Psychology and Other Stories (18 page)

A placebo works because we expect it to work; that is, having swallowed it, we can stop fighting, or fleeing, or shrinking from the pain. Blake once said that, “He who binds to himself a Joy / Doth the winged life destroy”; and we could perhaps add, “He who thrusts from himself a Pain / Doth invite the same again.” Just as chasing after happiness is the surest way to lose it, running from unhappiness is the surest way to bring it on. Margo, by resigning herself to her unhappiness, no longer had to fight it.

And since she would never be happy, no matter what she did or who she was with, there was no reason not to go back to Bertie—with whom she was comfortable, and about whom the worst that could be said was that he loved her unconditionally, and would not object, would perhaps not even notice, if she gained twenty pounds eating strawberry ice cream and cuddling with him on the couch in front of the television.

She wallowed in the idea of herself as fat and lazy and hedonistic—and alternately in the idea of herself as fundamentally, inescapably miserable. That morning, she slept in, was late for class, slouched into the room with her hands in her pockets, mumbled an incoherent (and insincere) apology, did not raise her hand when she had questions or objections, took no care to smile with her teeth, and, in short, enjoyed hating herself thoroughly.

But then in the afternoon, as a feel-good valedictory activity, Ethan had them write compliments and stick them on one another's backs. Margo's equilibrium was disturbed first by the fact that
she could find so many kind things to say. She had felt all week like an outsider, alone with her doubts and her criticisms and at odds with the group. She realized now that in many ways she felt only respect and admiration for her classmates. When she had first arrived on Sunday night she had, as if by default, been irritated by how sane and healthy, how effortlessly normal, everyone looked. By “normal” she did not mean happy, she realized, but something more like unconfused, coherent. Unlike herself, everyone here seemed to have figured out long ago the knack of being themselves. Like characters in a play, other people were incapable of acting
out
of character. They did not dither or second-guess themselves (or if they did, it was only
characteristic
of them). Now, however, five days later, she was more impressed by her classmates' imperfections and uncertainties. Some of them, she had learned, were grappling with real problems. Louise was being tormented by an estranged teenage son; Carla was fighting for custody of
her
five-year-old daughter; Sonja was trying to balance motherhood, work, and an incipient romance, all without guilt; Shelly couldn't get in an automobile again after an accident and had lost her job; John was trying to find a passion that could replace the career that he had been forcibly retired from. Margo felt that her own obscure, obsessive worries (what to do with her teeth!) were trivial next to theirs, and she found it easy to write heartfelt compliments for each of them.

She was even more disturbed by the comments that she received. Not because they were negative—they were all, if anything, embarrassingly positive—but because they were so consistent. The same adjectives and phrases kept reappearing. The composite image that they conjured up was, startlingly, of a woman not so very different from the one that Margo aspired to be: strong, outspoken, courageous, opinionated, independent …

But somehow this did not please her. Once, she and Bill and the daughters had been playing Adverbs, and Bill had done an impersonation of her. He had acted “Margo-ly” or “Mommily” by rubbing his hands together a lot and concluding all his sentences with a fruity “… I
think
.” It could not have been less vicious, but she was deeply offended by this caricature of her. She had not realized that she rubbed her hands together when she spoke or that she said “I think” more often than anyone else. These were mild, inoffensive mannerisms to be sure, and perhaps she should have embraced them; but once she was shown them they became
conscious
mannerisms—that is, affectations. Thereafter, whenever she caught herself rubbing her hands together, she felt that she was doing an impersonation of herself.

That afternoon, too, she felt ridiculous, as if she'd been praised for playing a part well—instead of just being herself.

She had already been asked by Brad to dance, and had said no. Feeling guilty, if also a little flattered, by his hangdog look, she had explained herself expansively.

“Dancing these days is all improv. You just get out there and do whatever you feel like, with or without a partner. But when I was young”—she pulled out this phrase with a defiant absence of irony—“we danced to a script. You had to learn the steps first, but at least you always knew what to do. And then you could perform. There's no
performance
in this kind of dancing,” she said, gesturing with repugnance at the few people twitching and jerking solipsistically around the dance floor. “It's either meditation or … showing off.”

So Brad had gone off and found someone else to dance with—a blonde girl from one of the other connect groups whom Margo had not noticed before. Watching them, she was flabbergasted by the
extent of her bitterness. This was the archetypal story of her life; this was the hell she had created for herself: to be always looking in from the outside; to be always waiting in the wings of life, never to be onstage. She could of course change her mind, go and ask Brad for that dance. But she could not be the sort of person for whom that would be the natural choice. She could never be the sort of person who would have said yes in the first place. She saw her limits but now was no longer wallowing in them. She hated herself keenly, and hated all the world, which at that moment seemed to her to be made up entirely of dancers.

Now John was asking her to dance. It was a slow dance; she would not have to improvise. She was surprised at how strongly she wanted to say yes, just to spite Brad.

“I'm sorry, John,” she began, then stopped herself. She crumpled up her napkin and threw it into the middle of the table. “Will you hold that thought?”

She strode across the room. The vast banquet hall was a glittering ice cavern, and she skated across it. Though she might fall, she couldn't hurt herself: she would only slide off whatever she collided with … She was drunk.

Jim Bird was talking to one of his connect group leaders, but she spoke anyway.

“I'm sorry to interrupt here, but Jim … well, shit—how would you like to dance?”

He looked up at her with confused eyes, a mouth unsure whether it should smile or not.

“I'm sorry,” he said at last, “but I don't actually really dance.”

“That's what I thought,” she said with dour self-pity. But by the time she had recrossed the room she was remembering her tone differently.
That's what I thought
, she'd said—but joyously, almost triumphantly, as if she had scored a point against him.

I would, said Nietzsche, only believe in a God who knew how to dance.

She danced with John, then found Brad and danced with him. She drank some more and fussed with her napkin. She ate chocolate brownies. She shared a cigarette with Brad in a stairwell or a parking lot. She had a long conversation with Lottie. She discovered a new way to dance: she moved until she did something that felt silly, then repeated that movement methodically, rhythmically, and made it her own. In the bathroom she wiped off what remained of her lipstick and laughed at something someone said. She would die one day, she supposed. She still missed Bill. She loved her daughters; she had no regrets. She liked herself, and wanted to change. She was happy, and she made a list of resolutions on her napkin and stuck it in her purse. Her ears were ringing. Brad shouted in the elevator. His breath was warm. Life was a piano, but the keys were out of order. She was paddling an iceberg. Healthy self, heal thyself. She laughed at the boyish reverence with which he took off all her clothes.

But she was only pretending.

SATURDAY
.

The physicist Schrödinger (unlike Jim Bird, I do not think Nietzsche is the only show in town) once put forward the idea that consciousness only accompanies novelty. To the extent that an organism already
knows how
to do something, or has developed a routine of reflexes or habits to deal with a known situation, to that extent it is unconscious—as when we walk or drive down a familiar street without even being aware of our surroundings. Only when some new element, some differential, pops up, demanding to be dealt with in a new way, are we fully awake. The world around us fades from consciousness as we learn how to deal with it.

But not knowing how to deal with the world is, to say the least, distressing. Consciousness, then, is distressing. According to Schrödinger, the most aware individuals of all times, those who have formed and transformed the work of art which we call humanity, have always been those who have suffered most the pangs of inner discord. “Let this be a consolation to him who also suffers from it. Without it nothing enduring has ever been made.”

The basis of every ethical code, he goes on to say, is self-denial; there is always some “thou shalt” or “thou shalt not” placed in opposition to our primitive will. Why should this be so? Isn't it absurd that I am supposed to suppress my natural appetites, disown my true self, be different from what I really am?

But our “natural self”—what Jim Bird calls our “true self,” “living self,” or “underself”—is just the repertoire of instincts and habits we've inherited from our ancestors. And our conscious life is a continued fight against that unconscious self. As a species we are still developing; we march in the front line of generations. Thus every day of a person's life represents a small bit of the evolution of our species. Granted, a single day of one's life, or even any one life as a whole, is but a tiny blow of the chisel at the ever-unfinished statue. But the whole enormous evolution we have gone through in the past, it too has been brought about by a series of just such tiny chisel blows.

The same is true of the individual. At every step, on every day of our life, something of the shape that we possessed until then has to change, to be overcome, to be deleted and replaced by something new. The resistance of our primitive will—shouting, “Do what's easy! Do what you've always done!”—is the resistance of the existing shape to the transforming chisel. For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time. Deciding what to be, becoming what we are, is a true continued self-conquering.

*

What the age-old debate over free will boils down to, it seems to me, is this: Can we sometimes do what is hard, or are we condemned to always do what is easy?

The materialistic determinists, men like the famous philosopher who kindly wrote that introduction to James R. Bird's book on Nietzsche, believe that we always do what's easy. We are physical systems, and physical systems always follow the established routes. Clocks do not run backwards, water cannot run uphill, and a neuron firing in our brains can by no effort of its own pull itself up by its bootstraps and act counter to its habit. It does what it's supposed to, what it has always done.

I do not know much about the brain. I know that neuroscientists like to eulogize it as the most complex three pounds of physical matter known to exist in the universe—but always with the implication that it's still just a lump of physical matter, that we are still just fancy machines. (As Nietzsche put it, “The living being is only a species of dead being.”)

But it seems to me that the material determinists want to have it two ways. We
are
our brains, they tell us; and (therefore) we are in thrall to our brains.

But if we
are
our brains, then we are not in thrall to our brains. You cannot point to one piece of our brains, one neuron among billions, and, noting how regularly and unimaginatively that piece behaves, thereby disprove unpredictability or imagination on the larger scale. It would be like pointing at my arm, which moves
every time
a certain pattern of electrical impulses reach it from my brain, and saying, “Your arm is not free to move or not move; therefore
you
are not free”—when I was the one, each time, who freely decided to move my arm in the first place. It would be like pointing at a soldier who always follows orders and concluding that the general has no power, or that the movements of the army are fatalistically determined.

The patience of the bricklayer (as a poet once said) is assumed in the dream of the architect; the obedience of the soldier is assumed in the freedom of the army. We think with our whole brain, and we need our individual neurons to follow orders predictably and reliably so that we can call up ideas or memories or biases or vague feelings or pros and cons whenever we need them. But what the whole system is going to do with all of that material, what the universe in your skull is going to produce or conclude or
decide
after mixing all those things together for a while, is astronomically unpredictable. Our decisions, our free choices, are nothing if they are not the fruit of deliberate thought. The more that we need to think about something before we act, the more parts of ourselves brought into play in making a decision, the more chemicals that get put into the beaker—the less certain the result, and the
freer
our will becomes.