vital signs

“They’re right: I have lost something. I'm not exactly sure what it is; but I know I didn't always feel this... sedated.”
~ Lester Burnham, in American Beauty


Have you ever seen the movie Fight Club? I guess you’d call it a coming-of-age story about an unremarkable everyman who feels compromised, confused and disconnected from his life; and about where those feelings lead him.

The film’s director once gave an interview which, in my opinion, summed things up very nicely: “We humans are designed to be hunters, and we find ourselves in a society of shopping and consumerism. There's nothing to kill anymore -- nothing to conquer or overcome in our daily reality. We’re not even really necessary to a lot of what's going on. It's already been built; it just needs to run now.” What results, I suppose, is perhaps the ultimate form of emasculation … and the hands-on-violence-seeking members of Fight Club explore one way to recapture that connection.

It surprised me to find I was most affected by an earlier part of the film’s setup, wherein the protagonist (if that’s what you’d call him) attends a disjointed series of support group meetings to encounter individuals “with real problems.” And even though the film spends limited time with these people, to me that’s where the bona fide fighting occurs. A more quietly desperate kind of fighting, maybe, but no less brutal and bloody than the battles depicted later in the film.

I’m not sure if I’d have noticed this distinction even a decade ago. But in the intervening years, I’ve had the gift –- oddly uncomfortable term, but yes, the gift -- of climbing into the ring with people who have not been granted the luxury of disconnection. Maybe, like me, they existed for a time in that predictable, sanitized sameness that many come to occupy –- commuting back and forth to work, watching TV, folding laundry, wondering what’s for dinner. And then one day, maybe without any warning at all, they were jolted to the realization that they live on a fault line.

For some, that fault line might be an addiction; for others, a loss; for still others, a threatening health condition. But no matter how you label that fault line, there’s one consistent truth: It forces its inhabitants to redefine everything they know. They become exceedingly, even excruciatingly aware of a certain ... volatility. And those who summon the courage to exist in that space, those who muster the resolve to push back, are irrevocably, electrically awake.

You have to look very closely. Because outwardly, this awakening often fails to resemble the kind of thing a caffeine-charged society might expect. It may show itself as nothing more than an awareness of moments, a tone of quiet thoughtfulness, even a tendency toward stillness. But inside, the gloves are off as an old reality shatters, pretext evaporates, pride and vanity clatter to the ground like some gilded shield discarded.

The rest of society –- the ones Fight Club was meant to reach, I imagine -– often consider these people fragile, broken, weak. Interesting. Because I’ve noticed that as they struggle and thrash to get up, and get up, and get up, they frequently manage to lift others with them.


"When I was little, my cousin had a pregnant dog, just a mutt, who was due to have her puppies in about a week. She was out in the yard one day and got in the way of the lawnmower, and her two hind legs got cut off. The vet said, "I can sew her up, or you can put her to sleep if you want, but the puppies are okay. She'll be able to deliver the puppies."

My cousin said to keep her alive.

So the vet sewed her backside and over the next week the dog learned to walk. She didn't spend any time worrying, she just learned to take two steps in front and flip up her backside, then take two steps and flip up her backside again. She gave birth to six little puppies, all in perfect health. And when they learned to walk, they all walked just like her."
~ Gilda Radner (1946 – 1989)