TERRIBLE KNOWLEDGE

Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

TERRIBLE KNOWLEDGE

"Damned hot-house flowers," she said. Catherine stared irritably at the half-dozen pink roses she?d received from Spencer as a 'two-month' anniversary gift. They had dried up, bent over and died before they'd even blossomed. She wondered if it was inauspicious, if her relationship with Spencer, which showed such promise for the first few heady weeks, was likewise starting to lose its blossom before it had really begun.

"Damned hot-house flowers," she said again, more sullenly but a little louder, loud enough for Spencer to hear her from the next room, where he was working while half-watching one of those lurid B movies with family members that turn out to be deranged killers with bizarre habits, and with women that always seemed in a continuous state of undress.

She had quizzed him about his infatuation with these camp films:

"You get the XXX station, Spence," she said. "Why do you want to watch the bland racy stuff when you can watch the whole explicit thing?"

She decided it must have something to do with the young age of the Troma film B-movie starlets. They looked like Junior High girls, and when they ran around in what she called "teeny-bopper sleep-over clothes," it was clear that were under age to do any of the hard stuff, and didn't have much to show off anyway.

"You have this thing for juveniles? Some secret fantasy from your youth that you never got to fulfill and has left you with permanently immature tastes?"

I?m not sure what it is," Spence replied, pensively. "Maybe the fact that they're naive, unformed, untainted, unjaded. I mean, it's not like I have a passion for little girls or anything. I don't get turned on by any woman under..." He turned to her with a wry smile to see if she was finishing the sentence for him.

"Twelve!," she said, embarrassed at having been caught but laughing all the same. A brief pillow fight ensued.

Remembering that conversation, Catherine again felt uneasy about Spence's apparent sexual immaturity. Since they had been together he had bought her, in addition to the unfortunate flowers, a mini-kilt and a cheerleader skirt (he said her legs were wonderful and should be shown off) and a virginal white, sheer blouse, and candy. Clothes and bribes for schoolgirls? He had a collection of David Hamilton photography books that also, in her mind, focused unseemingly on naked teenagers. Spencer had waved off that argument with a laugh, too. "Teenage slaves, that?s my fantasy, I confess" he'd told her when she asked him about this. "Dozens of them, naked and devoted to my every whim."

Now she looked again at the flowers. They struck her as so pathetic she almost cried. She remembered a day about a month earlier, leaving work at the end of a particularly wearisome day. It was blustery, and there were two men coming down the long steps from the office tower ahead of her. One of them suddenly noticed a street-vendor of roses and said to the other "Oh, shit it's my anniversary. Hang on a minute until I buy my wife a flower." He'd bought one of those miserable cellophane-wrapped 'sweetheart' roses with the sprig of greenery. "Aren't you going to get her something else?" his colleague had asked. "Naw, she knows better than to expect a lot from me. She'll be thrilled that I remembered at all," was the reply. Catherine had pictured this horrible man?s poor house-worn wife, old before her time, wretchedly dressed, accepting this pitiable gift with such delight and pleasure. Whenever she saw flowers now this picture filled her mind.

She shuddered. "Men," she said with disgust, but she meant more than just men. She was suddenly filled with revulsion for all humanity. Everything was miserable, squalid, ugly, pointless. Spencer came up behind her, seeing her suddenly hunched-over as if she were trying to make herself smaller. He put his arms around her waist, and said:

"Insensitive bastards, every one of 'em. Abusive, immature, cruel, earth-ravaging monsters."

Catherine closed her eyes and smiled the sad smile Spence loved, leaning back into him and returning his hug, backwards. "It's not just men. It's everything. A woman I knew in school, who had an enormous IQ, said she believed you had to be either ignorant or insane to survive in this world - it was all too unbearable if you were neither. I know that when I read or watch the news nowadays I just get mad - it's all so brutal and overwhelming and I feel so helpless, I just don't want to know."

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Spence said "You can't let it consume you. We do what we can."

"I don't know. It's not enough. The terrible knowledge of what goes on in this world, if you face it straight on, has to inflict some kind of serious and permanent damage, you know, like the post-traumatic stress disorder that soldiers and abused children and animals suffer, but brought on much more slowly. A form of insanity."

She looked back at him and went on: "Maybe it's your sense of humour that lets you cope with this so much better than I could. Or your vivid fantasy life," she added with a sly smile.

He gave her another hug. "Nikki and Jack will be here soon. They'll cheer you up."

"Yeah, right. Jack belongs to that Internet suicide group. The essence of cheery." After a pause she added: "Thanks for the flowers. Let me go put on my new 'cheerleader' outfit, so at least I can cheer you up. Maybe it'll be contagious."

He let go of her and walked back to finish his work. At the door he turned back and smiled. "No underwear with that, remember." A pillow flew by his ear as he left the room.

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It was raining, steady and straight down. Spencer stared out the window at the forest beyond his back yard, half submerged in late-afternoon haze.

Catherine was in the shower. Spencer poured a glass of Catherine's home-made lemonade and walked out onto the back verandah, followed closely by Worf, the scraggly, stubby-legged mongrel he'd saved from the pound last year. Worf had been fearful of people, especially when Spence had first adopted her. But the dog had the resilience of a child, and soon rediscovered her puppyhood, playing games with a joyfulness that often brought tears to Spencer's eyes, and returning his friendship with a fierce and selfless devotion. She trailed after him everywhere he went. They would often sit for hours on the verandah, Worf staring at the activity in the trees and on the ponds in the distance, and Spencer reading, playing the guitar, or as he was now doing, writing. As he watched the rain he wrote:

We are all passengers in an empty midnight train,
its rhythmic sounds
its too-white light flickering
its wheels screeching metal-on-metal
casting shards of firelight into the darkness
careening through the valleys and canyons
of our voiceless desperation.

We are in that timeless space,
that nether world of aching grandeur without motion
where music is suggested but where no bird sings.

We are at that still moment,
between the absolute and the impossibility,
not a moment of peace or reflection,
but a moment of suspension,
like the moment when you know something has fallen
and it is too late to catch it;
like the moment when you know something is broken
and it is too late to fix it;
like the moment when you know something is lost
and it is too late to find it again-
like the moment when you know something infinitely precious is gone
and it is too late to get it back.

So you know at last what Eliot meant
when he spoke of waiting without hope:
you long to find a connection to love, to community,
to faith, to some one or some thing,
but there is no connection here,
no attachment, only the dread-full feeling of
becoming
inexorably
disengaged.

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It was just after nightfall, in Spencer's and Catherine's huge back yard, manicured like a golf fairway and ringed on three sides by wilderness forest, its trees still dripping from the recent downpour, with their house in the background, its lights giving off a ghostly glow in the mist that had rolled in from a nearby pond. Spence had recently built a round stone bench at the forest's edge, with a raised table in its centre, and he, Catherine, Nikki and Jack were seated around it, ringed with citronella candles. Worf was off in the nearby trees, only her wagging tail visible, sniffing ecstatically. In the trees closest to the bench Spencer had rigged some lights and some wireless speakers. The lights gave the trees ringing the yard an eerie phosphorescence against the blackness beyond. Nikki was sitting crosslegged, playing the recorder to the music coming from the speakers, first the Tallis Fantasia and then Jon Elias' Prayer Circle: Innocence. Spencer listlessly picked up and then set down his guitar.

Jack was talking, mainly to Catherine, about alt.suicide.holiday, the Internet's disguised Usenet group for those wanting to discuss suicide without judgment or preaching about its moral and psychological justifiability: "Some of its members have been contributing for years, and are obviously bright, level-headed and, under the circumstances, good-spirited."

Catherine was skeptical. "Sounds kind of maudlin and self-indulgent to me. My ex-boyfriend and I used to talk ourselves into a terrible state when one of us got down. It was like a cocoon of depression we wrapped around ourselves."

Jack sipped on one of Catherine's wonderful cinnamon cappuccinos and replied: "Suicidal ideas don't always stem from depression. The alt.suicide.holiday gang believe that a decision on when to end your life is no more outrageous, or emotional, than a decision on where to live, or what career to follow. Though admittedly more final," he added. "In my case, for example, I confess I'm an idealist, and I'm also immature and inarticulate, so I can visualize a perfect world, but I'm neither emotionally or intellectually able to reconcile it with what the world is really like. So the result is, I guess, what psychologists (who a.s.h'ers ridicule, by the way) call insanity, and what the people in my life," he added sarcastically, looking over at Nikki, "call insensitivity. This combination leads me to think, objectively in my opinion, about the desirability of ending my life."

Worf had wandered over to Nikki and was watching the musician curiously. Nikki interjected with impatience: "Rationalization, Jack. You've read When Elephants Weep-how could you be so selfish as to terminate your life when you're one of the few people that understand the mission that can transform this world into the perfect world you envision - who understand that instead of space shuttles and SETI projects looking for 'intelligent' life on other worlds, we need to focus on learning to communicate with, and learn from, the wonderful, intelligent, emotional creatures all around us, like this guy here," she said, scratching Worf on the head.

"Girl," Spencer corrected.

"Girl," Nikki confirmed, with an apologetic nod to Worf, then continued: "If we understood the rich emotional lives of our fellow animals, it would change our ethos, our political and social systems, our laws, our religions, our philosophies, everything. We - you, Jack - have a duty to bring about this change. This is why we're here."

Jack shrugged. "I don't think I have the heart for it, the energy, the optimism, the patience. I'm not a do-gooder, and I don't think we can change enough people's way of thinking in time to save the world." He looked off into the distance, and shrugged, "Maybe I'm just lazy".

A long silence followed, until Catherine said: "You're not talking, Spence. What do you think?"

He was scribbling on the inside cover of the book he was reading, Renata Adler's Speedboat. He had drawn a giant "I" and then beside it, in a column, added the words Jack had used to describe himself: idealistic, insensitive, immature, inarticulate, insane. Beside the column he had sketched Jack?s face. He looked up and said:

" 'We do what we can'. 'This is why we're here'." He paused, and then shrugged: "Five word haiku for the new millennium. Works for me."

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Just before they went home, Nikki told the others a story about a recent bus trip she had taken. The bus had been jammed full, and very noisy, when two students from the School for the Deaf had boarded and ended up at opposite ends of it, in the last two open seats. To Nikki's amazement they had continued to carry on an animated discussion via sign language throughout their trip, and even out the window across a busy street when one of them reached her destination. "And yet arrogant scientists still claim vocal cords are essential for language and attainment of 'higher forms of life'" she concluded.

When Nikki and Jack had gone, Spencer and Catherine stayed outside a while longer, until Spencer succumbed to the inexorable lure of Catherine?s cheerleader costume, especially when, lying in the mist-soaked grass, she revealed that she had complied with his underwear ban.

-----------------------------------

The next day, they watched a documentary on dogs, with Worf wedged in between them on the couch. The program postulated that emotional life of all species was directly proportional to sensitivity of the senses and sharpness of memory, and went on to point out that dogs' sense of smell is acute enough to detect subcutaneous skin cancer, and that their hearing and memory can differentiate thousands of different car engine sounds up to half a mile away, and associate them with the vehicles' owners after a single meeting with those owners. When the program showed how many animals suffer cruelty and neglect from humans, Catherine cried for an hour.

"We have to do something", she said once she had calmed down. "You're the technologist, Spence, what can be done to fix this?"

"Well", he said, we could study other animals' communication systems enough to learn, and convince others, that they are every bit as sentient and emotional as humans. Then we could use that knowledge to extend our Bill of Rights to all creatures. The only problem is that even most humans have no rights, not even to life, liberty or pursuit of happiness, and we're so disrespectful of others' human rights we're likely to kill each other off before we can begin to move to extend these rights to other species."

"You really know how to cheer a girl up. It's hopeless, Spence. It's bigger than all of us, it's careening out of control, there's no stopping it -- us -- seething, cancerous mean-spirited paranoid humanity."

Spencer considered for a moment, and then, muting the TV sound and getting up to pour some more lemonade, said "Life is about choices. Doing nothing is a choice. Trying not to know the problem or the difficulty of the solution is a choice. Taking heroin to get away from facing grim realities is a choice. Doing something small, insignificant, to make it better, even knowing that no one will ever recognize or even notice, is a choice. Giving up everything and going to the wall to fight for a better tomorrow today, is a choice. My prescription for everyone, smart or stupid, driven or paralyzed or lazy is -- Make your own choice. Depression and suicide aren't symptoms of being unhappy with the world, they're symptoms of being unhappy with ourselves, our own choices."

"Well I choose to be unhappy with the choices we have." She was inconsolable. "I think Darwin painted a monstrous picture: smart, fierce creatures prevail over stupid and gentle ones. Always. Unless a comet wipes out the prevailing dragons, and then we just start all over again. It all seems so pointless."

"Those are just the rules of natural selection. There doesn't have to be a point."

For several minutes they just sat in silence, listening to the sounds outside of the whistling frogs, and the chorus of a murder of crows, in response. Finally Worf broke the spell, sliding off the couch and retrieving a tennis ball from her toy box, which she presented, tail wagging furiously, to Catherine. And with that, they all understood there was a point.

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Later, back on the circular stone bench in the back yard, Spencer was playing along half-heartedly to Neil Young songs coming over the wireless speakers. Catherine, lying on the grass with her legs up over the edge of the bench, was talking on the cell phone to Nikki. Worf had her head resting on Catherine's breast, getting a tummy rub.

Catherine was saying: "It's like we've been disenfranchised by our own creations - governments, companies - these are all institutions that we created for the public good, that have taken on some Frankenstein-like life of their own, out of our control. We've manufactured these horrible intangible monsters and turned them loose, and now we're helpless to rein them in."

Neil was singing:
An ambulance can only go so fast,
It's easy to get buried in the past
When you try to make a good thing last.

Spencer was thinking: The hardest thing is not knowing what might have been.

Catherine said: "It just fills me with such powerless rage. We could have created a world of beauty, peace, wonder, joy, balance, understanding. And what we have created is foul, sordid, ugly, violent, sick..."

Neil sang:
Though my problems are meaningless,
That don?t make them go away.

Spencer thought: The hardest thing is not knowing what is really happening, what will be. The hardest thing is not knowing. If we knew it all, we could not bear it. But if we knew it all, it would be easy...