Page 29 - The Myth and the Moment

Morning

be some incredibly well-balanced or weirdly mutated individuals who
can stand in the stream and not get water-logged. I can’t. Proves I’m
weak, no doubt.
But weaklings, same as stronglings, end up crystallized in some
personality, in some modus vivendi. So there’s my version of the
working-class myth: the organizing principle for me may or may not
be a rationalization of my short-comings, but I have it set up so that
the issue is irrelevant. The End justifies my lack of means. My fellow-
workers are posterity, to whom I may appear in any guise I wish; the
boss is the Bomb, who I’m attempting to cheat on the final payday.
And the princess? I’ve already sent her back to the king. Nate
Evangelino and his private mythopoetic ramblings. Freud, if not
William James, would have to say I’m getting something out of this
crazy scheme of immortality by printed proxy.
Catharsis, right? Being weak, I get scared; charged with fear, I seek
release. But isn’t that really an exorcism? A pre-psychology term, that.
Symbols (who has ever seen an intercontinental ballistic missile
swooping down through the smog toward ground zero?) set up the
demon inside my nervous system. Mental defenders of the faith,
sanity’s immune system, create counter symbols: throw manuals on
hydrology at videocassettes of conflagration. Odd expression, ‘put
out the fire.’ Like it’s still somewhere, just not where it was when you
decided to get rid of it. People have always been glad to dump their
demons into some other animate vessel, goat if appropriate, or
heretic or foreigner or personal enemy.
And thus to tragedy from what should be a minor healing art. The
curse of an inextricable devil, capriciously overriding all socialized
norms of behavior. And the ultimate scapegoat, Lord Jesus, to whom
the entire human population can pass its bogus bucks and rest
assured they won’t be back for a second haunting. Christians get their
Word, but they treat it like a hot potato. The Asian-Buddhist way is
more appealing: good and evil cancel out in the psychic equation,
leaving a nice, clean, empty vessel—not a delusional state of grace
achieved by externalizing the eternal spring of unconscious nastiness.
And the Asians knew the value of words: zero. The Great Chain of
Being from Plato to Bertrand Russell finally snapped by
Wittgenstein—and he cancelled himself out, for good.

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