The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

HANGOVER OF A NONDRINKER

JAMES R. FISHER, JR.

© December 14, 2016

REFERENCE

This is another excerpt of the novel, DEVLIN to be published in 2017. Devlin is in South Africa with apartheid acute yet secondary to his breaking through the prison of his idealism to embrace life as a human being, no longer content to remain "the puppet on a string" that had been his existence for his first thirty years of life. This chapter explores this introspection.

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Devlin woke seeing he was fully clothed, wrinkled and disheveled in his living room, and remembered he had spent the previous day with his chief chemist.  There was a humid cloying yet putrid odor in the air as the fire in the fireplace had gone out in the night.  At some point in his sleep, he had had an erotic dream of Nina and awakened violently throttling the chair’s cushion, feeling the sticky reminder 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 while exchanging bodily fluids only to torment his soul.  How different she had been educated.

His Catholicism taught him there was a body, a mind and a soul, as if separate and discrete entities with only an accidental connection to each other and not one integral whole.  In him, these conflicting demons had different needs which meant they were in a constant war with each other, one moment uplifting and the next deflating, proving the spirit existed beyond reason and the need of such constraints. 

His mind tantalized his body with the need to avoid pain and to seek pleasure, while his soul released him from such needs.  Was making love to Nina spiritual ecstasy or the ultimate in depravity?  Nina is troubled by no such war as she finds spiritual ecstasy through the fusion of her mind, body and soul.  How he envied her.

He had had such a conformist adherence to every nuance, ritual and dogma of his Roman Catholicism, but now felt abandoned as if existing in an alien world where it no longer offered him succor. He had been so inner directed that he was practically unable to breathe in the bright new world of reality of which the church had not prepared him.  Consequently, his inner life meant more to him at all times than any of the accelerating and disruptive demands of the external world.     

He thought he understood the inner sense of the biblical words: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  Since he thought with words, he believed through words he understood himself.  


For the German philosopher Johann Hamann had said, All understanding of anything whatever is self-understanding, for the spirit alone is what can be understood and to find it man need only look within himself.  Elsewhere the philosopher had said:  If a child cannot understand you, how do you expect to understand the child? Alas, crafty intellectualism is a prison and not an escape.  Was he self-incarcerated?

*     *     *

Freudian psychology is as inordinately weird as Christianity.  Indeed, Freud amplified and reified our obsessive attention to our damaged psyches, tampering with 2,000 years of guilt to rename sin as simply guilt.   God wasn’t dead.  He just introduced a new nomenclature.  Freud’s attempt to simplify human confusion compounded St. Paul’s flight into abstraction to make us all walking fruitcakes. 

For St. Paul, salvation is founded in the hereafter with life on earth little more than a living hell.  Freud is no better.  He charts a course to finding heaven on earth through the subconscious that is equally indefinable.  If this is genius, then these strange brothers represent its epitome as no one can confirm or refute their other world premises.

St. Paul talks of a “Second Coming” of Jesus, the Messiah, to save mankind, while Freud invents the “talking cure” as the ultimate gauge to coping with life's desultory demands.  For Freud, man is an instinctive social animal driven by his buried subconscious. For St. Paul, God resides in heaven while Freud’s exists in the earthy hell and subliminal world of George Orwell’s “Big Brother.”        

If there is any merit to this mania to define man, it invariably relates to man's dependence on a religious connection.  Theology and faith are predicates of science as much as they are of religion.  Neither talking cures nor Revelations can be proven in a laboratory.  


Although psychology, psychiatry, sociology and anthropology adhere to the scientific method, they are essentially explanatory disciplines consistent with St. Paul’s Christology.  It is that old l saw: self-fulfilling prophecy.  If something is repeated enough times, it comes to be believed although limited to a modicum of probability.  In a word, everything seems to be faith based.

The world population in 1968 is 3.5 billion souls of which one-third are Christians, but wholly 80 percent believe in the existence of God.  St. Paul wrapped this consensus around a personal savior, Jesus Christ, while Sigmund Freud wrapped it around the personal construct of an Ego, Superego and Id, asserting that the subconscious was at the controls in a mechanized universe. 

Much of science, although it would suggest otherwise, is largely based on faith with its theoretical postulates such as evolution and climate change.  There is forever a war between self-direction and other-direction, between free will and instinctual enslavement, between an inner life and outer dominance, between belief in God and a discursive rationality. 

The Procrustean tendency of modernity is to examine human relations with the quantitative methodology of science, while qualitative interpretations are what people value as truth as they involve the diversity of natural and varied desires, aspirations, feelings and ideals providing a sense of worth and dignity, whereas the classifications of science (including those of Freud) see human beings only in mechanistic ways. 

The new religion of science (and he knew he was part of it) had created a power seeking elite mobilized to exploit and oppress others without redress while wrapped in the steel coils of denial, justifying this offensive behavior in the name of progress (as he was now doing) while being manipulated by remote masters on mahogany row as if puppets on a string.  Here that, Nina?  I’ve admitted it!

*     *     *

Devlin took solace in the fact that had he followed the dictates of his programming he would not have been given this assignment in South Africa.  His claim to success was the rejection not acceptance of his brainwashing.  


I’ve been trained to reason when emotions have been my primary tools.  I’ve been schooled in abstract logic when moral intuition has been key to my problem solving.  I’ve been told we are limited by the arbitrary construct of I.Q., as if intelligence is a fixed data point when intelligence is an ever growing phenomenon.  Intelligence is not a test score but what intelligence does. 

Americans bought into Freud’s surrealistic nomenclature whereas Europeans did not.  Americans are gullible to the new: to fads and fantasies, to anything that is expedient and promises to bypass the agencies of control.  With a cache in crazes, Americans are pushovers for the simplistic explanation to the complex riddle, solving problems they can grasp rather than the problems they face.   

Freud is the Jewish equivalent to the Christian Paul.  Freud thought he was unveiling a new science when he was giving birth to a secular religion where no gods could muck up the works.  Christianity has its dogma; Freud his explanatory models. 

What did Sarah say earlier?  “So what if I wake up your fucking brats!”   Pure Freudian, but was he a ventriloquist with her speaking his mind?  The words came out of her mouth but did they originate with him?  Did he make her like she was?  Or did she make him the way he was?  Were they simply two icebergs on a collision course?  Freud would have an explanation; the Church a sacred text, and both would skirt the basic dilemma of their damaged souls.  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 nine, primarily because Robbie showed all the signs of being as much a displaced person as was his father.  He expected him to be equally as successful and equally as miserable.  Devlin reasoned that in knowing him better perhaps he would come to know himself better as well.  Disheveled and soiled in the quiet of the house at 5:30 in the morning, he commenced to write.

Dear Robbie,

Once again I’m writing to you while in South Africa.  I am now fully 30-years-old, successful and an influence beyond anyone has ever been in my family’s history.  Your father, however, is a fraud, and I fear of his four children you may follow in his footsteps.  You may not read this until you are fifty or sixty, 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 and is sinning with no more clue as to why or how it came about.  It is the nature of the times, clueless.  Most numbing of all, however, is knowing you have neither the will nor the way to extricate yourself from this downward spiral into oblivion. 

The paradox is that I cannot disentangle my mind or my body from this pattern as I have committed myself to it in the name of ecstasy and in the person of a woman that God should never have created to tempt me so.  I can explain my enslavement because I live in an explanatory age, but in the explaining it comes to possess me even more deeply. 

I know this is absurd but we live in the Age of the Absurd.  Will it have faded when you are an old man?  I doubt it because we are becoming increasingly detached from ourselves, and, yes, there is a ready-made explanatory model for this called “self-estrangement,” which helps none of us at all. 

We live in an age of justification for inaction, rationalization and explanation.  It is easier to explain an action than to avoid the necessity for the action.  We have perfected self-deception to a science and we call it psychiatry.  We have idealized self-distrust to a phobia and now have a mania for secondhand information to guide us.  We have become addicts of information as surrogate for thought.  Without a foundation in self-knowing, self-trust, and experience life is an accidental journey. 

Your father is a passenger on this secondary life.  I look around me today, even in this land far from home, and I see those who would claim to be sophisticated and in charge all look alike, live alike, think alike, and wonder why they are bored alike, your father, of course, included.

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 the chicanery, duplicity and deceit that is “business as usual,” which to my amazement is the equal in depravity to that of apartheid.  This condition offends your father on so many levels and makes him scream in his dreams, but instead of doing anything constructive about it, he makes love to his multiracial princess, and comes home to fight with your mother at night.

Is your father a cad?  Yes, he is.  Is he immoral?  No, he isn’t.  That may surprise you that I’ll admit to not caring about another’s feelings, mainly your mother’s, but that I care about such moral issues as business practices and apartheid.  My hope is that when you are an old man the content of your character will mean more than the color of your skin, and that men will no longer desire to distance themselves from other men by the content of their portfolio.  But I suspect this, too, will not change.

Your father has a different take on morality than when he came to this country, but I’ll leave that for 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, but mainly don’t punish yourself for being blood of my blood.  Your father is walking through the wilderness, alone, perhaps by choice, and there are no landmarks with which to mark his progress or to guide his way.  It is called, 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 its quaintness 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 morning cold air typical of the Transvaal at this time of year, 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.

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