Living In My Own Private Alternate Universe
Am I insane? That’s a very good question. I ask myself that almost every day.
So much of what we call “reality” seems determined by group consensus (scientific or otherwise), and I spent an awful lot of time as a kid playing in the sandbox by myself. So that may contribute to why I might come across as demented.
Or maybe I really am from outer space.
…
Not long ago I read this in The Art of Possibility:
A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying,
SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES
The other writes back triumphantly,
GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES
To the marketing expert who sees no shoes, all the evidence points to hopelessness. To his colleague, the same conditions point to abundance and possibility. Each scout comes to the scene with his own perspective; each returns telling a different tale. Indeed, all of life comes to us in narrative form; it’s a story we tell.
This is the beginning of a chapter called “It’s All Invented.” The authors point out, among other things, how differently the world looks to a frog than to humans, and give an example of how extending the boundaries of a particular puzzle makes a solution appear. They talk about how Einstein changed our Newtonian view of physics, and how our scientific paradigm is constantly evolving. It’s all very exciting and suggestive of expansion and new possibilities.
But, now, wait a minute.
Since I got here — birthed, or landed — I feel like I’ve been challenging (or maybe just butting up against) the prevailing stories about what’s going on, what the hell this is, with regard to any number of existential questions. Since rejecting the reality story offered by the evangelical church, I’ve resisted conventional wisdom about life purpose, truth, value, relationships, you name it, and tried to invent a more AlienBaby-friendly universe out of my own intuition, intelligence, and experience. What I seem to have gotten is equal resistance from the “outside world,” which has yet to show me evidence that it doesn’t have a wholly independent existence that’s impervious to my intentions. It’s been like swimming upstream for the last twenty-five years. Adherents of new-consciousness thinking, who surround but have not managed to convince me, say that we create our own reality — which sounds real nice, but I ain’t seen it happen yet.
What I want to know is, say I do run with that — hey, I’ve tried! — what makes me different from the highly medicated or the incarcerated? What if I decide that shooting the president is totally the way to win over Jodie Foster? It wouldn’t have all that much bearing on “reality,” would it? Sometimes I think the difference between myself and a Hinckley is only one of degree.
…
I was a senior in high school when Terry Gilliam’s wild, visionary, dystopian film Brazil came out. I saw it multiple times over the course of a few months, completely transfixed. It was as if I knew it would prove to be in some ways a metaphor for how I would experience life. Even though the protagonist was male, I identified with Sam, played with deadpan looniness by the marvelous Jonathan Pryce.
Sam is a fairly insignificant cog in the massive impersonal machine of his Orwellian government’s bureauacracy, where a clerical error caused by an insect results in the torture and death of an innocent man. (Twenty years later, doesn’t this seem prescient, given what we’ve found out about extraordinary rendition and the murder of innocent people like Dilawar, the Afghan taxi driver beaten to death by U.S. troops at Bagram?) Billboards propagandizing The Good Life obstruct views of ruined wastelands and the decaying living quarters of the desperately poor. (And what distinguishes this imaginary metropolis from any city in America?) Public and private discourse is dominated by shallow slogans and misleading euphemisms that short-circuit any real communication or connection between human beings. (Do I need to add further comment?)
Into Sam’s bleak, gray world of meaningless jargon and ugly architecture intrude vivid dreams and fantasies that have a mythic, Hero’s-Journey quality to them. In these dreams he is a mighty winged warrior, striving to rescue the ethereal Woman in White from her floating cage. He battles numerous obstacles — towering, impenetrable monoliths, ghoulish hooded creatures with hideous baby-doll faces, and a giant metallic samurai among them — all of which correspond to intransigent obstacles in his waking life.
(I must mention that Sam is not alone in his craving for a better narrative, for a grand tale that has love and heroism and meaning in it; his coworkers at the dismal Records Pool spend their furtive, unsupervised moments comically trying to watch Casablanca.)
When Sam actually encounters his dream woman in the person of Jill Layton — his vision really exists! — his fevered pursuit and declarations of love come off as lunacy. His overwhelmingly felt connection to this woman is rooted in the Jungian realm of dreams, intuition, symbolism, and myth — things that seem patently ridiculous in these soulless, mechanized, Darwinian surroundings. Sam seems unhinged, delusional. (But then, even in the less extreme surroundings I have to navigate, he’d seem delusional. I’m pretty sure I do.) No one can be trusted in their world; why should she trust a raving madman?
**Spoiler alert** In the end, after his involvement with Jill and other so-called “terrorists” leads to his being classified an enemy of the state, Sam is captured and prepared for draconian interrogation tactics, with no escape route save his own fertile imagination. Contrary to the prescriptions of many a respectable guru I know, he doesn’t surrender to what’s happening and accept the present moment! In the final shot, he is left in the torture chair (a dentist’s chair, of course), eyes rolled toward heaven, a blissful smile on his face. Jill is most likely dead, but in his mind they are miles away, together.
And that’s kind of how I’ve gotten through life. Oh, nothing’s been that dire! Nobody’s going to come after me wielding sinister dental implements — at least not at this point, I hope. But there is many a dull moment when I fall out of my Walter Mitty reverie with a shock, to greet real circumstances as indifferent and unyielding as the granite facade of the Ministry of Information, and hard facts that fly in the face of my heroic Joseph Campbell-esque visions.
I think of Jill at one point in the film, saying “You have no sense of reality.”
At such moments, I believe it.
And then I wonder if the mothership is ever coming back to take me home to a planet where I can feel moderately normal.
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