THE DOSTOYEVSKY DAYDREAM from A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA (Amazon's Kindle Library, 2013)

  THE DOSTOYEVSKY DAYDREAM

From the pages of

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA (Amazon’s Kindle Library 2013)

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

© September 5, 2014

REFERENCE:

Devlin was born during THE GREAT DEPRESSION of humble parents who never escaped being part of the working class poor.

The first five years of his life, living with relatives or foster parents, he never knew he had real parents.  The shock and comfort of having a mother and father was his first watershed moment.  He would have many more.

The personality of every individuals is influenced if not formed by those impressionistic experiences the first five years of life.

Due to the diligence, vision and motivation of his mother, who lived her life mainly through her son, and due to his natural sensitivity and conceptual grasp of reality, he became comfortable as an outsider with something of a mission, a mission more intuitive than cognitive, a mission driven by conscience.

Money or religion were not the drivers of this conscience, but the idea of life, and what that idea meant to him, and only to him.  He was not a crusader, do gooder, or pleaser, but an equalizer.

He was in the world but not of the world, a world that was constantly changing its identity, perspective and the currency of its denials, whereas he was into constancy.

Paradoxically, he was an enigma to most everyone as they judged him by their behavior, ideals and motivations, which were to succeed and profit, impress and be impressive, be recognized and rewarded, belong and be held in regard, that is, by arbitrary standards created by capricious insiders.

He was therefore not a hero or antihero, impossible to define, and identify, and therefore a threat without being threatening to all that was cherished.

By temperament and inclination in ordinary parlance, he was a young man with a chip on his shoulder, and that chip was something that had become anachronistic if not nonexistent, a conscience.

That said success came his way because he took seriously education, opportunity and responsibility, and yes, failure, as part of the drill, and a privilege rather than a right.

Bright and able as he was, given this arduous preparation, what separated him from others, what made him a bona fide outsider, was his conscience.

He loved being and doing for itself and never had a job he didn’t love from his days as a student, sacker at the A&P Supermarket, and beyond.  To do was to live.

In his nearly thirty years of life, father of four children by age of twenty-five, he was a 24/7 worker, dreamer and thinker.  He never forgot his first five years as they were cauterized on his soul, always remembered he was of the working class poor despite rising to the status of the nouveau riche.

Ostentatious wealth had no appeal to him, be it displayed in fancy cars or boats, fancy homes, or fancy friends.  For him, the appeal was in books which gave him his greatest solace, finding that outsiders before him had had similar battles with their consciences in a world that always wanted to forget its.

THE DOSTOYEVSKY DAYDREAM

What is it they say, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer?”

Devlin had no friends.  It is difficult to have friends when you are not friendly and are not into friendship. Was friendship too much of a burden, too much of an intrusion on his freedom?  He took comfort in the words of Dostoyevsky who embraced the problem in art.

The great novelist fought his demons by holding them at bay by gambling, drinking, carousing and whoring around, but in the process he turned his sins into art, and his art into an inspiring earthiness with a conscience.

Devlin was not into gambling, drinking or whoring around, but attempted to escape his demons through work in the theatre of people as his laboratory.

His first introduction into the mystique that was Dostoyevsky was by the incidental requirement of a core course at university to read “Notes from the Underground.”

Devlin had no idea a writer could express such truth with such candor and naked honesty.  It never occurred to him before reading Dostoyevsky that words written on a page could get inside one’s own turmoil and uncover the depths of one’s misery for denying the lust in one’s heart.

He had never admitted to himself that he had such an unconscious need to connect with a woman simply to release the tension of his seed of need into her for no other reason than to end his torment.

It was this shame Devlin never discussed with anyone for fear they would think him mad, when Dostoyevsky clearly lived in this madness, and made no apologies for it, turning it into art.  He argued in bitter prose that the “underground man” was an emotional cripple who resisted any attempt to find love and a normal state of happiness.  The “underground man” chose to live on the edge, as Devlin felt he clearly was living.

Happiness was a myth.  “Notes from the Underground” was an affirmation of that myth.  Dostoyevsky dealt with the astonishing challenge of individuality against a society committed to a common sameness.  Why cannot people see this, not resist this?  Dostoyevsky could and did through his art.  Could he?  Would he?

When Dostoyevsky returned from Siberia, life served as an arrow that pointed the direction of his art.  The great man dealt with his demons that mirrored the pathos of everyday life of his times in book after book.     

In “The Possessed,” he revealed the mask society wears against its capacity for convulsive, senseless, gratuitous violence.  Not even the shock of this violence could wake man up to full consciousness for violence had become the norm, and life no longer sacred.

Imagine Dostoyevsky’s mind as he was marched out into that prison courtyard in the chill of a Siberian morning, expecting to die before a firing squad, blindfolded, and then not shot.

That reprieve spiked his conscience and set the pattern of the balance of his life.  He would be engaged and engaging, an irrational rascal with a purpose so that these hundred years later he is read as his pathos has become our pathos, which Devlin clearly felt in his bones.

Devlin, too, had faced the firing squad of his individualism and was not shot, but understood as Dostoyevsky understood the power and motivation of anger.

“The Possessed” was a repudiation of nihilism.  Could there be a more nihilistic society than South Africa?  Did an idle interest in nihilism give birth to the Voortrekkers’ apartheid policy, as the Marxist Revolution gave birth to the Soviet Union? 

“The Possessed” shows how an idle interest in nihilism brought about murder, rape, robbery and arson in one Russian community.  Devlin wondered if this green island in this black sea was latently as violent in the disguise of a surface calm.  On this, South African history left him ambivalent.

*     *     *

In 1836 began the Great Trek across the African continent from the Cape region, the greatest event in Boer history.  Several thousand Boer farmers and cattlemen and their families traveled by ox driven wagons through unforgiving terrain to the eastern side of the Vaal River.

The Boers were fleeing the British as well as the forces of nature. 

Drought and rinderpest, a cattle disease caused a virus, had killed most of the cattle.  After 150 years of Boer occupation, the Cape region had become fallow.

Africa is a harsh environment, but paradoxically, the Boers embraced this harshness to escape the yoke of British authority to find a place they could call their own.  The British had abolished slavery, which meant the Boers suffered greatly for this economic hardship.  

Boer history prefers to claim it was because they were not allowed to speak their own language or practice their own religion, which had validity.

Futile battles were fought against kings Chaka and Dingaan of the Zulus for the Natal region until the “Battle of Blood River” (1838) crushed the Zulus power for a time.  Meanwhile, another segment of the Voortrekkers crossed the Orange River to form a new settlement.

The trek of the Voortrekkers would eventually give birth to Johannesburg in the north and Durban in the south.  The triumph of this struggle would also personify the Boer character: heroism, tenacity and endurance.  Boer women were especially gifted with these qualities managing to preserve their families while enduring inconceivable hardships moving across the continent in cover ox wagons with little more to work with than an indomitable spirit.

Historians see the Great trek as confirming the schism that exists to this day between the Boers as Afrikaners and the British.   

The British scorned the Boers for their failure to embrace and participate in the nineteenth century cultural “Enlightenment” that separated Europe from the rest of the world, preferring to see the Boers as unfinished, unsophisticated, and boorish. 

The British could not fathom that the Boers as Afrikaners did not consider themselves Europeans but as Africans.  Africa was their home, and South Africa was their country.

The Boers chose an unforgiving world they failed to understand to the world of their European ancestors that failed to understand them. 

It could be said it was a die cast deliberately.

Devlin had friends in Iowa of Dutch descent with values similar to Afrikaners as well as to his own, which threw him into a bit of a dilemma.  Here he was in a segregated society that made his American society seem integrated.

Could he work mindfully in mindless apartheid?

He was not trained for this assignment.  He was trained as a chemical engineer dealing with things, not people.  He was not trained as a diplomat, sociologist or anthropologist, and had no experience living with Negroes in Iowa, and now Bantu.  He had affection for Afrikaners, being from a farm state, but enmity for the British, being of Irish descent.  Given everything that he believed to be true, apartheid went against that belief.

He knew he was a capable doer like the Afrikaner, but not a sophisticated man like the British.  He was sensitive to the point of madness at this contradiction.  Did his company think he could suspend his mind and beliefs for this assignment and perform like the walking dead?

He was trained to plan a task, work the plan, implement the plan to action, measure the results, weigh the shortfalls, make corrections and avoid the quicksand of high risks.  But how could he avoid the quicksand when he was placed knee deep in it from the start?  Did the company not know him at all?

He was by nature a plodder, going compulsively forward charging through barricades unconsciously if not sometimes obnoxiously with his focus only on the outcome.  The choices he had made thus far were consistent with that construction. 

Was he delusional?  Was he deceiving himself?  Would he find truth in the bloated conceits and deceits that he was encountering?  Was he living a lie?

Had his mother not given him the confidence to follow his instincts he might have taken a more predictable path.  He wouldn’t have married Sarah.  He would have become a Jesuit and professor at the University of Detroit where his uncle taught.  Now, as he moved forward in an unhappy marriage with four children the product of that marriage, on an assignment that was clearly beyond him, he quaked with Dostoyevsky’s misgivings without his artistry.  How cruel God sometimes is.

Sarah yearned to be an insider when they were both born outsiders.  Could she not see this, acclimate to it?  She craved a circle of friends when they had only acquaintances.  She pined for a crowded life with sparkling vivacious people when she married a man who epitomized dullness and embraced it as a calling. 

How could God allow such disparate people to collide in life?   Or did God not have anything to do with it.  Could it be simply biology and expediency?

Friends, which Sarah cherished, expect you to behave consistent with how they see you and expect you to behave.  Individuality is permanently a casualty of friendship in the climate of collective conformity.

More absurd, the company proffers the idea of a family, a family that behaves, a family in which individuals conform to the company’s expectations. 

Devlin was expected to play the hand dealt to him without surprise.  Was that possible?

Was apartheid ruthless?  Yes.  Then why would such good people as the Afrikaners cut off their nose to spite their face?  Dostoyevsky would see this simply as manifest nihilism.

Yet the Great Russian was ambivalent about the Czar, about the Aristocracy, and about Christianity.  Dostoyevsky was equally insensitive to the needs of the peasants, as if the peasant were meant to live subhuman existences in perpetuity as if an act of God. 

Did the failure to be shot kill the novelist’s revolutionary spirit?  Had it killed his?

Do the Bantu have nothing ahead to see but suffering and subjugation?  Life can seem meaningless when examined too closely.  Is there a crueler joke than to identify apartheid as civil justice?  Religious leaders speak of God and eternal bliss in the next world while people forever suffer in this world.  Where is the humanity in this?  Where is the sanity?

Where is the Roman Catholic Church?  Where is he?  Devlin aimed to find out.  He knew he thought deeply about things, like Dostoyevsky, but the Russian turned his into art, what did he do with his?  Nothing!  Was he a nihilist?

Nietzsche said “all gods were dead, all reason had disappeared, leaving sovereign only the absurd.”  Could anyone argue with that nihilistic premise?  Certainly he couldn’t.

Had he ever taken the time to sit down and think of the good and evil in his own heart?  No.  Was that because he couldn’t fathom evil, or himself capable of evil?  Was delusion his safety net?  Perhaps that is why he liked treating people as depersonalized data.  It saved his hands from getting dirty ……

“Mr. Devlin, Dirk, hello!”

Devlin looked up through starry eyes to see Nina’s strong even features looking down at him in a thoughtful smile.  “You were a million miles away.  You must tell me if it is wrong to interrupt you when you are like that.”

“No.  No.  It is quite all right.”  But was it?  He tried to smile but it did not work.  How absurd was that to be dreaming while awake?

*     *     *