“…something that wants to rise and shake itself free” (William Carlos Williams)

I had a fairly disconcerting experience when I was a 9^th grade spectator at our school’s varsity basketball game. It was a rural school, Kindergarten through 12^th in the same building. Maybe 30 kids per grade, so we knew pretty much everyone, or so I thought. But as I was watching the game, one of the players, maybe two years old than myself, a member of our church, our mothers were friends, became instantly unrecognizable.

I lost the flow of the game and became hypnotically focused on this one person. I tried to juggle the knowledge of his “familiarity” with his sudden alien strangeness. His bearing no longer conformed to anyone recognizable. But in a deeper sense, I was noticing him for the first time. Noticing the discrepancy between the mask of confidence he was trying to wear (the identity he was trying to present) and the unfamiliar reality of himself.

And the alien feeling spread to the entire gymnasium. My hometown crowd, all familiar faces, looked like they were all struggling with masks. It was as if the known character of each person was peeling from their bodies, revealing a routine pretense, which was their public persona, which also revealed something of the real human being struggling with fear and doubt.

I also seemed alien. I had never noticed how herky jerky I behaved. I tried to snap out of this alternate reality, but it stuck around for a long half-hour and then a milder version never fully dissipated the rest of my life. I became even more self-conscious, more herky-jerky, and felt more like a fraud who didn’t know how to stop being a fraud.

But at the same time – and this is far more important – the effect was not one of haughty disdain for myself or others, but an unprecedented feeling of sorrow for the real human beings I’d never noticed before. Beneath the smiles and cheers they looked sad or tired.

Sheer forgetfulness may have been the key accident opening this glimpse into more subtle realities simmering beneath the surface presentation; beneath the scripts that often trap us into being people we weren’t meant to be. Where familiarity once was, now bewildered human forms could be discerned. The vague outline of a soul writhing in a spider’s web or a cocoon, depending on whether they would emerge or not.

It was a short window opening into an almost paranormal vantage point. Not mine, I was merely the dumbfounded bystander next to a psychedelic window that accidentally opened next to my fog-bound brain, sweeping away the fog for one brief disconcerting glimpse of the unsuspected reality of a human being.

And “like a magic lantern that threw the nerves in patterns on a screen” – a line TS Eliot wrote, which lit up when I read it, like a memory of that event — something could be seen of the whole web holding us bound (a web of deceit and a web of love, depending on something I still can’t articulate). For this window let me see something about why we were caught. An insight no more retrievable to memory or understanding after the window closed than a treatise by John Dee.

Perhaps it was a window into death. Or how we might see the world at the moment of death. Like Dostoyevsky being driven to the firing squad. The unspeakable beauty and pain of the world flooding at last through the open window of our surrendered pretenses and stupid human dramas.

All we know of other people are the vaguest lines of a narrative. Nothing of real substance. Even familiar people become a shorthand story that we all feel strangely obliged to maintain. We need the other people in the web to stop trying so desperately to free themselves from expectations. Our own entangled stability depends on it.

As we get older that little window stays slightly ajar, and we can smell the rich loam of death. And this allows us to look back at the whole knotted network of human drama and recognize it as a mutual farce from which we never dared to shake ourselves free. Our entrapment became the comfort of familiarity. These sticky strands that tie us to small identities are mistaken for the bonds of love. We find our community by hiding together in opposition to other trapped human souls, who are hiding from us. Tied to the past by these strands of ancient pain, which can never find resolution, a dependency on pain itself develops, which preserves the illusion of community.  

And the many horrible things we came to admire, the heroic stories that defined our place in this web, the beautiful bomber jets we needed to keep the story lines firm, the noble insistence that children ready themselves for another generation of butchery  – these cherished ideals begin to pale when that window opens on the actual human beings, the innocent human biology, strung up like some predator’s meal, generation after generation. The stupidity is almost too much – these vast souls caught in tiny forms of themselves, awakening only for a brief glimpse of their horrendous error just before they finally realize the window has shut for good.

That might be why we are so committed to denying inconvenient reality to the point of mutual annihilation. In every direction we find the same hungry lie, the same brutalized brute.

Some think this retreat into the comforts of a shared lie can keep extending itself forever and we’ll never have to come to a real reckoning. They are the ones who want to blame this on human nature, so that it doesn’t feel like their fault. It may not be our fault, after all. We can never find the originator of a brutality. The brutes were already brutalized. But it may still be our responsibility.

So many white lies are required to keep the system of deception and illusion from collapsing into a cold but necessary slap of truth. Empathy is the revolution. This window into death is arousing pity and outrage across the globe. It’s not about Palestine or Israel to those of us who say “enough”. The drama of nations, races and religions is absurd. We don’t know whom we are killing. Our histories are absurd. It’s absurd to justify the slaughter of unfathomable human beings to preserve an illusion of ourselves. That’s not human nature, that’s pretense.

We’re probably not heading towards the end of humanity, but only this form of humanity. The form which has numbed itself to avoid feeling pain or sorrow or recognizing its own deceptions. The form of humanity sociopathic enough to make a living at an oil company, to join an army, to design bombs or support the slaughter of entire populations. Only those who suffer secretly, deceptively, can do such harm.

None of these poor brutalized brutes dare to notice the wall we’ve all hit. It’s a fear so deep we have to pretend it isn’t there. That’s what we call “strength” and “toughness”. Growing up, there was no other encouragement, except the encouragement to ignore reality, to become sociopathic enough to not feel. Tough meant acting so that we might fool ourselves enough to believe it.  Tough meant being scared enough to hurt other scared people.

This is stopping now, whether we like it or not. The earth doesn’t have enough room for this many sleep-walkers. The excuse of human nature is no longer available. Evolution has always depended on leaping beyond our genetic “determination” and our stupid history. The illusions are ending. A window is shutting on what is familiar and false. And a window is opening on an unfamiliar potential. We are either killing ourselves or ending the familiar portion of ourselves. But one way or the other it is ending.

It’s ending because the lies are becoming visible now. Even as they proliferate. The lies that keep the Epsteins of the world in business, the lies of Trump, the DNC, Israel the government (not the human beings who live in Israel), Hamas the organization (not the human beings who live in Palestine), climate change deniers, fake news spreaders. They proliferate because they are being exposed. The cowards, the brutes, the sad, shrunken forms of great souls stuck in the web (or the cocoon, which will it be?).

Nobody’s body deserves to be destroyed for a sickness that is entirely immaterial, a dream driving us berserk. Fascism is only the oozing stage of a chronic sickness. Maybe an allergy to a “peace-time” diet of advertising jingles, too much self-esteem, patriotic humbug and religious hypocrisy. These lies poison the body-politic with resentment, discouragement and anger. And after 5 or 6 generations, the culture regurgitates all this in some movement towards vengeful authoritarianism. Once purged, the peace-time diet resumes and the threshold of another allergic reaction approaches. Therefore, it’s the broader diet that needs adjusting, not merely our methods of containing the puke.

There’s somebody real under all this sickness. Somebody stuck in the cocoon, an atom of energy so profound, any one of us could explode for good or ill and change everything. This atom could start or end a world.

There is a righteous anger in these atoms, but they have turned against themselves, and know not where to unload. It’s the impeded “force that through the green fuse drives” the sorrow and the pity; “something that wants to rise and shake itself free”.

And when we look with the eyes of someone who is dying – and we’re all dying now – the surface dramas of our pathetic histories and identities are the enemies of real human beings. What we hold so dear is a predator eating us alive.