On Poking the Caged Hunger Artist: Sado-Masochism

Skip the B.S. 

by Skip Eisiminger

“Poke my bunny with a stick, Sir?”—Nick Downes

“You’re a total sociopath, Ron. I like that in a man.”—Scott Adams

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—1/2/12—Clemson students are often perplexed by Edgar Poe’s narrator in “The Raven.” Most of them have grown up in middle-class homes with one or two parents and one to six grandparents, so the experience of a solitary young man who turns his apartment into a silk-lined mausoleum after the death of his lover, Lenore, is foreign to them.

All right, I confess, the experience was foreign to me as well the first time I read it. I did not understand how or why a man’s grief could morph into extended, self-imposed punishment. Poe’s student asks the storm-tossed raven (surely just the product of a troubled imagination) several questions that can only be answered, “Nevermore.”

He’s a bright-enough fellow and knows the bird he’s created has a limited vocabulary; yet he continues to pose questions that his interlocutor can only answer negatively and rime with “Lenore.” Furiously, he continues the interrogation long after most of us would have called animal control. Moreover, only a madman speaks iambic English in trochees. At some point, it dawned on me that the mourner did not make that phone call because he was enjoying his questioning like some sadistic inquisitor who finally has his enemy where he wants him—strapped to an electric chair. Except, in the student’s case, the foe is inside his head.

I recall one student comparing Poe’s narrator to a contestant on a reality show. I never had the pleasure of watching Joe Millionaire but, apparently, it involved several gold diggers throwing themselves at Joe in hopes of winning a many-carated engagement ring.

Joe, however, only earned $19,000 annually, and everyone except the shameless women on the show knew that. The student said that there was one contestant who somehow figured out Joe’s real potential, yet continued to court him in earnest. He said it was a bit like Charlie Brown eternally bent on kicking a football he knows is going to be pulled away.

Exactly, I said. Some wounds cry out for the salt. Charlie reminds me of an aunt who said the first time I met her, “I divorced a man who was an alcoholic and abused me in order to marry your uncle who, I’ve learned, drinks heavily and beats me.” Since I was present to mourn the death of my uncle’s first wife, I decided not to pursue the matter, but I won’t forget that introduction from a woman intent on destroying herself. A few years later, she succeeded in spades.

Whether internal or external, the weak make a tempting target. When my sainted mother-in-law began showing signs of dementia, it was all I could do not to tease her. I wanted her to fight for the memory and life that were slipping away, but she just smiled without comprehending my efforts to stimulate her brain. Once I came up behind her as she was watching my wife prepare a meal in the very kitchen where she had prepared food for nearly 50 years. “Mom,” I said, “don’t you want to help?”

“What can I do?”

I had some potatoes in a basket that I had brought from the basement. “Well, for starters,” I said,“you can wash and peel these.” Mom just smiled and went back to marveling at her daughter, who must have seemed like some prestidigitator turning water into wine.

While we were eating dinner, I noticed that Mom had taken only the heels of the oil-and-vinegared tomatoes. After I complained, she said, “Skip, you know how much I love the ends.”

“No, you don’t; no one does—we have always shared the ends.”

While we were quibbling, my wife ate the disputed slices off her mother’s plate and replaced them with some thick ones. By the time Mom resumed eating, she’d forgotten what we were discussing.

I suppose the closest I’ve come to masochistic behavior were the times I graded essays for the Education Testing Service.

For a quasi-eternity, hundreds of English teachers sat in a drafty, New Jersey ballroom and graded tens of thousands of high-school essays on a topic like “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” I compared the tedium to my father as whipping my thighs with a riding crop eight hours a day because it felt so good when I finally stopped.

If I’ve sipped the forbidden pleasures of masochism, I can’t say the same for sadism. When I see it on film or read about it, I often have to look away—it’s just too painful to experience even at second-hand. One recent exception was a 45-second video of a mother and grade-school-age daughter driving in England. The middle-aged woman smiles proudly, looking in the mirror at the girl coloring in the back seat. Outside, it is beginning to snow. Without warning, a police siren causes the van’s driver to swear silently. Seconds later, an aging traffic cop asks for the driver’s papers, and she begins rummaging through her purse. Slightly embarrassed by what he’s done, the officer asks the girl, “Hello. Mummy in a bit of a hurry, was she?”

Barely audible, the girl whispers, “She’s not my mummy,” and holds up a crude sign that reads, “HELP.”

Blindsided by the revelation, the officer inhales sharply, draws himself to attention, and yells, “Step out of the car, Madam—step out of the vehicle now!”

The camera, meanwhile, zooms in on the youthful Dragon Lady, smiling with satisfaction in the back seat. Without ever revealing how the mother is going to handle this predicament, the director cuts to black with a caption reading: “Born to create drama.”

Now this appalling brat is not Hitler telling Himmler how disappointed he is that the Jews are not suffering enough in the gas chambers, or heavyweight Mike Tyson hitting his wife with “the best punch I’ve ever thrown,” or a group of boys killing a calf with lit cigarettes, or even an office worker pressing the elevator’s “Close” button by “mistake.” It’s just the beginning of a fine family story with plenty of room for a therapist to untie a loose knot.

I once heard a minister explain Job’s comforters as “Schadenfrohfriends” who visited Job because they enjoyed seeing his fallen state. I don’t doubt there are people that debased but, apparently, I have more faith in human nature than the minister.

On the rare occasions when I visit the sick, I go reluctantly, because those visits usually remind me of my own mortality lurking in the cancer ward. But most of us go, I suspect, not to gloat, but to tell some good stories and provide some services the disabled cannot provide for themselves. The majority of us, I firmly believe, are hard-wired to be altruists.

It was through cooperation that we survived two million Pleistocene winters: not baring our throats or clubbing our spouses.