[The Stone, a poem by Rebecca Foust that inspired this]
I can’t hear the word ignorance without thinking about The Matrix, and Cypher’s infamous line, “Ignorance is bliss,” while he chews a luxurious steak that the computers conjured up for him. My 12-year-old self tried to grapple with how this man could so horrifyingly betray his crew in his desperate attempt to survive. These people wanted to be free and had fought with everything they had to get to that point. Hell, they fought with everything they had to survive every day. They did it side by side, in what I thought to be the most intimate of family bonds. It still sits with me as such an evil spectacle, pernicious seems an apt word.
As I get older, I keep re-experiencing that scene in different aspects of life that harken back to what I felt when I first watched the Matrix, particularly the scene where Cypher betrays his crew. Yet I also feel I don’t fully understand all the complexities swirling around those sacred film moments. It’s not that I think I’m close to betraying anyone but the temptation to just not know what you now know can be quite alluring. If I were to gorge myself on a glorious steak made for me free of charge, I might consider - Can I go back to where I didn’t know how awful you were? How utterly fucked up all this is? Well, like it or not, now I know, and I have decisions to make. There is no computer to offer me a deal and hide my memories. For me, even if I make what I think to be the “right” decision, I somehow feel worse off just for knowing. Thinking about these new revelations makes me feel vulnerable to a world with a capacity for such evil.
The other desire is real too, to have someone else decide. A part of me hopes someone else can make the decision to get me away from here or get me back to where we were before all this. The disorientation of what I am now beholding makes me doubt there was a before. Some things feel like too much responsibility.
The thought of the truth setting me free pops up as a write, an intrusive thought! I don’t even know how that fully applies here. But that’s the implication, right? That to know is freedom, but is it? Now I’m wondering what freedom really is, and it feels like I am chasing a white rabbit down a hole I didn’t want to go down – pun not intended.
And this reminds me all of grief again. Dare I try to process anything without grief rearing its domineering self with its strident demands that she be heard, and scarier, to be felt. To love is to know and to know is to love and with all that love comes the potential for great loss.
Big love equals big grief, or the other way around, as my friend learned in her grief group. Okay, I can take a few big breaths. Slow down. Process. A lot can be lost on the journey.
Back to the matrix, one of my favorite characters, Switch, dies after this ugly betrayal, and it feels all so pointless. I don’t think pointless is the right word but utterly powerless. She iconically says, “not like this… not like this,” before Cypher pulls her plug and she collapses. She has that gut realization right at the end, all this effort, all this love wrapped in all this knowledge, to have come this far to then go out like this.
And that is a betrayal of the highest kind.
[here is the scene for reference but I warn you, it’s a bit heavy]