Eight: A furious discussion of free will.
From Some Stones Don’t Roll
In Stockbridge, Massachusetts, during the 1970s, the author befriends a young man, unaware that this newcomer is a paranoid-schizophrenic who depends on medication to keep him from suicidal and homicidal behavior.
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2014
My sweet woke up dizzy today. She could not do her sit-ups. She is out to see if she can do her walk. Here in the middle of Manhattan there is death all around. In the early morning you can hear the keening cries of overnight drunk kids lofting up just as they do in Vegas or on Boylston Street in Boston. I think of life as chance and mechanism in equal measure mostly coordinated but sometimes not. I think of consciousness as taking advantage of the balance when it is there, I think of now as the only realm of action in reality. I think of memory as something we are called on to reckon with. Bill on the table. No more at peace in the placidity of death than he in the coiled placidity of his private existence when moving about the Berkshires. He got out of the car and walked, he and his new guitar, down the stairs at the east end of the Red Lion Inn and into the Lion’s Den. It was dark. That is the last time I saw him.
It is cold this morning. As cold as the time in Stockbridge in that winter that refused to become spring. I should put on my hoodie. I am dressed and ready to go. If my sweet needs me I will be ready to go. I have seen it coming. The day when I might have to take care of the one who always takes care of me. Chance. Mechanism. Quarks. Axioms.
I drove slowly to the right turn to the post office and to the right turn back to Route Seven and up to the main street — around the block — then headed left back to the house. That house is gone now. Someone else owns it. My ex is gone, moved down the road, moved on from me. My kids are gone, moved to England, Nevis, West Springfield, their children spread as well. And I am back in the city of my birth. And my sweetheart has not come back from her walk which would be a good sign. I hope it is a good sign. Bill. It is my faith these days that good will triumph and that triumph can be won by internal means. But Bill is a reproach to me now. He is one of those to whom voices are unbidden, just like the tinnitus in my ear. No, one thousand times more pervasive.
If I am a paranoid schizophrenic, do I address the voices back and say, You do not belong inside me, you interlopers! You are degraded signs, semiotic nonentities, bio-morphic idiots, away with you! Or do I nod compliantly when the doctor offers whatever pharmaceutical goodies were available in the early 1970s and says these will help you when the voices come. There was no self-exorcism for Bill. He had walked naked outside of McLean perhaps with knife in hand and they had sent him out to Gould Farm and then he had left Gould and found a cheap room in Williamsville. Was it in Alice’s Church? This was the story that my ex had known, or was it? She worked at Gould with a minister from Monterey who was eventually ruined because of a penchant for crossing lines with a female who did not bear his name. By what ethical standard do two practitioners of divinity allow a walking time bomb into the community? What does it say about me that I am the one to whom his care is now given? Totally unaware of the demons that lurk, seemingly fixed as pillars on some ancient Roman building, waiting to turn into a serrated-knife attack. Why didn’t he attack me?
But no. Knowing nothing, I did everything that was asked of me. That was my Stockbridge mode. I had come there to watch my own career move gently toward oblivion. I had hit the bottom and then discovered music, dove into it, saw it as semiotic release, access to truths in texts that cannot be expressed save in the lyrics they become. I was in the infancy of the rest of my life. I did not see Bill as a permanent fixture in the future.. But I had no idea his past contained what it contained, that he no doubt wrestled daily with incipient, condemnatory, damning voices. I did not know he was imprisoned in a diagnosis of doom, dependent for the sake of himself and others, on the ingestion of pharmaceutical products designed to shut down the damnation. We wrote song after song, going back and forth. We got up on the stage — nothing but a riser — at the back of the Lion’s Den and sang harmony and played tolerable guitar, never receiving more than the perfunctory recognition of a few. There were no triumphs or moments when we looked at each other and said, Hey, we’re gonna make it! It had every character of something that was going to end. And I was entirely unaware how.
Now it is 7:27 AM and no sweetheart. This is odd. I do know she was dizzy. I do know that I am dressed and ready for action if needed. She does have a cell phone, something we never dreamed of back in Bill’s time. I wonder that Bill and I never discussed religion. We never did. I am a theologian and we never discussed theological things. Yet the night he wandered off after stabbing George, they had been locked, I was told, in a furious discussion of free will. I do not even have the capacity to guess what side Bill took. I take limited freedom as a given. Ah, my sweet is back. She will call and go to the doctor and have her blood pressure checked. She will not want me to come and walk with her to the doctor. Limited freedom. We can choose the values we will seek to live by. I know the values. They are tolerance and helpfulness. Democracy and non-idolatry. They are meant to achieve a measure of beauty and truth. Truth and beauty. These two things are one finally. She is sitting on the bed pulling on some socks. Still cold out there. I roll over in my judge’s chair. We smile at each other. We are at an age when life can change because of a failure of either of us, unanticipated but inevitable. We can freely choose these values, but we cannot control all reality, just what the embrace of values can bring about. I wonder how a discussion of freedom between Bill and me would have gone.
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Stephen C. Rose has written a number of books (Fiction/Non-fiction). You can tweet him here.
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