Haywire from "This Fragile Fortress"

“Things fall apart/the centre cannot hold.”

-W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

North American loggers in the nineteenth century were branded a “haywire outfit” if they regularly used the wire involved in binding up hay to make hasty repairs. Their methods were makeshift, unstable. 

It is defiant to make permanent what is clearly temporary, but is that not our nature? We often hold stubbornly to old solutions despite mounting evidence of ineffectiveness. 

We 

b 

e

n 

  d 

the bough until it br

eaks 

and then we must make a choice: clumsily tie it back onto the tree, or relocate ourselves. To choose to adapt means to recognize the strangeness of the space we’ve landed in. What is scarier than the structure collapsing? What is more frightening than freefall? Who are we without our bearings, unsteady as they might have been?

Objective reality is impossible, yet we live in the shadow of its illusion. We build cultures and bridges on the basis of its laws. We may conceptualize our world into being through memory and myth, but that doesn’t make it any less real. 

The solidness in question is less about the tossing of the trees and more about the uneasy sound we hear when this fragile fortress finds itself a whistle played by the wind rushing through its mighty, splintered doors. 

Bend/break. 

When imbalance occurs that which protects us can morph into disease. Fever is a symptom, almost always, of infection. Symptoms are generally signs of healing. The body ramps up the temperature in an effort to kill off sensitive pathogens and aid in white blood cell reproduction. 

While the body usually regulates temperature effectively, sometimes it calculates wrong. Sometimes the infection spreads and the hormones produce fever in the brain and the hypothalamus keeps coordinating a rise in internal heat; like a stuck, spinning wheel. Sometimes the solution becomes the problem.  

Shame, as a coping strategy for traumatic childhood abuse, epitomizes the psychological version of this paradox. The haywire ceases to be a quick fix and becomes a habit. What was originally an adaptive solution to an overwhelming situation often grows cancerous for the survivor that employs it. 

Children don’t utilize shame consciously, but they don’t choose to be abused, either. They do choose, almost always, to grow in the most intact way they can imagine. The chaotic implications of an adult—especially a caretaker—seemingly bent towards annihilating the child’s sense of self is too much to bear. Internalizing the aggressor’s perspective—which is basically the aggressor’s whole objective in directing abuse toward the child in the first place—is the child’s only protection in a world without rules or safety. Children will absorb the toxicity of their environment in order to ensure their survival. They will sprout out of cracks and brutality and generations of entropy. Survival isn’t the question; the question is can a plant grown in bitter soil not be poisoned? 

At one point does an adaptive strategy become maladaptive?  Perhaps when the wind breaks the bough or blows down the door and we rely on the haywire rather than allow the faulty solution to come to its natural end. When the poison becomes the orientation, the symptoms carry the disease. The body’s temperature skyrockets. The shame grooves the neural connections in the brain until they are smooth with wear. The adaptation controls the organism. 

Psychological coping mechanisms, unlike the clean and highly refined process of biological homeostasis, are regularly messy. All learning happens through successive approximations, which suggests that our minds work more like blunt instruments than laser beams. 

The importance of the conscious flexibility required to manage our emotional lives—though no more important than in the ever shifting terrain of the body’s needs—clashes directly with the core fear of change, uncertainty, and impermanence inside us. 

It is consciousness that is afraid; consciousness that contains the construction of memory and myth that cry out for haywire solutions in the face of what is broken. It is conscious perception that builds castles in the sand, right next to the shoreline, again and again. Consciousness is what allows us to see ourselves as separate and, thus, alone. 

Consciousness, however, is also the basis of choice and—in yet another of life’s spectacular twists—it may be choice alone that can override maladaptive drives. As in the case of any mythological monster slaying, the hero must first decide to embark on the mission and this requires an intimate relationship with both fear and the mechanics of perception. 

Plants grown in bitter soil can thrive. In fact, Sunflowers are often planted in order to purify toxic soil so that other vegetation can live. With shame, what is leeched can eventually be expelled, but only through an intimate assessment of its purpose. The fortress materials must be inventoried. It is here, on this dark landscape, that something new may be built; perhaps something discrete and powerful as a tree tilting steadily into the wind.