“Don’t Tell Me What I Can’t Do.”

After last week’s episode of “LOST” I head up to my bedroom. It smelt like sulfur. How fitting.

Locke’s signature line “Don’t tell me what I can’t do!” ripples through me like ice cold razor wire oscillating in the winter wind.

Once, in November 2006, I participated in a weekend workshop where people go – if you’ll indulge my Miltonian imagery – to battle their demons. Not in a casual “Oh you have to face your demons” kind of way. I mean really. I’d say it’s something akin to coming face-to-face with the parts of your personality that contribute, predominantly, to the cause of your undoing. Sound scary? Maybe. It can be confronting and that’s sort of part and parcel of the exercises inside of the workshop. My intuitive sense is that most people don’t get it, and some people do get it, coming out the other side with something akin to a transformation of self – a new perspective on who they are, etc.

Part of the course included an exercise where you identify what might be called the central theme of your life. For me it was “Fuck you. You cannot tell me what I can and cannot do.” I said this emphatically, with pride, after some thought. Essentially the same theme as one John Locke’s “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”

Long story short I didn’t complete the course. I walked out in the middle of it. Caused quite a scene actually. Call it a problem with authority, an unwillingness to play ball, or just being emotional and irrational. Call it what they call it, an “act.” Call it whatever you want. It is what it is.

Light Vs. Dark.

It’s been a tough choice, believe it or not (no pun intended) to choose which side of the board to be on. I’ve tried to walk both sides, play both sides, and I’m not sure that it’s worked out. And optimally I’d prefer to play no side. I guess I’m not sure what that even means – or looks like.

The followers of the Light say the followers of the Dark are just that: agents of darkness. And the followers of the Dark, identify themselves as the true followers of the Light, saying that their adversaries are the proxy of shadow. Which side is up and which side is down. The truly wise – it is said – comprehend and understand  and accept that as above so below, and as below so above. Dynamic symmetry. Mirror images. All are one. It’s maddening. And I am neither that wise, nor that capitulating. I am just lost… enraged, and inspired, and in my own little world, in idiot in the etymological sense of the world.

Either way, I see myself in Locke, in this… in matters of pride. I see how he lives in the flash sideways, how he comes to terms with his accident, and his paralysis. He chooses to just be. And we assume he lives happily ever after as a result of that. He surrenders his pride, his defiance, his constant flying in the face of what others and the rest of the world are willing to afford him in terms of that defiance. He accepts himself and his circumstances. How noble.

I am just too… proud, I suppose, to do that.

In the other reality, he dies, nearly committing suicide moments before being betrayed and murdered by his “friend.” Tragic.

Dignity escapes me. Pride commands me. Anger and hellfire consume me.

Pride And Defiance.

This whole episode – this whole theme of pride and defiance – had me thinking I’m hellbound, which is of course a ridiculous superstitious fear for those of you who do not find themselves stuck to/clinging to the same Cathlolic-informed sensibilities I had hammered into me throughout childhood. I wish the right-side of my brain would shut up long enough for me to have the atheistic comfort I once enjoyed in my teens and early twenties. Then again, that’s about when I began declaring war on my principles, shredding my self-respect in favor of getting along with the rest of the denizens of my world world: craven, sloppy, drunken idlers.

So again, to burn out… or fade away. Good or evil. Black or white. To be or not to be.