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, I think, 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. Not proud of that, but it's the truth.
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 perfomance was pretty convincing. Maybe she was going
for a temporary insanity defense. But I
think the reason I remember it so clearly is because of this idea….is it possible
to be so out of control, to lack any awareness and do something so
heinous?
(STILL REFINING THE REST AT THIS POINT)
Because if so, that’s
terrifying. How much control does that
inner Hyde have? Yes, sometimes while
I’m driving and the other drivers around me aren’t meeting my expectattions, I
just shut up and give them their space…..other times, my language sounds
just like that of the women I met in the
hjail that day and I have to apologize to my passengers. But sometimes its just
beyond the edge of my control…..the stuff I do that I regret that Im sorry for
later…where I ask myself What was I thinking?
But not to the point of putting my hands around someone’s throat….or
slamming into someone else’s car and then getting out and drawing a gun. But that stuff, unfortunately does happen. And the most mystifying question is how? How does it get to that point? Is it a lifetime of giving in to the alter
ego that makes the degree of bad behavior increase or dcan a person, as a
popular tv show claims in its title, just “Snap.?”And what preseves some of us
from taking it to that next level? What
is it that separates those of us who are outside walking around drinking
starbucks and buying tvs from the folks with the stubby penscils behind the the
bars?
I’m not talking here though about the mentally ill. And clearly, our jails are filled with people
who are in the wrong place. The
criminalization of the mentally ill is a much debated topic and everyday people
who suff e r form schizophrenia and borderline persaonality 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 a ll of
the eras before and after it exists now.
Just listen to the news. I think
there is nothing more to explore when a young man decides to walk into a school
and shoot a bunch of first graders.
There’s no depth of exploration to be had 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 shse might spend her life with a man who would
rather remain childless. That’s just
pure evil. Likewises the appeal of
Jekyll and Hyde does not lie in the specific atrocitis that Hyde commits,. Rather we are like the maid at the window
witnessing Carew’s murder. We alike 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. Well, most of the
time. 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, why re shows like Dateline, 20/20 and Snapped so popular? Why is there an fascination with murder and
death? Why do we have 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? And what does it say about us that
we are willing to spend time ? People
love a good story. And there seems to be
no shortage of material .They want the same thing I’m asking here. They want to know why. They want to know what happened. How it got to that place. Or does this
vicarious watching protect us from our own Hyde side? WE spend a little vicarious time on the wild
side , an hour in our recliners staring
at a screen Somehow we get it our of our systems, say a little prayer that we
aren’t the ones who allowed the anger to take over and then we go back to doing
the best we can to tolerate other drivers on the road, stand patiently n line
at the check out and recover from the numerous betrayals we might suffer at the
hands of others. The minute I knew I didn’t have to worry about my son playing
video games. 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.” This was a kid who spent
hours in his room He knew the
difference. He knew evil when he saw
it. And from that kind of evil, we must
turn away.
The appeal for most of us is those other smaller sins that
Hyde commits that really intrigue us, the ones that Stevenson leaves vague and
unnamed that seem most lurid in a way that isn’t as harmful to others of their
lack of specificity. 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
because of our our hyde like urges are far darker than we like to admit. The phenomenon I am more interested in is
the everyday folks. Science has tried to
explain it. One neuroscientist boils it
down to the old “fight or flight” response that is buried deep within our
primitive ancestry. It’s the last time
you felt trapped or stopped when you wanted to go and that 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)
And part of the means to understand this is to also
understand the term “threat” and how we perceive it. For example, while researching this topic, I
visited several online articles that discuss this same idea. While reading I became aware of a side bar
advertisement for a product that I have recently shopped for. I suddenly became angry. So then I ask myself…why am I angry? Does my primitive brain perceive a threat? Indeed it does…..the fortress feels
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, “Ad pop ups something. Com” and I take rational
steps necessary to rid my computer of cookies or whatever it is that allows for
this kind of transparency. Or I 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. But like so many other things in life….awareness
is the first step. And whether, as Dr. Jekyll or my friend Sean has done, you
want to name that person inside yourself that has fight or flight anger issues
and talk to that person directly as if they were in the room…
“Okay, Schwan, settle down.
Why are you angry right now?”
or you want to own
that part of you that is ready to fight to the death and just do some internal
self talk, the idea is as Shakespeare said, “Know thyself.” Know your triggers, acknowledge your
primitive brain, do some self talk and keep it together, man
And that’s fine. I think the more interesting idea is about
when we are unaware that we are Hyde.
Until later when regret etc
great delight when we think
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