Another excerpt from A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© April 17, 2011

 

REFERENCE: Many write and ask about this novel – when will it be published?  I don’t even know if it will.  This is another excerpt as I go through correcting and editing and rewriting.  I hope it is not found too confusing.  Remember, it is a novel that has much in common with the works of James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett.

JRF

 

CHAPTER FORTY

THE HANGOVER OF A NONDRINKER

Devlin woke seeing he was fully clothed, wrinkled and disheveled, and remembered he had spent the previous day with his chief chemist.  A silhouette appeared in the morning light projected through the window of the study.  There was a humid putrid smell in the air as the fire was out in the fireplace.  The room was cold and dank.  At some point in his sleep he had an erotic dream about Nina he couldn’t remember, but he could feel the sticky reminder to that fact in his boxer shorts. 

How different they were.  She was the United Nations in one body, and he the United States of Anxiety in one soul.  She gave him peace with an exchange of bodily fluids but how different the education of her soul.

Devlin’s religion taught the body, soul, and mind were discrete entities of disparate connection and function.  His mind reasoned, his body needed, and his soul fought to uplift his spirit beyond reason and need.  It was nothing less than a war zone.  The mind tantalized the body to avoid pain and seek pleasure, and through spiritual ecstasy the soul released the body and mind from such limitations.  Nina found spiritual ecstasy naturally through the fusion of mind, body and soul.  How envious he was of her.

Freudian psychology, then, was no less thwarted and weird than Catholicism.  If anything, he was an amplification and reification of the conflict.  Freud tampered with a 2,000-year proposition and thought he had gone one better.  In attempting to simplify human complexity, he had compounded the excesses of St. Paul.  Salvation for Christianity’s creator was left to the hereafter whereas so stated it could be neither confirmed nor denied.  Likewise, Freud put his money on the subconscious that no one can see much less define, building his rationale on this porous sieve.  He claimed we are social animals with our conscious mind only the tip of the more controlling influence of the unconscious mind. 

According to him, and this is why the religious connection seems valid, being based more on faith than science, he would have the unconscious buried deep inside us wrapped in coils of denial.  Most of us, then, pass through life controlled by this buried force like puppets on a string.  Here that, Nina?

Were Devlin to have followed the dictates of his programming, he would not be here.  He had been successful by rejecting his programming.  How so?  He had been trained to reason when feelings had been the key to his success.  He had been schooled in logic when moral intuition had fueled the problem solving.  He had been schooled in limits when he found his boundaries were only the fragility of his perceptions.

Americans bought into Freud whereas Europeans did not.  Americans believe solving problems through social connections.  They are suckers for fads, for anything that will delay dealing with reality.  Americans are quick to embrace the simplistic explanation to the complex conundrum, which confirms their fascination with fads.

Freud narrative is the equivalent of Paul’s.  Freud thought he was unveiling a new science with his narrative of a secular religion where no god need mix up the works.  Christianity has its dogma and Freud has his explanatory models.  Both models play on fear.

Nothing makes us believe more than fear.  Christianity in the first century was threatened with Armageddon while modernity now threatens man’s relevance.  When we feel threatened, when we feel like victims, our actions and beliefs are legitimized, however questionable they may be.  We become paranoid, isolated, insular, and xenophobic.  We stop growing as provokers and become childish defenders.  We become green islands in a black sea.

Envy, greed, and resentment now motivate and become sanctified because now we are defending our honor and acting in self-defense. 

Freud and Paul understood the first step to believing passionately is fear, fear of losing our identity, our lives, our status, our security, and our beliefs.  Fear is the gunpowder and hatred is the fuse.  Religion isn’t alone in dogma as Freudians can attest.  Dogma is only the lighted match. 

What did Sarah say earlier, “So I wake up your fucking brats?"   Pure Freud, but was she a ventriloquist speaking her husband’s mind?  The words came out of her mouth but was his mind the origin of them?  Did he make her like that?  Or did she make him like this?  Or were they two unconscious icebergs on a collision course?  Freud would have an explanation; the Church would have a sacred text, and both would damage their souls for the effort.  Why was that?

*     *     *

Devlin retrieved a notebook he had hidden behind a loose brick in the fireplace.  This notebook was dedicated to “Fragments of a Journal.”  He wrote them to Robbie, his eldest child, now ten, primarily because Robbie showed all the signs of being as much a displaced person as his father.  He expected him to be equally as successful and equally as miserable.  Devlin reasoned that in knowing his father better he might come to know himself better.  Disheveled and soiled in the quiet of the house at 6:30 in the morning he commenced to write.

Dear Robbie,

Once again I’m writing to you while in South Africa.  I am now fully 31-years-old, successful and an enjoy influence beyond anyone in my family’s history.  Your father, however, is a fraud, and I fear you may follow in my footsteps.  You may not read this until you are fifty, but it is for you.

Your father is a sinner.  He sins and he continues to sin.  Given the culture of our times you will sin as your father has sinned.  It is sinning with no few clues as to why or how it came about.  It is the nature of the times.  Most numbing is to know you have neither the will nor the energy to extricate yourself from this downward spiral. 

Your father cannot disentangle his mind or his body from this pattern as he has committed himself in the name of ecstasy in the person of a woman God should never have created to tempt him so.  Your father can explain his enslavement because he lives in an explanatory age, but explanation drives him only deeper into his dilemma. 

You say this is absurd, but we live in an absurd age.  Will it have faded when you are an old man?  That is doubtful because we are becoming increasingly detached from ourselves with ready-made explanatory models accelerating self-estrangement. 

Inaction is justified by rationalization for it is easier to explain why something isn’t done than to do something. 

Self-deception has been perfected into a science.  We call it psychiatry.  Self-distrust has been idealized into a phobia. We call it celebrity.  An active life has been rejected.  We call it iconic worship.  Thinking has been abandoned.  We call it secondhand information. Without a foundation in self-knowing, life is an accidental journey that can end only in disappointment

We have no sense of evil or menace as we see them as the preserves of others, nothing to do with us.  Meanwhile, our preserve is dogma.  Dogma forms our identity.  Whoever questions are dogma is our enemy.  What do I mean by dogma?  The dogma of capitalism, the dogma of being white, the dogma of being American, the dogma of being Christian, the dogma that makes anyone and everyone differing with us evil, making it our right and duty to destroy them.  Dogma is the only road to salvation.  Dogma is the order of survival, and dogma is the face and personification of fear.

Your father is a passenger in someone else’s vehicle.  He looks around this place far from home, and sees clones of a gone by era claiming to be in charge.  Small wonder they are bored, and of course so is your father.

South Africa has been a shock to your father’s system, not only in having an affair with a South African woman more beautiful than a movie star, but in business being of equal depravity to match that of apartheid. 

These conditions offend him on so many levels.  They make him scream in his sleep.  Instead of doing anything, he makes love to his multiracial princess, and comes home to fight with your mother yet another night.

Is your father a cad?  Yes, he is.  Is he immoral?  No, he isn’t.  That might surprise you.  He’ll admit to not caring about your mother’s feelings, but he does care about the morality of business and the immorality of apartheid.  He hopes that when you are an old man the content of your character will not be judged by the color of your skin, but he suspects that, too, will not change.

Your father has a different take on morality than when he came to this country.  He’ll leave that discussion to another time. 

Don’t be hard on yourself when you read this, be hard on your father if you like, although that would serve no useful purpose.   Mainly, don’t punish yourself for being blood of his blood.

Your father is walking through the wilderness, alone, by choice, and there are no landmarks to guide his progress.  Some call that a life.  Until later.

Your father

*     *     *

Devlin closed the notebook, placed it back behind the brick, then tiptoed down the passage way with his shoes off, went to the armoire, got a fresh suit, shirt, tie, socks, shoes and underwear, took them to the bathroom to take a bath, wishing they had a shower.  The tub was ridiculously short for his long body and had ancient legs on it suggesting another time, but he had come to love it nonetheless.  The warm water was soothing.

Once dressed, he tiptoed down the hall again, left all his clothes out for Gabriel to send to the cleaners, put his shoes on, and was hit by the invigorating cold of a Transvaal morning, got into his car, and thought, I hope this is an uneventful day.  If he had only known, he might have gone back to bed.

*     *     *