snapped

Snapped

by Bob on July 30, 2007

Snapped. A fishing line can snap when a fish which is too large to catch or pull in gets on our fishing line. And the strength of our fishing line is not strong enough.

Clearly, there is a metaphor within this perception.

To be concrete, firstly, people can snap, too. And snap they do.

It happened in New York when someone went into a tirade on a commuter train many years ago. Totally unpredictable. Or was it ?

People can snap when we least expect it. But although it's defined as something quite in situ, and unpredictable, and impetuous, and out-of-control, one wonders whether there was a pattern leading to it which we could have foreseen and made an intervention.

I was walking in my hometown of New York City one day some years ago (luckily people still do walk around for now as even legs are becoming vestigial with the media and internet sensations) and it was a hot summer day and it was rush hour. There was always a lot of tension on street corners between the pedestrians and automobile drivers. As I said, especially around and on corners. Pedestrians congregate on street corners waiting for the traffic light to turn green so they can walk. There is an implict Social Contract between car drivers and pedestrians. But sometimes it is broken. So the tension arises as to whether the car will actually try to run the light around the corner almost knocking us over when we are allowed to walk.

This day, a businessman in a fancy suit, carrying a leather attache case, started walking across the street when the traffic turned green, and lo and behold, a taxi cab crawled around the corner almost hitting him. Then SNAP ! That was it. Out of seeming nowhere, the otherwise polite businessman fancily attired took his heavy and expensive briefcase and smashed it into the window of the taxi, shattering the glass. And then he slowly walked away leaving the scene. No one was surprised. One can just push people so far into being pushed too far and then they snap in an instant. Not even the taxi driver, who was unhurt (thanks to modern plastic-like safety glassmaking techniques), was surprised. He knew he had pushed the envelope of rational tolerance and patience. It's part of the rat race of our modern world. Pushing the metaphorical envelope. That's okay if you're a physicist on the verge of a breakthrough in science, but not not when you're a taxi cab driver at rush hour on a hot summer day in Manhattan. It was all over quickly. The social statement had been made by physical force and anger and by the businessman's having snapped.

Testing limits seems to also be part of modern life. It can be wonderful in a lab or music setting where we strive for new frontiers. It can be awful in social situations where we push people to their breaking point.

We as a society frequently wonder just why it ever happens, this snapping of a person. But we should be admonished not to be so smugly surprised. It usually doesn't come out of nowhere.

Suicide can one of those snaps. So can heinous crimes. So can a fight on a soccer pitch or on an ice hockey rink. Or even when we say something terribly hurtful to someone we really love in a moment of anger.

Albert Camus had something to say about snapping. Some of his works focused on some of the more serious implications of the process. We can also look at many of his essays, too. Therein he pinpoints the dilemma of existence. At one Camus wrote that the only serious philosophically demonstrable issue is whether we should carry on with our lives. Full stop. He wrote that that was the definitive moment of choice. To live or die. And that decision was totally philosophically founded. Heavy and heady stuff, eh ? Well, others pondered this, too. Nietzsche did think of it many times in his brilliance and yet seeming insanity. He wrote that the only consolation at 3am, which he defined as the quintessential time for the dark night of the Soul, was that he could just simply end it all straightaway.

But such a seeming impulsive maneuver to snap and end it all is actually in some Western senses, a bit cowardly. It's just too easy. It hurts those left behind who love us. It is a "cop out". It is a waste of a life. But Camus would have argued that the decision is profoundly interesting and important.

In some cultures and societies, death is not a big deal. We just pass on to another form, or realm, or become invisible to the naked eye and senses (actually the ancient Greeks had a line of thought like this -- that the dead are not really dead-dead but around us and we just can't see them or sense them through the normal channels). Or we turn into a frog and croak in a differnet fashion happily on a lily pond. Or become a prince where before we were a pauper in our past life. Whatever a past life means. There is a metaphysical problem with the past, present, and future. They just don't seem to exist when the argument is made. They seem a convenient invention of manking to keep the trains on schedule and measure progress albeit a kind of illusion and dream.

Shamans in Central Asia and elsewhere seem to believe that we never really die, and Dr. Jung knew this when he wrote of the collective unconscious and his theory of Synchronicity. And we congratulate Sting and his rock band The Police for making a musical album by this title and raising the questions on a six stringed electric guitar and drum set. Shakespeare also chimed in on this topic many times when he said that the dead are a problem for the living although the seemingly dead people are fully alive in our mind's eye and consciousness. He didn't say it was an illusion, either. He knew a lot about the Alchemy of life and human experience.

So we tighten up the seeming ostensible digression here. Snapping is usually a bad thing in human behaviour. It usually has bad results. It makes a heavy point the hard way. It is unpredictable, seemingly. It is undesirable. It is contemptuous.

But, as the great playwright G.B. Shaw wrote, the thing happens, as one of his play titles in the Back to Methuselah pentateuch. It's part of human nature to lose it sometimes. Hopefully it is not a tragedy. Hopefully the taxi's window can be easily replaced and the situation will not frequently repeat itself, like a dodgy curry meal. Hopefully we all learn from this anger, or temporary madness, and this snapping instantiation.

One opines that the upshot of all this is to try to tune in to other people and feel what they are feeling sometimes. So they don't drift off and snap when we least expect it, or really, forget about it. Pay attention to a continually barking dog, as he might bite.

Snapping is but a moment of anger, pushed beyond the limits of tolerance, and into the realm of temporary madness. Great sages have said that anger is but a temporary insanity as judged by the measure of normalcy. But, as Diogenes in ancient Greece sought almost in vain with his lamp to find an honest man, we, too, are very hard-pressed to find the elusively defined "normal" person. Normalcy is a societal contract and invention. Useful but not universal. Dr. R.D. Laing probed that in his works as did Michel Foucault especially in his Madness and Civilisation.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. An ounce of compassion and understanding is worth a ton of later regret.

We turn to something which I was reading today at the kind provocation of a student I know who was reading Latin. We got to a very profound Ode of Horace. Ode 1.5. "Quis multa gracilis ..." wherein he says, translated into English:

Who now is basking in your golden smile,

And dreams of you still fancy-free, still kind,

Poor fool, nor knows the guile

Of the deceitful wind!

It also talks of Pyrrhus. Something to think about.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods by trickery. We wonder, in the light of symbolic fire of anger and snapping, whether it was such a good idea.