Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

The trouble with chinks of light is their connotation of a wall of darkness. Nowhere is the wall darker than at Ted Wilson’s Wall. Unmodified since his total disappearance, it is still open to visits and messages from whom it may or may not concern. If ever I should suspect myself of undue optimism, I can visit this electronic relic and refresh my sense of the baseness of our natures. What can to this day be seen on Wilson’s Wall, which I shall name a disgrace, began with the return of Mrs Ted Wilson to Chicago and the attendant public confirmation of Ted Wilson’s bigamy. Somebody posted,

You are such an asshole Ted.

This message, in and of itself not too bad, served as the as it were first sign of nightfall in a land of ghouls, and out of the dark came evil spirits, goblins, bogeys and bloodsuckers. Very quickly the Wall was covered with messages such as,

What whore are you fucking now Ted?

I’ve heard all about your love of underage fuck buddies, you rapist.

Hey Ted — terrific job abandoning three kids and two wives.

are you getting your new bitch to shit on you Ted? are you getting what you always wanted? are you happy now?

Psychopath.

douche

I hope you’re dead you cheating piece of slime.

I’m sure he is dead. Suicide is the most selfish act in the world and he seems like a pretty selfish guy:(

There were many more. This vile aggression went on for months, and my bewilderment only grew as the vilification intensified and nobody did or said anything about it. Who were these people? Where were his friends or the people he had friended? Where was his well-wishing Facebook community? Was nobody thinking of Mrs Ted Wilson and her college-age children, who must have visited the Wall and witnessed the public stoning and gang shaming of their (late?) ex-husband/father? I remember worrying if there was something I could and should do, whether, specifically, I ought to join Facebook for the purpose of posting a message of my own, not only in order to come to Wilson’s defence, if that is the right word, but to rescue myself from the culpable helplessness into which I had been dragooned by this turn of events. Yes, I felt as if violence was being done to me, who was unknown to these verbal thugs; I felt under attack. Under attack from what? From the peristalsis of circumstance, which forces one forward as a turd is forced. I remember thinking that I had to ‘speak out’, if not to effect change, if not to rebuff the hooligans, then at least to put on the record where I actually stood in the Wilson matter rather than where, against my will, I had been made to stand, i.e., to stand by.

(The record! I’ve always found it a hoot, this mythic tabula on which our deeds are inscribed and preserved. Where is this record? Who is the recorder? Who are the readers of the record? Egocentricity! Superstition! Anthropocentricity! (One understands the metaphysical origins of the error, of course, it being an almost unacceptable and unbelievable proposition that we exist in an adjudicatory emptiness, and arguably a definition of the human must refer to our distinguishing if babyish sense of (and/or need for) being kept under observation or lorded over. (The fantasy of the record is closely preceded, surely, by the fantasy of the forum — the ideal if invisible fact-finding or listening body to which one mutters one’s arguments, sometimes audibly. I do it all the time. It’s consternating, really.)) Yet here, it appeared, was a record: the eternal, ineffaceable webpage of a disused but still functional Facebook Wall.)

I resolved to do nothing — resolved to not ‘speak out’. I couldn’t work out what my speech would be, and I didn’t want the mob to turn on me. I was cowed, it cannot be denied, and filled with the shame of the cowed one. In the time that has passed, my silence has continued, and my shame has deepened. It is open to me this very evening to join Facebook and say my piece on Wilson’s Wall. I won’t, though. It would rouse the virtual beast — a frightening creature, even if these days it gives off only an occasional hiss of poisonous nostril steam:

I know you’re out there Ted. So do your children.

DON’T THINK YOU’VE BEEN FORGIVEN YOU TWO-TIMING MANIAC

In fairness, nothing I might post on the Wall would make a difference to the injustice done to Wilson. When Wilson disappeared, so did the very idea of Wilson’s facts, and with them the very idea of justice. I’m not in possession of corrective new information, and, even if I were, it would be non-information, because the factual component of the case is the property of the accusers, who, by virtue of being the de facto fact-owners, have unlimited powers of assertion and denial and making shit up. This makes my blood boil, to be honest. Take the last-mentioned accusation: Ted Wilson is a ‘two-timing maniac’. I don’t take this to mean that he’s insane — which, if true, would remove him from the realm of responsibility to the realm of illness — but to mean that he is a villain of the most conscienceless sort. Maybe he is; it’s entirely possible; but there are other possibilities. Maybe something other than maniacal two-timing is going on. In order to investigate this — an investigation I insist on, it seems — we must ignore the frenzy of incrimination by which Wilson is already in the stocks, his face dripping with old tomatoes and rotten eggs. (Where do people find eggs that are rotten? Do they keep them in store, in anticipation of the opportunity to throw them?) We must undertake our inquiry neutrally and methodically, beginning with the basic situation, a man and woman in a marriage, and with the basic acknowledgment that because marital relations are transacted in private, we cannot know what experiences they involve. We begin with a mystery, in short.

(It’s a mystery that cannot be dispelled by a couple’s self-presentation. I’d guess that nobody at the firm had an inkling about where the Jenn — me deal really stood, behind closed doors. I didn’t go around leaking how I was doing (i.e., not well; the line between my being alive and my being dead had faded almost to the point of unimportance), and Jenn — well, she was outwardly sunny because inwardly she was, I believe, in the main OK with the outcomes produced by the her — me undertaking. I’m making no criticism at all here, just adverting to the fact that Jenn drew sustenance from stable-partnership products — a residence, financial pooling, professional assistance, social status, and, in due course, a reproductive and parenting cooperative — rather than from a partner qua partner. She wasn’t really a great fan of the whole person-to-person Liebe an sich thing, if such a thing actually exists. (She was a wonderfully devoted and even emotional advocate for her clients, and a terrific colleague at work. (On the phone, I always knew when she was with workmates because she would speak to me in a considerate, upbeat tone that in all honesty I very rarely met with if we were talking privately, when she could be a little ratty, if I may say so. (This gave rise, in my mind, to one of those distinctions that seemed important for a while but which, over time, I’ve come to see as another low point in my personal history of thinking, namely the difference between rattiness in rem (innate rattiness, or rattiness towards the world) and rattiness in personam (rattiness towards a certain person). I held it against Jenn that she was quite capable of non-rattiness at work yet found it a challenge to not be ratty at home, when face-to-face with me. This wasn’t fair to her, because she could well have been innately ratty while being, at work, pleasant in personam . Or, she could have been naturally pleasant but when at home made grumpy by me through no fault of her own. Even by my standards, this line of thinking is unusually futile.))))