I know (of) you

It would be easy to casually remark that Stephen King’s 2006 Lisey’s Story is the long version of the old adage, “behind every great man is an even greater woman.”  But the surface telling of a widow obsessively remembering life with her late husband is also a vessel used to explore the lives we live in public, versus those we choose to share only with our dearest confidants.  Anyone voluntarily subscribing to a celebrity Twitter-feed should understand the difference between Knowing someone, and knowing of someone.  Lisey’s unfolding memories underscore this gap, which King refers to as the difference between love and curiosity.

“When you look at me, you see me holistically,” remarks writer Scott Landon to his wife in a memory.  She cares for his person, and his personal well-being.  As a couple surrounded by followers and fanatics, she cares for the person Scott Landon, not the beloved bestselling writer.  As King brings her to life through his first person account, it’s difficult to know when he is simply providing her character’s voice, and when he’s using her to voice his viewpoint on fame and all that accompanies it.  Both voices proclaim that truly Knowing a person comes from intimacy, and the other, a sense of  knowing-of, is depth-less and trivial.

When we know-of someone in the public eye, what really can we say of them?  We know-of those things a publicist crafts while engineering their persona.  We know-of those things which spill out from tabloids, based on secondhand observations of decisions made in private.  We know-of their image, crafted to make us believe they are our dear and trusted allies.  The relationship is one-sided at its best, and unhealthy at its worst.

Truly Knowing a person is being let in behind their daily defenses.  Knowing is having the key to the little door they live behind, to the room where they think, and feel, hurt and heal...and lock when they head outside to face each day in public.  “I was lost, and you found me, I was burning, and you gave me ice,” Scott recalls to Lisey gently in recalled exchange, sitting together in a hospital room after he has been deeply wounded by an obsessed and unbalanced fan.  This is a couple with full access to each other’s hidden places--not only married, but caring and devoted friends.

As with every man and woman who has left their mother and father behind as boys and girls, they bear with one another’s sometimes literally crazy family histories.  The very burdens which can dig in and hurt us as individuals are lighter when shared between two people.  King uses his couple to illustrate the “leaving and cleaving” aspect of married life--leaving behind parents, families, and all other past histories, and cleaving to one another as supportive friends through all endeavors.  

The tightness of Scott and Lisey’s relationship is one I can see in only a handful of marriages around me; two, maybe three.  I’m pretty sure that it’s the product of a unique mindset, and of a unique pairing of people set aside for one another by design.  I don’t believe there is only one person “right” for another, but I have witnessed that there are “perfect” matches, and not just the ones found on the bestseller’s list.  

Keys

For a few years as a kid in New England, I came home about an hour before my father locked up the retail part of our apple farm to help me with homework. I was a latchkey kid before I knew what that meant, even though we lived in an area which didn’t really warrant locking our doors at all. When you’re surrounded by hundreds of acres of heritage apple trees, you become pretty confident that no strangers will wander into your living room. Even so, we each had a key and made use of it. No use taking a chance, we’d say.

At their core, keys are invitations to come inside, to be initiated and welcomed into a social clique. The giving of a key is a gesture entrusting of our selves, our possessions, and our well-being to another. The taking of that key is an unspoken acceptance that we’ll not break that trust, or at least not ding it too badly.

Years ago, shortly after moving, I entered my little red house in Prairie View and found a small bearded man in my front room. He wore a two-toned grey flannel shirt, heather grey suspenders, and a pair of charcoal grey pants. Despite his seated position in my favorite "Memorex chair," I could tell he was a little person. He confirmed this as he stood, taking his grey wool bowler cap from his knee and clutching it nervously between shaky hands. His eyes were clearly visible and slightly enlarged through his steel rimmed glasses, with bushy grey eyebrows raised with both hope and anticipation. Overall, he gave the impression of a slightly oversized garden Hummel, whom some sketchbook artist had drawn quickly using varying shades of grey markers. I’m slightly color blind, and so was disturbed for two reasons: had my eyes finally given up seeing color altogether, and who was this strange, grey little man?

I would later learn that he was the estranged father of the previous owner’s wife (also a little person, which explained why all of the counters were so LOW when I moved in). He’d been given a key 17 years earlier, before a few poorly chosen words had revoked visiting privileges and cut him off from the life behind what was now my front door. His key still worked, it just didn’t open up the chance he’d hoped for.

As I’m writing this, I’m watching a 1969 performance of Jimi Hendrex playing Red House live in Stockholm. It’s a long video, but at the 5 minute mark, Jimi and the little grey man could commiserate–neither one could open the door they’d hoped to just moments earlier. Jimi got another chance, but I’m not sure if the little guy did. I changed the locks that weekend, blocking the doors each night until I could get to the hardware store and ensure I wouldn’t be surprised by any more tiny visitors.

Jimi Hendrix can be seen performing Red House at the following link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TZeCntatHQ

Locks

I unlocked my front door’s deadbolt this morning, hit the auto-unlock on my little car, and heard the satisfying click of the thumb latch as the front door snapped shut behind me. I ate breakfast with a friend in a restaurant that never closes and doesn’t have a lock on their front door–they throw a chain and padlock across the crash bars in case they have to close unexpectedly.

My friend tells me that on mornings when we eat together, he runs ahead of schedule and is the first at his office. On those mornings, he unlocks their front door and punches in the code to deactivate their security system. Each morning, he logs into his corporate server with a personal password, accessing client and personnel files until calling it a day.

My debit card doesn’t work unless you punch in "3VOM." I’ve linked my PayPal account to Overstock, iTunes, Amazon, and eBay in order to make online shopping convenient, but only after typing in the mystery pin phrase that prevents online phishing programs from accessing my online data. Hopefully, this makes it a little tougher for people out to steal Scott Wheeling’s identity and protects me from hacking.

Before turning fairly ridiculous, movies like Eagle Eye and Minority Report raise a not-too-subtle voice to the issue of being watched, self protection, and privacy. But when we leave the house to visit the silver screen, why do we lock the door behind us? Why does the school janitor carry a belt loop full of keys? Why is the keycard at your average hotel (yuck, bedbugs) only coded to your door?

After 20 years, my friend’s father installed a lock on the front door to their split level home in rural New York. A troubled niece had moved back into town, and they hoped to avoid returning home one night to find she’d pawned their valuables to pay for a nagging maple sugar habit she’d acquired at college. Their neighbors had found numerous small tools, a GPS, and sunglasses missing the previous week, and credited an unlocked side door as the likely point of entry for the opportunistic borrower.

Toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 classic "The Shining," Jack Nicholson’s character reminds us that locked doors only prevent honest people from getting inside a locked room. His maniacal smile tells us that if someone wants to get in badly enough, a locked door is really just a formality. Hopefully, few of us will ever have to face such an unwelcome intrusion, but the nagging question remains: when I walk away from my locked door for the day, whose hand might jiggle the handle to see if they could conveniently slip inside?

One key behind locking our doors is that we distrust. It may be our oddball neighbor, or the thought of a late night visitor with an eye on our canned goods, but fear of the unknown is a strong motivator. Why else are we so intimidated by the giant shark in Jaws, even though we don’t get a good look at the beast until the movie is nearly over?  Beyond trust is the proven poor track record of humanity–given the chance, we’ll steal from, cripple, and even eat one another–if the door’s unlocked and it’s convenient enough. Now I just need to be careful to watch who has access to my keys.

Drains

Ever wonder where the water goes after you’ve rinsed your mouth and put away the toothbrush?  Recently, I came across “The Moving Finger,” a short story by Stephen King which was also made into an odd little short in 1991’s “Monsters” video collection.  A New York City apartment-dweller hears a tiny noise coming from the bathroom, and upon investigation, finds a little index finger poking out at him from the bathroom sink.  Upset, confused, and eventually freaked out, the man goes on the attack, using everything from drain cleaner to a discount pair of hedge trimming shears.  As the neighbors hear the struggle and NYC’s finest arrive, our leading fella’s sanity is called into question—just what in the world happened to this guy?

Upon hearing King’s author’s notes on the story, we find that he wrote the story to illustrate just how wrong things can go for normal people going about their everyday lives.  Driving yesterday on a local toll road, I saw four sets of black tire marks on the fresh asphalt, and as traffic slowed, saw the lines intersect into the remnants of two SUV’s who had presumably started out the day “on track.”  In a local town, police SWAT teams responded to an accidentally dialed cell number, after his wife mistook his muffled car stereo audio for a gangster-style attack upon his schoolroom.  Presumably, she assumed that his day may have gone…wait for it… down the drain.

But King’s story isn’t about things going DOWN the drain, it’s about something coming UP from it.  It isn’t about things falling apart so much as it is bizarre happenings coming out of nowhere to throw our lives out of line.  When a United Airlines pilot recently spilled his coffee on the plane’s radio and triggered a highjack alert, that was his fault.  When something happens that we can’t explain, it’s a little more difficult to pin down. 

I plan on sitting down and watching the “Moving Finger” video online this weekend.  For me, it’s a great reminder that no matter how much I may try to line everything up and make my own plans, there’s only so much I can control.  If you read such things, the New Testament book of James goes a step further:

“Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring.  What is your life?  For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. (ESV)

There’s only so much we can control, and admitting that is not only honest and humbling, it’s freeing.  King is echoing the point made in the James excerpt:  we don’t know what tomorrow will bring along, and we’re giving ourselves too much credit when we insist otherwise.  It may be hard to know who to point that moving finger at, and even the sharpest pair of hedge clippers may not protect us from everything that comes up the bathroom drain.

“The Moving Finger” can be viewed online at Google video at the following address.  Happy viewing!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5741702786654941097#

Under the Dome, Part Three

In this final installment focusing on Stephen King’s 2009 novel Under the Dome, we find that the story reveals an individual and collective ability to justify one’s actions in the name of piety and collective good. The very person callously responsible for instigating unrest is the person deflecting the blame and absorbing the credit, the very opposite of the window and mirror maturity exhibited by truly gifted leaders.


Under the Dome, as in our American culture, a central theme is justice versus injustice. We despise Big Jim’s character, not because he is a "conservative Christian" in name but not action, not because he is a used car salesman, not even because he is selfish in so many ways. To despise him for this might be to admit shortcomings within our own person.


We despise him because in King’s narrative storytelling, we’re given a chance to see behind the scenes to the actual events, and see injustice being served. Big Jim is the face of every abusive father, every mean-spirited teacher, every child that grows up torturing his pets, and every elected official who loses track of the "servant" part of "public servant." He is an unjust man, and King appeals to our inherent desire to see the bad guy lose in the end.

Throughout the final chapters, King repeatedly focuses on an unsettling proposition: at some point in our lives, we have all either been the person giving or receiving abuse. His narrative portrays a picture of the helplessness that a victim feels, a picture of the helplessness to stop the abuse and of the regret and shame which accompanies it.

Surprisingly, King contends, this is a feeling shared by both the offended and the offender, and he seems to argue that the actions of the offender will eventually return to haunt him. The manner in which each character accepts this proposition seems to correlate with their demise or survival. Those who accept responsibility for their actions seem to be at peace with themselves even into death. Those who will not admit their guilt it seem to leave this world suffering, either at their own hand or at the hands of others.

Without surprise, a lot of King’s characters die during this story, victims of their own and others’ decisions. Once the book closes, he leaves his audience challenged to take stock of their own lives, and reflectively ask themselves how they have abused or been abused, and how they’ve come to terms with their part in the events of their own lives. Peace, it would seem, may come in the form of our individual acceptance of our faults.

Under the Dome, Part Two

As Stephen King’s latest work progresses, the thin veil of fiction over his commentary on American policies in the war on terror is cast aside.

Like a skilled conductor before an orchestra, town selectman Jim Rennie directs his constituents into a symphony of paranoia and fear-driven decision making.  During the tumult, Rennie’s character disappears into the background, content to allow the mayhem to run freely until he can surface and provide direction.  He has methodically concocted a fear-based culture in which he alone is blameless, and “God help anyone who does not stand on ‘our side’.”

The ensuing town mentality reveals a population eager to surrender due process and individual liberties for the common good.  Supplanting due process is trial by association.  When several citizens are found guilty in the court of public opinion, Rennie wins an easy victory, using the town’s fear as the district judge.  The town quickly begins to fracture into two time honored camps:  “us,” and “them.” 

In the black and white conservative world inhabited by Becks and Palins, it’s hip to target moderate or rational people as radicals responsible for the nation’s fall from God’s favor.  The far left offers little help, painting ultra-conservatives with an anti-intellectual stigma usually reserved for children.  As Americans, we may recall recent headlines, wherein those who did not support the war in Iraq did not support the deployed American troops.  If one didn’t support the Patriot Act, one wasn’t a true red-blooded American.  King’s story alludes to all of these recent memories in his fictional town of Chester’s Mill.

King’s ability to find the voice of his characters on both sides of the aisle is remarkable.  Equally poignant is the polarizing effect upon interpersonal relationships.  People who have lived in proximity for years find themselves, in the face of adversity and human fear, aligning along two factions:  those on the side of control, and those on the side of freedom.  There is little room for discussion between sides—automatically, townspeople believe they know what is right or wrong based solely on appearance.  There is little room for self reflection, objective thought, or evidence.  If a man appears guilty, he is.

King’s veil of fiction lifts entirely as he poses the following question:  Societally, once we have demonized, polarized, and labeled, what freedoms will we willfully and joyfully give up to preserve safety and order?  Will the cultural mindset continue to be one of paranoia and distrust, or will there remain a small population which continues to value reason?

Finally, King reveals an savvy understanding of American media’s ability to sway public opinion.  Both “sides” make an effort to propagandize and energize their causes, but neither side is faultless.  This week, Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder responsible for releasing thousands of classified military documents against the federal government’s warnings, has been arrested after being charged with two counts of rape by Interpol.  Following weeks of Wikileaks-related headlines, many have already tried, judged, and sentenced Assange—but are these fair assumptions? 

Under the Dome’s storyline allows the cynical segment of society to question the timing and validity of these allegations.  Are they real, or a form of political retribution for airing information in the face of an administration’s warnings?  When viewed through the lens of King’s warnings, it may be better to reserve judgment.

It’s our American right to hold an opinion.  We may be well cautioned by King’s story to understand these opinions are limited by our human fallibility, our knowledge of only part of the story, and our own mental acuity.  The wisest citizens recognize the line between opinion and fact.

In the next and final installment of Stephen King’s Under the Dome:  The issues of justice and abuse.  Until then….