Dennis Dale’s daughter purchased the right for him to post on Slog for a week through our annual holiday auction Strangercrombie, which this year benefited neglected children and the homeless. More info about our charity auction here. The views expressed in Dale’s editorials on Slog are his alone and have not been edited based on ideology.

We’ve all been working hard; let’s take the day off. I will be frolicking in the U-District, shambling among you like a specter; if I hadn’t a date already I might even invite you to look me up. Probably not the best idea. More old material molding beneath the fold.

Possession

I confess I’ve never been overtaken entirely by passion. I’ve never given myself over unconditionally and without reservation to anything; neither joy nor grief, hate nor love. Likewise for any given idea; but this is just another way of saying the same thing, for the passions are ideas too. The purest ideas, confounding transposition into mere language and only hinted at by even the most sublime art. One has to live such ideas. The poets tell us the lover, as opposed to the merely amorous, is a zealot prepared to accept death itself on behalf of the idea of love.

But for me always there is an inaccessible self-consciousness, a clinical awareness that becomes alien. There is a foreigner within narrating the varying circumstances of my existence: so this is Dennis stricken with grief; so this is Dennis afflicted by love; etc. It has taken in every tragedy or conquest, every humiliation and all the pride, unaffected. This awareness constitutes, impossible I know, a distinct entity. Another Dennis.

I’ve always had my suspicions about this separate consciousness that is not conscience. It’s not the opposite of the conscience, but the absence of it, that part between mindless instinct and moral self-awareness. It—he—observes me as if from without. He waits for the thing, whatever it is, to end; he makes no distinctions of geography—the peak of Everest or the easy chair, it’s no difference. He takes everything in with a wonder-less curiosity, and never with surprise, even as he takes note of the novelty of a given occurrence, how familiar it is, or not, how it might change the dynamic of my existence, but not really, because, he knows, it’s all just protocol and convention in the end, until it all ends—and this I expect he will witness with the same idle, abstract gaze. He is impossibly inhuman.

But there he is, always, looking down on the confusion of my psyche as if through impenetrable glass. I can only dimly sense his formless presence, there behind the reflection I cast on the pane separating us, unforgiving in its clarity. He sees all and records nothing; he doesn’t care. He humors no vanity. He has the goods on me; he doesn’t care. He taunts me with his lack of reproach for anything, great or small. He will not be run off; he can’t be gotten to. His indifference is eternal, mocking, superior.

I’ve felt passion, of course, even “deeply”, whatever that means to you. But if a man hasn’t at least once been “consumed” or “blinded” by passion, whether it be love or hate (and what’s the difference, in the end, between these inversions of each other?), he cannot say he knows them. It then follows that he cannot recognize them in others; he can only behave as if he understands. He knows what a thing is supposed to look like and responds accordingly, in the interests of order, but mostly out of habit. Eastern mystics of one sort or another—and I can’t tell them apart—might say he is unrealized as a human being.

But a human can only be human, in part and in whole, no more or less in the depths of “inhumanity”, and always. The depraved man appalls us not only for his deeds but for his irrefutable demonstration of humanity’s potential for evil; it must then follow that he demonstrates for each of us our own capacity for evil, because we cannot escape the bond that is our shared humanity. With each transgression the evil expand the Devil’s realm, as surely as the the great establish the uppermost boundaries of human achievement. Every iteration of a man is an argument on behalf of and proving itself; lives committed to malice, lives sacrificed selflessly or stupidly, lives of “madmen”, lives “wasted” to sloth or obsession; all are competing models of man. No man can escape the assertion that is his life; he lives as he would have everyone live. Each life is the proposition: “this is Man.”

There is some sort of accommodation between the reasoning frontal lobe and the reptilian brain stem, a Faustian bargain, a grotesque, conjoined symbiosis, right here in my head. Here appetite meets abstraction. A devil’s workshop fashioning rationales for base impulse. It’s a bureaucracy employed in legalizing anything, as needed. But it is not immoral—that would be too human, a transgression of morality and thus a recognition of it, leaving the prospect for contrition and redemption; it is amoral. It’s out of this world, man.

A Christian might call him the Devil. Popular convention calls him “detachment”, a sort of psychological debilitation, an unfortunate byproduct of modern society, or of Society; a decayed capacity to feel resulting from the ease and equivocal nature of the age; a problem of too little struggle—and too much time. One convention even, ironically, blames Convention. Vanity imagines him as a superior posture. Psychology gives him one name after another, as if to coax him out by finally landing on the magic invocation; after long and total failure, this science of the mind resorts finally, crassly, to myriad refinements and specialized forms of the original, temporary solace from the alien self: the intoxication and suppression of the senses.

These answers may suffice for a time, even a lifetime, but in the end they all fall short, because they allow for some accommodation or destruction of the demon. Even the Devil cowers before God, just as we mortals do. I am witness: my demon is a constant in presence, measure, and autonomy, immutable and ageless, there from the flash of conception to a death he will likely witness with the same impenetrable indifference. But ultimately he cannot be separate, even if he confounds my will to the end; he is central, he is in fact the last reducible part of me, to be resolved by fire or oblivion, as the case may be. He will not distinguish between these two, therefore I cannot. I speak only for myself, understand.

51 replies on “And Now For Something Completely Diffident”

  13. Canuck, hello, thank you for the wakeup that it’s time for a SHOT! Only three more posts allowed per the Strangercrombie rules, tickticktick…

  17. Ok that….
    Dammit it was incomprehensible!
    I sat here with my eyes getting squintier and squintier, and my brow getting wrinklier and wrinklier, and I came up with…….Dennis fears he may have multiple personality disorder?
    There’s going to be more than ONE Manhattan when I get home this evening let me tell you!

  23. Heh. No, I don’t do The Facebook…too many old boyfriends in the woodwork…but I would lurve to make it to Slog happy one of these days and meet up with my besties…mwah!

  24. Hey, Dennis Dale’s daughter!

    Instead of buying op-ed space on The Stranger, could you make sure your dad is taking his medication? Cuz it’s all shits and giggles until he opens fire in a kindergarten.

  26. Are you guys sure this is only Loughner-esque? I don’t think y’all are taking Dale seriously enough, or despising him adequately. Needs more . . . reflex, and even less taste.

  28. “WAITER: Well, you look like you’re getting the idea, so why don’t I give you these, uh, conversation cards? They’ll tell you a little about philosophical method,…”

    it craps me that there’s an ‘s’ in his name…

  29. @23 Don’t keep us waiting 4eva, Canuck. Slog Happy, Canuck Edition will be epic. You’ll sail into the sound on an illegal iceberg turned rave boat, and ride up to the chosen bar on polarbear-back (get your mind out of the gutter) where we’ll all be waiting in our finiest.

  31. Dennis, you poor guy. Let me try to help you make a point.

    The target audience for the NBA are those who want to see basketball played by the best players in the world.

    The target audience for the WNBA, apparently, are those who want to see basketball played by people without penises.

    It’s a free country, and people can watch whatever kind of basketball they want. But isn’t it kind of strange that the latter audience, small as it is, even exists? I mean, how does the absence of penises on the court make the game more compelling to these folks? One wonders if the WNBA’s audience has something against people with penises.

    But shit, I prefer the NBA, so what do I know.

  32. OuterCow, I love that you know me enough to assume that I’ll read something sexay into that, because you are right! (Okay, polar bear is simply mode of transport, got it, whatever….no fun…) and Kim, oh I would dearly love to meet all of you, that would be amazing! (You guys have Jagermeister there, right??) Hide yer lampshades and get out the 1975 disco tunes, oi!!!

  33. @33: Yes, we have Jagermeister, but more importantly, we have Fireball, which is certainly among the best liquors ever produced in the Great White North.

    If you go, I may just have to get off my ass and go myself.

  34. What is this “Fireball” of which you speak, seandr? It sounds like something I could develop a rewarding relationship with…yes, if I ever make it to Slog Happy, I’ll be disappointed if you and the drag queens fail to attend…

  35. @26, PRECISELY what I was thinking. Dennis writes like Charles, if Charles were sent to a WASP-run deprogramming camp, forced to read Ayn Rand over and over for months, and then turned loose on a bottle of Drambuie and a 1998-vintage iMac.

  36. Dennis: that level of detachment is not normal. My dreams have the third-person aspect you describe, but I’d be worried if my life did. You might want to have yourself checked out.

  37. @35: Oh it would be EPIC if you came to a Slog Happy. I would take the day OFF for that. And there might be cupcakes again……..(wanders off in a blissful haze)

  39. As a former writing TA at a prestigious university I can confidently say that this essay resembles the drivel submitted by freshman bros who just read some Nietzsche and suddenly think they’re all deep and interesting and stuff.

    Your thoughts and ideas are not unique. Your writing is opaque, bordering on unreadable. Your ‘philosophical’ arguments are weak and self-serving.

    Go read some Kierkegaard and get over yourself.

  41. Mmmmm..Fireball whiskey. I’m out of that, as well. (Vodka, Gin and Fireball all out at once? What am I doing with my life?)

    Canuck, if you’re heading over there for a SLOG happy, you better tell me. I’ll see if I can get a trip across the country the same week as well. Although, the Toronto sloggers also need to remind you how excited we are to plan a SLOG North based on you making it to the centre of the world (I kid, I kid).

    Haven’t figured out what to have as my shot, yet. Will post again with my drink choice.

  45. @41 Oooo, cinnamon whiskey…be still, my beating heart, that does sound yum indeed…

    Canadian Nurse, although I am slightly worried that meeting me in person will be a big let down (“what? no glitter fingernails? no 7 inch lucite heels??”) I would love, love, love to part of Slog Happy Canada, we would, of course, need one laptop (laptop, OuterCow, not lapdance, sheesh!) and an open thread on which to post our progressing inebriation…I will bring my iPod with the “Disco!” mix (“shake your GROOVE thing…”)

  46. @40: “As a former writing TA at a prestigious university….”

    Let me guess what you are now: Senior barista at a mall coffee shop.

    Go read some Marmaduke and get over yourself.

  50. Ziggity @1: Wow, this is frankly Loughneresque.

    I was going to write, “This is kinda what Jared Loughner will sound like in about 30 years (if he doesn’t get the death penalty).” Good to know the first commenter had the same reaction.

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