sanity is a fence

i MUST have that turtle

genesis for this story is based on real events
(or as “real” as any events are)
*spoiler alert: will start out normal (or as normal as anything i do is)
but then there is a dream sequence book quotes & an attempt to
tie it all together

new habit past month is reading outside in the evening
so i’m reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”
(or rather re-reading, read about 2yrs ago)
by Robert M. Pirsig

just realized i need to back up just a little for those unaware
i live in a camper in the woods w/my blonde lab dusty
no elec, a/c, fridge, or any “normal” contrivances we were used to
but that is a different story; relevance here is the fence

dusty was domesticated in an urban environment
before last october the only home he knew had all the above “conveniences” + a fence
the fence is less to keep him confined, but more to show boundaries
where “his territory” is (so he can defend it like my ex taught him)
so i put up a fence in the woods. counter-intuitive as it was, nonetheless we have a fence

back to the story
so i’m reading & he starts barking behind me
usually if it’s nothing he doesn’t consider too threatening a whistle will bring him back
it wasn’t and he didn’t
so i walk to see what’s what
and on the other side of the fence is a HUGE FEROCIOUS
turtle

yea, not huge or ferocious but never mind that, it had his ATTENTION
he’s pawing at the bottom of the fence so i go grab a landscape timber, chunk it at the bottom of the fence (to discourage digging) and promptly go back to reading
well he just gets more worked up, and so i put my bookmark in
turn around to see & guess who is suddenly on the OTHER side
of the fence
yea, so i’m like ok, better remedy this
walk to the fence and see that he had just wormed his way under
so i lift the fence & make him crawl under (turtle came also)

so now he is on the “right” side of the fence & content cuz now the object of his desire is on the same side as he is
he starts pawing at the turtle & i tell him to quit & he does
(quit pawing that is)
grabs a big ole mouthful of turtle & takes off
tell him to drop it
nothing doing
grab him & try to brush the turtle out
not happening
grab dusty, lay him down & PRY the turtle from his mouth
the turtle is fine, box variety that was closed up tight
take the turtle out thru front gate, beyond where he can see
and release
we’re good

finish reading, getting dark, time for bed
*Cue dream sequence
don’t remember all of the dream just bits & the feeling
i was on the “right” side of the fence, you know the side w/ppl,
cars, buildings, streets all that cool stuff
come across a fence
nothing major, garden variety decorative iron fence
easy enough to just step over
so i do
now i don’t know if it was a zoo
but that is the impression it was giving me
that it was a protected place (garden of eden)?
and i’m like, cool!
walk around a few minutes, not too long or too far
cuz you know i’m not on the “right” side of said fence
so i head back & close to where i’m going to cross back over
is a storm drain
you can look up the huge pipe & see the street
so i’m looking & two sheep come from the road to
the “garden” & i think hmmm…
look back up & angry dogs are on street looking in
but not coming in
well lest they decide to come my way i pop back over the fence
back on the “right” side with the streets, buildings & a cop car
remember walking by trying to look “innocent” & guess i got away
(dream police maybe) ;)

before going further most of you will need to click on this link:
http://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html
if you get no further than the dilbert strip, you’re good

cue book quote: After a while he says, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“No,” I say
“Why not?”
“Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic.”
The way I say this makes John smile. “They contain no matter,” I continue, “and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people’s minds.”
The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. “Of course,” I add, “the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people’s minds. It’s best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you’re safe. That doesn’t leave you very much to believe in, but that’s scientific too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Chris says.
“I’m being kind of facetious.”
Chris gets frustrated when I talk like this, but I don’t think it hurts him.
“One of the kids at YMCA camp says he believes in ghosts.”
“He was just spoofing you.”
“No, he wasn’t. He said that when people haven’t been buried right, their ghosts come back to haunt people. He really believes in that.”
“He was just spoofing you,” I repeat.
“What’s his name?” Sylvia says.
“Tom White Bear.”
John and I exchange looks, suddenly recognizing the same thing.
“Ohhh, Indian!” he says.
I laugh. “I guess I’m going to have to take that back a little,” I say. “I was thinking of European ghosts.”
“What’s the difference?”
John roars with laughter. “He’s got you,” he says.
I think a little and say, “Well, Indians sometimes have a different way of looking at things, which I’m not saying is completely wrong. Science isn’t part of the Indian tradition.”
“Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it.”
He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. “Sure,” I say, reversing myself, “I believe in ghosts too.”
Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I’m not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.
“It’s completely natural,” I say, “to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It’s just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist.”
John nods affirmatively and I continue.
“My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn’t that superior. IQs aren’t that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”
“What?”
“Oh, the laws of physics and of logic — the number system — the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.
“They seem real to me,” John says.
“I don’t get it,” says Chris.
So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.”
“Of course.”
“So when did this law start? Has it always existed?”
John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.
“What I’m driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.”
“Sure.”
“Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone’s mind because there wasn’t anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere…this law of gravity still existed?”
Now John seems not so sure.
“If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don’t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn’t have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still `common sense’ to believe that it existed.”
John says, “I guess I’d have to think about it.”
“Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.
“And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people’s heads! It’s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people’s ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”
“Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”
“Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as `education.”’
“You mean the teacher is hypnotizing the kids into believing the law of gravity?”
“Sure.”
“That’s absurd.”
“You’ve heard of the importance of eye contact in the classroom? Every educationist emphasizes it. No educationist explains it.”
John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.”
I counter, “That’s the first normal thing I’ve said in weeks. The rest of the time I’m feigning twentieth-
century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.
“But I’ll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.
“The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can’t escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don’t get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It’s that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it’s just that that doesn’t make it bad. Or ghosts either.”
They are just looking at me so I continue: “Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.” ~Robert M. Pirsig “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

so…fence, shoes, sanity, ghosts…

let’s see
sanity is like shoes in some respects
although i prefer to be barefoot, societal pressure & habit
find them on my feet before the “thought” even crosses my “mind”

the fence also represents sanity in some respects
dusty has always been able to get on the “other side”
he just never had a large enough incentive

the author had a bout with the other side of the “sanity” fence

Pirsig suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals between 1961 and 1963. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression as a result of an evaluation conducted by psychoanalysts, and was treated with electroconvulsive therapy on numerous occasions, a treatment he discusses in his novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

so once they shocked him back to “normal” he had to learn to live
within the boundaries of societal sanity; all the time aware that at
any given moment he could “fall off the fence of sanity”

I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you’re presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There’s a very close analogue there. ~Robert M. Pirsig

so today’s flat earth is taking everything we have been taught at face value
that the people who told us “this is the way things are” were correct
the same ones that say to be happy “get a job, buy stuff”

People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There’s no villain, no ‘mean guy’ who wants them to live meaningless lives, it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless. But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding ~Robert M. Pirsig “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

i have experienced what some call “awareness”
not everyone does
that should be enough…should
i could stop
some would argue that i “should”
but, i won’t….no, not won’t
CAN’T i must have the turtle
and if i can’t cross back under the fence of sanity?
i don’t know that i would want to

for 50 years i have been told what to do
what to wear, how to talk, how to act, what to eat
and NONE i repeat NONE of these people are as
content as i am now
no, not content; relaxed, comfortable
but comfort too is a lie
what lies beyond the precipice of sanity
that everyone avoids but so few “know”

because in the end
if i’m as happy as i am now
doing exactly the OPPOSITE of
what “society” encourages
who know how much more bliss awaits
we shall see

@DaveGrigger