The Bottom Falling Out of the World
Life is patterned. Socialization divides us up into sections and places parts of our being in a whole series of pigeonholes. Life is classified and categorized. Because of the convenience of this perceptive anabolism we can deal with life easily, as it comes, as a matter of routine. And if one small part of life goes wrong, we have all the rest to support it while we patch it up. By cutting up life into small sections, we safeguard the whole.
Tragedies do occur. Tragedies cut across the sectioning process, disturbing whole areas of the pattern. There are problems so extreme — though we do not all encounter them — that one’s life as a whole seems threatened with reduction to ruins. One’s sense of self, one’s whole being in the world, is threatened by tragic circumstance. The tragedy might be sudden and physical — an accident; or it may creep up on one — a steady decline into bankruptcy. Such experiences have a deep and considerable effect on those who encounter them. People are scarred for life, go gray overnight, will never be the same again. The bottom falls out of the world. The pigeonholes are shattered, and all one’s life tumbles into a heap from which it has to be resorted and repatterned. Sometimes, it doesn’t seem worth it. Sometimes, people decide to die instead. Sometimes, even when they try, they are unable to reconstitute the world. Almost always, though, for those willing and able to take it, there is a route of escape, one category of existence left inviolate, in which one can take refuge while gathering one’s resources to prepare for rebuilding an existence. Always, there seems to be a hiding place. It might be a job, or one particular person who alone can help. It may be somewhere to which one can return — an old home where parents still live, so that one can almost literally return in time to an easier way of life, a different set of categories.
Tragedy, like common, everyday misfortune, can be defeated by the pattern of life, by the process of categorization.
In Block C, however, in the cage, I am stripped even of my categories of life. The pattern is replaced by a constant monotone. There is no variety of input and output. There is only one routine. I have lost my home, my job, my friends, my environments, my car, my bed, my mailbox.
The effect of this shearing away of the categories of life until I am left with only one gray existence in which to operate is to make every common misfortune into a terrible tragedy. There is no hiding place from the slightest of emotional hurts, anxieties, fears. Everything is naked.
I left people behind me. I try to keep in touch. How? Not why, but how? To them, I am a dead man. To me, they are the living and I the dead. The only human contacts I have are with my fellows, and these I cannot avoid. I cannot divide up my life. I am living it all simultaneously, and that is why I am living no life at all. The world of Block C — my world — has no bottom at all.
Let me tell you about Sam Mastervine. He used to be a scientist. Which means that he had a whole chain of rational thoughts to support every single opinion that he carried in his head. Which means that he had at his mind’s disposal a vast body of eminent authority to back up his every statement. Which means that he carried into Block C a whole mass of serious and meaningful thinking to tell him what he was and how and why, and to give him a life as rich as any that was possible inside the concrete womb.
Being a scientist is exactly the same as being a priest. You know the truth. There is no difference between religious dogma and scientific paradigm. Both are sheep’s clothing wrapped snugly around wolves. Both are the clothes which can make a pauper look like a prince.
The only difference is that science conforms to certain standards of peculiarity known as rationality, which purport to answer all criticisms, while faith simply maintains itself impervious to all criticisms.
The importance of Mastervine’s being a scientist was that it put him in the know. It made him the intellectual elite. Because he knew the word “psychosis” and understood its references, the word held no terrors for him. Like a sorcerer of old, once he knew the true name of an elemental, he held power over that elemental, and it would serve his purposes rather than its own.
Psychosis did Sam Mastervine’s bidding, served Sam Mastervine’s purposes. He hurled the fits of madness around like tennis balls in a dazzling display of intellectual elegance and competitive expertise. He played them in the manner of a virtuoso reproducing a masterpiece on a baby grand. He knew them, he dealt with them, he “cured” them.
His own personal king-sized specimen was no trouble to him. The chain of rationality, though it never breaks, has rubber links which can stretch to accommodate all the ignorance, stupidity, self-delusion, perversion, and insanity that accumulate in the interstices like dirt under the fingernails.
Sam Mastervine, like all the rest of his insidious breed, could never ever conceive of the possibility that he might be wrong. He might not know what the hell he was talking about, but he would defend to the death whatever he happened to be saying, with the invincible magic weapons of reason and logic. He kept his Superman uniform wrapped up inside his desk calculator, under his slide rule, or in the case which usually held his horn-rimmed glasses.
He was kind to his mother, in favor of nuclear disarmament, and a great fan of Mickey Mouse. There was nothing particularly odd about Sam. He had his life measured out into its cavities. He was pretty much of a cliché, taken as a whole. It’s not surprising — clichés breed clichés and educate them into being clichés. Sam’s father was kind to his mother, drank his whiskey neat, and always talked straight to shop assistants. Cardboard people don’t have thirteen-carat-gold baby sons.
When Sam Mastervine came to Canaan, he was all set to be king of the castle, a creative genius, and the Second Coming of Walter Mitty. He had it all taped. Being a scientist, he lacked all sense of proportion. He had himself all confused with Einstein, Galileo, Pasteur, and Doctor Who. Being a scientist, he really thought he could bring it off and live.
He couldn’t.
It’s not that his intelligence let him down, though he gave himself credit for too much. He conceded Edison’s glib and terribly reassuring definition of genius, and he knew it wouldn’t be easy.
It was purely and simply that he lacked contexts. He couldn’t reapportion his life, because the pieces wouldn’t fit. Sam found himself in hell, the ultimate failure. Science, like religion, provides for human frailty but not for human individuality. Sam found that it was all useless to him. It wasn’t that he was short of answers, nor that he came up with the wrong ones. It was just that there weren’t any questions.
Sam, when I knew him, was the bitterest of men. People — especially nuts — who are denied their rightful hallowed shrine in the ephemeral esteem of their subservient neighbors, often become bitter. Sam became bitter because he was not a better man than those with whom he shared his fate. He’d been prepared to come to Canaan and be alone. He’d not been prepared to come to Canaan and cease to exist. He could have coped with any sort of a conflict between his own identity and the society into which he was thrust, but he wasn’t ready to find no society at all, and that he couldn’t cope with.
In the final analysis, Sam was a creature of reflex — socially conditioned reflex. His science was no more than a version of faith. In the end, it was no more use to him than prayer. And no one was listening. No one at all.