams of an equality paradise where people can cast off their oppressions and be equals because they can resolve conflicts by already agreeing on everything. Businessmen and investors constantly think the stock market will go up and up and up without ever wiping out a country into another great depression. National security workers think we can simply change the world into a battle fortress to insure ourselves against terror, (take a deep breath everybody) doctors and scientists think we can run the country along ideal medical regulations without taking the realities of people's jobs into account. We shall not even, dear reader, approach issues of diversity, sex and gender with disinfectant gloves.

This whole country, the pragmatic USA that emerged after World War II with more than 50% of the world's GDP because it did not embrace the narrow strictures of every other country involved, is besotten with precisely the sorts of ideologies they once fought. 

And yet we wonder why we're just another declining superpower...

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Actually, nobody wonders. Everybody thinks they have the explanation, and the explanation is inevitably provided by their ideologies. 

And from where, ultimately, do we get these ideological certainties?

The place you are reading this essay, dear reader. 

The interlinking screen is a force so innovative, so powerful, that we will not fathom what we've unleashed until we see its full might. 

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Part 3:

The hardest thing in the world to do is treating others with humanity when you watch them dehumanize you. When you've spent every day of your life living with a person or people who love you yet bristle with total contempt for everything in the abstract which you are, everything you believe, everything you value, have never had any inhibition about saying so in any situation, and yet you're supposed to believe that this abstraction has nothing to do with their opinion of you particularly and she or he or they grow offended when you point this possibility out, which makes you erupt in anger, and then they all take it as validation that they were right about people like me the whole time. And yet you know that this was their experience too with people who weren't like them, and that is how the cycle perpetuates itself, over and over again, until everybody's absolutely demoralized and arrive at a point of explosion. 

This is not just my situation, this is America's situation, this is increasingly the situation of the entire western world. By now, is there a single person in America or Western Europe who hasn't had some version of this experience?

None of this is rational behavior. None of this has anything to do with the proper course of action. This is thinking with the heart, the nerves, with adrenaline and cortisol, it is thinking with every organ but the head. It is a narcissistic addiction to rage where people become defined more by what they hate than what they love. They grow to devalue each other's choices, then eventually each other's lives, and eventually it takes enough toll that they grow to devalue their own lives too; they think less and less of putting themselves and one another in dangerous situations where life can so easily be lost like unnecessary wars and unnecessary protests and unnecessary support of both dictatorships and terrorists. 

Sometimes war is absolutely necessary, but that is never a decision to make in anger. It is a decision that must be left to the optimists like Roosevelt, the melancholics like Lincoln, the agreeables like Eisenhower: people too in touch with their primary emotions to not observe their baser reactions. 

Wars are not games, they can never be conducted by short-fused egoists of absolute arrogance who mistaken themselves for gods and rush to judge all situations, all people; and therefore reason themselves into transformative projects that invite the very forces of nature to oppose them. 

That is not war, that is the banality of evil. It is the politics of grievance and victimhood that reduces perfectly good people into clay in the hands of leaders who view their public as slaves to their will. 

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Everyone has their lives' defining experience. Mine was high school: a high school for troubled kids who told the students that their flaws in life were based on a lack of moral character, and therefore justified themselves to use techniques modeled on 1960s cults like the Children of God. 

Was it as bad as Children of God? Of course not. Not even close. it wasn't even as bad as the average boarding school pre-1950, but it was bad enough, and a very different kind of bad from those schools which existed to beat elite children and absolve rich parents of responsibility for them. But in a different way, it was worse: its aspirations totalitarian rather than authoritarian, and for those who had predispositions to mental illness, the stress of it warped the very walls of reality in manners that made sanity basically irrevocable. The whole point, a point they freely admitted, was to erase a kid's sense of self and replace it with the only personality type sanctioned by the Hyde School. What was the personality type sanctioned by Hyde? It wasn't a personality, it was an ideology. 

It was an ideology which stated that moral character was the only reason people did not achieve what they wanted out of life. Questioning the ideology was punishable by the physical pain of the most intense excess exercise, sometimes three hours a day or more: pain that is literally self-generated. Those who contradicted the school's expectations were publicly censured, often in front of the entire school in a way that was deliberately inflicted to cause maximum humiliation. Language itself was manipulated for a series of cliches that were deliberately Orwellian in their contortions. Like a bad parent, the whole point of the school was to convince children that they were utterly unworthy of affection, approval, or love. By a few months in, I absolutely believed it, and my mind spun further and further out of control until I believed things about myself so awful that I will never state them in print. What was the use of trying at all? I would literally sit in a seat for hours at a time, unable to move. I would scream into pillows and then be upbraided for it, once I was so depressed that other students reasoned that I must have some terrible thing I'd done against school policy: in my lowest state they ambushed me, then accused me in front of the entire school, and I was ordered in this state to confess in front of the whole school to things I hadn't done. There are so many other tales I could tell: of events I endured and still worse events endured by others. The spiral only ended in my final year when finally I did what I should have done from the moment I set foot on that campus: fake that I believed it. Unfortunately, by then the damage was done, and I believed I was sent there to endure a series of tests from God himself: to prove whether I was worthy of being a God-anointed great man, or so evil that I deserved damnation, with no realistic self-conception in between. 

To tell about the processes by which the school manipulated reality would take days and days of writing, and to this day too painful to subject myself. It would be much easier to tell of straightforward horrors: people would understand them, you'd get proper sympathy, proper help, then you'd move on with your life. 

But what it showed me, beyond anything else, was just what monsters people could turn us into with just a few basic techniques of manipulation: all they need is a little gas and a lighter. People become convinced the movement they belong to matters more than the self, purely on the basis that millions of other people mean to take our sense of self away from us, and people become the very thing they fear most becoming. It is not the millions who take away our sense of self, it is a relatively small conglomeration of psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists who mean to define themselves by how they erase the selves of others: we literally become instruments of their wills, the It in the I-It. 

But just as those who mean to recover a sense of self become vacant tools in the face of trying to recover a selfhood they perceive as threatened, one can become the very mechanism of rage one means to renounce. Such is the difficulty of self-improvement and modification that perhaps we are meant to be these selfish avatars of rage.