Masque of the Red Death
"But you have two consolidation loans. You are over $20,000 in debt!" The bank manager sat across from me, her neat black-and-white tweed suit framing a red lipsticked mouth pursed in disapproval. Her paternalism infuriated me. Here I was trying to be creative by co-signing a loan for our Watershed community, and all she could focus on was my temporary money problems. Why do people working with money always have to be so superior I wondered? They give the illusion of wanting to help, but only if you fit their pre-determined mold. I was angry at Bank Lady, at her immaturity and moral superiority, at her inflexibility in helping me with my problem. I blamed her emotionality and hated her. "Who dares confront my noble efforts and suggest I have trouble with money?" In my mind I prepared to execute her at dawn.
I thought my plan was rather good. Although economic madness was sweeping the countryside with "balancing the budget", I was going to get around the problem. I had always had money. My two Visa consolidation loans and maxed-out Mastercard didn't change that. It was simply a matter of some partial payments, juggling a few bills, using one credit card to pay another and extending this loan. I had enough to absorb times of want and to support something I valued. I would be immune to picayune money matters, and would continue to be important.
It is frightening to see how thick I build these walls of defense. My friend Paul suggested the loans manager was right in her message, even if her tone was asinine. I started to look at not only how I spend money but my attitude towards it. To be more honest, I had known for some time that I use money to avoid facing my own attitudes of inferiority and superiority. Buying on impulse, buying to feel better, spending on others to buy their affection, donating to feel important. But with creative financial juggling, starting an emotional crisis and depersonalizing the loans manager, I managed to avoid facing this truth. I was as immature and arrogant as I saw her to be. Added to this was the horror of how I completely avoided hearing the critique and created my own reality.
There is a deeper truth here than money management. My response is more evident in my life than I'm comfortable with. After this episode I began noticing this defensiveness coming up consistently with friends and at work. On the surface it seemed the external was the issue. But seeing these events through the eyes of Red Death, I see a defensiveness against knowing myself more deeply I fear self-knowledge will bring rejection. I couldn't help noting the irony that I value Watershed as a place of learning but in some ways am fundamentally opposed to learning.
The natural response is "What can I do to stop being defensive?" which is another way of building walls. Poe's story doesn't ask for analysis; that just propagates Prospero's castle. Poe ends his story with Prospero dying without knowing the truth. As Bettina Knapp in Edgar Allen Poe suggests, Prospero's death isn't redemptive. His credo of "it was folly to grieve or think" brings only horror. "Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made". When we take life so seriously that we can't laugh, the truth doesn't hold redemption. It shatters us because we desperately try to maintain an illusion of control.
Yet throughout the story there are hints to the reader that it could be
When Death finally joins the group, almost as a summation of all the hints, Bettina Knapp suggests he represents "a very real need for integrating the temporal forces that it personifies." This doesn't happen for Prospero; he dies a sterile death of denial. A common feature in Poe's stories is that a breakdown of old consciousness is needed for new life. The irony in Prospero's refusal to gain wisdom calls for this breakdown in the reader. Prospero was always in unity with everyone; he just didn't know it.
There is relief in finally admitting a long-evaded truth. After talking with my friend, I was relieved that I could start letting go of my myth of privilege. Expecting myself to rise above the common struggle with money is a heavy burden. I was surprised that self-knowledge didn't bring revulsion but acceptance. I became more open to what life was trying to teach me. I started to think about how I could enter other contexts without defensiveness.
But it takes more than Bank Lady. Poe is a genius for understanding that the human desire for control dies hard. The gift of this story is that it ends with all-encompassing death. Defensiveness always loses to unity. In my life, since "accepting" this truth, I have again become defensive and avoided truth. Presenting this story to our Folio Club as "objective" literary criticism and avoiding the personal insights I write of here was sobering. But every time I realize what I'm doing, I'm reminded that Death can bring freedom. This response is so consistent as to be hopeful. The word of this story for me is not to change my defensiveness, but to recognize it as part of myself. Then the walls of horror I build around myself become openings to hope in a Universe calling me to let go and live.
Are you willing to be sponged out,
erased,cancelled
made nothing?
Are you willing to be made nothing,
dipped into oblivion?
If not, you will never really change.
The phoenix renews her youth
only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down
to hot and flocculent ash.
Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest
with strands of down like floating ash
shows that house is renewing her youth
like the eagle, immortal bird.
- D.H. Lawrence
