The Living Sea of Waking Dreams by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Be Kind To Be Cruel

Anna and her brothers, Tommy and Terzo, are keeping their mother alive in a Tasmanian hospital while the world around them burns with apocalyptic wildfires. As she withers, they invest more will, emotion and money to stave off the end. Of course they believe that they do so out of love. But the author (and the reader) know this is a fabrication. These are cruel people.

Yes, it’s true. Human being can rationalise anything, including the torture of loved ones, perhaps especially the torture of loved ones when they cannot resist, namely when they are very young or very old. When young, we teach them to want, desire, believe, and say the right things (and hide other things that you must never ever tell about), through psychological intimidation if not outright physical abuse. When old, we insist they undergo every possible treatment to prolong their life, regardless of the pain, anxiety, and distress it might entail. We do these things in the name of love, of duty, even religious obligation. We are monsters.

“For Terzo it was simple—and she understood now why that was. To every problem of their mother’s weakening flesh was their infinitely stronger cruelty. Once you accepted its necessity, it was unstoppable and impossible to defeat. She felt almost giddy with the sheer power of their cruelty. Buy in the help they needed using Francie’s money—and to what better use could it be put?”

The fact is that we love power, or at least the feeling of power. Power to control events, to shape outcomes, to create the future. There’s a certain buzz one can only get through deciding, acting, and claiming credit for a result. If the result is the extended life of another, the buzz itself justifies the love of power, not only is power necessary but it is also rightfully employed in our hands. Given sufficient power, we may even come to believe that our hands are those of God guiding the world towards its correct fate:

“Anna and Terzo both had what people call comforts: a little money, a little power. By the standards of the real rich, pitiful; by the metrics of the truly powerful, negligible, even laughable. But still: money and power. And they were accustomed to acting on the world and not allowing the world to act on them.”

The rationalisation extends to our possession of power not just its exercise. We don’t have any real power, we say. In fact we are the victims of power. It is others, the rich, the influential, the connected, who have power. We are forced to protect ourselves from these people, as well as from the vagaries of existence itself, that is to say, from God. We are obligated to resist this power, particularly the power of death. Thinking of her mother in light of her brother’s dictates about her treatment, Anna muses “It wasn’t enough that she lived in her sea of waking dreams. In Terzo’s view, she had to live like us, rationally, in a rational universe. And as there was to be no death.” Isn’t life the most important thing?

What we mean is that my life is important. My life should not be interrupted by the loss of your life. My life should not be compromised by the reminder that your death foretells my death. My life is painful enough; your pain relativises mine and at least doesn’t make my pain more intense. My life can be given purpose and meaning by exploiting your life; your life makes my life seem bigger. Your continuing life is a distraction from the vast numbers of other lives - whole ecosystems - that are being extinguished now and prospectively over which I don’t have any control whatsoever. We never make these rationalisations explicit. Instead we call them love, devotion, obligation, even hope. Thus we engage in the ultimate delusion.

What we are deluded about is fear. Not necessarily fear of death, or loneliness, or unwanted memories and regrets. What we fear is nothing, literally nothingness, for which we have no other word. “What is the image of nothing?” Anna asks. Exactly. Nothingness doesn’t exist. We used to think that nothingness was an interstellar emptiness. But we’ve learned that emptiness is filled to overflowing with ‘stuff,’ fields and interactions, and comings and goings of particles. Such space is hardly nothing. Nothingness is inconceivable. Nothingness is what mystics mean by God.

It is the certainty of the inconceivable which, I think, scares the pants off us. So much so that we are willing to inflict unlimited suffering on those who confront us with its paradoxical presence. Our bodies may return to the earth but that ability/organ/conception we call our minds goes no where at all (perhaps it was never real at all). And with it our ability to rationalise comes to a dead halt. Our minds can’t adapt to that; we can’t rationalise it no matter how hard we try.

This is why so-called schizophrenics are such a problem. By her dying mother’s bedside, Anna’s schizophrenic nephew says, “Your mind’s a garden, Auntie... Mine’s fucking Aleppo.” The mind that can’t rationalise is, while not dead, a living symbol of both the fragility of thought and the nothingness for which there are no words. Schizophrenics are beyond reason. Thus the historic treatment of schizophrenics - incarceration, drug-induced idiocy, electro-shock. All in the name of ‘care.’

In Flanagan’s novel, the rationalisation we do around death is a kind of stealing, a stealing from reality. It makes words superior to what is and what happens. It shows up in Anna’s mysterious loss of body parts, in her son’s thefts from around the house, and in her inability to resist her dominant brother’s will, expressed of course in directive, decisive words. Her brother steals her own will, her self, every time he argues, bullies and cajoles. Repressing this makes the siblings merely “amiable strangers.”

The brother, Tommy, father of the schizophrenic, knows what lies buried beneath his brother’s words but he is incapable of overcoming their power:

“Tommy stutters. I mean, is translating experience into words an achievement at all? Or is it just the cause of all our unhappiness? Is it our tragedy and our ongoing conceit? The world gets carried away with words, phrases, and elaborate paragraphs. One word leads to another and soon enough you have affairs, wars, genocide and the Anthropocene. Silence, according to Tommy when in his cups, is the only place where truth can be found.”

Tommy understands that in the matter of death, words have nothing to say. His stutter is an obvious trope about his relationship to language.
Tommy knows that contrary to what the poet says, and despite what our waking dreams within language (not just the internet for heaven’s sake) would like us to believe, death does have dominion.

So Anna finally realises about her mother “They had saved her from death, but only… by infinitely prolonging her dying.” With this Anna also has an epiphany that coincides with Tommy’s insight: “words are walls between ourselves and reality,” especially the reality of other people. Consciousness itself may be the image of the nothingness she senses, a void filled with ultimately meaningless words that are shown to be so at death - the release her mother had longed for, from her words as well as theirs.

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