About My Fear

“You’re scared and a coward!”
“You mean you’re not scared?”
“Sure I’m scared, I’m not an idiot.”
“Then why am I a coward and you’re not?”
“You’re scared so you run, but I’m scared so I fight!”

I can’t catch my breath, like air has left me but I’m holding my breath, too, I feel my heart thumping and hair on my arms and back and neck standing up goose-pimply, all my attention riveted on something I don’t understand, something dangerous, unknown, trying real hard to identify it but meanwhile wanting to run so bad just get the hell away before something gets me or just that it would show itself so I can stomp the living shit out of it . . . that’s fear. Deep in our heads, down in our brain stems sits an ancient trigger fundamental to life’s long survival, a toggle (on/off) that can override higher brain functions instantly sending us into rage or terror, desperate fight or flight. You know this, you’ve felt it many, many times, perhaps (like me) you’ve studied basic psychology so you get it, like me you’ve lived with fear all your life and do quite well, thank you. So if you’ve read my last post(s) you may have asked yourself, “Why in the world was he afraid of his birthday?” or, if you read to its end, “Why in the world is he afraid of cooperating in celebrating his birthday?”

Look, I’ve always found something creepy about birthdays (creepy being that pre-fear feeling, when skin begins to tighten up and tingle and move, usually away from extremities and toward one’s heart). Perhaps it has something to do with mom or having a mom and asking those questions early “Where did I come from?” so a nervous parent who wants to be honest but not go into anatomical detail answers “From mommy’s tummy” like she spit me up one day and boy do I remember how bad that felt. Or maybe because as a small child I spent so much time anonymous (this was before children were so forefronted) and unremarked until one day suddenly the white spotlight has me blinded and blinking in confusion. But allow that child to grow just a couple of years and suddenly he’s pondering one of life’s fundamental mysteries: I came from nothing (or almost nothing: “The best part of you ran down the crack of your mother’s ass!” and just thinking about mom reading this brings up a whole lot of things Freud talked about), literally didn’t exist, actually was not in every way, how can it be that before my birth (and the nine month’s gestation, since we’ve learned basic anatomy) I didn’t exist at all? Think about that a bit, you’ll find it a scary thought.

Pascal noticed, famously, that just thinking certain thoughts or imagining a scary event can make us feel the fear we would if we were actually experiencing that event. That’d be a trivial psychological factoid except that Pascal built the Enlightenment on it, hoping to supplant the messy lower mental functions with pure, crystalline thought: because I think (and not because I feel) I know I exist. But his method held its own undoing, because that rational ability to think so that one can postulate and induce conclusions is the very same ability that can make one shiver and squirm by simply imagining someone dumping a snake in one’s lap (more with the Freud). And Pascal stayed pretty basic, whereas Schleiermacher went straight and deep to one particular thought and it’s feeling consort, that of absolute dependence. Thinking deeply – which means thinking so that one feels, too – about not existing before conception or about falling into dust after living leads one to feel a certain way, according to Schleiermacher, a way he described as feeling absolutely dependent on something besides myself for my existence, and not dependent in a good way but in a helpless, can’t do anything for myself way. Both Pascal and Schleiermacher recognized that some thoughts seem to open onto an abyss, where we feel not just fear and want to run or fight but where we feel like we’re going to fall, like when you’re standing on a rock bluff or a high building’s observation platform and you look down and feel that yawning void at your feet and imagine a great sucking force that if you let go will pull you over and you’re rushing down faster and faster, some thoughts threaten with falling into . . . confusion, inhumanity, insanity, into being anything but rational, an animal gibbering.

Frank Herbert imagined such a place at each person’s inner core, a place from which the Bene Gesserit recoiled in terror, could not face. That’s a non-cognitive place, one both Pascal and Schleiermacher would recognize, so I think it’s worth our attention, too. Some thoughts by their form or content lead us down to a brain-stem fear response where they grab handfuls of that stuff then swerve back up into our higher cognitive functions coupling fear-response with our imagination and our speculative reason and leaving us feeling – this is a feeling, now, and not a thought - like a huge void has suddenly yawned open, that we really don’t understand exactly what’s going on but that something big is happening and we sense just a tiny bit of it, and that terror threatens to shake us to pieces but we’re survivors so we take that tiny bit that gives us the briefest, slimmest glimpse of how awfully complicated, complex, way beyond us it is and using it we construct a way that we – and I mean the personal, individual first person singular use of “we” meaning “me” – fit into this immense reality, and if the fit is right and feels solid, then we feel not terror but amazement, overwhelming and grateful astonishment. When we feel that, we’ve moved through fear into awe.

Awe respects the abyss beneath certain thoughts, or questions, or assertions. “Respect” is a paltry word here, I wanted to write “reveres” but that feels wrong. We feel awe when we find ourselves a place in abysmal thoughts, and these are thoughts, mind you, awe is a thinking person’s response, even a dervish after twirling twenty hours though deep in ecstasy does not trip over into awe unless she thinks about that ecstasy’s place in the world, how that ecstasy points to another, deeper reality permeating this basal, mundane one, then the abyss opens and she feels fear perhaps terror but when she makes the connection, the personal connection between that abyss and her world she feels not fear nor terror but awe. Paul Tillich called questions that connect us to the abyss “ultimate questions,” dealing with “ultimate concerns,” concerns about our tiny, individual place in a huge, abominably huge and complex universe. Tillich’s ultimate questions are questions of meaning and he postulated a “ground of all being” on which our most terror-filled experiences ultimately rest, a ground in which terror is transformed into awe because no matter how huge the abyss, underneath the abyss is some place where we mean something.

Ultimate questions about birth and death are questions of meaning: what do I mean, what will my life mean in the great river of human history? I’m born into this huge stream of humanity, I die out of it, and what’s left over? I think of Tillich’s “ground of all being” like the bed of a river, a really big river that encompasses all time and space and everything in it. Which is more the river, the bed or the water that flows through it? The bed is relatively stable (floods may change the course of a river suddenly, the regular flow of the river changes its course gradually) and determinative of the river’s contours, even the eddies and swirls reflect river bed topographics. I don’t find Tillich’s ground all that comforting (in terms of transforming terror into awe) because it’s rather impersonal. Imagine me, an individual, as a drop or a bucket or even a bathtub dumped into the Mississippi. What does that one drop or bucket or bathtub of water mean in the scale of the river? Perhaps it’s my arrogance, but if that one additional drop or bucket doesn’t make the river swell so that it changes course (perhaps not dramatically, but at least somewhere along its great length), that it interacts with and changes the river bed and moves even the slightest bit into a new direction (just adding to the flood, just flowing right along seem little more than inertia or gravity), forming a new curve or bend, then in spite of the ground/bed that shapes the river I don’t see how one life can mean very much. And in spite of Tillich’s pastoral concern to comfort us in modern terms, that big ol’ river may be no more than life itself in all its myriad forms and all its long history, and birth and death – that dynamic that terrifies me so much – may be nothing more than a very successful strategy for life to get more life, damn the details. And though life’s long evolution is awesome to conceive, it’s also terrifying in its brute impersonality.

What can one life mean in the three-billion-year history of life (at least on this planet)? That’s the subject of all biography and autobiography and every birthday party you or I have attended. You bet I fear birthdays, not because of cake or singing or presents or the inexorable addition of years, but because of the question that fuels the celebration: what do I mean? What can one life mean? That’s a terrible question, one from which any sane person should recoil. The challenge is to transform it into an awesome question, one resplendent with possibilities, to ask, “Can one drop move that great river” and in spite size and time to say, “Yes!” and here’s how. Thank you for reading.