David Davis XVI, Part 1

On feeling

As a kid, I always felt that there was too much feeling in the homes I grew up in. I hated the screaming and the breaking of things, and I never got used to it. I had a lot of sisters, so even when no one was upset, there was still the endless talking, bickering, laughing, vying for attention of big families, sometimes (though not always) in apartments where there wasn’t enough room to for everyone to have their own private space unless you felt like duking it out for the bathroom. It was like Little Women, but without the secure attachment or a loving, principled father.

But this isn’t the way I wanted to start this DAVID series, because feeling is not measured in decibels. It’s not even measured, but assessed. I could tell you how I assess my own feelings (a skill I am still developing) and I could tell you how I assess the feelings of others; both require a mostly instantaneous and often subconscious gathering of cues harvested from physical sensation, pain/pleasure valuation, temperature, memory, breath, knowledge (both native and otherwise), and verbal and non-verbal communication. (There’s much more to it, I’m sure, but this is a non-scientific newsletter, so we’re going broad strokes here.)

And the thing is, armed with these two capabilities, I’ve never once encountered someone who was unable to feel. I may assess other people as feeling things that are not beneficial for me (animus), or of feeling things I disagree with (They are afraid of me, but they need not be) or that are inscrutable (She is hesitating to speak…Why?), but never in my life have I met someone and thought: They do not feel. They cannot feel.

Because a human who does not feel not only doesn’t feel those things that we think of as inherently human—kindness or empathy—but they also don’t even feel those negative feelings—anger, desire, rage—that we attribute, like table scraps, to humanity’s also-rans, from so-called sociopaths to those we dehumanize for our own convenience, gain, or ends. Not even the most villainous of fiction’s villains, some of whom are of contested humanity or are flat-out something else entirely, are without feeling, not HAL, or Judge Holden, or Walter White, or Randall Flagg, or Cruella de Vil, or even J.K. Rowling. An unfeeling human would be a void, and a void is only an antagonist insofar as we can project our own fears upon it (think: The Abyss). It’s not compelling on its own because it doesn’t have the feelings required for malevolence. Without that with which we imbue it, it’s merely a force of nature, and thus can’t be evil, only one of varying levels of inconvenience in the way that a virus has proven to be very inconvenient for all of us. Sure, we’ve all met people who desire voidness (perhaps we desire it for ourselves), but none of them attain it. Human beings can’t be voids, even the ones who want to be, because there’s still that desire involved—feeling. No distraction, drug, high, whatever will change the fact that you have to come down from however you dissociate sometime. Long enough to find a way to get high again, anyway.

This means, then, that when we talk about humans who do not feel, we are talking about a contradiction in terms. We are not talking about what we think we are talking about.

When we say, They do not feel, we are actually saying, I do not understand how they feel. And that’s a different matter entirely.

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.