A Human Being, Vehemently in Spite of Himself
by Joe Lalia

Bastien often considers the possibility of existing solely in someone else’s thoughts. He does so because I created him, and this is his hamartia. When Bastien is considering himself the discharge of someone else’s synaptic fire, he likes to compare himself to Sisyphus—or rather, I should say he tends to trouble himself with this comparison. He doesn’t like anything about it. Bastien believes that when people think of Sisyphus, nowadays, they only think of his tedious labor, which is beautiful in its horrific monotony. Thus, it is Bastien’s conclusion that Sisyphus was created to illustrate some point that has long since vanished into obscurity, and now merely serves as a roadside attraction on some hero’s odyssey. Bastien isn’t very fond of this idea. He finds the implications offensive. He doesn’t care for the notion of simply being an aside, an afterthought. He has loftier ambitions. He wants to be the mote in my eye.

So there he was, sitting next to the window, in the middle row of Philosophy 101, drifting in and out of attention. Bastien felt he had little control over the course that his brain seemed intent on taking that day, as he often does when he is at the helm. He likes to think that his brain whimsically alternates between auto-pilot and obedience, or even that I step in, now and again, and take over; but neither idea is true—not entirely.

It is true that Bastien felt these things because I wanted him to; you see, I set the wheels in motion. I scooped up a few pieces of particulate matter, formed a unique yet perfectly normal amalgam, and rolled his dispositions downhill like a snowball. True, Bastien was designed the way I intended. However, one can never tell how one's creation will be accepted, rejected, or abused by the world into which it is thrust. In this sense, the creation is independent of the creator. In time he would understand this. In the interim, Bastien’s convictions swayed like the top of a buoy in the unsettled sea of his own imagination.

Suddenly, Bastien found himself facing Professor Anura in his ridiculous bowtie. The professor was a small fellow but he taught class with a supreme confidence that made him seem ten feet tall. His oversized spectacles made him look like a frog and he had hair so white it seemed in shock of itself. Still, Bastien found him easy to ignore. It wasn’t until he began doing so that he realized he hadn’t been paying attention. The professor’s words suddenly permeated Bastien’s ears, and he heard him talking about something called the Transcendental Unity of Apperception.

“…is the idea that all of our perceptions are our own perceptions, all our sensations are our own sensations. What Kant was really saying with those fancy words was something intrinsically simple in nature, and yet it had the most earth-shattering implications. It is actually a simple derivation of the Law of Identity, which can essentially be condensed to the form of a mathematical equation—if X equals X, then X cannot  equal Y. So you see, if we can never truly know anything that is not X, then we can never know anything that is not an extension of ourselves, anything outside the confines of our own self-absorbed existence…”

Bastien sneezed. A few people turned to look at him as if he had done something wrong; most of the students never let their gaze wander from the professor, however, who had continued speaking all the while. That was all the reaction Bastien got—unwarranted derision. When they looked at him, Bastien half agreed though, wondering what sort of foul paroxysm his crude biology might come up with next. He wondered if nobody says “God bless you” when he sneezes because they know he’s an atheist.

The truth is, Bastien’s not really much of an atheist. He’ll staunchly dispute the fact, however, because he believes it to be the ultimate insult to his Creator.

Bastien tried to continue listening, but his brain apparently had enough, so his head oscillated back toward the left, and he stared vacantly out the window. It was spring, and he saw a robin land on a tree branch hanging near the window. The bird made Bastien think of that awful Beatles song that was initially cast into its rightful place of obscurity, alongside himself and Sisyphus. The song Bastien heard was cunningly resurrected long after Lennon’s death as a collector’s item for the anthology. “Free as a Bird,” indeed. “Stupid humans,” he whispered, “stupid humans and their silly anthropomorphisms.”

Bastien had only recently learned what an anthropomorphism is, but he was quite proud of being able to articulate the human fallacy, even in such a small form, that he felt so pervasive.

Growing annoyed with that bird for the malice it had done him, Bastien’s eyes again wandered, and began their daily sojourn over the curves of the girl who sat with bizarre regularity to the front-right of him. Bastien found this bizarre because he rarely sat in the same seat; wherever he was she was at 2 o’clock. Of course, there was nothing bizarre about it. Classes had only been going on a couple of weeks, but Bastien still didn’t know her name—he hardly knew anyone’s name. It took him that long just to get the professor’s down.

With his heavy head supported by the palm of his left hand beneath his chin, his fingers curled and covering his mouth, Bastien stared at her auburn hair like a wounded soldier might look at a medic, like she might save him from certain doom—more forlorn than hopeful. It just barely caressed her shoulders before curling upward at the tips. Bastien made circling motions with his pen, pretending he was sticking it in her hair and twirling it around like spaghetti. He kept doing that for a couple of minutes without realizing it; he even forgot why he started doing it, but he seemed so committed that it was pointless to stop. Bastien began to get fancy with his maneuvers, making horizontal figure eights. He must have looked like he was on opium—conducting a languid symphony for himself.

She casually glanced over at him, and it took a moment to register, but then Bastien realized what he was doing. At first she seemed alarmed, but then she saw right through him when he dropped his pen in an embarrassing instant of realization. Bastien watched in horror as it fell to the floor and bounced out of reach. And then, the most curious thing happened. She leaned over, picked Bastien’s pen up, smiled at him, and put it in her pocket. He was flummoxed. Bastien sat in bewilderment for some time—staring at her with his brow furrowed and his mouth agape. Now and then, she would turn to him and grin, but would then just as quickly avert her gaze.

After a good ten minutes, Bastien’s brain gave up this puzzle and turned its attention back toward the window. His non-existent autopilot veered skyward, and he considered several cumulus clouds. They rolled over each other in a circular procession, ingesting and regurgitating one another, forming a monstrous white billow that seemed to boldly pronounce a statement of some sort. When Bastien looked closer to try to decipher this message, it appeared to him as a great hand congealing to give him the finger. He looked away perplexed, and a bit agitated. I was most amused—I had done nothing but observe, as I always do.

“I don’t deserve such audacity,” Bastien spoke aloud.

“What’d you say?” she turned to him and whispered.

“Huh?” was all he could manage.

“Do you want your pen back?” she asked him.

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Oh,” she said, grinning. She then turned back around and faced the professor.

Bastien’s thoughts were briefly transfixed. He was unwilling to consciously dwell on such human feelings for long—he still held much resentment for his biology and whatever had designed it. Instead he tried dwelling on how much he wanted that pen back. It occurred to him that he didn’t know what for, since he rarely took notes, but he wanted it back nonetheless. Yet he liked her keeping it. Bastien began thinking of things to write with that pen. He wanted to write an editorial by the Creator of the Universe. His version would be composed of two words, “Pardon me.” Bastien also wanted to write a letter addressed to his past self in case time travel was invented. That would be composed of three words, “Thanks a heap.” But mostly, he wanted to write her, and he wanted to do so with exactitude—about her, to her, and, possibly, for her—this was something he was entirely capable of, which is why he had trouble doing so. Deep in the darkest, loneliest, and wisest corner of Bastien’s unconsciousness, there was the realization that what Bastien wanted to write and what would materialize on the page would be distinctly different things. Bastien would like to have been a romantic but he was very much a realist. Without his pen, he sat there pondering what to write, writing nothing.

For some time, Bastien struggled to come up with a divine metaphor that might possibly capture the exquisiteness he saw in her angelic face, because nothing less would befit such a beauty, but then he remembered that he was an atheist.

This irked him a bit—that he toyed with the notion of articulating his fascination with her in terms of the divine. Bastien became so unsettled by this idle fancy that he abandoned the idea of writing something altogether in favor of trudging around the muck he had gotten himself into. It was as if he suddenly realized that he was waist-deep in the Florida everglades and had been trying to go ice-skating.

Bastien blinked his eyes and saw endless muck all about him. The mud had only reached his stomach at most, but he was nonetheless saturated from the discomforting climate. Bastien is funny, and no one has appreciation for his humor like I do. He spoke: “It’s not the heat, it’s the humanity,” and wiped the sweat from his brow before surveying the landscape. He was about fifty feet from the nearest plot of semi-solid ground with no trace of civilization so far as the eye could see. He stood there with his hands on his hips and made me chuckle once again: “Well this is a fine mess you’ve gotten yourself into.”

Bastien’s only visible companions were the golf-ball-sized mosquitoes that flitted incessantly about him, seeking an opening that they might penetrate and feed from. Fortunately, Bastien’s winter-wear left only his face vulnerable to such an attack, and he was able to defend it aptly with his hands that were themselves protected by mittens. Peculiar sounds came from all about him, giving away the diversity that inhabited the swamp. Several somethings rose swiftly and submerged even quicker, as if trying to take a peek at Bastien before he spotted them—some made ripples the size of a softball, some the size of a large watermelon, and so, Bastien thought it best he get going. As he began to plod along (for ice skates make slow going) an auburn hare hopped onto the landing Bastien was headed for. Bastien thought this a strange sight for a swamp, and so he gave it some pause. He then noticed a small disturbance by his side, and, looking down, discovered a turtle that had risen to the surface and was now staring into his eyes, unflinching. Bastien decided to make haste for the shoreline; his cumbersome attire, however, did little to alter the speed of his initial pace.

As he finally seemed to close the gap between himself and drier mud, Bastien’s golden retriever Curtis sprang onto the scene from out of the shrubbery. He trotted over to the shoreline and looked at Bastien stupidly as he wagged his tail, never making a sound. Fearing for the hare’s safety, Bastien tried to distract Curtis by hollering at him and causing about as much of a clamor as possible while plodding along in waist-high muck and a complete winter wardrobe.

As Bastien was about to emerge from the muck, the hare took three bold hops, immediately alerting Curtis to its presence. Bastien began yelling “No!” and “Bad dog!” even before Curtis scrambled after it. Rather than flee, however, the hare swelled in size, scooped Curtis off the ground in mandibles of death, and proceeded to thrash him against the ground like a chew toy.

Bastien fell to his knees, aghast, by now only in ankle-high muck, and anxiously crawled away from the gruesome spectacle he was forced to endure—away from the gargantuan, carnivorous, auburn colored hare that now lay on the banks dismembering his golden retriever Curtis.

Bastien managed to rise to his feet, and dared to take a few tentative steps toward the awful hare when it snarled at him menacingly. Startled, Bastien quickly tried to step back, but fell on his rear when he failed to compensate for the ice skates. He lay there horrified. Soon afterward, a strange sound boomed across the landscape. Bastien craned his neck up in confusion and looked around, noticing that the hare was doing the same. Then it came again, louder than before, thunderous and omnipresent, but thoroughly unintelligible. Bastien looked to the swamp and noticed the turtle with its head to the sky as well. Bastien thought God was mumbling at the universe incoherently. He looked down and noticed that this thunderous clamor was coming from a small frog with white hair. Bastien was then ripped from his daydream.

“Mr. Sebastien?”

“Yes?” he replied.

“An example, please.”

“Of what?” he asked innocently.

“An anthropomorphism,” the professor sighed.

“Um…”

As Bastien desperately searched for a satisfactory reply, he could focus his thoughts on nothing but the girl sitting at that same position, 2 o’clock. She now looked at him along with the rest of the class expecting a good chuckle; everything that came out of his mouth was gold. The teacher began to give up on him and was about to pose the question to another student when Bastien finally began to speak. Bastien paused briefly as he discovered that the weather had turned violently foul during his absentminded fantasy. Dark clouds loomed on the horizon. He began to say something insanely funny, but halted when he saw her twirling his pen and grinning at him. In milliseconds Bastien calculated a multitude of possibilities, repercussions, and implications, and they all robbed him of his humor. He looked at her twirling his pen as she grinned; there was no malice there, but no seriousness either, only playfulness.

He discarded what he was going to say, and I assure you, it would have been a prize, he would have had us all rolling in the aisles, but instead, only I would find him funny.

“God.”

“Good,” said the professor.

Her look changed a bit now, but she was still grinning at him, as if the punchline hadn’t come yet.

“That’s an idea I hadn’t thought we’d cover yet. Could you explain it a bit?”

“This thing we call God is no more than the baseless attribution of human qualities to the unknowable. Whether or not such a thing exists we cannot determine, and so it is pointless to speculate, but we nevertheless feel compelled to speak of it, and we do so with the bias of human perspective. Even if something called God did exist it is utterly arrogant to suppose that Man is even capable of forming an accurate conception of something so grand. It’s like trying to visualize eternity. So we liken it to ourselves. God is the ultimate anthropomorphism.”

“Ha!” he thought, “Take that!”

She wasn’t grinning at him anymore. But she didn’t look at him like he thought she would either, like so many of them did—like he had said something so phenomenally artless that they pitied him. She, however, looked fascinated.

“This raises an important issue,” Professor Anura took over, “Does the fact of something being an anthropomorphism necessarily mean it isn’t true? Mr. Hawkings, do you have any…”

The professor continued riding this train of thought Bastien had masterfully created in order to keep the good man occupied long after his student’s attention had faded. Bastien tried considering the scenery again, but found it unengaging. His mind was feeling increasingly confined in the space it felt comfortable enough to wander. His thoughts grew frantic. The confrontation was unavoidable; since she sat in front of him there was no way to simply flee. A moment later they were dismissed, and she turned to him, as he knew she would.

“That was an interesting example you gave before.”

“Woof,” said Bastien.

“What?”

“I said, ‘woof’.”

“Why?”

“Arf.”

She looked at him incredulously.

“May I have my pen back?” he asked her.

She gave it to him without a word, turned, and left the class.

As Bastien passed him on the way out, the professor congratulated him on his contribution to a productive class. Just before departing, a flash of brilliance illuminated the room, and the ensuing thunder sounded much like a giant boulder rolling downhill.

Joe Lalia still believes, now more than ever, that the surest sign of intelligent life existing throughout the galaxy is that none of it has tried to contact us yet.  Slightly appalled by the inherently subjective nature of literature and the sad realization that talent does not always correlate with success, he has resigned himself to the study and practice of medicine in what is likely a vain effort to become a better human being.  He loves surfing and tunafish.

© 2008 prickofthespindle.com