Being Afraid

So what really frightens you? What terror seizes your body, and impertinently terminates voluntary control over your bowels? The scenario is easy to imagine: one of those early morning (or is it late night) conversations, in which superficial nothings take the form of timeless truths. Sex lives have been aired, reincarnation discussed, but at last you reach the enduring issue. Fear.

Personally, my student years have altered the nature of my greatest torments. Gone are the days when enormous worms slipped into my bedroom, or many headed extra-terrestrials invited me--and not too politely--to breakfast. After a heavy night's imbibation, as I wheeze nauseously in bed, and fall onto the welcoming floor, a gigantic terror presents itself. The mirror is just over me. Inching towards it--steady as she goes - the possibilities for what I could look like flower. It's not just the issue of bruised eyes and a grassy verge of a mouth. A black, suppurating tumour may cascade from my forehead; my eyes could have multiplied; little horns might peep up through my rug; my nose could be replaced by a bluebery muffin. The final encounter with the mirror have never proved as bad. But the fear lives on--especially on Sunday mornings.

I don't know whether this is normal: at least it seems to be the endpoint of a grand, grand history of humanity's greatest emotion. And one thing you learn about in this country is fear. You collect and nurse it, and unwillingly let it infect everything you do.

Last week the Boston Phoenix ran a lengthy piece on violence in college campuses around the country. The escalation in physical and sexual assaults on students is not unique to the U.S. In Oxford, the rather glamorous old conflicts between privileged students and hardnosed town residents have been replaced by horrifying acts of violence--not in the name of class war, but for the sake of drugs, money and kicks. In the U.S. violence has shifted from premeditaion to simple brutality: one in which the randomness of it all makes everyone a possible victim and a possible assailant. Sit in the Tasty in the wee hours of the morning, and watch assembled oddballs stagger in, argue and stumble out. Their mere presence, as drugged or drunk uncertainties, conjures up the worst fears of anger, assault and guns.

Four years ago I visited the U.S. for the first time. I arrived in New York alone, weighed down with a heavy backpack, with no idea where I was to stay. The prospect of a cheap, insalubrious downtown hostel enticed me, so I headed for Madison Square Garden. Spat out onto the street from the subway, I had no idea where to go; people rushed past and into me without interest; and, of course, I couldn't look at a map. Everyone told me that--never look at a map on the street. Nascent paranoia was restrained as I made a lucky guess and arrived at the famed hostel: a huge, mucky building, with a central quad piled with trash and puke. I cannot forget that night. A constant drone of police cars filtered through the window (accompanied by odd flashing lights), and my roommate--it was a cheap place - who happened to be a fellow Englishman, was wallowing in the later stages of drugged stupor. He had come to New York with a mission to explore its gunky side. In his first week he had been mugged--twice. He spent 20 hours a day in those charming boutiques clustered around Times Square. He had an abominable snore. That night I don't think I slept at all, but merely shivered with unadulterated fear.

This time round things are different. In recent years, I have been mugged twice at knifepoint. Friends have been raped. Stories have been told about knives, and facial rearrangement. I'm sure this is the same for many students here. No longer are our fears transfused, as in childhood, into wonderful creatures and cosmic events. The annual festival of awakened demons, Halloween, has turned into a kinky excuse for parties, a chance to don leather garments and paint your face white. No one can seriously be chilled by a cemetery's annual effluence, when the roads outside present many more daily terrors.

So fear has moved from the abstract to the substantial. And how can you trust anyone in an environment in which the sickness underlying every soul is more truthful then the moral transparency? Everyone is saying this: all movies delve the layers of madness; all codes of morality are tainted as relative, or simple extensions of our ego's needs to be discarded when necessary.

Yet we don't talk about this much. Have you noticed the terrible evasions in the presidential debates, when the most compelling issue of inner city violence was skated over, hidden beneath waves of economic statistics. Hide away in leafy suburbia, and I suppose you can close your mind to the nearby inferno. You can surround yourself within bars and alarms, and nurture a solipsistic terror about everyone outside. But what sort of life is that?

But beyond the anxiety about the evil others may inflict lies the deeper fear that you do not know what you yourself are capable of. An acquaintance in England told me that she would like to get a gun, for protection, but that she feared she would be more than likely to use it at the slightest provocation. The more we see undercurrents of violence in others, the more we become aware that under our civilised facade we could be just as bad. Not that any of us could possibly do such a thing: most, I hope, could not live with the memory of inflicting physical pain on anybody. But at the end of the long descent from nebulous fairytale fears, we arrive at the point of fear of oneself, of terror about what, just possibly and terribly, one could become. And so the mirror lies in wait for all of us. To end in a whirl of pretence, Omar Khayyam foresaw it: "I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul returned to me, And answered 'I Myself am Heav'n and Hell."