Nine: I said why is he not institutionalized?
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.
Ω
2014
My sweet has improved. Seen the doc. Is not her blood pressure. Maybe inner ear. Crisis averted, not exactly but put on hold. Maybe it will go away. Bill not so much. Not now. Not the resurrected challenge to everything I now think, the fly in the ointment of my optimism, my contradiction of pragmaticism, my invitation to permanent nihilism. For you see if those voices Bill was hearing were not amenable to free challenge by Bill himself, if he could not face them down, banish them, do them in, well then I cannot write my philosophy which depends precisely on the capacity to stop and allow the reality within to be challenged by tolerance, democracy, helpfulness and non-idolatry. Am I not merely imperfect, which I know, but also fraudulent?
Bill hears the unwanted voices clear as a bell. They tell him to do this or that. They push him into involuntary harm creation. They appeal to the primal force that we associate with Bruce Lee in shriek mode. But he stops and says, “These are my reality.” Then he says: “I can tolerate this. I can be strong enough to bend. I can control these voices. And if I cannot, I can disempower them. I am the decider here.” And he adds, “I am part of the human community and I have the right to function as part of it. I do not need to be corralled by these voices which rise like challenges, from where I do not know, instructing me to do things I know are harmful. Yes, it is harmful to take that knife off the counter and stab George, to kill him with one stroke. And helpfulness? What is helpful about this? It does not help me. It will not help George. I cannot banish you, voices, you are part of my reality. But I can put you in your place. I can quarantine you. Why, because harm is what it is. Harm. Being gay would be OK. But stabbing George is about doing harm. It is about harming myself. And harming others. That is the bugaboo.”
We exist, move freely, consciously, banish harm. Or reduce it at any rate. Bill goes on to the root of it all — non-idolatry. He says: “I will not idolize the Dostoyevskian freedom to do anything. That is slavery. That is what you voices want of me. And I am not to serve you or any other earthly master. I am not to give you the space you seem to desire. If I cannot banish you, I can ignore you. If I feel myself slipping into the involuntary mode, I can banish you not by force but by slipping back into the tolerance mode and allowing you to sidestep me. You are unwanted voices.” Then Bill comes to the product of the collision between the voices and the values of tolerance, democracy, helpfulness and non-idolatry. Though he is inert, for yes he is still as Buddha, he is able to allow to come into his mind the words truth beauty, beauty truth, the inseparable sum of all knowledge and spur to all action. His response to this conscious process is to arrive at an action or an expression that will advance history. Yes, all of our actions either advance history or they do not. He is literally conquering his own demons. He is doing so because Abba, or whatever name he gives to the higher reality within us all, is empowering him to overcome the voices, not with a comparable force, but with the very ease of the higher power, the power to disperse and to move on. The true power of love and freedom. For one without the other is a scutcheon. From his inertness he rises and reaches out and then back and touches his face. Marvelling in the simple flexibility of his hands and arm. He transcends.
I know this was not Bill’s reality. I know there are some who do not survive. I know that when Bush and Cheney create war out of nothing, they condemn tens of thousands, many more, to suffer the evil results of their own free actions. I know shit happens. But I also know that we are in a battle and that on one side is the conscious process that sees harm for what it is and overcomes it. On the other side is a world in which this thinking is seen as nothing more than pollyannaish nonsense. It comes down to conduct. It comes down to freedom. Bill was a poster child for Skinner mechanism. I am a poster child for overcoming. And the linchpin is harm. And harm is not what your action does to ruffle the feathers of unconscious reaction. It is an actual physical act that is palpable and loud. Whether verbal or weaponized. Harm is the action or expression that hurts and pains an individual.
Tsunamis exemplify harm that cannot be attributed to human causation. But even weather can and does stimulate us to protect ourselves against its effects. Move out of that hurricane corridor. Build where it is safe to build. Am I talking a life dedicated to comfort alone? No. We who are nomads of the universe stand tall against the flood of mindless violence and put ourselves on the line for tolerance and democracy and helping others. Yes. And we sermonize in places that are supposed to be entertainment, to get our minds off the prosaic issues of everyday life. Wrong. We do not sermonize, we wrestle with the binary. We move to the triadic.
There now. Yes. The traffic recedes when I get this way. I am fully engaged. I am Camus. I am Nietzsche in Sils-Maria pondering things. Bill is back and I google paranoid schizophrenic and see the results of those who hear the voices and strike out and realize that that inhuman energy is not amenable to reason. You see, when Bill’s real nature was revealed to me, when I learned after he disappeared that he was a paranoid schizophrenic, when I realized that he was a danger to others and to himself, I became tough. I said why is he not institutionalized? I went as far as to say that anyone who openly speaks of suicide should either snap out of it or face being put someplace where that sort of action is not easily executed.
If voices inside you are summoning you to harm, that is by all rights an occasion for the conscious defeat of evil.
Ω
Stephen C. Rose has written a number of books (Fiction/Non-fiction). You can tweet him here.
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