FOR MANY YEARS I SUFFERED the following recurring nightmare: I was on the run, guilty of murder, about to be apprehended and extradited to the execution chamber of some unknown state. What especially horrified me was that, although I was presumably guilty as charged, I could not remember whom I killed and why, nor who was bringing the charges. I always remembered those nightmares I went about terribly anxious for days thereafter.
One night during the Kosovo bombings, I dreamt I was present for the secret burial of mass-murder victims. It was a grisly and gruesome dream, in vivid color, and included the unbearable stench of death. As usual, I felt convicted of the horrendous crime of murder. This time the victims were obvious, in various stages of decomposition and in fire-petrified rigor mortis, but I was still awfully nonplused.
Why me? Just then an excuse appeared, a living scapegoat carrying a shovel. That explains it! He did it! But, of course, it was the gardener! Self-charged, I had finally cleared myself! I awoke and sat upright, feeling greatly relieved. The long-standing mystery that had plagued me for many years was finally solved. Yes, I mused thankfully, that was Death planting his seeds, perpetuating creative destruction by cultivating even more immediate reasons for bloodshed. But that is not my fault! Not in particular, anyway.
So why had I felt guilty of murder in my dreams? Because I was a killer in the abstract, a thinker of murderous thoughts while awake, thoughts to be avenged in dreams. Yes, I confess I have had murderous thoughts, the sort that can only be translated into deeds in confessional novels.
For instance, when I saw what was happening to the hapless Kosovars at Serbian hands, my first thought was to level Belgrade with a tactical nuclear weapon. To blame the Serb leader was patent nonsense, I reflected, for he is only the epitome of the collective Serbian homicidal intent, the leader who is given the means to carry out, in the name of "the people", the barbaric murder and mayhem. Therefore, my logic came to its inevitable conclusion: Serbs deserve the ultimate wrath of the righteousness of the sky gods, the modern justice of nuclear holocaust, or, at the very minimum, the massive carpet-bombing of the enemy population. To wit: destroy the Hydra and cauterize all the necks lest even more vicious heads spring from the monstrous carnage. Above all, in the manner of ancient gods who rule while hovering aloft, the crime against our humanity, the humanity now represented by our adopted Kosovars, must be avenged from the skies with thunderbolts. Godly hands must not be bloodied by a dirty ground war. For, still today, gods can die and our reasons to live along with them. But alas, once Ares is dispatched with Havoc and Panic at his side, indiscriminate killing is bound to ensue from his savagely ambivalent attitude.
When I saw particular Serbian men, women and children dead and mutilated on the ground, after I had studied the history of Serbia for a while, I was sorry for my homicidal intentions. I was an abstract murderer, and part of me yearned for the capital punishment of the guilty part of me, which if actually decapitated, would take its accusing accomplice with it. That is, the sentence of death would be self-murder rather than a period of forced sublimation or psychotherapy.
My waking view of violence left me feeling not so afraid of myself as I was in my dreams. It gave me cause to play a brief game of Ping-Pong with myself as the ball. Murders are suicides, I thought, and so are wars, no matter who starts them, for the idea of an independent, separate self or separate group of selves is a psychological illusion. The gardener with the shovel is our own shadow he did not commit the murder: we did. Man killing man is suicide. And what do we have in common? The Others. Kill them and you're dead too. Of course, the deed is worse than the thought, but thinking is all too often the best friend of our worst enemy. The human race, having feasted at the tree of knowledge, has fabricated the crime of murder; the murderous deed proceeds with the conscious intent, with malice aforethought. Thus each has their portion of the prey whether they participate in the hunt or not-merely voluntarily watching violent movies is enough to purchase a share of the guilt. Each has a portion of the abstract corpse. Hence it seems right to kill the enemy, once the enemy has already been dehumanized by mental, or virtual murder.
The wars, or mass suicides, are relevant to the individual self-murders. In the case of suicide, who is killing whom? Is not the ideal (good) self-killing the real (evil) self? And is not the ideal self to a great extent fabricated by society, as is, by way of contrast, the confused definition of the contemptible real self? The "I" does seem to be a Ping-Pong ball oscillating betwixt what-is and what-should-be, playing both sides of the game. Again, who is killing whom in the psychological civil war? Is the suicidal man murdering the Others or are "They" murdering him? Is not every player guilty? Does not the sum of the guilt of Others exceed that of the self-murderer? Is that not one reason why the suicide victim used to be buried at the crossroads with a stake in his heart, or be pulled through the village upside down and decapitated, lest the ghost, the awful truth, get out and wreak its vengeance on the community?
Subsequent to the above reflections on my terrifying dream, I am no longer pursued for the crime of murder in my sleep. I was just a cat chasing his own tail.
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