The Short Leash

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My father told me once, and he only had to tell me once: "Chris, you're on a really short leash. Everything you do bad, you get caught for."

I gave him the philosophy back. Everybody pays for what they do, sooner or later. The universe keeps books. He shook his head. "No. You in particular, Chris. You can't do anything wrong without totally being caught and being held account for it."

He was not describing justice. He was describing me, specifically, like a man reading a spec sheet. Other people got away with things. I would not. I have carried that sentence around for fifty years, and I have never once tested whether it was a warning, a fact of my construction, or a hex he laid on me on purpose. A hex works the same whether you believe in it or not. That is the thing about a hex.

The watcher

Whether the watcher is Jesus, or God, or just me, my own personal conscience, or the universe, or my father's voice still sitting in the back of my skull, the machinery runs the same. I have behaved my whole life like a man being watched. Low-key panopticon, my entire life, decades before I had the word for it. Bentham designed the panopticon as a prison: a tower in the middle, cells all around, and the guard may or may not be in the tower, so the prisoners behave as if he always is. I never needed the tower built. My dad just told me it was there.

This was all in place long before I published anything, long before social media, long before there was a feed to perform for. A kid in Hawaii, then a teenager, then a young man, moving through the world on the assumption that the record was being kept by somebody, and that the record would be read back to him.

Emerson's eye, pointed the other way

Emerson got there in 1836, in Nature: "I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God."

Read that closely and the eye belongs to Emerson. He does the seeing. He dissolves into the world's eyesight and becomes the instrument God looks through. It is a beautiful passage and I believe it, and it describes the opposite of my condition. My eyeball was never the one looking out. Mine was the one being looked into. God always sees you. Everybody always sees you. That was the weather I grew up in.

I read Emerson years later, with the leash already on, and what I felt was recognition with the current reversed. He had the hardware. His ran outbound.

Kundera's photographers

Kundera's version arrived in 1990, as a novel: Immortality. In it, Agnes catches herself performing her small private sins for an audience of God, and Kundera writes the update for our century: nowadays "God's eye has been replaced by a camera. The eye of one has been replaced by the eyes of all."

Then he makes the point that sat me up straight. The camera is new. The condition is old. "The photographic lens had existed long before it was invented; it existed as its own nonmaterialized essence. Even when no lens was aimed at them, people already behaved as if they were being photographed."

His proof is the famous audience at Erfurt in 1808, Napoleon at the peak of his power, Goethe climbing the stairs to meet him. "No crowd of photographers ever scampered around Goethe," Kundera writes, "but the shadows of photographers projecting from the depths of the future did scamper around him." Napoleon, mid-breakfast, slides his hand under his jacket into the famous pose and swallows before he speaks, because it is bad to be photographed with your face distorted by chewing. Then he delivers the line he has prepared for the record: "Voilà un homme!" Kundera calls it, straight-faced, a sound bite. Two immortal men in a room in 1808, both of them playing to cameras that would not exist for another generation. Goethe, for his part, had spent his later years slimming down, because he refused to enter immortality carrying a paunch.

And the trial never ends. In Kundera's afterlife, Goethe and Hemingway walk and talk, and Hemingway complains that nobody reads his books anymore; they write books about him. Goethe tells him: "That's immortality. Immortality means eternal trial." The chief witness against Goethe at that trial is Bettina, the young woman who climbed into his lap in Weimar carrying childhood in front of her as a shield, her lifelong ruse, and who, after his death, published their correspondence, edited by her and arranged by her, as Goethe's Correspondence with a Child. The watcher is not always God. Sometimes the watcher is a person taking notes, saving them for publication day.

I read both of them as a grown man, with the leash already decades old. They gave me words for a condition I already had.

Most likely to become senator

My senior yearbook said I was most likely to become a senator. Not most likely to be famous. Senator. Close Up brought kids to Washington to learn how the government worked, and at sixteen I sat at the hem of Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a war hero with one arm and a chest full of medals, the most powerful man my home state ever produced. He told us he slept four or five hours a night, every night of his life. I believed him completely, and it ruined my sleep for the next ten years, because I filed it away as a specification: this is what the machine requires.

Later I heard the other version, the one the islands tell among themselves: the hero and the machine were the same man, and the machine touched everything, the syndicate years included. Power is power. It does not change its nature because the man holding it is a genuine hero.

So the plan I formed was the choir-boy plan, and I want it stated plainly, because it sounds dumber than it was. I would become a senator by being squeaky clean. I have been a privacy slut since I was a little kid; I gave everything away, I hid nothing, and I also lived like a choir boy, because a man who is being watched has no other rational setting. The clean record was going to be my qualification.

Here is what I understand now, and it took me most of my life. The clean record was never the obstacle. When I wanted to become a senator by being squeaky clean, I would only really ever become a good politician if I wasn't completely compromised. An uncompromised man is the only kind who can hold the office well. He cannot be moved by a file, a favor, a photograph, a debt. The trouble runs the other way: he cannot be moved at all, and a machine built on leverage has no handle for a man without handles. The selection pressure of politics favors the compromised, because the compromised can be steered. I was making clean piss while real politicians were buying clean piss. I was manufacturing the genuine article at full price, in a market that only ever checks the label.

I converted to creative writing and American literature in my junior year, spent my year abroad at the University of East Anglia reading books instead of polls, and never ran for anything. The yearbook prophecy failed on its own terms. I am a follower who looks like a leader; people have been following me my whole life, and I have spent it trying to hand the job to somebody else. Those are my words about myself, and I will sign them.

The glass house

I publish everything. That is the whole strategy, arrived at without ever being decided.

A man who assumes he is always seen has nothing to extort and nothing to leak. There is no second set of books. There is no Bettina in my life holding letters for a posthumous edition, because I publish the letters as I go. I write everything down. I keep the archive. These days I keep a captain's log of the news and of my own days, entries written at the hour they describe, and the log is the defense: it was collected at 0400, it was analyzed at 0400, and here it is.

My father may have been describing my character. He may have been laying a hex. He may have been doing what fathers do, which is install the watcher and call it love. The result is the same, and at fifty-six I will call it the result he wanted: a son who lived as if the tower was occupied, who eventually stopped minding, and who built his house out of glass on purpose.

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