by Harvey Lillywhite
I, a small protest movement against unfairness and injustice, one of the 2,818 occupy communities worldwide, inspired by the Spanish Indignants and Arab Spring (American Spring?), but completely ignored by Adbusters, irrelevant to everyone but me, have decided, at last, to occupy ground zero: myself. Halfway stuck in the sucking analog quicksand of the 20th century, I can still see halfway into this new digital century. Though there’s less and less of me above ground, I long for a Harvian Spring….
A flâneur, as I visit American cities doing an unglamorous thing—teaching workplace writers how to think and write—I’m committed to peripatetic wandering, graffiti the high art I most admire, hoping to blend art and the psychogeography of everyday life as thoroughly as I can.
I find it completely presumptuous to tell anyone else what to do or to demand anything of anyone (aren’t all of us ME?), and don’t usually demand much of anything of myself—I am a really good listener, however—I suspect that I might need to find a new way of life simply because I’ve seemingly become victimized by a comfortable trajectory of living that gobbles up the years and leaves me as safe one day as the next, insecurities sunk below my awareness, steady as she goes, able to handle most anything in this life where nothing much extraordinary can happen. Unfair. Unjust.
MLK wrote in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” that “In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self-purification; and direct action.” While this program reminds me of the stages of Grief (are there 5?), I begin to prepare for my campaign, my occupation of me.
collection of facts to determine whether injustices exist
How could they not exist? On the one hand, I perceive myself as a pretty nice guy. But on the other hand look at all the ways I’ve managed to disappoint myself over the years, beginning with dropping guitar lessons in the 8th grade for no good reason, just laziness and a failure to see into the future as most smart, motivated people can. But MLK wants the facts, the sordid facts of a life of being unjust to myself. Well, I do like dessert but hardly ever eat it. And I sometimes have an urge to shop for stuff I don’t need, but don’t do it often enough to really satisfy my urge. I don’t balance my checkbook online each month nor drive an electric car, though my gas car does have a bumper sticker that says SAVE THE PLANET. So that’s at least something.
I have lots of desires. I want a lot of things. If I were rich, one of the 1%ers, say, I’d seriously like a 3-level house on the beach where the walls are just huge windows and the fog rolls in every morning and burns away by noon so I can surf or tan in my lounger on the sand. And the furniture is totally designer and ultra-modern and incredibly comfortable. I’d like a personal chef to make sure I eat good food. I’d like someone to clean the place. I’d need a big entertainment center, a large digital music collection—love music. Of course I’d donate a lot of money to solve the global problems, if I were really wealthy. But the parent in me tries to deny me what I really want. The Jiminy Cricket voice in my head makes me feel a little ashamed for even admitting what I want. Certainly this whole situation is unjust. In the best of all possible worlds, shouldn’t everybody have what she wants?
Let’s just say I’m truly a 99%er, assume the facts of my injustices to myself are too vast to count, and move on to the next stage. After all, it’s the last step we always want to get to though we know we have to suffer through all the preliminaries before we get what we want. Who likes waiting in long lines? What was it? Oh yeah, DIRECT ACTION. Right. So let’s move on and negotiate.
NEGOTIATION
Origin:
1590–1600; < Latin negōtiātus (past participle of negōtiārī to trade), equivalent to negōti ( um ) business ( neg- not + ōtium leisure) + -ātus -ate. Not leisure? Trade? To improve my life, which is finally what I want, to make it more JUST for all my selves (the kid, the parent, the worker, the competitor, the Dad, the son, the teacher, etc.), I can trade actions or possibly abstentions for the things I want that are missing from my life. Oh, when I listed the injustices, did I bring up love? More on that later maybe.
If I eat better and exercise for 30 minutes 4 times a week for the next two weeks, I will have earned enough points—call it trading currency—to buy the German chocolate cake I’ve been eyeing at the grocery store and have a big slice, IF I drop five pounds by the end of the month and can fit into my old suit pants for the wedding. That makes sense. And if I stop buying books for my kindle for two months, I can pay down my credit card balance by 10% maybe, or maybe 5%, and I can take a weekend at Ocean City in May when the weather turns.
I can promise to make a life plan, to map where I am now, where I want to be (not here), and how exactly I’m going to get there, step by step. It could be the checklist I always denied was really there at all, the one that I ignore, that actually motivates me to do a lot of what I do and don’t do. Hey, I care about what people think. I don’t want to come across as a bad teacher, or a bad Dad, or a bad neighbor, you know? Let’s just be honest about all that.
Maybe I think I’m above all that. That’s what I think. But I notice how uncomfortable I get when I think people see me as stupid, for instance (like maybe right now?). Right. I admit I have tremendous insecurities. And that’s certainly part of the injustice I failed to mention in step one. I want to measure up. Talking about this actually makes me uncomfortable. Maybe this is enough negotiation? MLK never says how much. But he does say that waiting too long is bad. And I have waited long enough for my life to be better! On to step 3, and then OCCUPY.
self-purification
This is the one I’ve been really dreading. I don’t think MLK means a Master Cleansing: first, squeeze Fresh Lemon Juice, then add Rich Maple Syrup, and Cayenne Pepper into Pure Water….
PURE: Origin:
1250–1300; Middle English pur < Old French < Latin pūrus clean, unmixed, plain, pure. Clean? Maybe do a sweatlodge? Hmm. Unmixed? This is complicated. What is my pure state? What is Pure Self? I’ve sat on my zafu for enough years now to realize that this is a trick question, semantics really. (If you’ve read this far, you might think I’m kidding with all this. But, sadly I’m not.) At one point, several years back, there was this moment of breakthrough where, no kidding, I kind of merged with EVERYTHING. No drugs were involved. It lasted an hour or so. It was not something I could put into words very accurately. Something like we’re all atoms, right? Total unity. No separate self. All one. That uncanny feeling passed, but I’ve never forgotten it. But I have doubted it. After all, I can imagine there’s no ME, no self, but it defies all my senses; it defies all my experience. It’s really okay with me if there’s no self. I can let go. All those silly desires I mentioned—real ones, by the way—I can see as being silly and can let them go. I’m really good at listening and, it occurs to me, maybe even better at letting go.
I’ve come to suspect quite recently that my extreme ability to let go (not always an advantage, of course) stems from my early childhood, being raised in a house with a fighting Mom and Dad (before their divorce), death threats, violence, all in all pretty horrible living conditions. I think I learned to dissociate from myself.
As the Internet explains: “Dissociation is an altered state of consciousness characterized by partial or complete disruption of the normal integration of a person’s normal conscious or psychological functioning. Dissociation is most commonly experienced as a subjective perception of one's consciousness being detached from one's emotions, body and/or immediate surroundings.”
From being totally lost in my thoughts when I’m driving to amnesia of certain horrible events that I reportedly experienced, dissociation must be what I learned, probably a fairly common disorder. It’s great protection from reality, that’s for sure. Like a huge coat of fur. Nothing can hurt me.
But it’s not that I have no emotions. I’m very emotional and pretty aware of them. It’s just that I can get to a point and…just let go. I further suspect that this thing that’s both a real defect in my personality and a historically necessary survival mechanism for me keeps me from abandoning myself in love or of accepting love from others. I think I’m innately mistrustful of people, even those closest to me—though this is way down below the surface, something that makes me very uncomfortable to notice and discuss. I can’t form normal social attachments. Ouch. That sounds awful. And, like I said, I think I’m pretty friendly, and I do care about others. I’d die, for instance, for either of my kids. But there’s that letting go thing again. The idea of death has never been especially problematic for me.
Maybe it’s a case of my greatest weakness being my greatest strength? Maybe the 1%ers have dissociation disorder? Well, I’m here to occupy the 1% of me that MLK has urged me to know and try to work with before taking direct (nonviolent) action. Can I make the 1% associate?
Pure is a pretty tall order. But MLK doesn’t say totally pure, right? Maybe just pure-er. It’s a tough call. In fact, one reason I find it completely presumptuous to tell anyone else what to do or to demand anything of anyone (aren’t all of us ME?), and don’t usually demand much of anything of myself, is that I wonder, when the occasion arises to do this: Who the heck am I to demand anything of anyone? I’m no better than anyone on earth. And I’m not just saying that. I do my best. Or at least I say that I do, and I sort of believe it. I’m kind of afraid really to do my worst. I secretly admire bad guys/gals in some perverse way. I can see why an outlaw could become a hero. I get why people go visit Jim Morrison’s grave. And it makes sense to me to rise up in protest and say JUST LEAVE ME ALONE! I’ve been known to cuss out a bad driver (and to be one). Maybe it’s courage I’m lacking? Balls? But MLK talked about purification, not getting all macho. Hmm.
Maybe I’ll be stuck in this step forever. I wrestle with myself about so many issues.
Purification? Be a vegan for a month (already have been). Check. So yoga for 30 minutes 3 or 4 times a week. Check. Give 10% of my money to others. Uh, wait a sec. Okay, let’s move on. Purification? Don’t talk against anyone for, what, 3 months? A year? Okay, maybe two weeks. Check. Bicycle to work. Check. Get a new high-efficiency heater and air conditioning unit in my house. Check. Use organic fertilizers and support organic foods (not grown via Big Agra). Check. Be Green in all household cleaning. Check. Put photovoltaic cells on my roof for energy and sell excess back to the grid. (Would love to, but…)
Okay, I think I’m getting the hang of this. I feel my competitive upbringing coming to life. I can be the Greenest SOB in Baltimore County. I’ll be as pure or maybe even more pure than anyone I bump into at Whole Foods (yes, I really shop there. One woman driving a van in the Whole Foods parking lot had a sticker on her window: GIVING UP FAITH IN HUMANITY ONE PERSON AT A TIME. I’m definitely NOT that person!
Still, all this purity isn’t really putting me in a good place. It’s not overpowering my dissociative personality. In fact, it’s a kind of avoidance. It’s something else to pay attention to, to divert me, from something deeper, something that frightens me. Maybe it’s the thing MLK wanted me to get in touch with. Is purification NOT DOING?
There I go again, spinning out.
I was about to say that it’s relationships that scare me (scar me?). How can I give myself to the world body and soul? What if it doesn’t love me back? (I hear Mother Theresa spitting at me.) But I don’t even pretend to want to be a saint. MLK was no saint. That’s not what he was going for I don’t think.
Michael Jackson said he was starting with the Man in the Mirror. Clever.
Actually, I’m just about at a complete loss. I CAN sit here and take deep breaths. I CAN listen. I CAN feel what I feel. Can I resolve to do whatever it is I do fully, if not any better? Can I learn to put my heart into what I do even more than I do now? I’d say my heart mostly is in there already. And that’s so vague. As for self-improvement? Maybe that’s not quite purification.
Maybe it’s closer to honesty. Just plain old honesty. Hmm.
I‘ll make a deal with myself, then move on to the final step. I won’t lie to myself or to anyone else. I’ll try it for an hour. See how that goes. Then maybe I can do it for an afternoon? An evening? A whole day? I’ll see how honesty goes. Really, I will.
DIRECT ACTION
Now it’s time to occupy myself! At last.