The afternoon air bloated with humidity, the gulf coast waves brown and rolling in sluggish rhythm, beach expressions whisked the sixteen-year old girl into the shore and away from the lifeless sand where her parents and little sister lingered. She squeezed the salty sting from her eyes, delighted after consecutive pummelings. The next wave met her more slowly, wrapping her like an arm beckoning, then a yoke strapping her in an impenetrable grip. She spit for air, a feckless limb pulled by a vacuum under the water, an impotent body rolled in funnels sucking life away.
So what's the big deal about a little fear? Lately, fear has been difficult to recognize in my daily life because it has become such a familiar companion. It is not the fear we see in movie gore or tabloid gore, all tales gruesome that smell of death, but something invisible that sits on my shoulder as I walk down the street, or has a drink with me, resting and waiting on the rim. It whispers cool breath into the canals of my body, sifting a frost over wants, numbing passion, deadening dreams. What friend is this who toils so arduously to keep me from making that mistake, the phrase that sends him away, the decision that leaves me unfulfilled, again searching? This friend is not always so kind. She often hisses "you suck" into my ear, radiating a venom that adeptly immobilizes the diaphragm, the larynx, the tongue, and finally ebbs at the lips. An especially annoying case pounced during a meeting with the Speaker Pro Tempore of the great state of Texas and two of his political comrades. Someone in the middle of my fog called my name and then asked my thoughts. What thoughts, I have no thoughts, nothing
important to say, surely nothing intriguing to offer. Forgetting how to speak can be no big deal for most sinners, because the ability usually returns within the half-hour. But, when foreheads are wrinkling upon me, hovering, waiting for anything to free them (and me) from the tension, that voice becomes a castigator damning me for days.
Why does my cerebellum signal lumbrical muscles to pick at snagged cuticles, and meld digits to mouth, gnawing like a rodent wears down super growth? Am I wearing something down, something super? Immediately after I decide upon an aspiration, a tsunami of suspicion sets in like a reflex. It is not suspicion of enemies lurking in shadows in order to sabotage, or suspicion of biased judges who defame
my work. It is suspicion of myself: that troll in the cave of my head who degenerates my being.
My fellow Americans and I are in the grand age of the "Someone is out to get me syndrome," bringing the realization that today, people are afraid. A frenzy is brimming in the form of endless outlets, which serve to purge the soul of doubt, a needling doubt creating Richard McLaren's Republic of Texas, Bill McCartney's Promise Keepers, and Marshall H. Applewhite's Heaven's Gate, and vulnerability, an arresting vulnerability capable of changing a sixty-year old man's ideology with the ease of a light switch, or forcing a twenty six-year old woman to swallow a mixture of Phenobarbital, apple sauce, and a shot of vodka in order to usher her own death by a smothering plastic bag. Today's fear phenomena are not agents that enable a person to connect with their religious center or political doctrines, they are agents of mutation, capable of unnatural possession, possession let in by fear.
An ideal existence seems to be one in which an individual lives to his or her highest level. Pleasing yourself is often the hardest thing to accomplish because you know every malady of the character within. Being this actualized person could lead to some aberrant race of humans, not at all perfect and just. To one end, a society of people living to their optimum level would continually propel each of us to a higher realm. Without anxiety and self doubt holding us back, in a sense, we would live basely, following our instincts. But problems could arise without the natural restraint of fear balancing us. People take more risks and feel more failures. They utter opinions without regret. A world where thought becomes speech appears. Politeness suffers, even deteriorates to oblivion. A super-hero complex substitutes the blight of phobias. We trade one malady for another.
"I'd do him," she blurted with the joy of a woman embolden with symmetry. Giggling to myself, pleasured by this exposure, I grazed others’ expressions to see if they too were one of her tribe. The classroom discussion turned with ease to the President and his pants, everyone's favorite kibble in between the porridge of hypotaxis and parataxis. The men opted out of the debate, occupied instead by oral images of this woman and the one before her who had made the same bid. On the left side of the room, I saw it, in flushed cheeks, chins angled downward, sneers to tell them how gross they were, how immoral they could be, how far beyond safe decency they had progressed. "But, he's married." I heard it, the faithful protectant against putrid propositions and lascivious thrusts, a protectant not from another, but from the self.
The admonition of others' plagues flows with ease, but it is the individual who remains bound, existing in a mass of bobbing bodies, isolated by an ocean of uncertainty. We cause injury through our lack of humanity, passing the man who sleeps on the sidewalk without giving a glance. He shakes his cup of pseudo copper and pseudo nickel, a drawbridge between his bed and our blinding strip of neon. He shakes
his cup of cold from his blood. We cause injury through our lack of ability to co-exist. We plant our homes polar: north side versus south side; west hills versus east plane—other sides of tracks—; suburbs or inner city; Yale or Morehouse College; First United Methodist or African Methodist Episcopal. We cause injury through our lack of lending, lending the center of oneself out to another, allowing them to manipulate the tender bits of you, a trust required and acquired only by a ballast of faith. Investigation of the self is the core that stares boldly back. Fear of a peaceful co-existence between the two zones of I is the struggle that taints all else.
Train doors slide open in the blackness of the tunnel. A full car of commuters awaits the ritual. A mechanical voice from the air announces, "watch the doors, the doors are closing," cueing forward motion once more, but not until the new passenger makes his choice between two vacancies. I observe. One seat, two rows down from the door, is next to a white woman in her mid twenties. She uses the signal today, a downward curl of the spine like an embryo. The man scans his first option next to a tall black woman in her late twenties, holding a large purse in her lap, keeping her serene gaze level. He looks up, passes by, and sits in seat two.
I am afraid of the database at work, a database aptly named Raiser’s Edge. Delving into the source of this anxiety, I first ask myself why? I suppose I am afraid that I will err, that I will enter something incorrectly. Mostly, though, I fear the battle between The Edge and me. Facing this sorcerer requires the demeanor of a Dopamine disciple, while it eats my minutes like a Pac-man, exhausting me, beating me in the struggle everyday. So, instead of shaving The Edge to its base, I avoid it whenever possible. Avoidance Fear permeates the seen and the unseen in our culture, both the popular and the unpopular. Fear of flying is a routine sample. The salve is the sauce--liquor--that numbs the anxiety-causing emotion. These sufferers will do anything to escape their present predicament, their relentless fear. Our conversations have tokened the term, "Fear of commitment," which, in essence, is avoiding the person with whom you have become uncomfortably linked. But, running from one’s fears seems to me much like the myth of Cassandra: fleeting toward disaster. Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy. Yet, she betrayed him and afterwards lived accursed, fated that no one would ever believe her warnings. Although disallowing the possibility of their truth, the Trojans feared the influence of Cassandra’s doom-filled prophecies so much so that they banished her, and presumed they had ridded themselves of the pollutant. As the famed wooden horse containing enemy soldiers rolled into Troy, Cassandra’s gift was futile. The city perished.
My first graduate school visit, I walk to campus for an appointment with the director of the writing program, mid-September in Chicago, crisp breezes, bursting blooms of perennials. I hadn’t felt that nervous in years, probably since freshman year in high school. The nervousness was partly due to the higher realm, a stereotype in my mind of elite knowledge. Did I belong? Could I belong? There was the question that held the majority of my panic. I will rest my judgement upon the feeling, I tell myself. Will this feel like home? The director and I meet in the common area where mild faces pass by in excited conversation. Instead of an understood language, we sit in opposing positions and begin to lob agendas at one another, an exchange that seeks a sell. Where was the idyllic post graduate vision quest I had imagined? I know PR Newswire, not Lingua Franca, telecommunications, not New Criticism. "You'll be interested to know that one of our students' poetry was recently published in Postmodern Culture . . . and, you'll want to see the special collections in our library. Check out The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent." I want to be a nonfiction writer, with a side of Bronte, not join a foreign company of literary viceroys. I feel breathless from the dissonance. I was looking for home, yet he presented me with campground for the rookies. Hands released, the involuntary pleasantry turned off, I hurry to freedom down steps, past a weeping willow, skimming the mirage of urban majesty to the café where my mother sits with hot tea.
Why do my neurotransmitters direct murky eyes
to open in dreaded ritual, and zap sleep from muscles, enlivened like a
manic dopes electric juice? Am I doping something down, something electric?
Just as I enter into a dare, a beam of blindness pushes in like a cork.
It is not a blindness to opponents clamoring in crowds in order to outdo,
or blindness to unseasoned superiors who chip my ego. It is blindness to
myself: that hag in the pit of my gut who spindles my immobility.