I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head

2 1 9 Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Severed Head 1. as a load off your shoulders although (or maybe because) i grew up in sunny southern California in the ’60s and ’70s, I was a morbid child, much given to Poe, Hammer horror films, and lovingly embroidered visions of a premature death—revenge fantasies in which my grief-crazed parents had to be physically restrained from hurling themselves into the grave as shovelfuls of earth thudded on my little coffin (“Bury me with him! Why, oh, why, sweet Jesus, didn’t we get him that Mattel Creepy Crawlers Thingmaker he begged us for!?!”). Such scenarios were all in good, mean fun. When I was truly depressed,bummed by a life grown way too complicated in the midst of what was supposed to be the endless summer of a California boyhood , I’d daydream about decapitation. Twilight Zone comics, read by flashlight under the covers, together with the Aurora “Monster Scenes” kit for a working, 1:15-scale guillotine in the window of my local hobby shop,its plastic blade poised to decapitate the little victim that came with it,provided the raw material for imaginary beheadings whose symbolism was groaningly obvious: What better pain reliever for a loner who practically lived at the local library and whose grade school head was already a wasp’s nest of hopes,dreams,fears,and insecurities ,not to mention the fascinating factlets I was gleaning from all the books I was reading? Sometimes, it felt as if my skull was about to explode from the hyperbaric pressure of too much thinking. T H I R T E E N W A Y S O F L O O K I N G A T A S E V E R E D H E A D 2 2 0 My status as an only child only compounded such problems.1 Solipsism is a singleton’s birthright,and I lived with a nonstop monologue inside my head—an ever-present voice-over that converted the world (the Not-Me) into the Me through an act of philosophical data processing: the instant, reflexive categorization and critiquing of everything around me. It was alienating, this internal voice, turning me into a neurotic escapee from a Bergman film who had somehow ended up in laid-back Southern California, harshing everyone’s buzz. In the San Diego of my youth, brooding existentialists in black turtlenecks were sentenced to reeducation in Disneyland, The Happiest Place on Earth. To be sure, a Marcuse-ian critical distance was all that stood between me and the intellectual horrors of being mellowed to death, in the real-life Margaritaville of ’70s SoCal. Nonetheless, there 1964 advertisement for the Aurora model of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors Guillotine. 2 2 1 T H I R T E E N W A Y S O F L O O K I N G A T A S E V E R E D H E A D is such a thing as too much critical distance, and the little me inside my skull,the garrulous homunculus that insinuated its hyperintellectual interpretations between me and everything I experienced, made me want to take a load off my shoulders with a real-life guillotine, sometimes. If only I could lose my head, I thought, I’d be mindless, a happy camper at last. 2. as no-brainer Paradoxically, there are those whose dumb-as-dirt demeanor, evident in their slack jaws and gazeless stares, makes them seem as if they deserve to lose the heads they obviously aren’t using.Surely,this writer isn’t the only nabob of negativism to have noted the uncanny similarity between the stunned, where’s-the-rest-of-me? expression characteristic of severed heads and the trademark frozen grin and lightsare -on-but-nobody’s-home gaze of George W. Bush, Dan Quayle, and other zero-forehead public figures.2 Typically, we see politicians, pundits, and the rest of the chattering class on TV, from the neck up, as talking heads—a term rich in symbolism . Listening to the just-shoot-me vacuities of bantering news anchors and Sunday-morning pundits, one can’t help but wonder if they’re proof positive of the theory, propounded by some of the doctors who experimented on freshly guillotined heads in Revolutionary France, that consciousness survives decapitation. The history...