A sobering rediscovery of an awareness I had relinquished to denial came back to me with jolting clarity when I was in the postsurgery stage. That awareness was that I had come to believe a little bit in my own press clippings. Having been a principal player in motion pictures for a very long time, mine was considered a successful career, and certainly it has provided a good living for my family and me. I’ve received plenty
of recognition, and I’m well thought of throughout a sizable portion of the world. Moreover, I’ve become closely identified with several of the parts I’ve played—uplifting, interesting, positive, good guys, brave and with dignity. You can’t receive (and enjoy) those kudos and that kind of acceptance without some of it going to your head. A little bit, anyway. And if you keep hearing it, somewhere along the way you start accepting it as the truth. I had, in fact, reached that point. I enjoyed believing much of the praise I heard. It brought me good feelings of acceptance. Feelings of worthiness, usefulness. I was thought of as someone with a gift, a skill, a craft. And one that hadn’t been wasted or abused.
Bathed in all that praise, I had lost touch with my own personal measure of myself, a more realistic assessment that incorporated the weaknesses and foibles, the generosity and the darkness, the human vulnerability. There were even times, during bouts of doubt and depression and feelings of inadequacy, that I found myself giving the public image a boost. While manipulating and inflating that image, I would ease my conscience by referring to my actions as a gentle massage necessary for the sake of maintenance.
There are different kinds of strength, you know? My parents weren’t people of great power, commanding huge resources. Much of the time they simply clung to life on an island that could have been reclaimed by the sea at any moment. But they carried on with great dignity, and they accomplished much. There was a kind of strength in their existence that I hadn’t been forced by difficult circumstances to
practice. But now, with cancer and an uncertain future looming, I knew that the moment had found me. I couldn’t
not
try to summon their strength. I knew that if I was going to die as a result of this disease. I had to find the strength to face death with some dignity, some courage, and some acceptance of the inevitable. Some honesty. Especially when I had to say to my wife, “Here are the possibilities.” In preparing her as best I could, I tried to let her know that I was concerned but not panicked, so that she would gain strength from that to carry her through whatever would be the outcome.
WHEN I WAS quite young, with no awareness of the personal demons within me or the different forms and faces those demons could endlessly assume, I developed a belief system that was fraught with danger. I had come to believe that the hard work of good, honest, fair-minded people with a passionate commitment to justice would bring about a world in which a life of dignity for all would be the rule. A world in which opportunities to pursue fulfillment would be limited only by the outer margins of one’s individual ability. I had come to believe that problems of race, ethnicity, color, education, sexual preference, class, and poverty, and the attendant afflictions left in their wake to plague the modern world in their names, would be successfully resolved through the efforts of those same good, honest, fair-minded people. A new progressive force with insight and cohesion was in the making, thought I. The ills of my generation would ultimately be addressed.
Frictions would be tamed, tensions neutralized, and out of the hearts and minds of good men and women would come the way to a better future—one in which we would all lend a hand at weaving the strong cultural threads of our social diversity into a more caring, a more
human
, community.
Bullshit!
At eighteen I was plenty old enough to damn well know better than that. And if it sounds like I’ve rendered a self-assessment far too harsh in light of my age, trust me, I haven’t. I was
wrong
to embrace that crap. Spending my impressionable years operating in the real world on such wishful thinking wasn’t only too costly, it was also too dangerous. I well remember as a young man learning day by day to test my wings in life by stepping farther and farther away from my ignorance. Then one day, at a bold distance from the safety of that ignorance, I finally spotted my demons—first one, then another, then another.
Some people don’t want to know of the presence of personal demons; they pretend not to know even when they
do
know. And there are others whose consciousness merely dances around the edges of their dark-side reality all their lives. Those folks never step close enough to look even one demon in the eye.
But listen, the day one decides to take the reins of one’s own life into one’s own hands, to captain one’s own ship, that’s the day the dance around the edges starts to slow down, bringing that person to a place where gnawing questions will no longer lie still. To a place where one just can’t help wondering why so
often in life an obvious solution to a problem gets twisted and pulled into a knot of frustration, with no regard for logic or reason. To a place where one finds oneself more and more at a loss to explain why logic and reason themselves so often go down in defeat at the hands of energies that are negative, hostile, destructive, and cruel.
I don’t remember exactly when I began to ask myself those questions that “wouldn’t lie still,” but when I did, they led to endless face-to-face encounters between myself and the dark side of my own nature—that part of me that has always been there, saying to my deaf ears, “I’m here, and one day you’ll be ready to take me into account. On that day you’re gonna
have
to take me into account. You aren’t ever going to manage through your life without coming by me.”
Age-old speculation as to whether the dark side is full-blown in some people and almost nonexistent in others or is distributed more widely—some in everyone—rages still from generation to generation. I personally think that there’s some darkness in everyone, though the “some” varies as widely as do personality profiles in the family of man. Darkness can explode in nuclear proportions with disastrous consequences or make itself felt in small, subtle, irritating ways, depending on the day, the time, the hour, the situation, and who’s in the room.
The extent of the dark side isn’t easy to fathom. People who kill aren’t evil twenty-four hours a day, and the dark side doesn’t advertise. The dark side in each of us operates from behind masks of varying complexity, coming to the fore when we elect to use its services. We all have a reservoir of
rage, dissatisfaction, self-loathing, unhappiness, intolerable feelings of inadequacy. But we don’t necessarily express these things. They’re veiled, hidden from ourselves as much as from others. But whether hidden or not, they make us all capable of terrible things. And the evil that we’re capable of enacting doesn’t flourish only in moments of rage or revenge, or in response to some unspeakable offense. Sometimes horrible acts are entertained and allowed under very considered and thought-through circumstances. “Everybody is entitled to a job,” someone might say, “but not
my
job. You try to take
my
job and I’ll kill you!”
Sometimes the violence in the dark side is turned inward. Some people take pills; some jump out the window. But whether violence is turned inward or outward, people can’t isolate components of their rage—it’s an accumulation. We think we’re raging against the darkness, but in fact we’re struggling against a life we can’t control. We opt to struggle for balance rather than fight chaos. “What got into him?” people ask of a well-mannered neighbor who turned ballistic. “He isn’t that kind of guy.”
But
of course
he is! We’re
all
that kind of guy! Do I have the wherewithal to be a violent person? Or course I do. I could do unspeakable things to protect my children. Would that be a choice made at that precise moment? Yes. But where would I go for that intensity? Into what well of murderous impulses would I dip? That reservoir has to be there already, waiting.
For me this awareness was the beginning of a new perception of self, of others, and of the world around me. In light of
my growing understanding, I took aggressive steps to try to find out why my best efforts had so often been defied by problems I would have thought were fixable. I boldly peeked inward—saw nothing I understood—then retreated again to ponder where inside myself I should look for answers to external human problems that defy one’s best efforts. I spent much time looking in the wrong places, but even there I came away with lessons. For example, some things simply
aren’t
going to get better. And some people just refuse to learn; if learning isn’t
good
for them, doesn’t
profit
them, they’re not interested.
So what else should that worldview have encompassed? Having grown up in an idyllic place that I mistakenly believed held the whole story if I could just discern it, my determination to find the answer to that question pulled me into a process that led to discovery.
The first conclusion that struck me was that the pace toward “progress” was slower than it should be. Growing increasingly impatient with that pace, I observed it closely and found out that the problem wasn’t
pace
but
direction
. I concluded that other people and other forces weren’t just going slowly; they were trying to go
another way, other places altogether
. There were parts of me as well—of
every
individual—that were trying to go other places altogether.
I also drew some conclusions about the educability of human beings. I had tended to believe in the essential nobility of man, had seen man as Noble Beast, and had thought that
education
could bring about change. Anything good and necessary that wasn’t happening was missing. I had thought,
because of someone who
didn’t understand yet
. But I came to believe that, while there are in fact some people who haven’t yet been shown, there are far more who are never, ever going to see, regardless of
what
they’re shown, and how often.
I also concluded that what it is we need to see—that Big Answer we all seek—is
even more complex
than it appears to be. More than a value system and its opposite held in degrees by various people. More than the vague but persistent sense that somewhere in ourselves lie hidden such answers as would be appropriate to questions we’re not yet fearless enough to ask. Questions like, for instance, How much truth is there in the lingering suspicion that Nature is fooling with us? Are we principal players with pivotal roles in her scenario (as we fervently hope) or merely inconsequential afterthoughts with not the slightest impact on her agenda (as we often fear)?
Why do we spend most or all of our lives searching for balance between the bewildering variety of opposites designed in Nature’s nature? Why do we struggle so hard to find a comfort zone between up and down, in and out, here and there, this and that, him and her, us and them, high and low? Ever present is this
duality
, and ever present is our need to articulate ourselves betwixt the various poles.
I concluded, finally, that in the juxtaposition of energies, Nature’s intent was major: the idea of the Other. The definition of self by its opposite: “I am not that.” I further concluded that if such duality in so many aspects of her being was necessary to Nature’s sense of herself, her sustenance, her continuance, her
survival, then duality must be a fundamental circumstance in her overall design. It must represent a basic, basic truth:
that collision is essential, that opposites create an energy, and that maybe nature has no preference for either of the opposites
. (What arrogance we possess, then, to think that there’s a preference in favor of
our
side!)
Instead, Nature waits for us to discover that her focus is on the energy that ensues from the coming together of yin and yang, and the coming together of high and low, and the coming together of this and that, and the coming together of us and them. All that blood on
Wild Kingdom
—we accept it in the animal world. In
our
world we say, “It’s dog eat dog,” and it sounds like a bad thing; but we talk about the “food chain” on the Serengeti Plain and give it civilized acceptability with polished terms like
zoology
.
During a bull session one evening, wrestling with this issue over after-dinner coffee, my buddy Charley Blackwell said to me, “You know, we’re not talking just about a process
in
nature, we’re talking about a process that might be Nature itself.” I took this to be a warning for us not to take ourselves too seriously. We were, after all, just two guys with little more than a fair amount of curiosity trying to stretch our minds by chewing on an issue light-years bigger than our bite, he seemed to be saying. I signaled my accord with that cautionary sentiment, and also its use as a ground rule to cover the deeper discussion that was likely to come.
At that point he reached into his knapsack and hauled out his trusted little tape recorder, positioned it on the table, and
said, “Okay, let’s see where this Nature’s-use-of-opposites thing leads.”
“You first,” said I.
“Okay,” said he.
“Let’s look at it in the same light as if it were the New Testament/Frank Capra/USA/Judeo-Christian dream that sustained us growing up and for a great deal of our adult lives. Then we found out that the dream
was
a dream, that it was inaccurate and incomplete. But we also discovered that that dream,
and the inaccuracy of it
, had kept us alive and allowed us to survive.
All
of us believed in John Wayne. Later on we said, ‘Well, he’s a conservative.’ But the essential ‘winning through,’ and ‘By God, we’ll get there,’ and ‘Over the hill, huh?’ and ‘Work hard and you’ll get there,’ and ‘Be true and loyal,’ and all those other things—
that’s
what kept us going. Now, knowing that—that (a) the dream kept us going and (b) it isn’t true—what do we tell the children? Do we tell them to keep the Capra? Let them find out the truth for themselves? Or do we tell them—?”