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[Hot Scalding Gayser]

Subterranean lit a match. The empty house looked the same as always. Awash in a sea of memories, he slipped into his worn slippers and padded down the tiles. Steps echoing, he paused to stuff down a jack in the box with dark curly hair that screamed nasally "Type me, type me bitch!" Shaking his head at the obscenity, Subterranean resumed his path to the kitchen. Low blue lights illuminated pictures of a shy, gangly boy, and then gradually, his progression to a shy, gangly man. The man shook his head. The shadows were always entirely too friendly every time he tried to get a decent headshot.

Tapping on his candle as if to dispel the darkness in his heart, Subterranean pushed open a door to reveal a low white kitchen with a checkered cloth covering a well worn wooden table. He strode to the table and removed the contents of his bag with the utmost care. Gathering his ingredients, he sliced whole wheat bread, slathered it with mayonnaise, and was just about to spoon the watery contents of canned tuna on top of it when he heard a voice.

"GAY!" the voice said. "GAY GAY GAY!"

Subterranean whirled around. There, sitting on his counter top, was a young man. The man was dressed in pink and purple and had an aura of indecent belligerence about him.

(=p =p =p)

[HERO]

In the same decade in which writers are discovering the emotional importance of childhood and are unmasking the devastating consequences of the way power is secretly exercised under the disguise of child-rearing, students of psychology are spending four years at the universities learning to regard human beings as machines in order to gain a better understanding of how they function. When we consider how much time and energy is devoted during these best years to wasting the last opportunities of adolescence and to suppressing, by means of the intellectual disciplines, the feelings that emerge with particular force at this age, then it is no wonder that the people who have made this sacrifice victimize their patients and clients in turn, treating them as mere objects of knowledge instead of as autonomous, creative beings. There are some authors of so-called objective, scientific publications in the field of psychology who remind me of the officer in Kafka’s Penal Colony in their zeal and their consistent self-destructiveness. In the unsuspecting, trusting attitude of Kafka’s convicted prisoner, on the other hand, we can see the students of today who are so eager to believe that the only thing that counts in their four years of study is their academic performance and that human commitment is not required.
The expressionistic painters and poets active at the beginning of [the 20th] century demonstrated more understanding of the neuroses of their day (or at any rate unconsciously imparted more imformation about them) than did the contemporary professors of psychiatry. During the same period, Freud’s female patients with their hysterical symptoms were unconsciously reenacting their childhood traumata. He succeeded in deciphering their language, which their conventional doctors had failed to understand. In return, he reaped not only gratitude but also hostility, because he had dared to touch upon the taboos of his time.
Children who become too aware of things are punished for it and internalize the coercion to such an extent that as adults they give up the search for awareness. But because some people cannot renounce this search in spite of coercion, there is justifiable hope that regardless of the ever-increasing application of technology to the field of psychological knowledge, Kafka’s vision of the penal colony with its efficient, scientifically minded persecutors and their passive victims is valid only for certain areas of our life and perhaps not forever. For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.