“When a monster passes, we take it for another whose favourable opinion we must seek.”
Lazy obedience is a unit of entropy. Entropy is high because there are countless dismal acquiescences to fall into and only one or two very focussed and specific manoeuvres by which to maintain yourself. Those who burst out thinking in public encounter not only sarcasm and physical aggression but a total lack of legal recourse. It takes skill to ‘pass’ among the standing dormant while remaining alive. This zombie camouflage involves more than merely looking happy. In a past when the options available were disappointingly unimaginative dares or the heaven complained of by Jesus, most people had to blame their interesting remarks on demonic possession, however seldom these might be. And then the inconvenience of death or exorcism. Rasputin was dubbed the ‘mad monk’ because, in times as conservative as our own, he sat down on one chair and rested his legs on another. He repeated this ‘two-chair jamboree’ in several venues, and the practice was later thought to be the source of his mystical powers.
It’s been said that a tree is known by its fruit, and this has become a world where it is a risk to be known. Keep the light behind you and they won’t see you’re thinking. You might also pass off an original notion by prefacing it with ‘It’s an old idea that…’ or ‘It’s a cliché that…’. You’ve shunted it into the past, rendering it presumably banal. Hoaxers used to pass off narwhal horns as those of unicorns. A greater gift would be a unicorn horn passed off as that of a narwhal and the subsequent realisation of its worth as it turns gold over the fireplace.
Another strategy is to adopt a standard-issue boil-in-the-bag wackiness such as pink spiky hair – this will be accepted and people will feel they’ve done their dutiful work of scanning for individuality and found nothing. You’re hiding in plain sight. You could even out-die them by agreeing fiercely, enthusiastic to the brink of assault. Such ferocious assent is startling and will disconcert long enough for a getaway. But remind yourself that benevolence may create an initial fight-or-flight response in others, followed by long-term suspicion and hostility. These consequences are the source of legends about curses incurred by meddling with a mummified cadaver. Take fear, as when an insect starts to bulge.
It’s better to bring 20 invisible things into the room than nothing at all. But those billions of quiet neutrinos give you an alien flavour. It’s uncanny how they know there’s something not quite right about you – an unidentified heat signature. Like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they can detect some sort of inner life-spark and will alert others in their anxiety. If asked, they could not explain why they are threatened by your sinister equilibrium, the fact that you live in a freight elevator and are growing a zebra orchid in the casing of a plastic radio. Disagreement, to a true believer, can be easily tolerated. The boundaries of organised religion are military.
Do not accept responsibility for their impression of you and don’t overturn the whole scheme to accommodate their theory. It’s useful to remain silent when someone wants to be interrupted. To the commercial doctrine that a person is a territory with no worthwhile exports, only imports, the individual who does neither is an abomination – the human equivalent of a Dyson Sphere. The skin conceals collisions of light and ability. A secret can be an energy source, a red organic battery. And by the time the secret’s fully out, the battery’s spent – but it’s served its purpose. The comfort of deception – it keeps the deceivers busy and satisfied. They could be doing something far worse, perhaps with monkeys. There may come a time when even the most masochistic of innocents find no more room for guilt and the swim of accusations can no longer be absorbed. These noises of a sudden have no significance and must go elsewhere if they desire a home. It may be years, if ever, before the accusers notice that a change has occurred. Solace is not loaded, it tends to be simple. For those who even breathe out of sequence, may they achieve what was said of Weil: that she erased her name but left it underlined.
But why hide? How expressive of life is a portrait in the attic which gets more colourful and smart as the outer you is desaturated by society’s baffling pressure to over-react? Scandal bores because it requires a foundation of consensus. In this unfulfilling masquerade there are many whose personality is a periscope, the real thing thriving beyond observation, and enough real idiots that your sham idiocy isn’t required. Do something else. Interactions with neurotypicals can be a study in why people behave the way they do around originality, and the fun you can have making people behave that way. To them you may appear as radioactively terrifying as an angel. A price to be paid for individuality is the abandoning of approval – actually a reward in itself. Robert Ingersoll and Yang Chu were weightless in their indifference to the false frenzy their words generated among the dogmatic. When the audience threw fruit at Charles Ludlam he’d catch it in his mouth. You may find the grace that fills those who fall upward into the epic win of exile.
It’s inevitable that upon those rare occasions of encountering an original notion externally, you will start drooling amid blowing fuses, the abyss at your side intermittently visible and scaring the unwary. The rest of the time, it’s all you. People will be happy or stricken to see each hacking cough release a green butterfly with the body of a stuntman. Arrive in a stupid badger-faced biplane with five adrenalin pens hanging off your forehead. Arrange for your arms to be already windmilling as you enter a room, if possible knocking out the teeth of a spoilt child. Retrieve a hemisphere of flowing mercury from your inside pocket and gaze at it in an attitude of ferocious, twelve-bore self-pity. Leave unacknowledged your coffee-coloured antlers and wings like the ghostly bones in the X-ray plastic used to press Soviet samizdat records. Stand pelted with angry finches, ashen-visaged in a moth-shot coat, thoughtfully scratching someone else’s chin. Go accompanied by a man-size chef with a parabolic face, carrying something which appears to be a torpedo. When asked your opinion, squander all good will in a blast of neutrality. Start your case from a position extrapolated way forward as if deliberately to annoy. Release a scuttling thing found in an undersea volcanic vent. Count backwards with increasing volume, looking tense. Whisper spookily of ‘the boy in the floor’. Use your own blood to scribble valence values on the wall while visibly taking on the distance colours of a mass card. Is it anything more than childish honesty? The preening dead can inspire just as the spaces between packed spheres are a more compelling shape than the spheres themselves. Listen to them attentively, carving a quick wooden rendering of their gobs in action. Cradle a hapless shad which looks them in the eye during the full hour it takes to gasp its last. Push their ‘oblique strategy cards’ into a dimensional pocket in the air, your face wrinkled as a flower. Point easily at the blue gold ceiling as it becomes transparent to reveal a clambering unison of infinite madcaps. Disappear in every direction or rise in a smack of black feathers, leaving them with simultaneous frostbite and sunstroke. At the very least claim that your father made a living wrestling with a medical skeleton as upward of 70 people bet money and roared at him in a boiler room.
When relaxing outside the ‘Goldilocks zone’ of tolerated zaniness, your bespoke insecurities will make others’ look all the more off-the-peg and cause an anxiety with no name. But it all too often degenerates into something done for effect or even approval. Faced with a race of technological predators with no self-control and a pretended fear of pretend rebellion, it doesn’t take long to realise that solitude is unbeatable for congeniality. If it happens that you can run rings around them, that doesn’t oblige you to use them as a focus. Do you have an obligation to fill a vacuum so total that lightning will innocently swerve to plug it at a rate of 400 victims per year? As a public service Nikola Tesla took time off from his busy schedule to manufacture ball lightning and ping it into the town, though as usual most of it headed straight for church. In the US most people evade the duty to question their government as stated by the founding fathers and are happy to be un-American. No point hanging on – Darwin waited before publishing his evolution ideas but people were still surprised. There comes a point of exhausted exasperation at one’s every act meeting with blanket disapproval. The only sane course is to disengage. Subtract your weight from their calculations. But sudden absence creates a sonic boom – better to be incremental. To depart from the narrative is to disappear, if it’s done right. Go the way of Bierce and Don Van Vliet. No one will see the look that passes between you. Medieval poet Francois Villon, repeatedly banished by the authorities, vanished at last when he wished to. The poet Ferrer Lerin quit the literary scene to study vultures in depth. Thoreau’s Walden is one big, beautiful restraining order. People are often corrupted by their desire for power or wealth. Has anyone ever been corrupted by their desire to be left alone?
When excluded from human society, don’t stop to get it in writing. You are free.