I’m driving to school.
I’m late. The traffic is terrible
and then someone pulls out in front of me.
At the last minute, I am able to veer into the passing lane to avoid a
collision. Expletives crowd the cabin of my car. As I pass the offending
driver, I crane my neck over the console in an attempt to make eye contact with
the person that I’ve now decided not only lacks driving skills, but also
intelligence about anything at all ever on the entire planet. I angrily press on
the accelerator revving my engine and bringing the front of my car parallel to
that of this thoughtless, no good, so-and-so. No luck. He won’t turn his head. “You should not have a license!” I shout
towards the passenger window. It’s
rolled up. No one can hear me. My next
move is to speed up enough to pull into his lane, directly in front of
him. Once placed, I tap my breaks. And
then, I tap them again. I look in my rear view for hoping to see a reaction on
his face. Wait a minute. What is it that I want, exactly, from such a
confrontation? What satisfaction is to
be had? In the moment, it really doesn’t
matter. In the moment, I have let my
inner “Hyde” take over.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was written towards the
end of the Victorian era, a time of strict morals and a strong sense of propriety.
The book explores the animal, infantile instincts and the potential for evil in
all of us. The same instincts that the
norms of society perpetually force us to keep repressed for the sake of
civilization, and also reputation.
At the end of Stevenson’s novel, good prevails over
evil. Restraint rules and order is
restored. But, the story goes that
there was first another version with a different ending, one over which
Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, whose name seems ironically apt, expressed disapproval
which resulted in Stevenson throwing his only manuscript into the fire. A fitting gesture for a novel about impulse
control. He rewrote the entire thing from
memory reportedly changing the ending. I
wonder about that first ending. Why did
he rewrite it? To please her? To conform with what was right and true and
good of his day? I wonder about the statement
he had originally intended to make, the one that met with criticism from his
wife. I can almost see her all laced up
in her corset sitting rigidly by the fireside in a tall backed chair, her
posture perfect, her lips pursed, her stare pointed at her husband who had
grown weary of the stringent zeitgeist of his day. A small sliver of my inner
Hyde hopes that he had, as rappers Salt-n-Pepa have said, “a chick on the side.”
Which isn’t fair of me because I’ve
never met Fanny. She was probably a
wonderful human who was just, like most of us, trying to do the right thing.
My feelings about Fanny stem from the same exasperation that
I imagine Stevenson to have had over the Victorians unwillingness to
acknowledge the stuff which makes us human.
No matter the manners and gentility portrayed by the Victorians, no matter
how much Fanny may have wanted to deny it, the fact remains that people across
time and across cultures have the types of urges portrayed in Stevenson’s novel,
and oh, the secret and deliciously devilish delight when we think of giving
over if even in a small way to the way we’d really like to behave sometimes, doing
what we’d really like to do, saying the things we’d really like to say. Let’s
be honest, even the best among us have spent time and energy fantasizing,
esprit d’escalier, about the things we really wish we had done or said when
we’ve been cut off by a thoughtless driver or bullied by a domineering mother-in-law
or insulted by an obnoxious co-worker or slighted by a hostile Meijer cashier. What
would we say or do were we not bound by our fear of consequence, our desire to
please others, our obedience to the social contract? Why we’d give them a
“piece of our mind”, that’s what. Or
we’d “show them who’s boss.”
Still, we are human and even though we know better, no one
makes the right choice all the time. Every day, we hear the tragic consequences
that result from the victory of our inner Hydes, the dark side of ourselves,
our alter egos. Indeed, I have a friend
who has given hisa name that is a sort of derivative of his own. So, if his name was Sean Duffie, his alter is
Schwan DuFAY. The important thing about the fact that he has named his is that
it indicates an awareness. And as any
member of a twelve step recovery program can tell you, awareness is the first
step to change. It got me thinking about my own alter ego and all the missteps
she has made in her life. I like this
idea of separating her from myself so that I can take a look at her. In
that spirit, she’ll need a name. Scarlet.
No last name. Just Scarlet.
It’s a name that says it all: total disregard for the spilled blood of
others. And I am definitely being hyperbolic and speaking figuratively. She isn’t as bad as all that. But, let’s just
say I’ve got my own history of choices that make me cringe when I replay them
in my head. They are the ghosts that visit in the night bringing insomnia with
them. I mean I haven’t killed anybody, but I have plenty of my own “what was I
thinking?” moments. We all have. Is it
possible for any human to be our best selves all the time? And aren’t these episodes, in a way,
necessary? If learning and growth comes not
from, as one of my former teachers Sr. Phyllis Supanchek once told me, the
mistakes we make, but what we do with them? Doesn’t the entire harmony of the
universe hinge on balance? Light and
dark? Empty and full? Good and evil? Think that over: bad choices as a
necessary evil to maintain equilibrium? Well, then okay. But, I guess then I’m just going to try to be
the person who does the least harm. It
feels good to revel in this awareness.
So, then was is terrifying to contemplate are those times when I have
been Hyde, but I don’t know it until after the damage has been done. Times when I don’t remember drinking the
potion in the first place.
During the time I was studying to be a teacher, all of my
college professors actively sought to raise their students’ anxiety levels
about the importance of volunteer work.
They pretty much had us all convinced that if we didn’t spend hours
manning the phones at the red cross or immersing ourselves into other teachers’
classrooms there was no hope of ever getting a job. We needed things to put on
our resume. And getting a job was
priority number one for me, so I signed up for an opportunity that I felt would
not only help me show myself as a caring and devoted educator but would also, at
the risk of sounding ghoulish, be entertaining.
But, that isn’t exactly the right word: entertaining. I signed up to do some tutoring at the Kent
County Jail. So, it wasn’t that I was going there to be entertained, but rather
to satisfy a natural curiosity about the place. It was as though a tiny Hyde
inside me wanted to witness life on the inside. For whose benefit? I’m not sure. No. I am.
For my own. For my own benefit.
As I pulled into the
parking lot, I stared at the circular building lined with several stories of
evenly spaced miniscule windows. Jail
cells, must be, I thought. Someone
somewhere must have done some research on inmate cooperation and determined
that even a little bit of sunlight makes everything run more smoothly. I
thought briefly of the life inside the cells.
In my mind, I saw a bed, a toilet and a person in a striped suit sitting
inside quietly doing nothing. I walked
in the front doors and was greeted by several uniformed police officers, one of
whom asked me to place my purse on a conveyor belt while the other wove a wand
around my person checking for, I assumed, weapons. Having passed both tests
they allowed me passage through the first set of many locked doors.
To get to the women’s unit, we had to pass by the men’s
first. All that separated me and the
incarcerated was a set of metal bars.
Feeling a little like Clarice Starling, I ignored their ungentlemanly comments—Fanny
would have been appalled-- and kept my gaze fixed on the back of my uniformed
escort. After much scanning of cards to
unlock and open doors, there was also much slamming and locking of doors. After a brief elevator ride, we were finally
at the women’s area where I was to meet the group of women with whom I’d be
working. It was not at all as I had
imagined. There were no striped suits
and there was no quiet. They were seated around a table with sheets of paper
and only the smallest stubs of pencils (can’t give them anything they can turn
into a weapon). I should mention that I
was not alone on this journey. I was
accompanied by a Social Worker whose job it was to spend time every day with
people who had let their inner Hydes prevail for whatever reason. She spent every day trying to striving to
instill in inmates a sense of awareness I’ve mentioned so that they might make
different choices and silence the beast within.
Thankfully, she led the meeting.
But before she got started, I sat in my chair trying to seem unafraid aware
that I was fooling no one. Tying to
assume a posture of “I’ve been here before” and “This is no big deal” when
clearly it was. I listened to the women talking to each other while trying to
pretend that I wasn’t. I am, of course,
omitting the expletives peppered in less for emphasis and just as part of the
normal sentence structure. They bantered
back and forth loudly, laughing sometimes shouting, just as any group of women
might anywhere else, at the workplace, lunch at the mall, at the gym, only the
dialogue had with an edge and the content of their conversations sometimes
included things like hearing dates or lawyer problems or issues with visitation,
who was and was not coming to see whom and how exactly that made them feel and
what they were going to do to them once they got out. It seemed I was invisible as they threw
around the details of their lives for anyone to hear The only real piece of
conversation I remember from that visit so long ago came from a woman who
looked to be about sixty. She was thin
and sat with wide blue eyes, her hands folded into her lap, her brown bob
hanging limply on the sides of her face.
I was not invisible to her because after sizing me up, she leaned in
towards me as if I were her secret ally and said just this, “They said I strangled
him, that I had my hands around his throat.
I don’t remember doing that.” And then she leaned back into her seat and
looked around at the talking women, listening or not, I’m not sure.
Her words have always stayed with me. I mean, I didn’t know whether to believe her
or not. She was in jail, after all. But
if she were lying, her performance was pretty convincing. Maybe she was going
for a temporary insanity defense. But I
think the reason I remember it so clearly is because it might be true. And if it is, what does that mean for the
rest of us? Is it possible to lack awareness
and go on Hyde auto-pilot? Does the Hyde
inside ourselves have the potential to take over? To do something so heinous,
so contrary to our natures? Because if
so, I’d like to permanently rent a room and lock myself inside. How much control does that inner Hyde
have? I mean, I make choices. I don’t always yell at other drivers on the
road. Sometimes, when someone cuts me off, I just brake appropriately, and give
them their space. Other times, my language sounds just like that of the women I
met in the jail that day and I have to apologize to my passengers. So, what the
difference? What is it that makes me act
one way or another? When do I act like
me and when does Scarlet assume control? And what leads a person to the point of putting their hands around someone’s
throat….or slamming into someone else’s car and then getting out and drawing a
gun. What is it that separates those of
us who are “on the outside” walking around drinking Starbucks and buying TVs
from the folks with the stubby pencils behind the bars?
Sometimes, of course, it’s about mental illness. And clearly, in our jails are many people who
are in the wrong place. The
criminalization of the mentally ill is a much debated topic and everyday people
who suffer from addictions and schizophrenia and borderline personality
disorders are imprisoned when what they really need is help, chemical or
otherwise, to heal the monster or at least shove it into a metaphorical closet
for a time.
And I’m really not talking about pure evil either. It exists.
Not just in novels. It existed in
the Victorian era, in all of the eras before and after. It exists now. Just listen to the news. There is no question that a young man who decides
to walk into a school and shoot a bunch of first graders is evil. The same can be said about a man who kills
millions of a particular race in the name of ethnic cleansing. There’s nothing more to say about a woman who
kills her own children so that she might spend her life with a man who would
rather remain childless. Evil. I have a son who, like many other kids in his
generation, has spent hours playing video games. The big “what if” for parents of these kids
always is about the terrible possibility of the disappearance of the boundaries
between the game and He came down the stairs and we were watching the news
coverage of a recent violent tragedy. He
stopped halfway down, looked at the TV and said, “Why are you watching
that? It’s horrible.” I was relieved, and I didn’t worry about him
from that time on. He knew the difference.
He knew evil when he saw it. And,
instinctively he knew that from that kind of evil, we must turn away. We listen to the news and we are like the
maid at the window witnessing Carew’s murder.
We are like Dr. Lanyon whose knowledge of Jekyll’s secret leads to his
own failing health. We are
horrified. We turn the channel or watch
cat videos on Facebook. Like Lanyon, we
don’t want to think about it.
Or do we? We can’t deny that there is an entire money making
machine in our society that pours this stuff into our living rooms every
day. If we don’t want to watch the evil,
if we are turning away, then how do we explain the popularity of shows like Dateline, 20/20 and Snapped, which
showcase real murder in every episode? Why
is there an entire cable channel devoted to nothing but recounting the stories
of people who have crossed the line, let their Hydes out completely and taken
someone else’s life? Is it curiosity? Like my trip to the jail? Is it a preventative? Let me study why and how so that it never
happens to me? Does this watching protect
us from our own Hyde side? If we spend a
little vicarious time on the wild side, an hour in our recliners staring at a
screen, do we somehow experience Aristotle’s catharsis and get it out of our
systems? We say a little prayer of gratitude that we aren’t the ones who
allowed the anger to take over and who are being featured on national
television and then we go back to doing the best we can to tolerate other
drivers on the road, stand patiently in line at the checkout and recover without
incident from the numerous betrayals we might suffer at the hands of
others? Again, awareness comes to
mind. Maybe the next time we tune in we
should ask ourselves: why am I watching this?
Mental illness is tragic and evil terrifying, but more
alarming to those of us who have dodged the bullet of disease and who are at
our cores pretty good people, is the possibility that we could at any time, like the woman at the jail, “Snap.”
Scientists are interested too. One
neuroscientist boils it down to the old “fight or flight” response that is
buried deep within our primitive ancestry.
He explains that the potential for it exists any time you feel trapped
or stopped when you want to go. That situation triggers within you some impulse
that makes you act before you think. Anger, he says, is our first and most
primitive impulse when we sense a threat.
And if we understand that we can go a long way to diffuse our response
system (Dahl). So, good news, the twelve
steppers are right. Developing a keen sense of self-awareness is the first step
to avoiding situations that can become out of control and result in life
changing consequences.
So, following this logic, suppose one day that, while
reading an article on my computer, I became aware of a side bar advertisement
for a product for which I had recently conducted an online search. I furrow my brow and frown at the
screen. My heart rate becomes elevated. How
dare some faceless, maybe even formless entity spy on my shopping habits?
Wait. Stop right there. What is this feeling? It’s anger. So then I
ask myself…why am I angry? Does my
primitive brain perceive a threat?
Indeed it does…..I perceive my own personal fortress to be vulnerable to
foreign invaders , so how does this play out?
My inner Hyde maybe picks the laptop up off the desk, raises it overhead
and, shouting rage filled assertions about the evils of consumerism and the
government, slams the computer to the ground and then jumps up and down on it
and then unsatisfied, finds a blunt instrument and clubs to it death just as Hyde
killed Sir Danvers Carew in the park.
Or, I recognize this anger and I make a different
choice. I go to the site that student,
Lucas Baker, told me about, after patiently explaining the technology that makes this possible (only half of which I really understood): “Ad pop ups something. Com” and I calmly take rational
and productive steps to eliminate the threat, in this case, ridding my computer
of cookies or whatever it is that allows for this kind of transparency. Or I don’t visit the site and I just say to
myself, “Yes, I am a consumer in the 21st century and companies are
going to do whatever they can to get my money.
Ultimately, I still choose whether or not to buy those Reebok tights or
not. “And I go on with my day.
Oh, if only it were that easy. It takes practice. And some of us will struggle more with it
than others. And whether, as Dr. Jekyll or my friend Sean has done, you want to
give that person inside yourself that has fight or flight anger issues a name
and talk to that person directly and aloud as if they were in the room…
“Okay, Mr. Schwan DuFAY, settle down. Why are you angry right now?”
“Scarlet, honey, tell me what you are feeling right now.”
…or cut the drama and just do some internal self-talk, the
idea is as Shakespeare said, “Know thyself.”
Know your triggers, acknowledge your primitive brain, recognize fight or
flight and keep it together, man.
And for those times when you are making conscious choices to
give in to lesser temptations and cross over maybe not to the dark side, but to some shade of gray, I say, reconsider. Love yourself and our world enough to make a
better choice. For what would our world
be like if everyone did the same? Besides becoming a smaller, more deformed
looking population, the only joy would be from self-interest and that can only
go so far to make a person truly happy. There is already too much sorrow, too
much pettiness, too much crime, too much hurt, too much self-will run riot. The
next time you are presented with a moral choice, ask yourself, what would Fanny
do?
The End.
Note to self: What to
do with this? I like it, but I don’t
think it fits.
An interesting feature in Stevenson’s novel are those
smaller sins that Hyde commits, the ones that lack spsecificity, the ones that
Stevenson leaves vague and unnamed.
What could he be doing that is so awful we ask ourselves? Inquiring minds want to know. Stevenson won’t tell. He leaves it up to our imaginations which can
be far darker than we like to admit.
