There’s a scene in Fight Club where Tyler Durden, who “also worked sometimes as a banquet waiter at the luxurious Pressman Hotel”, and his crew are masquerading as waiters at a black-tie function. I say ‘masquerading’ because their appearance there is patently ridiculous, but it is an interesting detail nonetheless that the idea of the presence of such a disreputable group of people must have at some point been signed off by management. And yet there they are.
Their purpose is to capture and threaten one of the guests, a keynote speaker, and remind him of the fact that the people he takes for granted every day—the disposable all-dancing, all-singing crap of the world—are actually more dangerous than he could possibly imagine. Do not fuck with us, is Tyler’s message. After which, they simply depart, presumably abandoning the very throw-away job that had allowed them access in the first place.
I was reflecting on Fight Club recently, while thinking about the kind of philosophy of life which I developed early in my adulthood; one which was significantly influenced, I think, by this particular film. It was a time in my life when I realised, during a cinema studies class at University, that I was the only person who burst out laughing in Pulp Fiction when Vincent Vega accidentally shot Marvin in the face. My style of humour and perception of the world seemed somewhat different to most others.
This personal philosophy extends, in particular, to observations of power relations between people generally, the actual “value” of material wealth, and the seemingly distorted correlation between tasks society deems worth significantly remunerating (because they further encode existing frameworks of hierarchical influence) versus those it does not. Tyler’s complete dictation to his victim goes:
The people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep.
Of course, in essence this is a revenge-fantasy of the have-nots, and as a young person largely free of influence or wealth, it absolutely appealed to my envious sensibilities to consider the ways in which the high and mighty mighty be brought down a peg or two. It was not at all difficult to bring that kind of attitude into my life generally; there are always a plethora of excessively entitled people whose own disdain (and, by direct correlation, neglect of those they consider beneath them) is easy enough to manipulate.
Why the long faces? The class action is about the urine content of the soup, not the bread rolls. Image: Twentieth Century Fox
Not long after the film was released, I was informed by a good friend of mine that his image of me as a waiter (my employment back then was almost exclusively in hospitality) aligned with this very scene. As the narrator is discussing Tyler’s status as “the guerrilla terrorist of the food service industry”, Durden, wearing an ill-fitting suit and a pair of headphones, is nonchalantly tossing bread rolls toward the bread plates of the guests in an act of counter-disdain. He has no respect for the provision of service, since he has no respect for the people he serves.
At the time, I was insulted by the suggestion that I was the same as this; I maintained a personal pride in my work which was consciously untethered from the approval of whatever managerial omniscience (whose values almost universally differed from my own) happened to oversee my work. More to the point, I felt as though I did do a very good job. Given the frequency with which I was tipped by the patrons whom I served, I felt as though my efforts were rewarded in a way which superseded the assumptions of my so-called superiors.
What I didn’t immediately realise about the comparison with Tyler Durden, however, was that my friend was referring figuratively to my attitude toward employment in general, rather than my literal behaviour as a waiter.
And that I could not argue with. There is a scene in which the narrator of Fight Club finds a book in which various parts of the body are discussed in the first person—I am Jack’s medulla oblongata, for example—which becomes an effective bit throughout the rest of the film as the narrator begins to extend the metaphor to emotions rather than just organs, or to mix the two. Example:
I am Jack’s inflamed sense of rejection.
Chuck Palahniuk, author of the novel Fight Club, upon which David Fincher’s film is based, recently noted in an interview with the Daily Beast that he was originally inspired by actual pieces of a similar nature in Reader’s Digest, in which “Joe” was the owner of the aforementioned organs. When the film was made, Twentieth Century Fox was required to change Joe to “Jack” to avoid copyright infringement. You might, then, join me in considering the colossal hypocrisy of that same corporation then imposing its own copyright demands on that same concept when Palahniuk composed his comic series Fight Club 2, which literally deals with the characters he himself created for the book which was the foundation of the film, etcetera.
Hence, “Sebastian” is now the new “Jack”, who was the new “Joe”. Nothing need be sacred when it can be brutally enforced by legal strictures instead.
Anyway, whatever sense of insult I felt about a comparison with Tyler Durden didn’t last long. If anything, it opened my eyes to my own inherent resistance to authority. Despite the effort I’ve gone to across my life to gain professional psychological insight (most of it extraordinarily beneficial), the origin of this virulent strain of anti-authoritarianism largely escapes me. My patient and protective parents, for example, are certainly not the reason and until I was an adult under my own autonomy I was a diligent and dutiful student. I had no desire whatsoever to resist the status quo until I entered the world purportedly as an equal.
Perhaps that, then, is the insight: while I was defined as subservient (as ‘student’ or ‘child’) I accepted my place, but once unleashed and able to express myself with actual autonomy, the mechanism of my superego wasn’t quite so pleased about the lowly position I was then assumed to occupy.
I am Jack’s raging bile duct.
The first and most obvious obstacle to progress was—and still is—money. I’ve always maintained what I like to call a zero-sum game, whereby the primary discipline of my life is reducing any and all material needs to the bare minimum, the corollary of which is that only the absolute minimum labour is required to maintain it. That’s the zero-sum game.
Thanks largely to various privileges, including a middle-class upbringing in which my sister and I were not lavished with material goods (we were adequately served and needed for nothing but were rarely indulged), a university education, various practical skills and a not inconsiderable intellect, I’ve never really worried about having a job. Certainly amongst the lowest tiers (where my employment has traditionally been) there are always more shitty jobs to get somewhere else. It’s almost as though the treatment of staff is so universally poor that most people in those industries simply float from one bad situation to another.
Having no inherent desperation to maintain any particular job (thanks not just to my skill set but also to limited responsibilities; I own no dwellings nor have any dependents), I enjoy a distinct advantage in advancing my personal principles: by extension, this lack of need reduces the level of power an employer might hold over me. If I don’t need a specific job, there is no power within their legal purview which might actually threaten me.
Undoubtedly one of the messages of Fight Club itself is a similar rejection of many of the assumptions we are asked to make about our reflexively consumptive culture and the so-called “need” for money which drives it. The medulla oblongata, not coincidentally, operates the automated functions of the body. At the point in which the narrator mentions it he is only just becoming aware of his own similarly automated processes and assumptions in regard to the way his culture has directed him to behave. Durden says, more directly, “the things you own end up owning you.” That line absolutely resonates with me. Later in the film, Durden goes further in expressing a particular kind of philosophy about the deceptive nature of identity in a consumptive society:
You are not your job. You are not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
Consider “you” and “we” in this statement. As the guru delivering the insight, he directs it at the listener, but includes himself in the clutches of its conclusion; we are all just automated peons, no matter our place within the hierarchy or our ability to perceive the world insightfully. It’s absolutely an idea worth pondering. The disassociation with personal values which capitalism subsumes beneath its obsession with the value of individualism is a concept not only mocked, but ruthlessly undermined, by the film. “Individualism” here, in the context of capitalist ideology, is only permitted to be expressed via the brands we wear or the material goods we possess. This merely allows us to be physically differentiated from others rather than actually being self-reliant, morally or ethically robust—given free rein to live the ‘good life’ as Aristotle might say—as other definitions of a healthy individual might suggest. In essence, the lacking component is self-determination and both the distance and opportunity for such an individual to legitimately flourish.
Like any robust exegesis, it takes its arguments to theoretical extremes, dancing around the boundaries of ultra-conformity as a means of distinguishing a position aside and apart from the equally ridiculous cult of materialistic individualism. This is evident particularly in regard to the manner in which such “individualism” remains hypocritically shackled to conformity, if not uniformity.
Foremost among the film’s specific opposition to bourgeois “individualism” is, of course, fascism. Particularly obvious given that religiosity, the other great suppressor of intellectual liberty, plays almost no active part in the narrative. Not least amongst the bitter pills which Fight Club wants us to swallow is the ease with which simple minds can be convinced by simple messages, no matter how grievously they act against the interest of the individuals dedicated to them. This is one of fascism’s legitimate strengths, and is most cleanly expressed in the film by the identity-submerging chant of “his name is Robert Paulson”. Yet it seems clear to me that, despite this flirtation, the denouement clearly expresses a firm rejection of fascist tendencies as well (an aspect some contemporary viewers seemed unwilling to acknowledge).
At one point, Tyler burns the narrator with an acidic chemical, and refuses to administer the neutralising agent until he has learned the lesson:
It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.
This particular line I do find somewhat pyrrhic and perhaps even perceptually vacant, particularly because it makes an assumption that the viewer has ever had “everything” to begin with. Many people never get that opportunity, and it seemingly ignores the exploitative nature of capitalism, which doesn’t only damage people by reforging them as mindless consumers but also as engines of labour for the Bourgeoisie. It also ignores the glaring need for some material wealth (even if that’s not in the form of money) in order to merely survive.
This particular phrase also ties in to a subtext of the film which explores the nature of abandoning materialism through a mechanism of extreme physical sensation, including such self-flagellation as these chemical burns, or the fight clubs of the title. Perhaps it’s merely an analogy for ‘play more sport’, and it certainly makes the film more dramatic, but it is in bed with the overtly fascist aspects of the narrative. The ones which might manifest, in a mind less used to nuance, as a violent and hyper-masculine “solution” to the world’s ills: just punch your problem in the face (even if that problem is your own self), and you’ll feel better.
My conclusion, however, was that the disgusting state of financial inequality enforced by inadequate access to things like stock markets or real estate to those beneath a particular financial threshold, and the fetishistic lure of consumerism (driven by overwhelmingly ubiquitous advertising), are the film’s real villains. The specific means of combating capitalism’s insidiousness are less enlightening (perhaps because consumerism is like a virus; while its effects are visible en masse it’s impossible to tell whether it’s infected you specifically until it’s too late).
The ability to undertake the modest tolerance of such things as using public transport or one’s own feet, as a general rule, is a good start. Or reducing one’s wardrobe to three sets of clothes on permanent rotation (particularly galling for the fashion-conscious). Or wearing shoes until they practically disintegrate. Or, being content with making one’s home a tranquil enough refuge to avoid the necessity of an escape into travel. The last of these was a revelation to me; a deal-breaker for more people than I would have ever imagined. In most cases travel is eye-wateringly expensive, but it’s often referred to as some kind of existential opiate, a reason for tolerating even more work. Procreation is the other elephant in that particular room.
Perhaps being an autistic introvert is an unforeseen advantage in this respect, because I rarely take holidays and don’t have any real ambition to travel. This despite having actually managed a two-month-long jaunt to Europe to get married, so don’t bother to extend your sympathies to this hypocrite too much. I’ve known since I was a child that I did not want children of my own, so lacking spawn was never going to be a problem for me. Besides which, working less gives me far more time to enjoy my actual time, so I don’t feel like I “need” a holiday even when the time comes.
One of the great throwaway lines in Fight Club comes early on, as the narrator moves through his apartment, which is digitally flagged with all of the names and prices of the various items he has used to furnish it. He says, “like so many others I had become a slave to the Ikea nesting instinct.” It’s a wonderful reflection on the communal nature of consumerism because anyone who suffers it is absolutely not alone. In fact, I’d argue it’s much more alienating to reject such a notion. Further to that, it really does involve a measure of slavery, as the line suggests.
After all, is slavery not the imposition of a coercive behaviour or outcome—which is the design of a master—upon a servile or powerless target, enforcing an arbitrary indebtedness over which the slave has no ostensible control nor reasonable recourse to resist? That this entire process might occur without the conscious awareness of many of its victims doesn’t seem to me like much of a defence of the practice itself. Throw in a kind of innate physiological assonance with the instinct to build a nest for a family, a few Joneses to keep up with, and you’re all set. Rinse, and repeat, until dead.
I am Jack’s cold sweat.
I have long wondered to what degree most people ponder such things. No doubt there are those who derive a great deal of pleasure from their job, which in a way I envy, because most of the time if I’m doing something I don’t want to I find it incredibly depressing. But beyond that there does seem to be a specific societal expectation that one works because it’s important to accrue wealth, either for financial security or for material gain. Or something like that.
My particular attitude absolutely has its collateral costs. It was a source of considerable conflict between my parents and I during my late adolescence and early adulthood because, in their opinion, work is something you do to contribute to society. However, the worthless jobs I was undertaking at the time hardly seemed beneficial. And by “worthless” I mean by the standards of society itself. Servile tasks, such as those in hospitality, don’t directly increase capital—apparently it’s only the material goods sold which generate profit, and the people who actually do the selling are conveniently overlooked—and hence are consequently devalued. These were the jobs available to me, under the guidance of some typically dictatorial small business owner, or being lashed to a computer inputting data for an anonymous fifteenth-degree-removed sub-branch derivative of a hedge fund or other faceless financial services operation. It taught me that such jobs were designed to utilise my (cheap) labour for the benefit of people far wealthier than myself.
There wasn’t much skill to it, which is apparently what makes it cheap. Don’t get me started with the so-called “skill” level required for many other seemingly prestigious positions. But most people can learn to carry plates and be polite in the face of condescension. In various hospitality roles, I discovered that I can perform under pressure and keep my cool, and perform my ostensible duties with competence. But the persistent element of my performance that always seemed to be the actual problem eating away at my employers was my attitude.
Being told to “just do your job”, when what that actually meant was that the issue at hand was my insufficient level of deference, rather than the quality of my work, has never reflected what I would call giving back to society in any kind of meaningful way.
I can still remember pre-shift pep-talks from one particularly entitled dickhead, who had been presented with an entire restaurant, bar and gambling establishment as a gift from his ageing father, who was a successful businessman. So despite having an attitude along the lines of “you have to work for what you earn”, he had not lifted a finger to earn what he himself had acquired. It was the first of many observations of the kind of colossal cognitive dissonance that seems to afflict some people of inherited means who, nevertheless, feel that they have “earned” their status through the accident of birth in the same way as one might from actual hard work.
Now, a question of etiquette; do I give you the ass, or the crotch?
This kid—who would be well into his middle age by now but would have been in his mid-twenties at the time—used to swan in ten minutes before we started, in order that he might pontificate a while. His favourite flavour of bullshit was to, entirely unironically, demand we give him “one hundred and ten percent”, in the fashion of an idiot version of Henry V or Julius Caesar who had learned the lines but had no idea what they actually meant. He would then proceed to scoff his free lunch and piss off in his BMW to do who knows what until he returned at dinner time to—in true blue-blooded form—have his dinner cooked for him and hobnob with some of the patrons.
I found it excruciatingly difficult to hold my tongue in those meetings, perhaps because I knew the only thing the manager had to say insofar as threats were concerned was that I should be grateful that he was paying my wage and he could take that away from me at any moment. While that was certainly true, his precious wage was no different to the same measly offerings handed out in a thousand other similar establishments, and unlike many other people whose livelihood was tied to hospitality by necessity—and over whom he legitimately wielded considerable power—I had no need to hold on to that specific job. From the very start, I harboured no illusions about any kind of reference, either. The stench of scumbag clung to the owner from the very beginning—and in fact I’d been hired by another manager while he away on holiday for several weeks.
It probably comes as no surprise to you, dear reader, to learn that I was fired from that particular job. I recall my supervisor at the time as being strict, but not unreasonably so; a woman of fierce discipline but also loyalty (to the employees in her charge) whose devotion to her work was, I suspect, a source of considerable pride and a disproportionate amount of her identity. She was of the same general age bracket as the French chef—whose time in Australia and its broad manner of speech had dulled the best inflections of his native accent—and they, in combination, were the true parental figures of the establishment.
I remember her saying that she had wanted to fire me privately and personally—rather than publicly, during a staff meeting—because “you’re a good kid”, and the owner had a habit of “making an example“ of people he intended to fire and humiliating them in front of other staff. In this case, I think she ultimately did him a favour; he was used to being in a position of comfortable authority over his minions. Being fired was not even close to a shock to me—over the course of my life I have been fired from fourteen jobs—and so the terrifying exclamations of consequence he might have wanted to serve may well have backfired. After all, I had plenty to say about him and no fear of reprisal whatsoever. His bombast carried no more weight than his mere status as my employer, which he was literally surrendering in the act of firing me.
All that being said, I always appreciated the protective instinct she showed me in shielding me from his wrath, which she described as “ugly”. Even though I missed a long-sought opportunity to spit in his eye, I was then, and remain even now, begrudgingly grateful she was looking out for me.
After years of travelling past this particular restaurant—it was visible from a train station in Melbourne—I watched it deteriorate and to my knowledge it doesn’t even exist any more. Whether that was under the guiding hand of the indolent scion, I have no idea. His father was old even when I knew him, a far more personable sort than his belligerent son, but nevertheless a man whose entire demeanour was encrusted with a hard-barnacled authority. If I was to guess, I’d suspect that the estate the son has (most likely) inherited by now will have kept him comfortable. I would further offer a thesis that he has marshalled his considerable financial resources toward maintaining his middling potential ever since.
But you never know; people like that sometimes have a habit of failing up, especially if among their few talents they happen to have a knack of choosing good staff who can do most of the actual work for them. This guy, though, was quite stupid; I’d be stunned if he had done much more than tread water in the proceeding decades despite all his inherited advantages.
Occasionally—and this is a habit I’ve attempted to ingrain as I’ve gotten older—I wonder how his life turned out. Whether or not he remained entirely tactless or was perhaps softened by time or parenthood or other circumstances in his life, perhaps even becoming someone more generous or even (though this may be a stretch) a little bit wise. An analogous discipline I’ve attempted to teach myself alongside this habit is to engineer some form of compassion toward those I inherently dislike, especially potential adversaries. It is the only method I’ve found to cleanse my soul of that roiling rage it generates far too easily for my liking, and avoid harbouring obsessive ill-will of my own, hatching endless sequences of retaliatory vengeance in my mind. I do so love plotting comeuppances for those I find distasteful.
I am Jack’s smirking revenge.
My personal experience of this particular manager was that of an essentially deplorable individual incapable of much in the way of insight or intelligence and who, despite this fairly obvious deficiency, thought himself better than just about everyone else. Certainly, he was obsessive in his pursuit of ensuring that everyone was aware of his status, but that also suggests that beneath his facade dwelt a powerful insecurity. Fight Club offers a piece of advice that I have often felt is incredibly useful, but one that also requires a surprising amount of discipline to enact in actuality. It’s a concept which is utterly incompatible with petty grandiosity:
The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.
Perhaps he has always suffered a degree of anxiety about his capacity? Occasionally a bit of insight into such deficiency can trigger an awakening. Or, the mere thought of looking foolish can close the mind even further (ironically risking even greater foolishness). He and I were (at least, at the time) whatever the opposite of a doppelgänger is—literal opposites (gegenübergänger, perhaps?). What mattered to him was worthless in my view, and I imagine the opposite was also true. His status symbols were loud and hollow (ludicrously so), and as has probably been made abundantly clear by now I had little care for material income or wielding power over other people. Certainly not in the manner of a mere employer, which is perhaps the most crude origin of authority after the application of brute force. On the other hand, he may not even have known who I was; a minor irritant to his sovereignty over a little dive-bar restaurant fiefdom buried amongst the endless sprawling mass of people-farms in the outer suburbs.
Most of my colleagues concurrent to that time were perfectly normal people. So strikingly normal, in fact, that none of them stand out enough in my memory with any particular specificity. Moments of joy or humour punctuate my vague recollection of my workmates. I quit smoking during that job, and recall gifting my last pack of cigarettes to one of my delighted colleagues (on reflection, a literally poisoned chalice, that one). I had an egg fight one morning with one of the chef’s apprentices, and hit him in the groin with one which, remarkably and painfully (for him), didn’t break. I recall opening the pantry some time around mid-morning to find the chef having a sleep on the floor inside, because it was dark and cool and largely undisturbed and he had been working since dawn and would still be there long after dusk.
Yet the owner remains with peculiar specificity in my recollection. Impeccably dressed, well manicured, but in every other manner a cloying boy-child; a small-minded bully who appeared blissfully ignorant to the utter disdain his own staff held for him.
In my time under his magisterial leadership, I never observed him show any kind of interest or concern for the people who served him—the one exception was a part-time model who worked the bar, but I doubt compassion was his motivation there—yet I have to acknowledge that even such a transparent milking of privilege still suggests a glaring emotional lack. I don’t know what his actual relationship with his father was, but I cannot shrug the recurrent thought that the old man modelled that most classic mountain of expectation which he, just a boy, could never hope to equal.
I am Jack’s inflamed sense of rejection.
Behold my astonishing acumen in undertaking this retroactive consideration of such a tyrant! Such incisive insight!
But there’s a hypocrisy here which lurks beyond this figure of ridicule from my memory. And that is my own recollection and the emotional vulnerability lurking, hidden, within it. Perhaps because of the distance between then and now, which is about twenty years, I expected these vague sequences, partial glimpses and vivid moments which I have strung together as “memories” to occur to me at the behest of my own will, and with a degree of perceptive reflection free of the emotional turmoil which punctuated that particular period in my life. I was only half-right on that score.
The day after I wrote most of this (which, in its original form, the previous section largely concluded), a foul mood befell me. One which initially obfuscated its origin. Thankfully, I am in possession of a range of tools for interrogating those kinds of discomforts and I soon recognised the source. I had not entirely lost contact with the considerable vexation of that time, which had accompanied my memory into the present.
Yet, I was at a loss as to how to reconcile it. Where had these feelings come from, and why were they still so strong? I felt like breaking something. I scoured my mind for some kind of definition for this feeling, one which might adequately express that (now fleeting) sense which had, for a few days, almost completely overwhelmed me. What I needed was a fortress to lock these rebellious emotions into, where they couldn’t escape my analytical insight. Trapped by logic.
Part of my hunt was, admittedly, at first in service of a method of ensuring that I never had to feel that uncomfortable feeling again. Hence the logic fortress. But as anyone who knows anything about the unrelenting power of sentiment already knows, they cannot be so held. Logic can dance like fire, full of dynamism and able to shed light into the darkest corners of the unknown. But feelings are a broad, deep reservoir with powerful, unseen currents, and trying to constrain a river with fire is the ultimate futility. The voice of my psychologist—synonymous with this line of thinking when I conjure it—insisted that I sit with it, give it time to coalesce and be identified, then manifest to a point where I might speak to it directly. That way, I might acknowledge what it is and how it might fit into the schema that I have redesigned for myself. Or, failing that, to tell it to fuck right off.
Yet, I failed to find that definition, and it was in the words of another that I at last recognised my own voice:
I took the elevator down to the street with three very pretty women who all appeared to be in their early twenties. As I drove back to my hotel, I felt sad and subdued and self-conscious. I had thought that I was researching this subject at a logical distance: that I could inhabit the point of view of an ideal millennial client, someone who wanted to enhance rather than fix herself, who was ambitious and pragmatic. But I left with a very specific feeling, a kind of bottomless need that I associated with early adolescence, and which I had not experienced in a long time.
Jia Tolentino’s writing—as illustrated in her many outstanding articles, like this one, for the New Yorker—is blessed with a naturalistic verve which is at once both fluid and incredibly sharp. I would be extraordinarily surprised if her talents weren’t hard-won, the result of years of practised, or necessary, vulnerability. She is brave in a way I know my own work can not be, largely because I lack the ability to reveal that vulnerability while it is still tender and exposed, as she seems to. In this case, I like to think of her words as a representation of what Carl Jung would call my anima, the female part of my soul and the subconscious feminine to my conscious masculine.
My own process is always associative, often via metaphor or allegory, or a reflection on some loose referent against which I can align, or allude to, my purpose (as with Fight Club, in this particular reflection). To properly explain myself I must now attempt to subvert my own anxieties about residual vulnerability by riding on the coat-tails of someone else’s courage, in place of my own.
To paraphrase the above in my own experience, for example, I would say that that the “sad and subdued and self-conscious” feeling Tolentino illustrates is what I too felt, recalling that phase of my life. I too wanted to think—at least at the time, and probably still—that I was somehow above the situation, able to reflect upon it critically and intellectually, ignoring the gnawing, nagging sensations which ruthlessly denied such detachment. Perhaps it was briefly possible, in part, or at times, or in some manner that only slightly betrayed my own inherent insecurities and anger. But, largely, it was impossible precisely because the inward-facing rage I carried with me constantly in my young adulthood was so great that it informed literally everything I expressed outwardly.
And once it was done it turned back inward again.
I am Jack’s broken heart
This entire piece remained unfinished for a long time—missing some critical aspect—until I read that magnificent line: “a very specific feeling, a kind of bottomless need that I associated with early adolescence, and which I had not experienced in a long time.” For me it wasn’t need so much as interminable fury, unshackled and falsely righteous. But that was the feeling I had been unable to express myself; that ill temper had been resurrected in me, surging to the surface of my consciousness with a power I thought I had long since conquered.
Originally, I was going to say that my indignation in regard to my former manager, the arrogant man-child, had turned to pity. In fact, I have already inferred as much.
But the reality is that my rage is still there, and the pity is part of a process I use to deflect and ease those inherent instinctual responses and is almost certainly disingenuous on any level that isn’t overtly conscious. That is, it takes discipline to overcome the truth of those passionate memories. Perhaps the closest analogy I can think of to this process is Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction, whose initial inclination is toward cruelty but, after witnessing what he believes to be a miracle and experiencing a “moment of clarity”, turns toward a somewhat more sombre interpretation of his own self-mythologising, as manifest in his famous Ezekiel 25:17 speech:
Now... I been sayin' that shit for years. And if you ever heard it, that meant your ass. You'd be dead right now. I never gave much thought to what it meant. I just thought it was a cold-blooded thing to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this mornin' made me think twice.
See, now I'm thinking: maybe it means you're the evil man. And I'm the righteous man. And Mr. 9mm here... he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. And I'd like that.
But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is you're the weak. And I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard to be the shepherd.
So, if I’m honest, I feel like the pity is there, but it’s not my instinctual response. Not even close. It’s a conscious focus on not falling back into the past and choking on the same lessons I would hope I had already learned to safely swallow by now.
The truth is, he was an arsehole. A pretty deplorable one. And I was hell-bent on resisting him—and anyone like him—through any methods necessary. Perhaps what I’m trying to be is a more generous spirit; the kind of spirit which it is not in my nature to easily be. One which can shed its rage, like a skin, and reflect—with some sobriety; the “logical distance”—on painful events without being swept up in the residual ache of their passage, which evidently doesn’t dissipate over time as much as we might expect it to.
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.
I am also Jack’s real hard effort to be the shepherd.