Fly on the Wall—Bringing a Lighter Zoological Gaze to a Horrid Current Event

Fly on the Wall—Bringing a Lighter Zoological Gaze to a Horrid Current Event

As we all found out last week when a person not long out of high school decided to climb a shed and take a few pot-shots at the US ex-President, the hazards of mentally disturbed people “going postal” are perpetually with us.  And we ought to not be too politically correct to say so.  Instead, we can try to make others aware that the very nature of discourse—a dialogue between self and other(s)—may best be understood as emanating from the internal seat of consciousness whereby, as children, we learned to disentangle our “I” and our “me” from the inner sensations we receive, such that we can make sense of them and decide how to react.  Things get dicey, though, when we feel attacked or aggrieved.

Violence, verbal but especially physical, arises, in a sense, as an extension, a spectral enhancement, of lingering dissonance between how one feels on the inside and how things are and how we present ourselves as being on the outside.  Words can hurt, as we know, and injurious sentiments matter—a reason why respectful dialogue in all spheres of life is a hallmark of emotional and academic maturity.  Indeed, it’s worth noting here that, as we age, we come to realize that emotional maturity is less about calendar age than we’d assume.  Adult humans, ourselves included, experience inner tectonics of feelings that occasionally, or, in some folks, with disturbing regularity, emit eruptions of fulsome vile: spewing forth as verbal gunfire.  In this sense, the cold war of internal diplomacy, whereby a person learns to live with the natural discrepancies that arise in life between wants and needs, can give way to violent discursive eruptions (or worse).  And perhaps for this reason, the current in vogue concept of functional freeze is so timely; this is where a person achieves “bare minimum basic functioning” while feeling increasingly deadened and desensitized, emotionally, on the inside.  Perhaps there’s no telling how such people may react because they’ve literally lost touch with how to feel alive as a human being.

Normal interaction in society implicates the animal instincts of our human essences where, as we know, the most dangerous wild beasts aren’t the ones running their normal course of life.  The most dangerous creatures in nature are the ones who are literally constrained, monitored and domesticated, physically abused, and nutritionally maltreated in such a way that they have no means of natural response but by recourse to their normal instincts.  The gunman “was quiet, but he was just bullied.  He was bullied so much.”  Instead of being risk adverse, which all animals have evolved to be given the lack of emergency rooms in nature (let alone wait times), animals that experience constant external physical duress are prone to lashing out.  Orcas and tigers have in recent years attacked their masters, for instance, and, depending on how you frame it, the 50% divorce rate in our culture says something about the unstable power dynamics in the modern family.

Language itself connotes this tendency for general instability in humans, with phrases like “cagey”, “angry as a bear” and “ornery as an old sow” (a gender-neutral sow, of course).  In a sense, because we cannot totally comprehend the irruptive dangers of living amidst unbalanced people, people who seem normal enough until they snap or who are always going off the rails (thus implying a train with a given destination that it now chooses to eschew), we tend to misunderstand ourselves right when we need to comprehend them most.  People who snap, who become violent, who in a classroom throw their papers off of their desk, storm out of a meeting at work, or flip over a board game table when they are losing, are not people functioning in a highly attenuated, evolved, state.  They’ve instead come to express the rarest of maladies, the disease of, if you will, not staying true to their authenticity.  After all, as we learn to understand ourselves, none of us honestly sees ourselves as callous, abusive, or uncaring.  Our self-awareness isn’t designed that way.  We have to be generous with our delicate, fragile, egos, such that when we lash out its only as a last resort—knowing, as we do, the repercussions.  We’ve all had moments where we claim to have not been ourself in an instant, or even for a number of hours or years.  But, tragically, some folks seem to get stuck that way.

So maybe, if you or someone you know seems a candidate for the functional freeze category, or just seems a bit out of sorts while largely functioning normally, why not blithely ask them how they feel on the inside? The young man who shot at Trump was an awarded science and math pupil and wasn’t known as a “Trump hater”; quite a fact given how few of us can emit flatulence without striking, symbolically mind you, someone in that camp.  Clearly, though, empathy is what people need if they are doing so poorly that they would lash out at others, to their peril.  And a sense of humor to lighten the mood.

We don’t need a course in therapy to know that a good portion of the suffering population will be pleased to give us a rundown of their current grievances, whether in life, in family, or in current events.  And if they do need coaxing, try giving an example from your own life that matches the functional freeze spectrum (or another, to be detailed next week).  It never hurts to reach out to people so long as you don’t claim expertise that you lack; we are all equal in human wisdom in terms of how many years we’ve been alive, after all.

We are all students of this thing called life.  We each of us feel a panoply of human sensations.  Some of us, regrettably and, reminiscent of the avuncular phrase to toddlers that if they scowl too much their face will stay that way, seem to get frozen in an existential grimace.  Miserable is the one “that way” what will surely never have a happy parade with floats and helium balloons.  Believe me I know, as a founding member of a local community college pride club.  Curmudgeons are not joiners, unless it’s to join in a kvetch session about this of that cultural pariah.  Functional freeze likewise typically isn’t something for the Eeyore’s in our life, who wear their miseries gladly on their sleeve.  Functional freeze affects the pleasant, even-tempered, peers among us who seem to have all their ducks in a row, all their caboose away from a moose, and generally to be doing fine in life.  The thing to remember, then, is that to see if oneself or others has functional freeze (or another mental health condition) we want to remember that we’re all mostly water, ideally thawed water, and people in their heart of hearts want to thaw, to be understood and respected, and that mutual respect might be the best defence of all against unscripted violence and cultural calamity.

If we’re really fortunate and effective we might even be able to channel some poetic life wisdom from the author Henry Miller, who wrote:

“Strange as it may seem today to say, the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, serenely, divinely aware.  In this state of god-like awareness one sings; in this realm the world exists as poem.  No why or wherefore, no direction, no goal, no striving, no evolving.  Like the enigmatic Chinese sage one is rapt by the everchanging spectacle of passing phenomena.  This is the sublime, the a-moral state of the artist, she who lives only in the moment, the visionary moment of utter, far-seeing lucidity.  Such clear icy sanity that it seems like madness.  By the force and power of the artist’s vision the static, synthetic whole which is called the world is destroyed.  The artist gives back to us a vital, singing universe, alive in all is parts.”

Icy in a good way, in other words, icy enlightenment in our veins! And from there, perhaps the floodgate of illumination (our own included) may gush forth.  Just as a small stream can lead a glacier to calf, offering up even a trickle of empathy might lead an appreciative tear to appear on the sloped countenance of our interlocutor’s visage.

References
Miller, H.  In Popova, M.  (2021).  ‘Henry Miller on Creative Death’.  The Marginalian. 
Khiron Clinics.  (2023).  ‘Unwrapping the numbing grip of functional freeze’.  Retrieved from https://nypost.com/lifestyle/what-is-functional-freeze/
Steinberg, B.  (2024).  ‘What is ‘functional freeze’? New York Post.  Retrieved from https://nypost.com/lifestyle/what-is-functional-freeze/

The Fly on the Wall has been a part of The Voice Magazine almost as long as I have.  Having a “Best of” without it simply wouldn’t be a fair representation of the Magazine.  This reader recommended installment from our July 19th edition was interesting because of how it tied in to current events while touching on the common themes of the Fly on the Wall: language, psychology, society, and how education improves all of it.