“For meanwhile the aforementioned change in public interest had set in; it seemed to happen almost overnight; there may have been profound causes for it, but who was going to bother about that; at any rate the pampered hunger artist suddenly found himself deserted one fine day by the amusement seekers, who were streaming past him to other more favored attractions.”- Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist,” 1924
Where else but in cyberspace could a gentleman from Ferndale, a bloke from down under, and a friend from Wisconsin, engage in an enlightening dialogue on assisted beheadings, the work of V. S. Ramachandran, and the aesthetic implications of subjectivity. Thank you Bill Debroux, Sean, and R.J.. The interplay of your thoughtful comments, rather than isolated response to the text, exemplifies why language is meaningful. Although I can’t access your comments now, I’ll attempt a response to what I do recall.
Sean, Mr. Bill Debroux is actually a kindly fellow who was brainwashed early in life by a group of Franciscan terrorists; and yet Bill’s intellectual gifts allowed him to overcome the torments of Sister Ruthless Marie and lead somewhat of a normal life. I too was exposed to her pseudo-spiritual toxicity, and I too managed to overcome her Svengaliesque mangling. Notwithstanding your marvelously witty response to Bill’s sweet insensitivity, it might not be a bad thing if all citizens of Earth were beheaded, so long as they could move about unthinkingly like swarms of black flies that aren’t biting due to temperature and wind conditions.
If there is a sort of crude continuum between hypochondria and death wish, then BIIDS, while relatively unknown to many people, undeniably occupies a perch on this line. While I didn’t cite him specifically, Sean is shrewd in mentioning Ramachandran’s work. Ramachandran, an eminent neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, has written on what I will call phantom appendage sensation, since his work reveals this phenomenon as existent in phantom breasts after a mastectomy as well as other organs and body parts. Again, Sean, Bill, and R.J., I think you might enjoy reading Gawande’s New Yorker article, “The Itch,” 6/30/08.
R.J., your canny ability at close reading, and careful consideration of something we all take for granted, perception, goes even a bit deeper than I had delved. Who really knows what we each see? Does the fact that Shadow might judge an artifact by its smell lessen its aesthetic value? Duh! Yea! Since animals can’t be said to exercise aesthetic judgment, or can they. My son tells me that some musicians work at attaining perfect pitch by associating tones with certain colors, and then visualizing a color when they hear a tone. Interesting. Does this kind of pneumonic device work? Who knows? What I do know, Mr. R. J., is this: we need more images of non-creepy amputated limbs. How about two amputated arms reading a book, or enjoying a coffee and smoke, or giving the peace sign, or the finger? Since I know you like Lovecraft, here’s an image for you, consider this passage from Gawande’s article:
“One morning after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, ‘this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.’ She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her that she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.”
PART II
Dear Zelda:
Yesterday the guards herded us together into the cellblock dayroom. The guards take sadistic delight in pitting us against one another. The blacks were on one bench, the Hispanics on another, and the whites at their own table. I was alone. The whites have rejected me for refusing to join their Aryan confederation. It is horrible here. Some of the inmates are so deranged and depressed they have swallowed rat poison, forks, and drain cleaner. I have a horrible skin disease. I sometimes stay in my rack all day. There are 4 of us to a cell and lice are everywhere. 2 of my cellmates are slaves of gangs. The food is rotten.... One guard systematically puts inmates with lung diseases in a cell next to the laundry room, where the walls sweat from the humidity, which worsens their condition. Yesterday, a 21-year-old man was put in a cell with two older hardened criminals, who raped him the first night. One of the older men has AIDS. Another guard forces prisoners working in the laundry to have sex with him. But the prisoners are too terrified to testify against him. I was raped in the factory block, infirmary, and psychiatric unit. I begged, pleaded and finally prayed; but to no avail. I pay what I can and am raped by those I pay. I asked the prison doctor if my anus could be sewed shut. There is no relief, no shelter from anonymous violation: the ripping pain and shame of irrational assault. I have nowhere to run or hide. Mine is a life of unending rape and fear of rape. I am sodomized and infected. Do something. Save me Zelda!
Your Zeke
Slowly, Stakel began to understand. He hadn't planned on asking himself what made Pluto tick; but the more he learned about him the more he wanted to know. As a text, Pluto's life might be thought of as a genre of prison literature, a narrative of confinement. If his life experience had taught him anything, it was the impossibility of being left without some kind of God. If the only doctrine the world had revealed was that slavery and self-destruction were the norm, and that the acceptance of suffering are the inevitable consequences of freedom, then his life was an imitation of Christ;
According to psychiatric interviews directed by Dr. T. Robert Kocsis, Pluto's early life was nightmarish. Slowly, uneasily, Zeke let slip painful clues: how his first foster parents had abandoned him and his eight siblings when he could barely walk; how after his father disappeared, his foster mother used to vanish for long periods, doing what, no one knew; how he scavenged the streets and roads, begging for food and sleeping in cardboard boxes and culverts; how when a concerned social worker brought him to the sheriffs department, he wanted to live there; and how the Lutheran Social services finally placed the children in separate homes, so that from the age of six all that Zeke had was his older sister, Zelda.
For a time they lived at the Father Garin Orphanage in South Marquette, a tomblike brownstone firetrap founded by Finnish Lutheran nuns at the turn of the century, which had a cramped second floor where Zelda and Zeke shared a tiny room with a bunk bed. On the wall was a sign written in bold:
GOD IS OUR REFUGE AND STRENGTH/
A VERY PRESENT HELP IN TROUBLE
- PSALMS 46:1
The place was run by a lay director named Mildred Small, who dressed them in black on Sundays, while indoctrinating them into the mysteries of Christ.
Once, when Zeke and Zelda were playing outside, a strange man appeared and began to rave at them, gesturing and pointing first at them, then at him.
"Who's that?" Zelda asked.
"I don't know," Zeke said.
The man furtively crept forward, suddenly clawing at the fence.
"Don't you know me, boy? I'm your papa."
They ran from the playground and cowered at the orphanage door; cringing in fear and loathing at the sight of a familiar boogieman. When they looked up again he had vanished.
Scenes like this gave Stakel some understanding of what events Plutonism's canonical literature seized upon in mythologizing the Supreme Signifiers life. Kosic's records shed light on what stability family life presented--when it was available at all.
Stakel poured over Pluto's unpublished memoirs for clues to Pluto's psychology. His time in the Army was consistent with the rest of his troubled chaotic life. In the mid-eighties his roommate, Joe Pierce, had been bludgeoned to death in his sleep at Fort Macdonald, Tennessee; a National media story that Stakel was vaguely familiar with.
"I remember the attackers were led by Brook's Bessex of Louisville, Kentucky. Joe was beaten to death with a baseball bat as he slept in his barracks bed early on the morning of December 7th, 1968. Of course, we all knew who did it. The constant and hateful denunciations of Private Pierce as a "faggot," "queer," and "homo," were dismissed as routine boot camp tension by a superior officer. The savageness of the assault, Joe's face was unrecognizable to his own mother, his eyes swollen shut and his head cracked open, was attributed to nothing more than the stress of basic training.
"That's the way it is, sir," Specialist Ricky Crest, our roommate, testified. “This is an Army where blowhards and bullies are encouraged to seek out a soldiers' perceived weaknesses, to invent horrible epithets, and to instigate a reign of terror that our superiors turn their backs on. Shortly before his murder, Joe told me he had had it, he would apply for a discharge. No doubt the fact that our drill sargeant would unapologetically bellow a homophobic cadence in leading us on our daily five-mile run: "Faggot, faggot down the street/shoot him, shoot 'til he retreats," had much to do with this decision.
This incident, as well as the death of my best friend and Zelda's childhood sweetheart, Gary Haley, was instrumental in shaping my profound distrust of any politic that involves ideological justifications. I learned to hate all isms; but most particularly nationalistic theories that appeal===== to patriotism."
Stakel pondered the tattered remnant of a letter Zeke had sent Zelda after Gary's death.
DEAR ZELDA:
On Friday, August 22nd, our company was in the field when the enemy opened fire on our point man with a high caliber machine gun. He died instantly. The point is most vulnerable during a firefight. I had also walked point many times.
Trying to avoid direct fire, we tried to pull back to the right. This led us into another ambush. To relieve us, our captain called in the artillery and air support. After an intense bombardment we were told to continue our advance. Our repeated attacks resulted in high casualties. The soldiers in our forward platoon were all killed. Finally, it was our platoons turn to lead the assault. After repeated failures we rested for the night. Nobody slept.
The following morning we were on point. Not long after we started up the hill we drew enemy fire. We had walked into a set of bunkers. Following our training, we attempted to encircle the first bunker. Gary's job was to throw a grenade into the bunker while we laid down diversionary fire.
As Gary got into position he was hit by an AK-47. Taking several rounds to the chest and head, Gary dropped immediately. After dragging him to cover, the Medic worked frantically to save Gary. The best he could do was make him comfortable. Gary's injuries were mortal: a slug in the temple, and multiple sucking chest wounds.
In the din of battle, I couldn't really hear Gary. But occasionally it would quiet enough for me to attend to him. His breathing was labored, as his lungs were filling with blood. Because both lungs were punctured, we were unable to help him.
Gary probably died by drowning in his own blood. Shortly thereafter, a medivac helicopter took him away. I never saw Gary again.
I am enclosing his wallet-sized photo album. I'm sorry, and so sad.
Love, Your Zeke
The expression of shock and numbness in Pluto's spare and removed prose was something Stakel couldn't process.
Stakel remembered the sixties. He had lived it. Pluto was more like him than he liked to think. The difficulty of admitting that so many had given so much for so little was as unacceptable to Pluto as the conviction many others held at the time: that the distinction between right and wrong was an immutable fact--a division beyond compromise. Stakel sympathized with Pluto's politics, if not its consequences.
The Fragments of Pluto's memoir that recalled his time at the Ypsilanti State Forensic unit troubled Stakel:
Like clockwork, the guards would bring me to the behaviorist specialist for psychotherapy. At the time, the Pavlovian aversion model was the recommended therapeutic approach. In practice, this involved being exposed to violent stimuli, both real and simulated, accompanied by nausea inducing drugs.
Once, Koscis and the behaviorist brought in a skillful actor to taunt and abuse me. After much of the boot and whip I groveled compliantly. I begged, pleaded: "Mercy. Please. I'll be your servant, your slave, your anything. I worship your shadow, your trace. I am not worthy. I obey your will, your boots, your feet." Was it enough that I licked his crotch with savage tongue, like a faithful dog?
Enough?-- perhaps, but not the right response. He plugged in the whip. What I had taken to be the final lash was only a prelude. Now the sting was charged, galvanic. My nakedness was conducive, my pain electric; I cringed, he kicked. The vertigo, nausea, the searing scourge drove me to my knees, and his legs. I clung to him for salvation. My profane reward was an unearthly pain. As I hugged, so he strangled, choked the life from me.
At this point, Koscis intervened: "That's enough. He's progressing." With this, my sadistic tormentor exited with a smile; his erection being entirely inappropriate to a therapeutic setting.
Dr. Alexis, the prison behaviorist spoke first: "The subject is, paradoxically, being chemically conditioned to associate retaliation with physical discomfort, sickness. The idea is that evil, violent intentions produce pathological symptoms. Theoretically, the subject is left with no choice but to succumb to the 'good'. Questions, Dr. Koscis."
Koscis looked troubled. "But what about the issue of free will. After treatment like this, is it possible for him to understand what choice means, as a concept? Darwinian self-interest, psychological adaptation clearly moves him to substitute self-abasement for violent reprisal; but where is the moral conviction in why he does what he does? In the state he is in now, he can't really be said to be 'doing', in the sense of choosing his actions in terms of wrong and right. His reactions seem more animal than human. Can we honestly define his actions as those of a morally autonomous creature, an entity capable of choosing between good and evil? "
What I learned from this of course is the wisdom of de-humanization; from the viewpoint of the de-humanized--of course. What a lark, what a plunge, what a character builder!
It was in Prison that I met Mike Savard. He was blond, his face Mayan-like with a dark mole high on his cheek, his visage constantly affecting the illusion of having just awoken from a deep sleep. I had never encountered anyone as innocent as Mike. The intense blue of his eyes and shaggy Beatle haircut reminded me of a proud lioness. Savard, born in the Upper Peninsula village of Germfask, was raised in Detroit. The mix of urban blue-collar stoicism and rural Northern Michigan family influences appealed to me. I found a sense of human connection I had never experienced before with Mike. At first he was hesitant, but then gradually he accepted my longing for him. Now he's gone; the delicate hands, the oceanic blue eyes, the kind, knowing smile; the silky feeling of caressing his exquisite ears, his kiss on my eyelids, the feeling of pushing back his hair while holding his head in my hands; the ecstasy in following the soft contour of his ribs, his warm, smooth tummy. Gone, all that desire now a painful void; a deep and anguished longing. I loved Mike.
Stakel vaguely recalled the Savard case. He had achieved a pathetic kind of notoriety. In the year 2000 his case would reduce the practice of capital punishment to the level of the absurd. In a ghoulish way, he would cheat the hangman, the terminal needle bearer, of his perverted satisfaction. In a moment of supreme tragic irony, the lethal injection would serve to euthanize rather than punish. Savard's was a case where, through a bizarre coincidence of circumstances, the state would transgress its own laws on assisted suicide.
Mike had been scheduled to die by lethal injection on December 16, 2000, making him the 218th person executed in Michigan that year. But when his death row guards found him unconscious from a self administered drug overdose on a sunny Monday morning, they assured that he would achieve his Warholian 15 minutes of fame---albeit unconsciously. Placed in intensive care in an Ann Arbor hospital, Savard presented the state with a politically delicate problem: would the State of Michigan remove an inmate from intensive care so that he could meet his date with the executioner in a timely fashion. The answer was yes. After the state rejected the Mike's final petition for a delay, Michigan officials took him to the death chamber in Flint and executed him by final injection. There is a grimly comic aspect in all of this. Because Mike's doctor deemed such a move as "risky," state functionaries used an airplane staffed by medical personal from the University of Michigan Hospital to ensure that he arrived in "good health" after the 25-minute trip. The sick diabolical mechanics of state execution were in full array on that millennial midnight when the brain dead body of Mike Savard was removed from a ventilator in an intensive care unit and put to death by lethal injection.
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