Your and my old lizards

I'm in way over my head, but stay with me.

Long, long ago, the Siouxland novelist Frederick Manfred used to preach that we all--all of us humans--were managed far more substantially by our sub-cortex, that area of the brain surrounded as if protected by the greatly blessed cortex, the home of what researchers might have thought of as all things bright and beautiful. The cortex was in all things fashionable; the sub-cortex was a lizard.

Human behavior--how we do what we do and are what we are--is, scientists have surmised, most greatly determined by our big blessed cortex. Mostly. No one denied that some stealthy inner motivations, from the sub-cortex were important, but those unwashed urgings were modulated or controlled and shaped by the cortex.

My old friend, Fred Manfred, the novelist and story-teller, used to claim we were far more substantially shaped by the primitive urges of the sub-cortex than any of us care to realize. Of that fact he'd say, we shouldn't be shy, pointing that long, skinny finger of his. What he and others  called "the lizard" within us, is far more of a dominating force than we'd like to admit--thus, saith Frederick Manfred.

In a thoughtful essay about Lord Grizzly, Manfred's most accomplished novel, John H. Timmerman traces the novel's mythic hero, Hugh Glass, desperate for life and then revenge after having been left for dead by his companions. "The Lizard crawls down in Hugh Glass through layers of vengeance and love, a burning desire to live and a desire for blood, down past desperation and dreams into a spiritual bedrock where forgiveness struggles against rage." 

Fred Manfred believed in the powers of the sub-cortex. Get him on the subject, and the night would be soon gone. I've never forgotten him and his lizard. 

And I've learned. Take me, for example. I've carried a long scar up and down the left side of my face for the last 75 years. It's as much a part of me as my non-existent hairline. Should you meet me sometime, you might just be struck by something you hadn't figured on--that lousy scar. 

But in all likelihood you wouldn't mention it; good taste suggests that asking about something like a facial scar, on first meeting--isn't at all kosher. You've got to know me first, or, so your conscience, the voice of your cortex, would remind you.

Manfred, the old lizard himself, used to say that a writer has to culture that inner, darker consciousness because the voice that says, "Where'd that Schaap guy get that scar?" is the voice one has to cultivate, to listen to and for, because it speaks the unvarnished truth. It's that "internal commentator," he'd say, who speaks truth. That's your lizard speaking. your I. C., he used to say.

Frederick Manfred was a preacher about some things, and "'the lizard' in us" was one of his favorites. 

All well and good. Call me a fool, but there's news out of Cambridge University now that research suggests--guess what?--that the sub-cortex may well play a far more determining part in human behavior than we'd like to estimate. 

Is that okay? Well, what will be will be, even if it might be a little scary. Life without the guidelines we inherit and use in and from our more moderate cortex--a sense of what's decent, what's good and right--might well contrast with grim reminders of the Old West, where life and death is determined by who has the quickest draw--a world drawn more from Trump than Obama.

I'm no expert, but I can't help but think that my friend Manfred would be smiling right now if he has consciousness enough to understand that what he used to preach just happens to have some new and amazing relevancy.

I know exactly where he's buried--right there in Doon cemetery, in the back, along the fence where, he said before he died, he could watch the corn fields yellow this time of year. You just have to take a little left on the path through the stones and watch for the stone--it's sort of pinkish.

But you don't have to go. I'll do it sometime. He'll love it, the old lizard.