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Notice that the conscience has already been removed in this illustration. |
When I was five, my parents took me to the
hospital, where the doctors dispatched me with ether, opened my mouth, reached
into the center of my head, and removed a few things. My mother, carefully explaining
the word “vestigial,” had promised me that the offending items, called
“tonsils,” served no good purpose, that in fact without them I would suffer
fewer of the sore throats that are (I have since decided) the proper lot of
five-year-olds.
I had my suspicions about the entire
enterprise. Most of the other stuff Mother Nature had given me—teeth, spit,
nostrils—seemed pretty useful, I thought, and on the whole it wasn’t like Her
to stick in merely-decorative extras. But then I considered earlobes, navels,
and toe hair, and on balance I decided to leave my trust in Mother Weathers.
The instant I woke up after the operation,
I knew I had been bamboozled. I was in a strange bed in a dark room full of
whining little bodies. My throat screamed unceasingly with a condensed lifetime
of pain. I quickly ran out of Kleenex to cough blood into. My mother was
nowhere to be seen.
Within the limits imposed by uvular agony,
I began to bawl, and after an eternity a giant nurse materialized by my bed, white
and ghostlike, whispering coldly, “Hush.
Brave boys don’t cry. Sssh. Don’t be a sissy. Quiet! You’ll wake up the other
children!” At any time earlier in my life, her appeals would have worked at
once. But the operation had changed me. Instead of meekly shutting up, I looked
her defiantly in the eye, pointed to the empty Kleenex box, and demanded, as
loudly as I could, “UH!”
I was never the same thereafter. It was
clear to me that when the doctors reached into my head, they had removed more
than my tonsils. Later, surrounded by still-cold Popsicle sticks in my bed at
home, I hounded my mother about it, and she finally admitted that, yes, the
doctors had in fact also removed something called my “adenoids.” That sounded
ominous. “Adenoids,” my mother explained, were lodged behind your nose and made
you talk like a kazoo.
So she
said. Today, sixty-umph years later, I know that when the doctors excised my
adenoids, they were actually after, gasp, my
conscience. Apparently they got it. I haven’t heard from that adenoidal
Jiminy Cricket of a naysayer since, and even today I am unable to secrete the
master hormone called . . . Guilt.
 |
Jiminy Cricket plays no role in my psyche. |
Yes, I am the only guilt-free man of the
Post-Freudian Age. It is a strange thing, and a mixed blessing, to go through
life without tonsils, adenoids, or guilt. While those around me writhe in
creative agonies of conscience (“Mea culpa! I don’t love my father enough!”
they moan, proceeding to write chapter twenty of their third novel; “Oy, the
sins I commit in the dark!” they wail, finishing the fourth movement of their
Sixth Symphony), I lollygag through life burbling, “Hey, what’s the big deal?”
and swing on the hammock of worthlessness.
But if guilt is the juice of creation, it
is also, from what I can see, the hemlock of despair. I’m just as happy to be
without it, thank you, even if it means I’ll never win a Pulitzer.
At this point I need to make a
distinction. While I don’t feel guilt, I do, of course, feel shame. I am, after all, only human.
Shame tells me, “You are foolish, weak, a dud.” I have, naturally, all sorts of
things to be ashamed of. I once invented a joke about a New Delhi swain who,
attempting to seduce a well-wrapped young thing, uses the line, “But, Indira,
love means never having to stay your sari!” That’s
something to be ashamed of. The way I look without a shirt is a shame. My
forgetfulness for names is something to be seriously ashamed of. The amount of
time I spend in front of the tv is monstrously shameful. And so, infinitely,
on.
 |
Love means never having to stay your sari. |
But one cannot help one’s afflictions,
even as one is ashamed of them. A withered wit, a sunken chest, a gripless
memory, even a limp character—one doesn’t feel guilty about them because one
did not intend them.
For guilt is about intent. More specifically,
it is about malice—the intent to do harm. The way I figure it, if I never
intend to do harm—and I never do—I have nothing to feel guilty about. When I
had it, therefore, my conscience was indeed a vestigial organ, and it is just
as well they took it out with my adenoids.
Oh, I’ll admit that there have been times
since the age of five when I thought that maybe the doctors had botched the
operation, leaving behind just a piece of a conscience, a slip of pathogenic
tissue hanging invisibly behind my septum. In the fourth grade once, for
example, as we were passing our papers forward after a spelling test, I noticed
as Bobby Zambri’s paper reached me that he had spelled the word “dangerous”
with an “e” in it; that looked more inspired than my version, so while
pretending to shuffle the papers around, I sneaked an “e” into mine. And later,
for a period of about five years starting when I was 13, I regularly did things
to my sweet older brother George that resulted in his enduring various forms of
physical and emotional pain, not to mention teeth marks, knowing that because
he was bigger he wasn’t allowed to retaliate in kind. And still later, when I
was 19, I managed, with all the delicacy of a beanball, to bruise the feelings
of a nice girl named J---. Fleetingly, I felt something almost like guilt in
each case. But nah, I decided, it was just the nature of youth, for which no
one—least of all myself—could blame me. And so I bubbled blithely—and
guiltlessly—on.
 |
This is how I once treated the feelings of a nice girl. |
Since then I have been negligent, stupid,
ignorant, insensitive, dim, petty, ornery, and disgusting—but, hey, what’s the
big deal? I never try to hurt
anybody.
Nevertheless, my absence of guilt has been
infuriating for many of those who have touched my life, especially wives,
children, parents, lovers, bosses, psychiatrists, giant nurses, and others with
a stake in emotional manipulation. “Ach, how you hurt me!” and “Sssh! You’ll
wake the kids!” never work on me. I am not to be moved by appeals to an organ I
no longer possess. And that, as any giant nurse will tell you, makes me a
dangrous man.
(The original version of this essay
appeared in Memphis magazine in July 1986.)
