Possession (Andrzej Zulawski, 1981)
"From now on she'll know how much righteous anger and sheer will she's got in her to say: "I, I can do as well, I can be better! I'm the best!" Only in this case can she become a success. Nobody taught me that. That's why I'm with you. Because you say "I" for me."
Guilt’s a funny thing. You do something bad, you feel bad about it, and then you do something good so that you stop feeling bad. You give someone flowers, do the dishes, or simply apologise. What a rigmarole. It would be a hell of a lot easier to simply not do the bad thing in the first place. But hey, where would be the fun in living like that?
You know that you shouldn’t eat all the pringles, that you should get out of bed early, that you should clean all the things, that you should exercise regularly, and so on and so forth. And sure, there is pleasure to be gained from doing the right thing. There is an immense satisfaction in getting it done. But it also feels so good to not do these things. In some ways it feels so much better to do the wrong thing. And we all know that this is the case.
So let’s do something wrong. I'm going to give you four choices and you're going to pick one. Here they are:
- Spill a glass of red wine on a white carpet at a party
- Be rude to someone in public
- Smoke a cigar in a non-smoking area
- Eat an entire cake
Have you chosen one? Don’t rush. Take your time.
Ready?
Good. Let’s continue.
Now, there’s probably a great deal to say about who you are simply based on which of these incursions you chose: a. is arguably an accident, for example, so maybe you can handle the idea of doing something wrong by mistake. On the other hand, b. could be justified to your mind, depending on the context (maybe the person you’re being rude to deserved that rudeness, maybe you're being rude to them because they were rude to someone else, and so on), whereas if done on purpose a. is a difficult one to justify. It’s unlikely that you would choose c. if you didn’t smoke, and if you do smoke and you chose c. you might say that you chose this one because it gives you an opportunity to do something that you enjoy (albeit, and again, something which you know is not necessarily good for you to do). And d. involves you ‘hurting’ no one but yourself, so maybe you chose this one to take everything on yourself, to ensure that no one else would get touched. Also, maybe you really like cake.
This is pretty interesting, isn’t it? Have a little think about what the choice you made might say about who you are. Seriously, look away from the screen, take a sip of a drink, look at the world around you, dwell on it, and then come back. Don’t you worry, I’m not going anywhere. I’m always here for you. Well, almost. Almost.
Now whatever you chose let’s take time to focus on how you are going to feel afterwards. The moment is over, it’s done, there’s no going back now. Action is complete. How are you feeling inside? Good? Hopefully not. But which of these two feelings do you think is dominant:
- Guilt
- Shame
You might say ‘They’re exactly the same, Ben, there’s no difference here, so that distinction is entirely non-existent,’ but you’d be hugely wrong if you said that.
Let’s look at the action of spilling a glass of red wine on a white carpet. Feelings of shame will draw you away from the situation. You’ll want to flee, to get out of there. You’ll feel everyone looking at you, and the hot flush that that brings, and you'll want it to end. Away, away, away. On the other hand, feelings of guilt will compel you to fix the situation. To do something about it. To tackle it head on. You might say ‘That’s hogwash, Ben!’ but it’s not. It’s the result of a 2012 study by Schaumberg and Flynn.
What they learned was that those who are more guilt prone than shame prone are actually subconsciously recognized as strong leaders by those around them. Even if the topic of guilt is never raised. Why? Because these people are seen to take care of things, they’re seen to be caring and motivated. Whereas those who are shame prone will simply try to avoid negative situations, even if they are the cause of them. Shame prone people will not fix, they will flee. As you might expect, shame prone people are not recognized as good leaders. Ergo, guilt is arguably better than shame.
That makes you feel pretty good about all those guilty feelings you have from time to time now, right?
But it doesn’t really address the question that I started here: why do we do bad things when we know they’re bad for us?
You can research this point quite thoroughly, and most of what you’ll find leans towards ‘here’s how to do those things that are good for you, even though you don’t want to do them’ but that’s not what I’m interested in at all. I’m interested in why bad things feel good. Why I do bad things even though they’re bad.
To give you a vaguely socially acceptable example I’ll tell you about that time on the train:
Ben on the train
It was a weekday, and I was travelling around on the tube during work hours. I was having an okay day, but for one reason or another was feeling pretty venomous. No specific reason for this, things were all tickety-boo, but I was not in the best mood. I was walking down the tunnel and could hear my train pulling in, so I ran: down a tunnel, up some stairs, across a bridge, down some stairs, and onto the train. I got on just as the doors were closing, and was a little out of breath. I sat down and looked at the map on the wall opposite me. I was doing a convoluted journey: go here and change, go here, walk to this station, go here, etc. And in these kind of journeys I tend to go on autopilot a little, so it’s good to look at the map every once in a while to make sure you’re on track. I was on track. Of course. Just then there was a voice. It said “Where are you going? I can tell you the best way.” And I looked down, and the voice belonged to a man who was sitting opposite me, and he was with his wife, and both of them were smiling, and comfortable, and happy. And I really don’t know why I did what I did. But I did.
Before I tell you what I did let’s talk about Naked Lunch.
In his 1959 book William Burroughs creates something called ‘the black meat’ which is culled from the body of giant centipedes: “The black meat is like a tainted cheese, overpoweringly delicious and nauseating so that the eaters eat and vomit and eat again until they fall exhausted.” Now this is a fabrication, and one that is intended to be read as a humorous metaphor, but I believe there is something solid in there, as there is in all good metaphors. I think the black meat moves us towards an understanding of why we do things we know we shouldn’t do. Not because we choose to, but because we are compelled by something bigger than us. Something that we don’t understand.
Going back to the train:
I looked over at the couple, at the smiling faces, at the nice clothes, and a wave of frustration came over me. How dare this man suggest that I need his help. How dare he attempt to fix someone who isn’t broken. There were a million things that I could have responded with, but what I chose to do was reply in a way that could definitely be termed as ‘unfriendly’. You could even argue that words such as ‘aggressive’ and/or ‘threatening’ could be thrown around here. I locked eyes with him. Did not blink. And said “I know where I’m going.”
That might not sound so bad, but trust me on this, it was threatening.
I kept my eyes locked with his until he looked away. And then I went about my day.
Today I feel bad about this. But I didn’t then. And I think it’s interesting that if we talk about the glass of red wine spilling across a white carpet we notice that those bad feelings, whether they’re guilt or shame, come to us immediately. As soon as the carpet begins to discolour we can feel it rush through our system in the same way: tainting and staining everything.
And at this stage I’m going to introduce the fact that we’re just talking about surface actions. We’re talking about the public realm, not the private. We’re not talking about those situations where things start getting really interesting: at a visceral level, on the inside, deep down and dirty, when we’re involved with something so personal (which operates on both internal and external levels) that it cuts us all the way to the bone. Sometimes we do the cutting, and sometimes other people do it. But there’s a culpability, and a question of motive that is dark and murky and unpleasant, and we don’t like to think or talk about this at all.
And then there’s that dream you had:
In your dream the objects of your guilt and your rage are physical, they’re not metaphorical. They grow, like flesh, like cancer, on and inside your body. So naturally you decide to do something about them. You’re in the bathroom and you can feel the regrets of yesterday growing into a lump under your skin, below your rib cage. You look around and as luck would have it there’s a scalpel on the side of the bath. You pick it up and with your free hand you find the lump below your skin. You gently nick at the skin over it, not wanting to hurt yourself to begin with, wanting only to create the smallest possible access point so that you can remove the offending flesh. As your amateur surgery continues you begin to become inured to the pain, and slowly grow more confident, bolder. The hole that you’re creating in your body is a start, and you can see the lump of flesh protruding, but it’s not enough. You can’t pull the lump through the clean slice you’ve made. You’re going to have to go deeper. You drop the scalpel to the floor. It hits the tiles hard and skitters away. You go in with your hands, pulling and ripping at your flesh. The lump inside is bigger than you thought, and you have to tear at yourself more and more. Previously clean surgical wounds are becoming a ragged assault on your own body. Pain is a different thing now, pain is no longer in the equation. You simply want to be clean and rid of the guilt, rid of it all. You have a firm grasp of the lump now and you tug at it. But it’s slippery, and you have to hold so tight that your fingers break apart the flesh of this invading presence. You’re forced to tease it out slowly: it’s writhing. It’s not dead flesh. It’s alive. It spins and snarls with its own rage, something completely outside of your own ego. As soon as you have finished, as soon as the final pieces of this twisting creature fall free of your body, before you even realise what you're doing, you bring it up to your mouth and feast on it. The meat is thick, and sinewy: you tear it apart with your incisors, chew it to a pulp with your molars, swallow it down. Reclaim the disease. It’s sick and nauseating, but it’s your sickness, your nausea, and the thought of leaving it outside of your body to grow cold and lifeless on the tiled floor is just unbearable. Your sin stays with you, but on your terms.