Wolves and Sheep · 6:04am Jan 9th, 2018
I have a throne.
My throne is a tailgating chair made of cheap plastic and synthetic blue. It is falling apart—the left arm hangs by a nylon rope curled twice around the bent plastic rod. Beside it is an empty cooler where sits a horde of nonfunctional lighters, ash, and a copy of A W Tozer’s book Knowledge of the Holy, which serves equally well as a mousepad and porch reading material when I wish to sit and decompress.
Whenever I sit there upon my porch to write or smoke or listen to the rain or talk, I sit in this chair and think quietly of Tennyson’s Ulysses. I have more than once, when I was alone and once when I was very Not Sober and not alone, said: here I mete out uneven laws unto a savage race / that feed and hoard and sleep and know not me.
I did not sit my throne. I yielded it to my roommate Grayson. I would speculate if he too thought such things, if perhaps it was not me but the chair and it’s permanence that bred this atmosphere, but maturation often means knowing when you do not want to be in someone else’s head.
Months ago I told Grayson: there are two kinds of people in my head, I think. There are two distinct categories, two distinct personas, two sides of the throne of god. There are wolves and there are sheep. The strong and the weak. The victors and the enslaved. The exploiters and the exploited. And I have always been a sheep.
What am I, he asked with a smirk.
You’re a wolf, I said, looking out in the dark.
Trauma does strange things to you. It comes in many forms, wears different faces, but always twists you. That’s not to say that it must always break you or ruin you. Merely that it changes and that one must learn to live with that change or be consumed.
The world is not actually wolves and sheep. But I see it that way a lot.
Borderline personality often manifests in this way. It’s called splitting. People, groups, experiences, things in general are split into the saintly perfect and good and the awful hellishly bad. Nuance vanishes, and with it people are swallowed up in a two sided and fruitless inner narrative. Because the black/white bad/good divide is inhumane. It is, as my old philosophy prof said, an acid no vessel can hold.
But Grayson sat in my throne and I leaned against the railing. He stands. He shakes his head. Sits. Shakes his head again.
I’m just tired, he says.
I say nothing. Job’s friends did well when they were silent. I ash into the glass tray and look out at the flooded lawn between the apartment buildings. The rain comes down in sheets, but it’s dry on our porch.
He continues on, Achilles of the tired eyes: left me on read, basically. Don’t call me until I call you unless it’s an emergency. That’s it. I don’t think it was too much to ask.
It wasn’t. Communication is important, I reply because I am a filthy hypocrite. I admit it. Hypocrites ironically know the Score, and the nature of things often.
Grayson left the chair. He switched to his Juul vape. Switched back to tobacco. We leaned against the railing on either side of the white pillar.
Does he limp like a wolf favoring one paw? Does he stumble as if he had been just barely some trap’s escapee? Where is the wolf? Where is the arrogant smirking devil who spares the weak because of whim and a kind of noblese oblige?
Is a wolf still a wolf if he cannot bite?
I’m tempted to say that the dichotomy of Wolf and Sheep is false, but I know I cannot say that. It is not entirely false. It’s just...
I too am a wolf, I think.
I think there may only be wolves. An endless chain of gnawing at bones. Maybe. It’s wolves all the way down. Perhaps.
Or maybe it’s that old moralist’s solution—men are made of wolves and sheep alike.
Or maybe it’s none of that. Or maybe there are only the weak and those who trample them, and time is only a boot grinding a face into the curb forever.
We lean over the railing, and the rain continues. I cannot see him the same way. I have no framework how to think of this. To call it good or bad seems ridiculous. It simply is. It is a mutable, changeable fact. This moment where the smirking cocky freshman breaks in my minds eye is just a split second and it may be different tomorrow. It may be different by the time I comprehend it.
I ash off the side of the porch because I’m an idiot. I listen.
I think about wolves and sheep.
I have this thought, about wolves and sheep. It's hard to articulate without sounding like a bad sunday school lesson, but... I think we're all both wolves and sheep, but that's only a starting point. It's what we feed, and what our lives feed. Sometimes you get the wolf beat out of you, because when every hint of a snarl gets a kick in the face, you stop snarling. Sometimes you fatten the wolf and let it run wild. Sometimes you feed the sheep, starve the wolf, and live in hopeless fear of a world of wolves. Sometimes you leash your wolf, and enlist it in defense of your sheep.
Time to put a record on. I'm thinking Animals.
Trouble is, sheep are very dim. And once they get an idea into their heads there's no shiftin' it.
If you spend a lot of time worrying about whether you're a sheep or a wolf, I'd say don't bother. You're most likely a sheep.
Because wolves don't worry about whether they're wolves. Do you think Harvey Weinstein worries about being a wolf? Or Woody Allen? Or O. J. Simpson?
Hint: most wolves don't even see themselves as wolves. They see themselves as poor little lambs who, at worst, have gone astray.
In time, and with the appropriate guidance, some wolves became shepherds.
When you civilize wolves you get dogs--in all their wild variations--and that's about right.
Resist the natural urge to dichotomize. Our world is too big now for that instinct. It leads to hatred and conflict.