[Image: “Eye Deals,” by John E. Simpson.]

From whiskey river:

Yamaoka Tesshu, a samurai and student of Zen, traveled around Japan studying from various Zen masters. One day, he wandered into the Shokoku Temple and happened upon the monk Dokuon.In a desire to show his comprehension of Zen, Tesshu stated to the Master, “The mind, the Buddha and all beings are empty. The true nature of all things is emptiness. There is no enlightenment, no delusion; no sages, no commoners; no toil, no reward.”

Master Dokuon remained quiet for some time and then banged him on the head.

Tesshu fumed in anger and asked, “What did you do that for?”

Master Dokuon replied, “If everything is empty, where did the temper come from?”

(Isha Foundation [source])

Well, there’s anger… and there’s anger. It’s one thing to lose one’s temper, at a slight real or imagined, and then to talk oneself out of it — or to remind oneself, pace Master Dokuon, that the anger is actually, well, nothing at all. But it’s something else entirely when one, like, loses one’s shit completely. After all, the 21st-century media/commerce/technology complex depends, for its success, on so-called “engagement” at any cost: the continuously active attention of as many human minds as possible — attention not to single stimuli, over sustained, thoughtful periods of time, but rather to rapid-fire machine-gun bullets of stimulation, fired one after another after another… Those institutions don’t “care” if your attention is favorable, unfavorable, or outright hostile, and in fact the extreme responses work effectively as fodder for even more hungry appetites…

Coincidentally, as I was thinking about whiskey river‘s little sliver of insight into anger, I was unpacking a box of old papers. Among them: a manuscript of a novel I wrote in 2007-08, called Merry-Go-Round. This was a near-future alternate-world science-fiction/humor/political thriller which I last wrote about here on RAMH in 2013, and I hadn’t peeked into the text since then.

I don’t know if the manuscript from which this excerpt comes was a first or subsequent draft. But for what it’s worth, here’s all you need to know in advance: a prisoner in a Federal penitentiary, Walker Bryce, is being quizzed for the umpteenth time about what exactly had happened at the time he committed the offense for which he was imprisoned. The thing is, he really doesn’t know. He remembers it was Election Day, sure. He remembers his pre-voting “competency interview,” required of all citizens who wanted — or believed they wanted — to vote; he remembered some of the couple dozen questions he’d been asked whose answers would confirm (or not) his competence to cast his ballot. He even remembered some details of the interview room.

But as for what followed, well…:

It all seemed so irrational, in retrospect, especially given the consequences (which to be fair, of course, Walker had never anticipated).

The weather: pleasant enough, in fact it had been pleasant for several weeks. There was plenty to be happy about just looking out the window, nothing rebellious-making about the immaculate blue sky and sunshine on that day. Walker had been having an exceptionally good week at work, although it was only Tuesday at that point. His boss and co-workers had smiled, Walker had smiled back, he looked up from his desk at breaks and lunchtime and was pleasantly surprised to learn that he had actually gotten a measurable amount of work — good work — done in the last couple hours. It was Election Day, so the ’rail had dropped him at the poll on the way home after a brief, trouble-free ride. He had enjoyed the program he’d watched on television (an old situation comedy, he thought) while sitting in the poll’s Green Room, waiting for his competency interview. And he’d really liked the interviewer that year, a woman who treated him very nicely, even flirtatiously teasing him about having such a serious face when voting was so pleasurable an activity.

The questions had been the same questions, or at least the same kinds of questions, that interviewers always asked on Election Day. They never asked your opinion, of course — that was practically sacred information, to be shared only among you, the voting machine, and the interviewer who would visit you in a few days just to be sure that these were, indeed, the votes you had cast. The pre-vote interviewers, they just asked what you knew, to make sure that you knew enough to cast a responsible ballot.

One year, for example, concentrating on economic questions per the parties’ platform, they might ask you where you worked and the nature of your work there. Naturally they would then need to ask your salary, and then it made complete sense that they would want to be sure you knew your tax rate, and whether your benefits were taxed as well, and which ones, and at what rate or rates. (After all, you were about to vote regarding things that your tax dollars would be paying for.) Did you obtain your information about tax rates from official sources, such as a government Web site? Yes? (At what URL would that be?) Or no, you got it from a knowledgeable friend: What friend was that? Where did he or she get his or her information? What were his or her salary, benefits, and tax rates?

And so on.

It was all perfectly reasonable. Of course you needed to be able to answer such questions if you took the idea of voting seriously — however pleasurable an activity it might be — and Walker had always taken it seriously, and he had always been proud never to have failed an interview, although he assumed he’d gotten some questions wrong, over the years.

But this year something had just… something had just happened. The interviewer, whose name tag said that he should call her Sandy, had just asked him the next-to-last question, number 24, which this year was “How many documentaries have you viewed in the last eleven years?” Walker was mentally running through the list (he thought the answer was two, he just wanted as a matter of pride to be sure), and he looked up at the ceiling in the corner, up and behind Sandy’s left shoulder. There was a small beige box mounted up there, with a transparent glass disk in its face, and a little red light next to the disk was blinking metronomically: blink (1)… blink (2)… blink (3)… blink (4)… Something which Walker could no longer recognize as his mind had suddenly, however momentarily but quite definitely, gone sproing at that moment. He remembered suddenly leaping to his feet (both ankles were functioning fully back in those days). He remembered shouting something like, “Why are you asking me this?” and he remembered planting his hands on Sandy’s desk, leaning across her blotter and her well-manicured hands holding one of several pencils there, and he remembered yelling something else now unimaginable, something like, “Do you even fucking know what the right fucking answer is?” and he even remembered grabbing the collar of her shirt, below her trembling jaw and her mouth formed in a perfect O, and he remembered the sound of the door slamming open behind him and he even remembered grabbing one of the pencils off of Sandy’s desk. Where his memory broke down, without fail, was in recalling what exactly happened in the next several moments. In particular, he didn’t remember what he had done with the pencil, although it had something to do with why he was in prison and he knew that assaulting a State election employee was considered among the most despicable of crimes, and had put it all together into a chunky, indigestibly ill-blended stew of a theory. All he remembered in the moment after that brief gap was lying on the floor of the interview room, the sensation of something — something at once slippery and sticky — being removed from his fingers while someone stepped on his wrist, and the blinking, blinking, blinking of the red light on the little box on the ceiling. And then he remembered nothing, until he was already here and on the first checkpoint in the journey — endless, he had thought at one time — through a jungle of questions, always circling but never satisfactorily alighting on the answer about his intentions.

(JES, Merry-Go-Round)

So, then: had Walker Bryce lost his shit? If so, could it be classified as an expression of, y’know, anger? Had he “gone mad”? And would it have all worked out better if he’d been interviewed not by the good-natured Sandy named in the excerpt, but by, say… Master Dokuon, wrapped in his inscrutable, Zen-temple equanimity?