Salvation From Anxiety
Who Would You Become Once You Stop Lying to Yourself?
It was endearing the first time I watched Spike Lee’s “25th Hour”, a movie about a man’s last 24 hours before he goes to prison. In the movie, there is a scene with a rant that Edward Norton’s character “Monty” hauntingly engages in as he stares at himself in the mirror. Most critics agree that this scene is one of sheer intensity and revelation, for Monty’s rant is hard to forget. It is a shameless “in your face” account, in the form of “fuck you’s”, towards the people that make up our everyday society. From his father to the Hasidic Jew all the way to the Korean Grocer. No one was safe from Monty’s wrath, especially as he ends his incinerating parade just as he started it — with himself: “No. Fuck you, Montgomery Brogan”.
It is highly unlikely that the Korean Grocer was offended by Mr. Brogan’s burns — after all, Monty was going to prison for a long time. Imagine the horror of having your life pulled from under your feet like that.
Monty was a conflicted man though, haunted to the very core — A drug slinger with backstabbing friends and an alcoholic father. It might perhaps soothe us to believe that prison is by all means better than a life lived like this.
The Road to Hell
To my mind, the Korean Grocer, a law-abiding-tax-paying-child-rearing everyday man, most likely gave Monty a carte blanche; for Monty was a doomed soul holding on to what appears to be good intentions. The Korean man probably knows deep within that it “takes one to know one”. With Monty going on a bewildering rant in the mirror that reveals some alienable truths, the Korean man sees himself in this very mirror. I imagine the Grocer chooses to forgive Monty simply because he holds sympathy for himself as for the very man that curses him — after all the Korean admits, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”… the whole damn thing feels too familiar.
Rant, Anyone?
It is the moment when life as we know it is stripped from us, do we choose a path of neurosis to cope with this horrific disintegration of our “truth”. With our neurosis comes a struggle that either paralyzes us or, as in the case of Monty, projectiles us towards freedom in the most uncanny way.
The logical exercise here would be to stand naked in front of the mirror of your vanity, and begin engaging in a rant of your own: make sure, as in Monty’s case, you begin and end the rant with a self-inflicting “fuck you”, dedicated to yourself with all its “guise and mess¹”. Then carry on in discovering the kind of filth that snowballs after that.
Surprisingly enough, you may feel sober in liberation as you take inventory of what is being revealed beyond your meager “good intentions”. Even for a handful of minutes, try choosing to embody the poetic “I went to God just to see, and I was looking at me²”
But a filthy rant without meaning is not revealing — it is just another vase shattered against our imprisoning walls in a moment of red rage. It becomes lost in the archives of film, a mere script collecting dust. It is the meaning of this rant that you should relentlessly pursue.
The first step to achieving meaning is by admitting to the fact that you engage in Monty’s rant all day every day — from the minute you wake to the moment you surrender to an ethereal sleep. It is the voice inside your head that constantly talks to you in a not-so-compassionate fashion; repeating over and over Monty’s words that you so cowardly refuse to utter, even in the privacy of your naked self against a blunt piece of reflective glass.
Mask: Off
The moment you choose to drop the mask you compulsively wear at all times is the moment you cut the umbilical tie, killing the infectious lie, that plagues you and I.
Every single one of us is guilty of wearing a guise and facing the world with an identity that isn’t safe from Monty’s reflections. It is this lie that we think emancipates us with a borrowed power to survive. It is an alienable lie that we think grants us the truth, but instead gives us an anxiety that we learned to somehow endure. The lie diminishes our authentic self that yearns to live its purpose. It keeps us from quenching the thirst for life without imprisonment.
The 25th Hour
But in a moment of liberation, we may very much break away from the shackles of Monty’s life as our own. Do not be fooled though: by transforming himself from an inmate of everyday-life to the confinement of a 4x4 cell, Monty is finally liberated. His transformation comes in a classic “man in the mirror” fashion. He became free when he denounced the fragile forces of life with its choreographed actors that recite their prewritten scripts.
Denouncing your delusional freedom becomes a revealing moment that launches you onto liberation. This is the contradiction that such rant represents: A moment of absolute truth as you look at your anxiety in the mirror and heroically order it to go fuck itself.
This rant is a visceral act that poetically transforms anxieties and fears by giving them a long-overdue makeover, a rebirth if you will. In a rant of such magnitude, we begin to engage in pure truth of life in its rawest most unforgiving representation: that we are all living behind our own prison walls, and we feel cheated for it.
Frame it Right, and It will All Be Alright
As we begin having the right conversations with ourselves, the inner dialogue then naturally shifts from an egoistic “what I ought to do” to a selfless “what I want to do³”. We rarely frame the questions we ask ourselves in a raw and, frankly speaking, insulting manner. Challenging one’s beliefs with a frantic, unforgiving monologue can undeniably engage us in a spineless rhetoric that one could hardly digest. Here’s the rub though: if you can’t seem to metabolize such revealing questions, your anxieties will do it for you — as you continue your slumber, dreaming away alongside a voice in your head and an anxiety in your heart, in a prison made by you, resembling a relentless rant that forgives no one.
References
¹ Marlin Manson, The Reflecting God, 1996
² Tool, Pneuma, 2019
³ Alan Watts, Become What You Are, 1995
