Now imagine this scenario enacted a million times.
Now imagine those two million babies leaving the hospital and beginning to live their lives.
Statistically, the Baby Ones are going to have a better time of it than the Baby Twos. Whatever random bad luck befalls the Babies, the Baby Ones will have more resources with which to engineer a rebound. If a particular Baby One turns out to be, say, schizophrenic, he or she will get better treatment than the corresponding Baby Two, will be generally safer and better-cared-for, will more likely have a stable home to return to. Having all his limbs, he can go where he needs to go faster and easier. Ditto if Baby One is depressed, or slow-witted, or wants to be an artist, or dreams of having a family and supporting that family with dignity.
A fortunate birth, in other words, is a shock absorber.
Now we might ask ourselves: What did Baby One do to deserve this fortunate birth? Or, conversely, what did Baby Two do to deserve the unfortunate birth? Imagine the instant before birth. Even then, the die was cast. Baby Two has done nothing, exerted no will, and yet the missing limb is already missing, the slow brain already slow, the undesirable parents already undesirable. Now think back four months before birth. Is the baby any more culpable? Six months before birth? At the moment of conception? Is it possible to locate the moment when Baby Two’s “culpability” begins?
Now consider a baby born with the particular neurologic condition that will eventually cause him to manifest that suite of behaviors we call “paranoia.” His life will be hell. Suspicious of everyone and everything, deeply anxious, he will have little pleasure, be able to forge no deep relationships. Now here is that baby fifteen seconds after conception. All the seeds of his future condition are present (otherwise, from what would it develop?). Is he “to blame”? What did he do, what choices did he make, that caused this condition in himself? Clearly, he “did” nothing to “deserve” his paranoia. If thirty years later, suspecting that his neighbor is spying on him, he trashes the neighbor’s apartment and kills the neighbor’s cat with a phone book, is he “to blame”? If so, at what point in his long life was he supposed to magically overcome/transcend his condition, and how?
Here, on the other hand, is a baby born with the particular neurologic condition that will eventually cause him to manifest that suite of behaviors we call “being incredibly happy.” His life will be heaven. Everything he touches will turn to gold. What doesn’t turn to gold he will use as fodder for contemplation, and will be the better for it. He will be able to love and trust people and get true pleasure from them. He is capable and self-assured, and using his abilities, acquires a huge fortune and performs a long list of truly good deeds. Now here is that baby fifteen seconds after conception. All the seeds of his condition are present (otherwise, from what would it develop?). Can he, justifiably (at fifteen seconds old), “take credit for” himself? What did he do, what choices did he make, that caused this condition of future happiness to manifest? Where was the moment of the exertion of will? Where was the decision? There was no exertion of will and no decision. There was only fulfillment of a pattern that began long before his conception. So if, thirty years later, in the company of his beautiful wife, whom he loves deeply, Baby One accepts the Nobel Prize, then drives away in his Porsche, listening to Mozart, toward his gorgeous home, where his beloved children wait, thinking loving thoughts of him, can he justifiably “take credit” for any of this?
You would not blame a banana for being the banana that it is. You would not expect it to have autocorrected its bent stem or willed itself into a brighter shade of yellow. Why is it, then, so natural for us to blame a person for being the person she is, to expect her to autocorrect her shrillness, say, or to will herself into a perkier, more efficient person?
I now hear a voice from the gallery, crying: “But I am not a banana! I have made myself what I am! What about tenacity and self-improvement and persisting in our efforts until our noble cause is won?” But it seems to me that not only is our innate level of pluck, say, hardwired at birth, but also our ability to improve our level of pluck, as well as our ability to improve our ability to improve our level of pluck. All of these are ceded to us at the moment that sperm meets egg. Our life, inflected by the particulars of our experience, scrolls out from there. Otherwise, what is it, exactly, that causes Person A, at age forty, to be plucky and Person B, also forty, to be decidedly nonplucky? Is it some failure of intention? And at what point, precisely, did that failure occur?
The upshot of all of this is not a passive moral relativism that makes the bearer incapable of action in the world. If you repeatedly come to my house and drive your truck over my chickens, I had better get you arrested or have your truck taken away or somehow ironclad or elevate my chickens. But I’d contend that my ability to protect my chickens actually improves as I realize that your desire to flatten my chickens is organic and comes out of somewhere and is not unmotivated or even objectively evil — it is as undeniable to who you are, at that instant, as is your hair color. Which is not to say that it cannot be changed. It can be changed. It must be changed. But dropping the idea that your actions are Evil, and that you are Monstrous, I enter a new moral space, in which the emphasis is on seeing with clarity, rather than judging; on acting in the most effective way (that is, the way that most radically and permanently protects my chickens), rather than on constructing and punishing a Monster.
If, at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we would, paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive — if only for a few seconds more — the possibility of transformation.
THE PERFECT GERBIL
READING BARTHELME’S “THE SCHOOL”
RISE, BABY, RISE!
Sometimes, at moments of desperation in a creative writing class, I find it useful to introduce Freitag’s Triangle:
It’s especially useful because I get to point to the portion labeled “Rising Action” and explain that this—this—is the hardest thing in storytelling: getting one’s action to rise.
Sometimes at this point there are snickers in the classroom.
Whatever.
If you wanted a perfect, Platonic example of Action (Rising), you’d be hard-pressed to find a better one than Donald Barthelme’s story “The School.” That’s essentially all it is: boldly rising action. He sets up a pattern (things associated with our school die), then escalates it. Some orange trees die, some snakes pass away, an herb garden kicks the bucket, some gerbils/mice/salamander, having been acquired by the school, cease to exist.
And we’re only at paragraph three.
“The School” belongs roughly in a lineage of “pattern stories,” which might be said to include, for example, Chekhov’s “The Darling” (woman with no real personality of her own takes on the personalities of a series of men with whom she gets involved); Gogol’s “Dead Souls” (guy goes around to a series of people, trying to buy the deeds to their dead serfs); “A Christmas Carol” (stingy man is visited by series of ghosts who try to convert him); and the stateroom scene in “Night at the Opera” (tiny room gets filled with series of people). In each of these we know, fairly early, what to expect: we grasp the pattern.