As promised on a previous post, I will intermittently feature songs designed to serve as accompanying soundtracks for my posts, each track produced specifically for this newsletter by the gifted artist (and my brother) J.P. De Veer. This week’s song is called “Kowloon” and is the perfect accompaniment to the essay below, which were written while listening to the song. It was designed to last the entire reading time. Enjoy.
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
~ James Baldwin, from The Fire Next Time
It is 3:37am as I write this. I know this time, this dead spot of morning still called “the middle of the night” to those who have not yet retired the previous day. I have not yet retired the previous day, choosing instead to stand vigil over yesterday as it bleeds out in my arms.
Such a waste of talent.
The world is silent now, other than the buzzing of timed automations and the whistling hum of servile machines that cater to our body’s unconscious comforts during the night. Up and down my city block, all the lamps besides mine have long been snuffed. The square of argent light that illuminates my bedroom window is the one flickering pixel that interrupts the otherwise perfectly-blackened canvas of this street.
This is the Dead Spot.
There is occasionally the waveform whooshing of truck tires as their wet rubber rapidly adheres to and then disconnects from the pavement below with the sticky sound of old adhesive being ripped upward. These vehicles are surely operated by humans, but these humans do not count among the denizens of the Dead Spot. Their lot is often equally lonesome, but their purposefulness saves them from the loathsomeness of our kind’s predicament. They are not members of this community, this organization of unsleeping souls who, throughout all of human history, have never once drafted an agenda, hosted a meeting, or taken attendance. We are a group with no dues, no affiliations, no bylaws. The only requirement for membership is that you stand vigil over the night, and you wish for morning while all others sleep.
Standing night vigil is a job much like any other. Yet this is not a job I was assigned, nor a job that I requested, nor one that suits me in the least. I am certainly not paid for this job. And yet, here I am: laying sideways on my bed, beached like a Roman Senator, listen to the sheering ticks of the large analog clock in the hallway outside of my bedroom. It is a broken device, cheaply made and unremarkable other than the hilarious fact that it has been terminally stuck at 6:11pm for the last two years. I’ve thought about taking it down countless times, but it hangs too high up and is too rarely referenced to ever generate the sufficient level of urgency required for replacement.
There always seem to be better things to do with my time than spend it on clocks.
The clock hands are frozen stiff, producing only a slight tremor as the internal motor repeatedly attempts to propel articulations among the tiny gears and spindles inside. But no matter how often the attempt is made, the tipping point of friction and torsion is never reached. The clock is thus rendered an unconscious Sisyphus, forever doomed to a repetition of trial and failure at the most regular interval of them all. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Yet despite this rolling failure, this programmed humiliation repeated sixty times every minute, the clock does yet provide one function: it still makes a ticking sound.
Though scarcely useful in 2022, there was an era of human history in which the ability to reliably count seconds could have moved science, military, and commerce forward by a hundred years. Nowadays, it is decidedly less useful. Especially as the lame clock hands do not advance and therefore produce no visual record of this ticking, even using it to time the heating of a Hot Pocket would require an active process of counting far more easily accomplished by nearly a million other more competent devices.
Yet it is with this one remaining utility that the device is spared from the shameful categorization of “utterly useless,” instead hanging stubbornly under the loathsome column labeled “almost entirely useless.” Almost. While I don’t rely on the crisp slicing ticks to measure duration, I do nonetheless use them to measure pain. I cannot say I know the length of a second by heart, but I do know the weight of one. I know how little we can mourn the loss of one before we must move onto the next. I know how many I have spilled behind me, millions of precious seconds casually flung over my shoulder into the past, discarded and unspoiled by meaning or memorial.
It is 3:58am as I write this. I wonder if this time 4am will bring salvation or rapture? It has not yet dragged either of these gifts into my lap, but maybe today will be different? Perhaps today time will finally reverse its flow, receding back into the previous day. Such an auspicious inversion this would be, as it is only four hours into Wednesday when I finally come up with a tenable plan for how I will handle Tuesday.
Perhaps time will not even bother to turn back on itself. Perhaps it will just reach an endpoint, be that a bang or a whimper. Who knows. Who knows what will come at the end of time? Perhaps the universe will collapse into a single particle, so hot and dense and chaotic that at last it fails to support even the mere logic of itself. It will simmer awhile, precarious and angry, until once more this single point will explode outward, reterritorializing the universe, restoring the eternal cycle of birth and death, repopulating the cosmos with the magical stardust that will one day become Swingline staplers and Michael Vick Jerseys and Chinese children making iPhones. Such a beautiful thought, my toilet bowl brush once having been made of stardust. Just like Carl Sagan imagined, just like Neil deGrasse Tyson wishes he imagined.
It is 4:13am as I write this. 4am came and passed. The early birds are starting to rouse out of REM sleep. I know better than to hang around to see the faces of those who rise with the sun. It’s always this time that I remember what keeps me up. It’s the pain, of course. The illness of pain, both physical and metaphysical, is the disease that is papered over when my inability to sleep is labeled as mere insomnia.
My body, disfigured by eight surgeries to correct a “structural abnormality” has now become a post-structural abomination. My stomach is a map of grotesque scars left by the many knives that have pierced my flesh. Most terrible is the 1-inch wide slash down the middle of my abdomen, a relic from the butchering I woke up from ten years ago when I was told they had to remove my umbilicus during the procedure. I remember laughing when I heard it, wondering if it was the stupor of anesthesia that made this notion so funny. What use did I have for that any more, I wondered?
It turns out things can be useless but also necessary. Much in the way that my hallway clock is necessary to remind me of the pain, my belly button was necessary to remind me of the time without pain. The time before pain. The time before a small hole formed in my abdominal wall and I elected to have a “routine same-day surgery” to have it corrected. This surgery failed and one year later I got another. A year later that failed and I got another. And another. And another. And another. And another. And another. I have another in six months.
My poor navel, discarded somewhere in a special trash pile probably labeled “biological materials.” I think about it sometimes, though surely it is disintegrated by now. It would be a stretch to say I have anything akin to “phantom limb pain” for my lost belly-button, but I have over time allowed myself an indulgence in the metaphorical significance of losing the part of myself that serves as the most obvious evidence of being born, of being connected to the mother, of being separated from her by the father. When I think about it long enough, it puts the messy whole of my life into crystal clear focus. When I think about it too long, it starts to be absurd.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
It is 8:23am as I write this. I have woken up with a start, my eyes blasting open and my shoulders shocking forward in such a way that only slightly compresses my abdomen. Slight as the compression is, it is more than enough to trigger what comes next. A series of cramp spreads like poison across my torso and a terrible pulling feeling turns into a ripping sensation near the surgical anchor points just below my ribcage. There is no position I can contort into that does not make the feeling worse. I instantaneously begin to sweat, a natural reaction to having to contend with so many uncomfortable feelings all at once.
There is crushing now.
There is twisting now.
There is sawing now.
There is burning now.
Crushing once again.
In desperation, I try to massage out a lump of striated muscle over the place that my rectus abdominus used to be. I gather my courage, draw a determined breath inward, and press downward on the knotted mass. The agony is so exquisite that I briefly have an image of a knife being pushed through my back and out the front of my belly. I briefly feel like I am going to piss myself. I briefly feel something akin to asphyxia, of being buried or burned alive. Both are losses of breath.
At this point I have been awake for nine seconds.
Within a minute of awakening, after less than four hours of troubled, broken sleep, I am forced to make a decision that holds more gravity than the decisions most people will have to make all day. Do I recede back into my bed, take a muscle relaxant, a pain reliever, maybe something to help me sleep a bit more? Or do I rise, walk directly into the pain like Wim Hoff jumping into a pool of icy water? I know I would be more justified in choosing the former. But I also know I will be miserable in my justification. I will be miserable if I stand, too. But at least if I stand, something will happen. Something will be different.
I choose to stand.
I rise, and the pain is clenching and perverse. It is like being squeezed by a corset that is drawn in four directions by four different horses, while simultaneously having my guts pushed out of a hole in the middle where my umbilicus used to be. The feeling is as nauseating as it is excruciating, and my body struggles to incorporate the data rushing in from its peripheral sensors in a desperate attempt to maintain internal homeostasis. My right hand outstretches to the wall and presses, providing the support that it can. It does the small favor of mercy for my body, to at least not be troubled by considerations of balance.
A few breaths, as deep as I can muster. My body straightens. I am out of breath. It will begin to get easier. Just a few more minutes. The pain is now receding back into its hole. It is still snarling. It is still angry. But it has retreated for now.
It is 9:01am as I write this. I am tired of the feeling of being inside my body. I want to give up. I want to go under for a surgery and not wake up again. But also, I don’t want to share any of this with anyone. I walk around all day, adjusting my posture, massaging my muscles and bones, and holding my breath as small tendrils of the pain reach out and stab daggers into different parts of my body. Even when I am not in the breach, I am subject to guerrilla incursions at all times. I am never truly afforded respite or safety.
Do you want to hear more?
Maybe you do. I assume that you are processing the story of my pain the way that most people experience the pain of others. If you love me, you will allow a part of your mind to imagine the pain in an abstract way. You will let it horrify you just a little, just so that you can be there with me in some small way. You know I understand it that you can’t step all the way inside.
But if you don’t love me, if you don’t even know me, if you are just some person reading this, then you are likely experiencing my pain on a theoretical or, at best, an intellectual level. Why should you be asked to do any more than that?
How much pain do you honestly feel when you read about a train accident in some country you’ve never been to, especially one with people that don’t look like you or talk like you or have the same religion or weather as you. Hypothetically, you feel bad. In reality, though, you can’t be expected to really feel all that much. Again - why should you? Did you know anyone on that train that crash in that city you can’t pronounce? The best you can do, the most that can be expected of anyone, is to call it a “damn shame” and move on.
This is especially true if you, like me, are constantly in fisticuffs with your own pain, be that of the body or mind. What bandwidth do you have to also take on the pain of others, especially the descriptions of pain you did not ask for? Perhaps you interpret what I am saying here as a plea for empathy, or a self-serving petition to be “seen” and “heard,” like so many seem to be begging for today. I don’t want to be seen or heard. I just want you to give me a break.
Does this phrase seem impotent? “Give me a break.” What sort of imagery does this phrase conjure in your mind? What feeling does it make you feel? When someone asks to be given a break, does that make you more or less likely to give them a break? What does it even mean to give someone a break? To me, I suppose it means providing a small space in your heart to understand that the behavior of another may be informed by causes that you cannot see. It does not mean that you excuse them of their poor behavior, nor does it mean you absolve them of their crimes. It simply means that you hold just a small amount of skepticism over the idea that a person’s behavior in any given moment is an accurate reflection of their entire existence.
We have sort of lost this ability, have we not? The ability to “give someone a break.” The increasing efficiency and organization of our world has led to a higher preference for binary conclusions. A person is either all good or all bad. A good person must remain on their best behavior. A bad person cannot be redeemed and, besides, there is so much more bad stuff happening that it seems ridiculous to spend any time rehabbing an evil person. Makes much more sense to spend our time supporting those who are good.
Never mind for a moment that the conceptions of bad and good are wildly unreliable, based mostly on the fickle voices of the rabbling crowd, or that most of the moral assignations are made with only a small percentage of the actual story (and in increasingly bad faith). We need not even go down the hole of moral relativism to see that this tendency of binary categorization is literally going to kill our civilization.
Social media is not “the problem,” it is simply the most potent evidence yet of the rot central to western civilization: purity. More accurately, the delusion of such a thing as purity. The belief that it is possible to be completely “good.” You think we don’t know? We, the denizens of the Dead Spot, know your awful truth more than anyone. We know about that thing you retreat into when times get hard. We know that compulsion that you have, the one you constantly accuse others of having. The one you hide and fear being found out for it so badly that you sometimes think you’ll just have to kill yourself if it comes to the light of day.
Oh, we know.
We like to mock the sanctimoniousness and stubbornness of our religious forerunners in the US, thinking their systems of rules and beliefs to be an absurd web of trivialities and encrypted delivery systems of patriarchy. These were the people, after all, who were burning witches and adding e’s to the end of words that did not need them. These were the people who toiled endlessly in the hard New England soil only to die miserable and drenched, hated by their sturdy bonneted wife and nine children (ten if you count dear Norman, who tragically died by snake bite when he was eight minutes old).
Many like to think of these people as historical NPCs, devoid of an internal monologue and deluded by their religion. And yet, how really different are we? Certainly the goal posts have changed, and certainly the methods of dissemination have changed. But are we not up to the same old games? In fact, are we not far far worse?
Is it really a fool’s errand to spend time with the guilty? Is it so bad to allow for a path of redemption for those who have faltered? Is it “bad for us” to forgive people who have hurt us? To believe that all humans are capable of redemption? Or does our ability to forgive, rehabilitate, make amends, and heal help us as people far more than those who are those asking for forgiveness?
Why do we find it so damn hard to admit just how rotten we can be? It would make the whole world a nicer place if we all started talking more about how hard it is to be good. It would be a lot easier than having to withstand the fatigue that comes with our constant bluffing.
It is 2:01am as I finish this. The Dead Spot looms in the hour ahead of me. I am afraid of it as I always am. And yet, I must pass through it once more. I must somehow manage to sleep again just before 5am. I will rise with a start again just after 8am. I will writhe in pain again. I will choose to stand, choose to march forward, choose to withstand the internal slings and arrows my body hurls against itself. I will continue to hold vigil over the night, to withstand the Dead Spot, to pull myself out of my temporary rest and back into the pain once more.
I will continue to do this, day after day, year after year. I will not complain about it. I will rarely even talk about it. I will act like nothing is wrong at all. I will ask for no sympathy. I will ask for no accommodation. I will do this ritual every morning until I die. I will do this ritual every day not as a punishment, but as a way of life.
I withstand this pain as a form of protest against the world who requires me to talk endlessly about my pain to receive even a whiff of sympathy. I will keep my pain private, I will not use it to justify the evil I have done or will do again. I will let the mobs believe whatever they wish to believe about me. I will let them call me evil. I will let them rip me apart limb by limb. I will let them press their fingers into the wound where my umbilical cord once was, connecting me to my mother. I will allow them to press their hands through my flesh, curl their fingers around my dermis, rip open my abdomen and spill my guts onto the ground.
I will smile as I bleed out and they cheer around me. I will smile because this pain is nothing compared to that which I have already endured. I will smile because I am finally going to be free from this pain. I will smile because they think they have felled the monster. I will smile because they will one day run out of monsters outside of themselves. It is only when they reach this point of total purity that they will finally have to contend with the evil that still haunts this world. Maybe they will do what they always do and find a new monster. Maybe this one will look or talk a certain way. Maybe they will have a habit they don’t like. Maybe they will have said words that they claim hurt their feelings.
Or maybe, at last, they can see that all of the monsters they have killed look exactly like that thing that lives inside of them, too. Wonder how many more “monsters” have to get killed before that happens. Wonder who will be left.