Deja vu

"But there was also a scarecrow self -- an unacknowledged, angry, aggrieved shadow, who lived in a scarecrow body. It was plotting from the beginning to sabotage the other self. That took a long time. But, meanwhile, she was sending messages in a bottle."

Strange Piece of Paradise
Terri Jentz

In 1998 I vividly recalled a dream I had as a child. In the dream, I saw a large, tall man with a shaved head wearing sunglasses. He wore a white button-up shirt tucked neatly into black work pants, which were partially obscured by a utility apron of some kind. His sleeves were rolled up casually though neatly. Around his neck hung a loose black tie, implying a concern for appearance that hesitated before intruding on his comfort.

This apparition presented itself to me in the form of a reflected image on the window of a green station-wagon. A grinning, wily man talked to him from the driver's seat. Cynicism oozed between these two conspirators, and the topic of their conversation filled me with a vague unease, though it wasn't clear to me what they were talking about.

Although well proportioned, the reflection made the man's shoulders appear enormous, and his arms seemed as pillars. The contrast of shadow on his face revealed the extreme desert heat of day that played across his face and body. The heat looked as bad as anything hell itself had to offer, and sweat beaded on the man's forehead. His work costume was adorned with various soot stains from some day-labor task or another.

But there were more invisible qualities to this character than appearances suggested. Darkness emanated from him like an obscuring veil. It seemed to me that evil clung to him. Smoke rose from his breath, his shoulders, his hands, and his hair. What's more, he was lithe, charming, and very smart; he could even be manipulative if he wanted to be, yet he had no motive as such. Malevolence sat unrestrained in his mind, like a naked body reclining in a bare, concrete room. His existence struck me as perverse, not that I could vocalize such an opinion, but his entire being seemed to taunt passers-by.

He was a walking riddle, every bit as dangerous as a devil. He would have been just as provocative too, but for his human appearance, and that obscuring aura. He thrived in the indifference of surrounding human beings. He looked like a bully in that ugly-yet-handsome sort of way. He knew his inner hideousness possessed a sort of power, but he refrained from using it. Why? Not out of kindness or a respect for life. He practiced a lazy self-deprivation for fun, perhaps as an escape, or maybe as preparation for a task as yet unknown. In simple terms, he looked very mean. I remember being quite terrified of that man as a child.

I had completely forgotten him until a '98 summer when, as a teenager, I was taking a cigarette break from my part time job as a bag-boy at a grocery store. A coworker had pulled up alongside me in his car that sunny afternoon. We shared a smile and some jokes. I caught my reflection, and felt a surge of adrenaline as my childhood self reeled in horror. The image staring back at me called to mind a perfect deja vu. The man I feared in that dream was me. I had dreamt that exact moment over a decade prior. All my fears were falsely perceived.

It was around that time that I had begun to unwrap, so to speak, a symbolic box whose contents revealed how I had been slowly developing into everything I had ever feared. I listened to music which was very scary to my childhood self. I dissociated with the religious ideas I had been taught, which of course damned my childhood self to hell. I was also angry at my near-sightedness -- I had actually wanted to be an air force pilot as a child. I had virtually no friends, and I didn't like most of my peers. As I've mentioned, suicidal urge plagued me and made me very cynical and angry at life, which was probably the scariest part of all. Many problems, and my inability to cope with them, had led to poor scholastic performance, and I didn't have the means to pursue my musical ambitions scholastically. Had I been seeking my fears or did they set out to find me? I still haven't really found the answer to that question.

This process of embodying fear has continued to unravel into my adulthood -- I never knew I would get kicked out of the military. I never knew I'd become a chronic smoker, drinker and occasional drug user. I never knew I'd spend my adulthood single or childless. I never knew I'd have extreme difficulty just making enough money to sustain myself from month to month. I didn't know companies could prey on customers. I never suspected my emotions could become so deeply drenched in sorrow and despair. I never knew I could lose my mind. I never thought I could terrorize anyone, or ever come to light a house on fire, yet here I am. The worst person in my life is me.

As I've become more frightening and unfamiliar to my childhood self, I understand more clearly just how limited my childhood, adolescent, and early adult worldviews were. But for whose benefit is my consciousness expanding? My own? What tasks await me, that I shall be glad to have acquired use of these strange experiences? Additionally, I am left with the unsettling knowledge that most of the world has the same expectations of me that my childhood self did. Most surprisingly, to myself; I am still me, nothing has changed, and I like myself more than I ever have. I have never felt more human or understandable than I do today. Have others embodied their fears to learn that there is nothing to be afraid of?

This process of familiarizing with the "scary"-- which I don't quite have a name for -- resembles my deja vus; of familiarization with the unfamiliar dreams of my subconscious. By the time I had my aforementioned deja vu, they were already a familiar phenomenon. The re-lived dreams, which have called on my life frequently and to strange effect, have probably had a greater hand in shaping my perception of time as non-linear, cause and effect as illusory, and free will as farcical, than any other idea, theory or philosophy. It has been my sternest teacher, and could be the chief cause of my tendency for devil's advocacy.

As I understand it, deja vu refers to the sensation that a scene has been seen before, or that a phrase has been uttered twice in the same way, or as a tick of some kind of mental 'feedback-loop'. When I experience deja vu, I recall several things in rapid succession. First, that I have dreamt of the moment. Immediately after, I remember my emotional state while dreaming, which supplies a clue as to the time frame of the dream itself. Next, I begin to remember sensory details of the bed I was sleeping in, further narrowing the time frame. (Night lives are marked by a succession of textures, comfort levels, and bed sizes.) Memories from the day's events soon become clearer, which, in the past, have ranged from a kindergarten school day to a party's alcohol binge or a hotel night's stay on a family vacation. Afterwords, I begin to remember my thoughts as they came when I first viewed the dream. They are surprisingly congruent.

Initially I am confused by the total unfamiliarity of the scene out of its proper context. Sometimes I recognize the characters in the dream, but they are all "wrong." Haircuts are different, or styles of dress are completely out of character. Sometimes there is 'in-dream-knowledge' that a person possesses a certain job, perhaps, or has a significant other I've never met or some other piece of information that doesn't exist in my present life. The setting is so patently unlikely that I cannot fathom how life could bring such an incongruent event. Could you imagine a child's interpretation of a dream of conversing with a prisoner? Would you recognize yourself today, twenty years back? Often, the least recognizable character is me.

My final thought as I remember the dream-state is generally the same: "This could never happen," I think, or, "it doesn't make any sense," or even, "how could this happen?" The memory lingers as I simultaneously exist in both moments; the dream and the reality are one, transcending time. The universe -- I must admit it's hard for me not to anthropomorphize the universe in these odd situations -- remembers it too. In unfolding my life before me, it has proven me not just wrong, but completely powerless to render judgment as to the probability or improbability of anything. "Absolute uncertainty," the Universe mutters in its silent, wordless way (which is to say, that's how I used to perceive it), "everything is complete and utter uncertainty." I have been proven wrong so many times, so often, about so many things, deja vu or not, that it actually causes me discomfort to even hear people speak in certain terms.

Like the keyhole nebula, this uncertainty seems to resemble a cosmic middle finger. It's downright frustrating. I suppose, from a certain point of view, the human struggle is somewhat contrary to the natural order of things in the chaotic sense, which could, from a theistic perspective, form a hypothesis for what the knowledge of good and evil might propose to stand for. When someone decides that certainty is good, he is at odds with Chaos, who wields the power to spite in ways one would never have thought possible. Evolution also pits man against uncertainty. Our brains are hardwired for pattern recognition in the hopes that we can make the slightest sense of it all. And we do, in our mentally-rendered, symbol-ridden way.

In the past, my deja vu has put me on somewhat antagonistic terms with the universe, with existence, my personal demons, and with god. This antagonism has had more to do with my path towards atheism than anything else, which, if anything, is an indication of how ridiculously stubborn I can prove to be. It wasn't logic that led me away from religion at first. Rather embarrassingly, it was the suspicion that god was deliberately screwing with me.

Paranoid suspicions like these are probably the roots of all religion; they certainly have a role in forming the personal collection of superstitions which describe my reaction to the elusive Belfast, whom I shall describe soon. I should probably clarify at the onset that I've never seen Belfast, heard him, felt him, or perceived him in any direct way, shape or form. I've never fully explored his emergence in my psyche, either. But lately I've been realizing something. Just as my dreams have transitioned to reality and my fears have transitioned to self, I'm beginning to see that, strictly speaking, Belfast was me, too.

Author's note: Sorry for the lateness, the sparseness, etc. Things have been crazy lately. This would make a great introduction to the entry I wanted to write, but it's all I could eke out. That's prison for you! Plenty of downtime and not much to show for it. See you next time?

elitefitrea.com

Dear Readers:

The elitefitrea.com website is now up. It is a placeholder for the more complete website that Bryan is designing in the prison computer lab, but contains his sketch of the elite|fitrea logo, using the font he created, and provides a link to download his two completed musical works - "Rand" and "July". He finished those the year before he went in (July 31, 2009).

As always, please send your comments!

Continuation

"Earlier in our televised conversation, Jill (Mytton, therapist) had described this kind of religious upbringing [of belief in hell] as a form of mental abuse, and I returned to the point, as follows: 'you use the words religious abuse. If you were to compare the abuse of bringing up a child really to believe in hell...how do you think that would compare in trauma terms with sexual abuse?' She replied: 'That's a very difficult question...I think there are a lot of similarities, actually, because it is about abuse of trust: it is about denying the child the right to feel free and open and able to relate to the world in the normal way...it is a form of denigration; it's a form of denial of the true self in both cases.'"

The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins

Having a rudimentary plan in mind; and with work in the evenings to distract me from myself somewhat--as well as earn me an income for my musical hobby--I had acquired the sense of direction necessary to help me overcome many of my symptoms and pull a 3.9 GPA my senior year. This balanced my overall GPA at an even 2.0, which, my father later admitted, was higher than what he had achieved in 1969. My father had always exhibited trepidation in telling me about his life, but I have pieced much of his story together from the various snips and fragments he told me through the years. It shares some similarities with my own.
Although he was sane and sound, my father's life was not without mental hardship, nor free from an influence of madness. His mother, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia around the time he was 10 or 11. She was committed to a mental hospital and remained there for most of my father's teen years. In her absence, my father and his two sisters accustomed to a quiet, detached lifestyle with an emotionally distant father--my paternal grandfather, whom I met briefly as an infant before he passed away.
Like mine, my father's childhood was relatively sheltered, but in a different way. Where my childhood was a cocoon of literal-interpretation style Christianity, reinforced by the culture and language barrier that existed between me and the German children I went to school with, my father's, on the other hand, was a Catholic upbringing, with attendance in Catholic school and none of said language barriers. I also lived in different kinds of communities from my father; he was more of a city kid, I think, where I was more of a small-town, rural sort. (Google-map Oftersheim, Germany, for a picture of my early life, and Dachtel, Germany, for a later snapshot, where you'll see my 'backyard'--a huge expanse of valley and forest at the Western edge of town.) Differences aside, my father was able to relate to me his own feelings of isolation and alienation--and culture shock--when he was suddenly thrust into public High School after his mother was hospitalized.
Through these helpful conversations, I learned at a fairly early age that I had a "crazy" grandmother. Curiosity about her condition led me to read up on it at some point, although I cannot remember precisely the age I was when I discovered that one of the risk factors for developing schizophrenia was having a relative with the disorder. Sources are usually quick to point out that the illness does not seem to be inherited, per se, but that it does tend to run in families. This curious fact confused me, as it does researchers. Could it be some sort of memetic 'virus,' brought on by the mental effects of long-term family habits, even seemingly innocuous ones?
At the time, however, what compelled me most about her illness was that it proposed the possibility that my sadness could somehow be related to her, if not directly then indirectly in the sense that it could be another kind of mental illness. I had never opened my mind to the possibility that such things could happen in my life, my family, my world. I doubted the validity of my own introspection, so I tried to think little of it, but I began to watch my behavior, and gauge it against what I learned to be certain warning signs-- a simple example being hallucinations, for instance. I told myself that I would know not to 'freak out' (whatever that might entail) since I would have had the foresight to know that they were within a realm of possibility. I watched for more subtle clues in myself as well.
This is not to say that I occupied my time with retro-introspect only; that wasn't all I did. I tried some of the teenager stuff--I tried alcohol, tried weed, tried smoking, tried breaking out of my Christian box when it came to girls--etc. I maintained the things I liked and dropped the things I didn't, and I succeeded in breaking out of my shell, at least somewhat, by age 17--although I wasn't as independent as I would have liked. But even that was changing--the more I worked the more freedoms I seemed to earn from my parents, whose behavior changed from what I thought of as relative strictness to mute indifference. Their focus had shifted more to my sister, and of course to my father's ever-progressing illness.
As my enlistment date neared, I began to have a feeling in the back of my mind which told me that I shouldn't go. I think that when people speak of gut feelings, they probably have something like what I felt in mind. It was a palpable disquiet in my senses. I was pretty nervous. When I talked to my father about my doubts, he intoned the importance of the contract I had signed, and the importance of following through with contractual obligations. I accepted that at face value, and I must admit that I felt a bit trapped by it as well. Eventually, I became so sorry for not listening to that feeling, that it could have helped 'open the door', so to speak, for the symptoms I heeded in 2008--but obviously this is mere conjecture.
On November 28th I stepped off an airplane in San Diego, got on a bus, and was soon acquainted with those yellow footprints all Marines know and talk about. The year was 2000. Boot camp was pretty awful, I'll admit. It is interesting to note the similarities between prison and the military--boot camp in particular. Recruits are kept in such a suppressed state, that when the drill instructors call cadence (this refers to shouting the words, "left" and "right" over and over), they are almost lulled by the melodic style Marine Corps drill instructors have exclusively adopted. Arabic calligraphy comes to mind when I think of the 'music' they sing--when art was banned under Islamic law, calligraphers learned how to draw images using Kor'anic verses. Similarly, Marine Corps drill instructors display their pride and instinct for paternal affection through cadence-singing. I merely mention it to demonstrate how restricted things are there.
In boot camp, knowledge of time is suppressed, talking is banned, and efforts by recruits to keep track of dates are suppressed and sometimes punished. It is strange to see (and feel) the psychological effects that take place in a person in a place like that. It isn't a stretch for me to imagine how North Koreans can become, well, the way they are, in defense of their leader. It's an existence beneath the dignity of the human mind, for sure, and is only justifiable, if it can justifiable at all, when it is temporary.
Tension is also high in boot camp; I'm not sure what sort of pressure drill instructors are under to perform, but one of ours was moved to another platoon because he couldn't restrain himself from physically assaulting one of the recruits (I'm unclear on whether it was an actual assault or something more like a "shaking"). I digress, however. There is plenty of literature on boot camps for the reader--I learned everything I was supposed to and have largely forgotten it by now. What helped me summon the energy and drive to complete it at all, if you're curious, was my desire to learn the language I had chose --Japanese-- and move on with my life as quickly as possible. I was very excited; even proud at times.
When I graduated from infantry training, four or five months later, I received my orders, and my first shock of disillusion. I had been assigned Arabic as a training language. I don't know how to properly convey the weight of this shock, but I was able to put if off because some official or another told me--and the other linguists who graduated with me--that we could expect for it to be changed upon our arrival at the language school; that Arabic was just a 'placeholder' text of sorts. I was hardly consoled, and my suspicion was raised.
At the language school, a week or so later, my suspicion was realized. I learned that I was indeed slated for Arabic. As an added surprise, the Marine Corps did not teach Japanese to its enlisted members at all--no small oversight on the part of my recruitment team. Either they didn't know this or didn't care. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I was at a complete loss, and I wanted out of the Marine Corps immediately. To me, that was a simple, straightforward concept. Those in positions of authority over me had a different opinion on the matter.
It would take three years before I could accept that I would have to break the law to gain my independence. I had a 5 year enlistment contract with a 3 year inactive reserve period, and the Iraq war was in full effect by the time I smoked pot to get out. I did not want to lie to get discharged. Nor did I want to feign injury or deliberately maim myself--although I seriously considered drastic measures, such as cutting off my toes; or less harmful ones, such as hiring a gay prostitute and leaving pictures prolifically around the base. But those solutions were too comical for me. I wanted the right thing to happen, for the right reasons. I could not fight in a war for a country that had pulled the rug out from under me; and certainly not for one as enigmatic as the Iraq/Afghanistan conundrum that remains in front of us today.
Under the conditions I faced during those three years, my first delusions began to arise. They were mild. So mild, I'm not sure if they were delusions, thought experiments, or common mental investigations. My depression, on the other hand, grew to unmanageable proportions--I fell into deep, dark despair, and pulled myself through a constant mud of suicidal urge. Still, I didn't think to do anything about it. I don't know why. Perhaps I thought it was a natural reaction to my situation. My depression was such an incrementally increasing thing that I scarcely noticed I was getting worse, and all the reasons I had found to quiet my sadness melted away daily. I began to self-destruct more, inch by inch. It was a way of assuaging the death drive. I experienced cynicism and anger I had never known before.
My unique situation--and outlook--drew a number of strange and wonderful characters to me as well. I think you would be surprised, reader, at some of the bizarre scenes I've played roles in. There is (or was) a strange, emergent sort of culture in the military, consisting primarily of people like myself, who really shouldn't be depended upon for military successes. I would argue, if I could, for enlisted members to gain the right to de-enlist whenever they want. If you think that would have dire consequences in war and defeat the purpose of a military, well, I'd say that's a good thing, especially in these modern examples of warfare.
With situations as they were in the wake of 9/11, one of the more horrifying days of my life, I became a Pacifist. It was a slow and grisly process. To this day I marvel at the amount of pain and suffering I had to go through to become so disenfranchised with war, greed, corruption, religious fanaticism, and intolerance. The irony and duplicity of a Pacifist coming to set a house on fire later in life is not lost on me, either. In some ways I believe I discovered my humanity with that crime, in the sense that most people have double standards and are hypocritical to some extent or another. I still maintain that I am a Pacifist, and I still abhor violence.
The tipping point in my decision to use drugs to get out of the military came when my engagement fell through (despite my troubles, I'm capable of loving people, and am pretty good at it.) I suppose I have my ex-fiancee to thank for giving me the 'freedom' to get out of the military when she left me. I had been staying for her sake because she wanted to live with me and go to college in Hawaii, where I ended up being stationed. She abruptly changed her mind at the last minute, opting instead to chase B-rate rock stars around the Midwest. She didn't agree with my choice to leave the military. Her opinion was that war 'would be good for me.' I find this to be a relatively common truism in the US.
After the breakup, I had also deteriorated emotionally; to the point of slipping back into the external-decision-engine of my childhood--this time using coins. I became obsessed with change, probability, and tracked inconsistencies in coin flip probabilities; thousands of them, which I tallied either mentally or on sheets of paper. I believed that I saw something greater to it all, although at that point I had no conceived overarching theory. My mind festered over time and free will, constantly. If science could prove that free will was illusory, what was thought? What was the difference between an internal decision and an external one? What made a coin flip come out one way or another, if all actions were determined by actions that had already been determined in the past (and somehow at the same time)? How was the future any different from the past, practically speaking? What could cause any of my so-called life choices to bring me such misery as I experienced? I pondered at a kind of inanimate-deism. I wondered if that was what religions had always been trying, unsuccessfully, to refer to.
Once again, music rescued and pulled me up eventually. as well as the excitement of getting out of the military, but I was different this time. Something had changed about me. I had gone somewhere; learned something, and brought that knowledge back with me, tacitly. I cant think of a good way to share it, but I'm trying to as I tell my story. The depression was there as always, but not there was this other, black, formless, disembodied "think" that wasn't there before. For whatever reason, I came to name it Belfast, though I spoke of it--of him, really--to no one.