A Quiet Rage Seething Below

This blog entry is not what it was originally going to be. I started off on a rant about one thing, and by the time I got a few paragraphs in decided that I wanted to go in a different direction. So, rather than talking about blowing up the planet and all the assholes that inhabit it, we're going to talk about the seven billion names of god. Or, more accurately, something more akin to the names of cats. Bear with me, this is likely to be a rambling treatise on nothing.

In the musical "Cats" it's said that every cat has multiple names; it has been awhile since I've seen it, but I believe every cat has three names. There's the name that the cat uses in dealing with non-cats, the name that the cat uses in dealing with other cats, and then there's the cat's true name that he doesn't reveal to anyone (or almost anyone). I could have this totally wrong, but that's what I remember. Anyway, the point here isn't to test my recollection of a story that I saw years ago, but to use this as an analogy for the different aspects of our personalities. We have the public persona that most of the world gets, and then varying degrees of private personae which we share with some subset of the general population, working our way up in exclusivity until we get to the self that we share perhaps with only a handful (or even less) of other people. Sometimes, and perhaps most of the time, there's substantial overlap in traits between these different selves. None of this is news to anyone.

What I'm most curious about, at least for purposes of this entry, are the parts of the self that we don't share with anyone. What do they mean? Are they even real elements of ourselves (how could they not be?) or are they just random thoughts that we might entertain from time to time? What is it that prevents us from actualizing them, and should we even endeavour to do so, or is it better that certain aspects of our mental universe remain locked away under multiple layers of safeguards and behind vaults with combinations infinitely complex, because to do anything otherwise would invite catastrophe?

Note that I'm not talking about the random thoughts of chaos that I suspect most people have on a fairly regular basis. Even the most Zen among us likely has a moment where something or someone is frustrating and there's that brief desire to walk over to the instigator and punch that person in the nose. Lots of people have fleeting thoughts of this nature that come and go and rarely get acted upon, and even if the switch were to be flipped momentarily and we actually did knock out that fool in the next row, the worst that would likely happen is that we'd get arrested or lose our jobs. Certainly these are not pleasant outcomes, but the scope of effect is fairly limited in the grand scheme of things.^[1]

No, for purposes of discussion here, I'm descending deep into the abyss, far below some random jackass in traffic that cuts me off or some coworker that's paging me and waking my ass up on the weekend when it's not my on-call shift. These are petty ramblings of little consequence. I'm thinking more about the kinds of thoughts that we rarely entertain and even less-frequently would ever choose to discuss with another human, lest they think that we really are perverse, demented, psychotic, or otherwise truly fucked up.

I'm hesitant to use any specific examples because either a) some random person that comes across this text is going to think that the example is actually one of mine (even if it isn't) and I'm seriously deranged, or b) the example I use actually is one of mine, the sharing of which would violate the whole notion of deep recesses of the soul that aren't shared with anyone, and if I'm not going to unlock that Pandora's box for someone that I know, I'm certainly not going to unleash it upon the unsuspecting Internet. I might want to run for public office someday. OK, no, that will never happen, but I also don't want some TLA showing up at my door, either, because they think I'm some kind of miscreant, deviant, or other sort of undesirable element of society [not that this isn't true, either].

So, then, we will speak in vague metaphor and allusions. Imagine there is an action or an activity, which may or may not involve other people were you to engage in it. We will call it 'Activity Z' if for no other reason than using 'X' would have been too obvious. When you contrast the mindset required to engage in Activity Z with the mindset that you normally operate with, they are probably nothing at all alike. Your day to day personality might have some set of qualities that you imagine yourself to find important, and you may think that these qualities encompass the sum total of who you are. Then there's Activity Z, something that seems so far outside the realm of "you" that you have to question where the thoughts of Z are coming from.

What prevents people from seeking out ways to pursue their Activity Z? Certainly, depending upon what it is, there might be such barriers to entry as prison time, loss of one's own life, and other such calamities, and in this case we have the entire societal infrastructure to stand against us and tell us that this thing is a Bad Idea(TM), but what if it's nothing quite that extreme? Or, even if it is, what prevents the demons from escaping the ninth circle of hell? At what point does something stop being a random thought and start percolating up into a regular presence in our minds, and what takes it from that point into actual being? What prevents it? What does your Z say about you? Does it even say anything at all, if you don't actually act upon it?

Is there a way to achieve controlled fusion, and if one is expressing their Z in some kind of sane and contained way, is it a true representation or is it merely a limited reproduction that still conforms to a larger set of societal (or other) constraints? I actually do have a concrete example that I can use here that I think most people will be familiar with and which I can cite without implying whether or not I give two shits about it one way or the other: the notion of a "safeword" in various forms of BDSM activity.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, it doesn't matter. All you really need to know is that it represents a hard limit placed upon an activity or series of activities. If no means no, except when it's really a yes in disguise, then the safeword means hell fucking no, this shit is going to stop right now, no more negotiation, no maybe, no thinking about it, etc. Regardless of what side of the equation you're on, if this is your activity Z, you know that when the safeword is issued, shit is over. It's the equivalent of a tapout in a fight. That's it, stop right now.

So now let's take that one more step. Suppose that this is your activity Z, you're doing whatever it is that you're doing, and the safeword comes out, but things don't stop, because you've gone down into that dark corner of your soul and let the demon out. Obviously, this is the point where your activities have stopped being consensual, and that's a problem, but I can't help but wonder how many people who are into this sort of thing hit the safeword limit and have at least a non-zero part of them that doesn't want to honor it, because that's what their demon commands, or because they want to see just how far they can push the envelope.^[2]

This just reminded me of the Stanford Prison Experiment, although I'm reading an article in The New Yorker right now about said experiment which provides a lot more detail on how the actual experiment was run than I had previously known. So maybe that isn't the best example. Even books like Lord of the Flies don't really go where I want to take this, because both the novel and the experiment don't represent people necessarily choosing to give in to the darkness so much so as they represent people reacting to circumstances in different ways and not being completely in control of their choices (one can argue this point, perhaps - they didn't have to kill Piggy, but they did).

....

Upon further thought, there really is no way I can fully explore this topic without more concrete examples, which I'm not really willing to do on a blog that is open to any poor bastard that stumbles across it. It is unfortunate that I am self-censoring on my own blog that pretty much nobody reads or knows about, but I'm not a fool, either, and I'm well aware that once it goes onto the Internet, it might as well be etched in a stone tablet. I guess I'll have to take this one offline. So, I'll end with this:

There is a quote from author Marianne Williamson that is typically incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela which is relevant here. "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us...."

I think this is partially true, and partially not. One can be powerful beyond measure but still swim in oceans of darkness, and I do not believe for a second that light and love will always win.^[3] I suspect that many people may indeed be afraid that they are powerful beyond measure, or at least that they are capable of far more than they give themselves credit, but nowhere does this imply that their power will be used for the betterment of truth, justice, and the American way (putting aside issues of what the American way actually means these days). We are all nuclear-powered creatures of both light and darkness, and just as the splitting of an atom can illuminate the way, that same reaction can truly fuck shit up.^[4]

Do we ever really know ourselves, or is even the most examined life still one of inadequate comprehension?