On Rebellion

Recalcitrance and Cultivating a Sensibility

i.

Question: What are you rebelling against?

Answer: Whaddya got?

The thing most adjusted adults eventually understand is that everyone who marches to that proverbial different beat does so not necessarily out of abandon or indifference; it is usually a calculated, even cultivated design for defiance. Of course, when you’re young you have your youth to burn, like Marlon Brando on a motorcycle. Or perhaps you long to improve upon the petulance of previous generations: you hear the different drummer and then refuse to march even to that music. It isn’t that you’re going nowhere; you are content to not even go there—to keep one step ahead of oblivion, and achieve it by any means necessary so long as you’re still inside the cyclone. Or something.

ii.

Milan Kundera, in the book Testaments Betrayed, explains his vision of the novelist’s acumen, which is “a considered, stubborn, furious nonidentification, conceived not as evasion or passivity but as resistance, defiance, rebellion.”

In The Brothers Karamazov, there is a chapter entitled “Rebellion” wherein the mercurial Ivan lays out his rationale for rejecting God. If the ostensibly benevolent—and omnipotent—Being that created us in His image can be credited for everything we see and achieve, He must also be accountable for all the inexplicable misery. Ivan is, ultimately, less concerned with Heaven or Hell but what occurs on God’s watch, here on earth. Even if his personal salvation were secured; even if every soul’s redemption was guaranteed, the calculus is intolerable if it depends upon one innocent child being forced to suffer. Ivan is incapable of accepting any circumstance where ultimate peace is contingent upon anyone’s pain. This is his rebellion.

Taking this scenario one step further, Ursula K. Le Guin, in her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, synthesizes elements of what both Kundera and Dostoyevsky are describing. In her tale, once certain types of people ascertain the way things really work (on earth as it is in heaven), they turn their back and forsake the security of organized society. Unable to reconcile the cost of a not-so-ignorant bliss, Le Guin’s heroes rebel by refusing to endorse—or even abide—the practical, and spiritual cost of doing business.

In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut draws an intractable line in the sand (or salt), siding with vulnerable humans over an infallible God: “And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.”

What they said.

iii.

Once I’d dispensed with organized religion and then determined that academia was no longer a suitable solution, I might have become paralyzed, either because of other options or the lack thereof. Instead, I felt oddly liberated, although that realization by no means occurred overnight. Eventually, I found I was not running away from anything so much as I felt compelled to run toward almost everything. Avoiding quiet desperation became my approach; finding ways to make art into life and life into art was my new mantra.

My rebellion, if it could accurately (or fairly) be described as such, was rather simply an antagonism against cliché: clichéd thoughts, actions, excuses and even intentions. I was still not certain what was going to work for me, but I was steadily recognizing what wasn’t going to work. Understanding that bills had to be paid, relationships had to be cultivated, mistakes had to be made and, above all, that one day I would no longer be around, my objective revolved around an obsession to live a life nobody but I could live. During those post-graduate years I steadily fortified, for all time, the most important—and rewarding—relationship of my life: the one with myself.