CAGE WE ALL SHARE -- DENIAL OF DEATH!

 James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 6, 2020

REFERENCE

This is the first chapter of my book, WHO PUT YOU IN THE CAGE? (2018). Author Ken Shelton has published a piece titled “Joe Death,” based on the film of that name. He is much more acquainted with pop culture than I am, but his missive reminded me of this reflective piece that opens my book.

CHAPTER ONE

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure in which he reveals the inner working of his soul.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), Russian novelist


Writing is like religion. Every man who feels the call must work out his own salvation.George Horace Lorimer (1868 – 1937), American editor

Life Death & Dignity

All writing is out of experience, even that of novelists. They write out of what they know, and that knowledge is from their cage. Whatever the genre, words emanate from life and its trials. Novelist William Faulkner said these words upon receiving the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature:

I believe man will not merely endure. He will survive. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. [1]

Someone wrote to me with this voice of durability. He remarked that he was ready for death, although not in the sense that he wanted to die, but in the sense that his house was in order. He was leaving two well-educated children, both of whom were yet to marry with no extended family with which to be concerned. His wife had died when his children were young and he had never remarried. He had provided for them and was now ready to die with dignity. We all die, but not necessarily with dignity.

He followed up the letter with a telephone call. “I have had a wonderful life.” Six months before, he was the picture of health, looking ten years younger than his age. He called it a “genetic thing,” being number one in his age group in tennis at his club, a position he had maintained for more than a decade. Then one day he fell off a ladder at home, and everything changed. Doctors found he had a brain tumor, which was inoperable.

Ernest Becker (1924 – 1974) won the Pulitzer Prize for The Denial of Death (1973). When a reporter came to interview him on the book, having hidden the fact that he himself was dying, he rushed quickly to his study from his sofa to appear as if having been interrupted from work. To the end, he didn’t want it assumed that he was lazy. He was forty-nine when he died. What causes us to be so self-conscious in this denial?

No one escapes death. Why are we so afraid of life that we build cages around us? Pondering that puzzle is why this book has been written.

The Cage and the Power of “No!” 

For many, life is a journey not taken and therefore a road less traveled. Such people wait. They exist, they don’t live. They wait for retirement when all passion is spent. They hide in obsessions or search for answers. They think happiness is a place when it is only a mindset.

Cage avoidance is best described in the ability to say “no” when pressured to say “yes.” There is amazing freedom when you say “no” when it is not in your best interest to say “yes.” It is a matter of choice.

Our cages have the bars of making misguided choices. Often such choices involve saying “yes” to carry someone else’s burden when they best carry it themselves. Codependency is a vicious cage.

It is not love when you say “yes” to your children when “no” is more prudent and instructive. Eventually, children will need to live and survive on their own wits, and that is not likely to happen if such wits are never developed.

Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider (1956), found he enjoyed his own company and was little inclined to yield to peer pressure. He realized quite young that it gave him enormous freedom. He put this to words and created an international sensation:

The Outsider’s case against society is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous, unnamable impulses, yet they keep up a pretense, to themselves, to others, their respectability, their philosophy, their religion, are all attempts to gloss over, to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized, irrational. He is an Outsider because he stands for truth. [2]

Discipline apparently came natural to Wilson, but I suspect his parents played a role. They gave him room, but not too much room, for if they had he would have found that the cage is a homeless mind.

Celebrating Individual Choices 

We live in a corporate society. So this book is about people caged in corporate society. Such people often lose their sense of power, identity and purpose for the corporate cage.

When the corporation makes no sense to you, personally, when the workplace culture is not consistent with what makes you look forward to work, when you start to have health and behavioral issues, something is wrong. A choice needs to be made, and that choice may be to retreat, to take a “time out” to assess where you are, where you are going, and where you prefer to go.

Few people in the course of their lives are ready to meet this challenge. Many bury the problem in the justification that “I have no choice but must stick it out.” Others attempt to convince themselves that “Things will get better with time,” and still others retire on the job, give up and give out. Sickness becomes a kind of relief.

Appreciating an Authentic Life 

Each of us walks the walk, talks the talk, and thinks the thought that is indigenous to our cultural programming. We have had little to do with its construction as it permeates our delicate psyche unconsciously when we are quite young. Thereafter, it is reinforced constantly to the point that we come to believe it is truth personified, which it is not.

Now in this media age, the Internet and constant bombardment of subliminal stimuli from every media outlet, we have come to resemble an Andy Warhol painting where the same picture is repeated frame after frame after frame.

Corporate society is not going to fade away, but that does not mean we cannot lead authentic lives despite it.

The aim here is not to make the reader comfortable in his cage. Nor are there any escape routes promulgated. Authenticity is one of those things that once you define it you lose it, for what is authentic to you is not authentic to me.

Yet, we are inevitably drawn to those who would ease our conscience with simple solutions to complex problems with no need for us to change. An authentic individual cannot be duped by such palliatives.

Being reminded of what once was free 

A reader of the “Great Depression generation” writes that he has pangs of nostalgia for a simpler time, a less complicated time, when things were quiet with less distractions.

He says he has grown to maturity in a small town that now resembles every other place, and has lost its identity for him. “The open country that once filled my lungs with fresh air,” he writes, “now is penciled with pastel colored tiny houses and acres of cement.”

He goes on to say that dense forests are now naked hills, the train station and freight yards have been abandoned, and now are eye sores. All this saddens him with a feeling of hopelessness.

Environmental degradation is not a modern phenomenon. It was apparent in the 18th and 19th century and took hold in 20th century after WWII in the name of progress, and continues with that momentum into the 21st century.

The Romans were involved in creative destruction in the first millennium of the Common Era. Geologists have discovered mining for iron was common in the mountains of Italy before the time of Christ. Such exploitation polluted rivers and streams, and created deep fissures in the mountain landscape.

It didn’t get any better when the Roman Empire became Christian in 312 AD.

Genesis reads: 

Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth. Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over the earth and subdue it.
A more definitive policy for progress could not have been conceived. The conquest of nature is nearly complete with little left of Nature to support its many species, including man. In conquering Nature, nature has conquered us. It is now our ultimate cage.

So, as this man laments the sorrow of his last years, and Global Warming fails to be a consensus concern, I think of Nietzsche’s words: “I love only what people write with their own blood.” Is there any other way?

Notes

[1] Our Times: The Illustrated History of the 20th Century, Turner Publishing, p. 381.

[2] Colin Wilson, The Outsider, Delta Book, 1956, p. 13