It’s like fussing with a wound that hasn’t even begun to heal, but humans are like that.  One of the hardest things to teach a kid is to leave it alone when it starts hurting again…

So the killer sent a package to at least one of the big TV networks.  I’m actually surprised he didn’t post it all on YouTube or MySpace, but he may have thought that would have given him up too soon.  I’ve only seen a few very brief clips so far, but one thing that that leapt out at me was how completely deranged he seemed.  I’ve seen anger, I’ve seen fanatical hate, I’ve seen bitterness.  I’ve had a gun pointed right at my head, saw killing rage in the face behind the iron sights, heard it in his voice (it was a road rage incident…obviously he didn’t actually shoot me…).  I can half close my eyes and still see and hear it.  It seems bizarre to think of it as sane, and yet I realize now it was sane, completely sane, compared to what I saw as Cho Seung-Hui vented for a few minutes about rich people and trust funds and debauchery. 

I keep hearing the word "disturbed" here.  Let me say it: he was crazy.  It’s not just our rational mind, but all the evolutionary baggage our brains have accumulated over the eons that make us human.  I’ve seen human rage.  I’ve seen human hate.  What I saw in that brief excerpt NBC showed us was chillingly grotesque…like a face blasted apart and sewn back together by something that had never seen a human face before and didn’t know quite where to put things.  There were pieces missing from him inside…deeper more ancient things then those higher emotions of compassion and empathy.  Things from the bedrock of our mammal souls.  Maybe older still.  And what was there wasn’t enough to make any sense when it came to making a person out of it.  I’ve no idea if his personality had decayed that much before he sat down to make that video.  But if it was anything near I can see why he was scaring the hell out of people long before he did what he did.  The face chills you, not because of it’s anger and rage, but because it is missing something, some subtle thing you can’t quite put your finger on, but which leaps out at you for its not being there.

I don’t think they’re going to find the why of this in anything in his history or his environment.  A trigger, perhaps.  Perhaps not.  This is a clinical case.  He was crazy.  I strongly doubt now that it has anything to do with anything that might have been said or done to him.  In addition to the video he left a paper manifesto, with photos and writing.  One glimpse of a page of densely packed text, no paragraph breaks, just one long string of words for line after line filling the entire page, was enough.  I’m no professional but I’ve seen that before in case study after case study, and in the graphic art of the mad, which I have studied with interest.  And…something I saw first hand…

I once worked for a private psychiatric hospital.  I was a stock clerk.  My job was to keep the office supplies and custom printed forms flowing to the various units, most of which only dealt with mildly disturbed folks.  But one, the Intensive Care Unit, had double doors you had to be buzzed through.  I made my deliveries there only just to the inside door, where one of the staff would take my things and hand me a list for the following week.  One day while I was doing that, I saw a young girl who had just been brought to them.  She was laying on her back on a sofa in a room just next to the door and I could see her clearly.  She couldn’t have been more then 20.  Young, strikingly beautiful.  Her face was set in a serene, peaceful, fixed stare at the ceiling.  Her elbows were at her sides, forearms up, her hands and fingers extended, the palms facing the ceiling almost as if she was pushing it away.  She was talking in a low, utterly calm monotonal drone.  Something like this…

remembering sank shadows echoed in water reflected gained in light realized remembered effort grounded in reputation in secure secure remember programmed joy of momentum needs energy remember the well placed expansive classrooms bringing forth eyes to ponder glass light thrown up into sky remember remember remember reframe embrace renew fever strives to purge soul light and sky remember imbalance pursuing sickness and wonder together in wonder wonder wonder wonder aware awareness gave transcendent sight casts forth water fire cast cast cast cast cast

Like that.  I’ll never forget it.  I wanted to quit my job then and there because I wasn’t sure I could deal with seeing and having to know because I was seeing it, how tenuous the grip the human identity really has inside of us.  What is a soul?

You hear it called the ravings of lunatics, but until you’ve actually witnessed it you might assume that’s something like a politican or a fundamentalist preacher babbling on and on about something that nobody but them actually cares about.  But no…it’s more like a brain just dumping its contents onto the table like it’s barfing.  That’s what I saw in that video, and even more, in the page of his manafesto.  It was a brain dump.

Cho Seung-Hui, I believe now, was crazy.  Not crazy angry.  Not crazy with hate or crazy with rage against…whoever.  Just crazy.  In the literal sense.  We throw that word around so much that it’s practically become meaningless I suppose.  But there it is.  The Abyss.  The unraveling of the human identity inside of a person.  That’s not excusing or trivializing what he did to 32 school kids who still had their lives ahead of them, and I’m not trying to dehumanize him.  Cho was certainly human.  He had that rational mind, was able to think and plan, was able to consider death and what would happen after he was dead.  He was calculating and methodical as only a human being can be.  But a very sick one.  He was mad.