My grandfather died on a mountain of beans. Not planting a flag mind you. Not victorious in any way. Just dead, in bed. When they found him, the cans of beans were discovered underneath, piled high from one end of the bedstead to the other. Not, one might surmise, because he thought he might have felt a bit peckish in the night, but to ward off actual starvation, which was a bit odd considering that he had enough cash to buy both the shop he bought the beans from and the bakery next door.
My other grandfather was more fortunate. He died of falling fifteen thousand feet in the twisting, burnt out fuselage of a Lancaster bomber.
Though the circumstances of their deaths were entirely different their final moments did have something in common. Fear, though what they were afraid of was worlds apart. The young anti-aircraft gunner, trapped in his cage of glass and steel, choking and struggling to free himself as he plummeted Earthwards, knew he was about to die.
You’d think the much older man, having had a full life, lying quietly in his bed with his boots off, was blessed with a more benevolent fate. But the mountain of beans belied the hidden reality of someone loveless, disconnected from a world by which he felt abandoned and against which he’d pitifully shored himself up with a horde of staple snacks.
Our more conscious fears are of the plummeting variety. Fear of Life seems incomprehensible, even petty by comparison, yet tomorrow’s Unknown sometimes has a way of eclipsing even Death itself.
and rather depends on the fantasy of what you think tomorrow will bring.
We Westerners think of ourselves as ever so evolved but we are caught in a cultural double bind that puts a severe crimp in aliveness. We think of the pursuit of happiness as a constitutional right but entering into the feeling that happiness brings means a letting go of control few will entertain. To the extent that you are invested in image and have learned to play the power game, so must you stay in control…
”because loss of control evokes the fear of insanity.” A. Lowen.
This fear is not immediately obvious until you look at how much talk there is about ‘negative feelings’, whole service industries whose sole purpose is to help steer you away from ‘toxic emotions’. Entire psychological theories and therapies exist to facilitate the process of dominating feeling life with rational egoic constructs to help us ’emote appropriately’.
But feelings are not produced by the ego. You can’t make yourself laugh or cry. Not without looking as though you are auditioning for a part on Broadway. To the extent that you are invested in the holy grail of appearance, so must feelings and spontaneity be suppressed and secretly regarded as the enemy, there to upset the status quo, ready to ambush your pretensions and overwhelm defenses. Feelings, particularly the more vulnerable ones of dependency and need, become equated with madness.
And so, with the greatest of irony, what we fear most, more than death, is our own authenticity which really does have the power to intrude upon preferred self-constructs and shred them like confetti.
So ordinary pleasures, a hearty cackle, the relief of a good cry, the beating heart of desire, the joy that demands we let go for a moment, has to be fended off as if they were the devil himself and substituted with multi billion dollar entertainment industries that amuse and help us pass the time without making any demands or rattling the bars of our cages.
People pay for this privilege by living lives of quiet desperation
”and go to the grave with the song still in them.” H. Thoreau
though it is not greed per se that leads people to want more and more luxurious and unnecessary things, but the fear that underpins it. Making ego king casts the rest of our souls in the role of enemy at the gate. A siege mentality is the inevitable result, dominated by fear and lack and loss.
This fear permeates our culture as absence of concern for others, as pathological competitiveness, as a doubling down on whatever yesterday’s truth might have been.
‘The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but it is really fear.’ Ghandi
The extent to which our lives are dominated by the unconscious fears associated with staying in control and projecting an image of ourselves that is dissonant with the true self has been artfully demonstrated by an experiment at Yale University conducted by professor John Bargh.
He observed that minorities are often attributed with the characteristics of germs and bacteria that threaten, like unwanted feelings, to invade and destroy. He reasoned that making people feel safer about ‘germs’ could change racist attitudes and political convictions about immigration policy.
So he set up a questionnaire on political affiliation but reminded a control group about the recent H1N1 epidemic and casually asked if the participants had their shots. This control group responded unanimously by filling out their forms with a conservative bias.
Then he set similar questions to another control group, reminded them of the recent epidemic, but this time handed out hand sanitizer before they picked up their pens….
‘A simple squirt of Purell after we had raised the threat of the flu had changed their minds. It made them feel safe from the virus and (by association) from immigrants as well.” J. Bargh.
Fear governs who we vote for, even if we don’t like the guy.
In the Yale experiment ‘germs’ were symbolic of ‘infectious’ minorities. But the minorities themselves are symbolic, of ‘inferior’ and invasive feelings, ‘intrusive’ thoughts that like-wise want to be on the inside.
And so, if the world is to become a more gentle place, power withheld from tyrants, then the inner tyrant busy controlling experience and walling off a full emotional life needs a little friendly chat.
Protection from cruel overlords begins at home, begins with recognising the fear of being really alive, the loss of control over self and others such liberation brings and the fear of madness that attends daring to be our true selves.
Most of us prefer to die peacefully in our beds at a ripe old age. But if its atop a mountain of beans are we really resting contentedly? I think not. We might make a virtue of being so prepared, of looking out for number one, of being First and Only, but if its at the expense of being so alienated from authentic feelings that we spend that life wanting to ‘get away from it all’, then the plummeting version begins to look like the better choice.
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