American culture_Essays-Lance Morrow

Lance Morrow

Daydreams of What You'd Rather Be

Lance Morrow (b. 1939), who was educated at Harvard, has been a contributor to Time since 1976. The author speculates on the relationship between the self and the antiself, which may sometimes be a monster and at others the basis of our humanity.

      Kierkegaard once confided to his journal that he would have been much happier if he had be­come a police spy rather than a philosopher. Richard Nixon always wanted to be a sportswriter. If one considers these fantasies together, they seem to have got weirdly crossed. It is Nixon who should have been the police spy. On the other hand, Kierkegaard would probably have made an extraordinarily depressing sportswriter (Fear and Trembling: The Angst and Bucky Dent).

      We have these half-secret old ambitions—to be something else, to be someone else, to leap out of the interminable self and into another skin, another life. It is usually a brief out-of-body phenomenon, the sort of thing that we think when our gaze drifts away in the middle of a conver­sation. Goodbye. The imagination floats through a window into the conjectural and finds there a kind of bright blue antiself. The spirit stars itself in a brief hypothesis, an alternative, a private myth. What we imagine at such moments can suggest peculiar truths of character.

      One rummages in closets for these revelations. Kierkegaard's fancy about being a police spy is a dark, shiny little item: a melancholic's impulse toward sneaking omnipotence, the intellectual furtively collaborating with state power, committing sins of betrayal in police stations in the middle of the night. It is not far from another intellectual's fantasy: Norman Mailer once proposed that Eugene McCarthy, the dreamboat of the late '60s moderate left, might have made an ideal direc­tor of the fbi. McCarthy agreed. But of course, McCarthy had a sardonic genius for doubling back upon his public self and making it vanish. He did magic tricks of self-annihilation. Nixon's imagi­nary career—wholesome, all-American, unimpeachable—may suggest both a yearning for blame-lessness (what could possibly be tainted in his writing about baseball?) and an oblique, pre-emp­tive identification with an old enemy: the press.

      The daydream of an alternative self is a strange, flitting thing. This wistful speculation often occurs in summer, when a vacation loosens the knot of one's vocational identity. Why, dammit, says the refugee from middle management on his 13th day on the lake, why not just stay here all year? Set up as a fishing guide. Open a lodge. We'll take the savings and . . . The soul at odd moments (the third trout, the fourth beer) will make woozy rushes at the pipe dream. Like a gang­ster who has cooperated with the district attorney, we want a new name and a new career and a new house in a different city—and maybe a new nose from the D.A.'s cosmetic surgeon.

      Usually, the impulse passes. The car gets packed and pointed back toward the old reality. The moment dissolves, like one of those instants when one falls irrevocably in love with the face of a stranger through the window as the bus pulls away.

      Sometimes, the urge does not vanish. The results are alarming. This month Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. died. That was his final career change. His obituary listed nearly as many metamor­phoses as Ovid did. Demara, "the Great Impostor," spent years of his life being successfully and utterly someone else: a Trappist monk, a doctor of psychology, a dean of philosophy at a small Pennsylvania college, a law student, a surgeon in the Royal Canadian Navy, a deputy warden at a prison in Texas. Demara took the protean itch and amateur's gusto, old American traits, to new frontiers of pathology and fraud.

      Usually, it is only from the safety of retrospect and an established self that we entertain our­selves with visions of an alternative life. The daydreams are an amusement, a release from the monotony of what we are, from the life sentence of the mirror. The imagination's pageant of an al­ternative self is a kind of vacation from one's fate. Kierkegaard did not really mean he should have been a police spy, or Nixon that he should have been a sportswriter. The whole mechanism of daydreams of the antiself usually depends upon the fantasy. Hell is answered prayers. God help us if we had actually married that girl when we were 21. In weak, incoherent minds, the yearning itself rises up and breaks through a wall into actual­ity. That seems to have happened with John W. Hinckley Jr., the young man who shot Ronald Reagan last year. Since no strong self disci­plined his vagrant aches and needs, it was his antiself that pulled the trigger. It was his nonentity. The antiself is a monster sometimes, a cancer, a gnawing hypothesis.

      All of our lives we are accompanied vaguely by the selves we might be. Man is the only crea­ture that can imagine being someone else. The fantasy of being someone else is the basis of sympathy, of humanity. Daydreams of possibility enlarge the mind. They are also haunting. Around every active mind there always hovers an aura of hypothesis and the subjunctive: almost every conscious intellect is continuously wandering elsewhere in time and space.

      The past 20 years have stimulated the antiself. They have encouraged the notion of continu­ous self-renewal—as if the self were destined to be an endless series of selves. Each one would be better than the last, or at least different, which was the point: a miracle of transformations, dreams popping into reality on fast-forward, life as a hectic multiple exposure.

      For some reason, the more frivolous agitations of the collective antiself seem to have calmed down a little. Still, we walk around enveloped in it, like figures in the nimbus of their own ghosts on a television screen. Everything that we are not has a kind of evanescent being within us. We dream, and the dream is much of the definition of the true self. Last week Lena Horne said that she has always imagined herself being a teacher. Norman Vincent Peale says fervently that he wanted to be a salesman—and of course that is, in a sense, what he has always been. Opera singer Grace Bumbry wants to be a professional race-car driver. Bill Veeck, former owner of the Chicago White Sox, confides the alternate Veeck: a newspaperman. In a "nonfiction short story," Truman Capote wrote that he wanted to be a girl. Andy Warhol confesses without hesitation: "I've always wanted to be an airplane. Nothing more, nothing less. Even when I found out that they could crash, I still wanted to be an airplane."

      The antiself has a shadowy, ideal life of its own. It is always blessed (the antiself is the Gre­cian Urn of our personality) and yet it subtly matures as it runs a course parallel to our actual ag­ing. The Hindu might think that the antiself is a premonition of the soul's next life. Perhaps. But in the last moment of this life, self and antiself may coalesce. It should be their parting duet to mut­ter together: "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia."

Suggestions for Discussion

1.   Why does Morrow think the Kierkegaard-Nixon fantasies seem to have got weirdly crossed? In his third paragraph he suggests the validity of the fantasies. How?

2.   What are the symptoms, dangers, and values of dreaming of an alternative self?

3.   What is the significance of the last sentence?

Suggestions for Writing

1.   Describe the alternative self or selves which you have aspired to be.

2.   Select one of the following statements and develop it in several paragraphs: A vacation loosens the knot of one's vocational identity; the daydreams are an amusement, a release . . . from the life sentence of the mirror; hell is answered prayers; the antiself is a monster some­times, a cancer, a gnawing hypothesis; all of our lives we are accompanied vaguely by the selves we might be; the fantasy of being someone else is the basis of sympathy, of humanity; the past twenty years have stimulated the antiself; we dream, and the dream is much of the definition of the true self.