The irony is that there are times when the culture actually fosters trance and hypnosis to further its purposes. The theater’s a form of hypnosis. So are movies and TV. When you enter a movie theater you know that all you’re going to see is twenty-four shadows per second flashed on a screen to give an illusion of moving people and objects. Yet despite this knowledge you laugh when the twenty-four shadows per second tell jokes and cry when the shadows show actors faking death. You know they are an illusion yet you enter the illusion and become a part of it and while the illusion is taking place you are not aware that it is an illusion. This is hypnosis. It is trance. It’s also a form of temporary insanity. But it’s also a powerful force for cultural reinforcement and for this reason the culture promotes movies and censors them for its own benefit.
Phædrus thought that in the case of permanent insanity the exits to the theater have been blocked, usually because of the knowledge that the show outside is so much worse. The insane person is running a private unapproved film which he happens to like better than the current cultural one. If you want him to run the film everyone else is seeing, the solution would be to find ways to prove to him that it would be valuable to do so, Phædrus thought. Otherwise why should he get better? He already is better. It’s the patterns that constitute betterness that are at issue. From an internal point of view insanity isn’t the problem. Insanity is the solution.
What it would take that’s more valuable to Lila, Phædrus wasn’t sure.
He finished his sandwich, put away the food and cleared off his plate in the sink. He guessed the next thing to worry about would be that engine, and why it was overheating.
If he was lucky it would be something caught in or over the through-hull water intake for the engine cooling system. If he was unlucky it would be that something had clogged up in the water passages inside the engine itself. That would mean taking the cylinder heads off and fishing through the heads and jackets to find it. The thought of that was awful. Really stupid, when he bought the boat, not to have bought a freshwater cooling system that would have prevented the second possibility.
You can’t think of everything.
Up on deck he raised the dinghy with the mast halyard, held it suspended over the side of the boat and lowered it gently so that its transom didn’t go under. Then he got in, unsnapped it from the halyard, and by hand-over-handing along the boat gunwale, worked it to the stern of the boat.
He took off his shirt, lay flat in the dinghy and reached down with his hand into the water until it almost was up to his shoulder. It was cold! He felt around but there didn’t seem to be plastic bags or other debris covering the engine intake. Bad news. He pulled his arm back up again and wiped it dry on his shirt.
He supposed whatever it was could have dropped off after the engine stopped, while he was sailing. He should have run the engine for a while before he got into the dinghy to see if it was still happening. You always think of these things too late. Too much other stuff on his mind.
He tied the dinghy to a stanchion and got aboard. He went back to the cockpit and started the engine. While it was warming up he began to think about Lila again.
She’s what you could call a contrarian. You’re a loner, just like me, she had said the day they left Kingston. That stuck in his mind because it was true. But what she meant by it was not just someone who’s alone, but a contrarian, someone who’s always doing everything the wrong way, just out of pure willfulness, it would seem.
Contrarians sometimes just seem to savagely attack every kind of static moral pattern they can find. It seems as though they’re trying to destroy morality as a kind of revenge.
He’d gotten that word out of his anthropology reading. It indicated there’s more to contrarians than just individual wrongness. It’s common to many cultures. That brujo in Zuni was a contrarian. The Cheyenne had a whole society of contrarians to assimilate the phenomenon within their social fabric. Cheyenne contrarians rode their horses sitting backward, entered teepees backward, and had a whole repertoire of things they performed in a contrary way. Members seemed to enter the contrary society when they felt a great wrong, a great injustice, had been done to them and apparently it was felt that this was a way of resolving the injustice.
Once you see it in another culture like that and then come back to our own you can see that in an unofficial way we have our contrarian societies too. The Bohemians of the Victorian era were contrarians. So, to some extent, were the Hippies of the sixties… The engine didn’t seem to be overheating now. Maybe the problem was gone?… Hah — not very likely… Probably it was just because the engine was in neutral and wasn’t working very hard. Phædrus shifted into reverse to let it tug against the anchor for a while. He waited and watched the temperature dial.
Anyway, it seemed to him that when you add a concept of Dynamic Quality to a rational understanding of the world, you can add a lot to an understanding of contrarians. Some of them aren’t just being negative toward static moral patterns, they are actively pursuing a Dynamic goal.
Everybody gets on these negative contrarian streaks from time to time, where no matter what it is they’re supposed to be doing, that’s the one thing they least want to do. Sometimes it’s a degenerative negativism, where biological forces are driving it. Sometimes it’s an ego pattern that says, I’m too important to be doing all this dumb static stuff.
Sometimes the contrary anti-static drive becomes a static pattern of its own. This contrary stuff can become a tiger-ride where you can’t get off and you have to keep riding and riding until the tiger finally throws you and devours you. The degenerative contrarian stuff usually goes that way. Drugs, illicit sex, alcohol and the like.
But sometimes it’s Dynamic, where your whole being senses that the static situation is an enemy of life itself. That’s what drives the really creative people — the artists, composers, revolutionaries and the like — the feeling that if they don’t break out of this jailhouse somebody has built around them, they’re going to die.
But they’re not being contrary in a way that is just decadent. They’re way too energetic and aggressive to be decadent. They’re fighting for some kind of Dynamic freedom from the static patterns. But the Dynamic freedom they’re righting for is a kind of morality too. And it’s a highly important part of the overall moral process. It’s often confused with degeneracy but it’s actually a form of moral regeneration. Without its continual refreshment static patterns would simply die of old age.
When you see Lila that way it’s possible to interpret her current situation as much more significant than psychology would suggest. If she seems to be running from something, that could be the static patterns of her own life she’s running from. But a Metaphysics of Quality adds the possibility that she’s running toward something too. It allows a hypothesis that if this running is stopped, if any static patterns claim her — if either her own insane patterns claim her or the static cultural patterns she is shutting out and running from claim her — then she loses.