The Covenant of Water: Is it a Great Book?

 Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Diversity, Quality

Is The Covenant of Water a Great Book?  Abraham Verghese seems to be positioning it as one.  It is long, the way War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov (both Great Books) are long (715 pages long); he somewhat self-consciously models the book on Moby Dick (another Great Book); and the verbiage on the cover seems to suggest that he is aiming at more than the summer reading audience.

The Covenant of Water is a book that sweeps in time from 1900 to 1977.  Though an important character is born in Glasgow, it is mostly set on the spice coast of India – the southwestern provinces, with Madras, a city on the Eastern coast, also playing a role.  The story opens with the woman who the author assures us will become a matriarch, travelling by boat from her home to an arranged marriage to become a landowner’s second wife – his first wife having died after bearing him a son.  Though she travels by water from the wedding site to her new home, her husband takes a much longer overland route, apparently because of fear of the water.

What is a Great Book? My undergraduate college’s curriculum was based on the Great Books.  The Great Books are a collection of 100 or so books, originally identified by John Erskine at Columbia in 1921, but developed by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. They were collected and published in a standardized English translation form by the Encyclopedia Britannica Corporation in 1952. 

The Great Books are intended to be a statement of the western canon – the books that have defined civilization in the west.  They have been criticized for being too stale, pale, and male – ignoring contributions by women, minorities and our manifold recent accomplishments.

Though Verghese is male, the central protagonists are female, and he is writing about people who live in the Indian Subcontinent, though many of them are Christians living in a nation dominated by Hindu and Muslim religious, but with a great many other religious traditions beyond these big three including Jainism and Buddhism.  A central theme in the book is interreligious and interclass engagement.  

At my college, we started by reading the Iliad and the Odyssey, as well as Plato and Aristotle – we read Euclid for math and Galen for science, and by senior year we were reading War and Peace, the Brothers K and Newton and Lobachevski for math and Einstein for science.   Moby Dick had been dropped from the curriculum during the time I was there, but we may have read Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener instead (I know I have read that short story, but I don’t remember whether it was while I was in school or not…and I’d prefer not to figure out when I read it).

The first criterion for a Great Book is that it has to have staying power.  People have to value it over time.  For this reason, there were relatively few books from the twentieth century in the curriculum when I graduated from the college in 1981.  We did study the double helix of DNA (the papers we read were published in the late 1950s) and, in general, scientific material can get in faster than material from other disciplines – but it can also cycle out more quickly.  Darwin will probably always be there, but science is, by its very nature, volatile.  We may think we have the answer, but then the world informs us otherwise.

Obviously, The Covenant of Water has not met the criterion of having been around for a while; it was only published a year or two ago.  Even though it is now a best seller, many books that start out strong, fade.  They appeal in the moment, but there has to be a theme that sustains the interest across multiple generations.  The Great Gatsby was not initially popular.  I think it grew in popularity after it was given to GIs for free during the second world war and this led to a wider readership that recognized its value (though I’m not sure if it will ever be considered a great book).  On the other hand, Shakespeare’s plays were always, as far as I know, SRO at their performances.

I think the second criteria is that it must get at an essential truth.  Theoretically, if a book does this, it will have staying power.  And one of the reasons is that we are particularly interested in the process of ferreting out that truth.  Freud is one of the authors on the Great Books list, and the books that are there are his later, philosophical/sociological books.  But frankly, it is the earliest works – even his book with Breuer on Hysteria – where he is figuring out that psychological interventions help address puzzling physiological symptoms – where the seeds of his later great discoveries lie, and I wonder if these books are more deserving of being enshrined.

In any case, despite its sweep of time, and the manifold generations of people that inhabit its pages, the plot in The Covenant of Water is pretty linear and the two great truths in the book are pretty straightforward.  The first truth is that all people need to be treated with respect.  India’s caste system is interrogated as are the wars between those of different faiths, but also the prejudices against lepers – a particularly Indian prejudice because of the prevalence of it on the subcontinent, but a pretty universally feared condition.

This is hardly the first book to address the importance of treating others with respect and kindness.  I was surprised to find that this is one of the central messages of Moby Dick when I finally picked it up this summer.  Ishmael’s love of Queequog is one of the great cross-cultural moments of acceptance.  It mirrors Huck Finn’s love of Jim, but also echoes Romeo and Juliet’s love of each other, and I recently heard an argument that Abraham’s mission statement from God in the Bible was to do good not just to the Jews, but to all people – that this was the path that was defined for him by God to help undo the pernicious evil that seems to be part and parcel of being human; evil that wasn’t eradicated by the first genocidal attempt to cleanse the human race – the Great Flood.  And, of course, it is the Great Flood that leads to the first Covenant of Water - that God will not try again to use genocide to improve the race.

The second great truth in The Covenant of Water is a very particular one.  The husband’s fear of water turns out to be one of a myriad of shared symptoms that are part of “the Condition” that is passed down within his family.  Others in his family have had a justifiable fear of water because there is a very real risk of drowning in even a small amount of water because they are disoriented by being in water and lose their ability to stabilize themselves.  They much prefer to climb trees than to be in water.  They also, over the course of their lives, slowly go deaf, and have to rely more and more on reading lips – but many of them start to lose their hearing early and never quite learn to speak as much as others – which seems to lead them to be able to hear others on a different register – to be ale to empathize with them.  They are silent empaths who don't interrupt - and, though they may miss detail, seem to get the essence.

The husband and later his son are very generous, and this generosity seems to be part of the condition, too.  The matriarch inherits a genealogy of the family and puzzles over the condition.  Her granddaughter becomes a physician and discovers the source of the malady – it is a genetic condition, an acoustic neuroma - that creates a lesion in the acoustic nerve of the afflicted and can apparently cause personality change as well.  This genetically inherited lesion – this secret malady – determines the functioning of generations of men in this family – and turns out to be an inherited, but also medically addressable issue – risky neurosurgery can improve the condition.

The author would have us believe that the secrets of a family are what bind us together – they become the covenant that holds us.  Just as God created a covenant with man after his first attempt to correct his errors by eliminating genetic variance with The Great Flood.  Having finally recognized his kinship with humans, God had to find a new way of coming to grips with man’s humanity fallibility through Abraham; so, in this version, we come to love family members not in spite of their inflictions, but because of them.  The mess that we are is a part of what makes us lovable – not something that leads to isolation and to shame.

Verghese is a physician and, as far as I can tell, a lovely person.  He embraces people in all of their variety.  He does not turn away from people with afflictions that cause me to recoil.  He depicts people in this book with huge goiters – and his detailed descriptions of the goiter and of the surgical treatment draw us to look at these people, not to look away.  Similarly, his depictions of leprosy and the ways in which the truly debilitating aspects of the illness are that it robs people of the “gift of pain” so that they start to harm their bodies because they no longer get the feedback that they should stop doing harmful things is heart-rending and evokes a kind of empathy I didn’t know I could experience for lepers.  Apparently, in his position as a professor of medicine at Stanford, Verghese teaches bedside manner to young physicians, and I am glad that he is the person that is doing this.  I think he can train people to see through the blood and guts and to see the human before them.

But I think this book, because it is seen through his eyes, forces us to imagine a world that is prettier than the one most of us imagine.  Through all of its twists and turns, through all of the dreadful conditions that he confronts us with, we are led by a guide who wants us to feel what we feel from a position of hope – with the reassurance that these terrible things all have a meaning – he reassures us that there is a web of meaning – a sense that we belong to this family – this family in India, but also to the family of man and that, as a member of that family, we are and should be joyful.  Thank God, we should say, that we are human.

In this sense, he feels akin to Stephen Spielberg.  I feel that I am being guided in this book by a man like Spielberg who wants to make me feel uncomfortable things - he wants me to cry and to be uplifted - but he also wants me to know that, in the end, everything will work out.  His characters are, for the most part, good people who are caught in bad situations.  We are not confronted, as we are in the Brothers Karamazov, with an Inquisitor - a priest - who would condemn a reincarnated Jesus to death all over again because he, the priest, knows better what the people really need.

I am aware at this moment that in my writings here, I often take a similar position.  I think that Verghese and I share an outlook.  But I think this outlook that we share may keep us from acknowledging the intensity of the experience of being kept out of that family – the despair of not knowing.  The depth of being other in a world that doesn't allow us, on a primal level, to feel joined.  In our attempt to reassure the reader, we may miss connecting with the despair that is at the center of the human condition – and this may be the third criterion for a Great Book – that it has to capture something not just of the capacities of the human condition, but of its limits – and crushing experience of realizing those limits.  The reality of the situation is that, after 77 years that included gaining independence and surviving two world wars, India is more like itself than not.  The old prejudices survive.

I haven’t finished Moby Dick.  I got bogged down in the middle where Melville is explaining how whaling ships work for a couple of hundred pages.  I trust that when I pick it up again, the maniacal pursuit of the white whale will draw me back in.  The grand-daughter in The Covenant of Water who discovers the family secrets – including the secret of her birth – is the Captain Ahab of this tale – seeking out the truth of the family condition.  These discoveries bring her joy – and a sense that the world fits together neatly.  Somehow she manages to stay above the fray – and part of what makes a book great is the process of joining into the fray.  Letting it take us precisely where we don’t want to go.

As I drive across southern Ohio in 2024 and see a myriad of signs supporting Trump for president, I think of how far, and not so far our country has come.  The populist taps into our darker selves and makes us feel alright about having those dark thoughts; including expressing and acting on them.  The populist nurtures darkness and encourages us to protect it onto others.  Verghese is striving to do the opposite; but pretending that our darkness is not there leaves us unarmed in the fight against it.  We puzzle at the characters who remain mired in antiquated views, for instance towards women.  We do not interrogate them as closely as we do the goiters in this novel.  We are not prepared to know them and the arteries that feed them, we believe that good will outweigh the bad in the end - that the arc of history bends inevitably towards justice - as if that will happen on its own, not through a surgical interaction with a pathogen whose existence need to be understood so that we can wrestle with it, not out there, with those who disagree with us, but in here, in our hearts, where we know that we are not all that we pretend to be.

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Tarot and Turning 65: Does Medicare eligibility entitle me to alternative medicine?

 Tarot, Fate, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Reading Tarot, aging, reflection 

Rider Tarot Cards

This past weekend, there was a celebration of my transition to Medicare eligibility which, in the United States, occurs when you reach 65.  This also used to be the retirement age here – and therefore it is considered an important landmark.  So, my mother, who is over 90 and commented that hosting a party for a son who became Medicare eligible was not something she expected to be part of her retirement plan, invited a few people from my home town as well as my nuclear family to a small celebration.

I was the only person at the party who knew everyone there, so I had a notion that I would provide nametags along with the identifiers F, T, and E on them and would, as a party game, ask people to figure out what the letters stood for.  Fortunately, I thought better of that game, but I did describe it to the group, once they were assembled, to let them know about this crazy idea, but also to introduce them to each other. 

I explained that F stands for foundational, and I offered my Mother and siblings as examples of foundational influences.  T stands for transitional, and I talked about friends from high school who helped me move into a broader world, as well as friends from graduate school, mentors in the community, and also my first (reluctant) wife, who helped me transition to being a father, and friends who had helped me transition after my divorce.  I finished by talking about E – enhancements.  These included people who “came with” my second (reluctant) wife – my two stepdaughters and my brother and sister-in-law.

In talking about my son and my second wife, I noted that the FTE system collapsed, because they both belonged to all three categories – as did everyone who was present.  Our relationships help define us, and I have been lucky to have people in my life who have been foundational, transitional and enhancing and have thus defined me in ways that have allowed me to grow as an individual and as a member of a sometimes very disparate community.

After the guests left, the eldest reluctant stepdaughter, who is finishing graduate school in the family business of psychology, offered to do a Tarot card reading for me as a birthday gift.  I was pleased and happy for her offer.  She normally does readings based on the past, present and future.  I have had Tarot readings done (and dabbled in doing them) in a variety of ways, and I was looking forward to this progression; however, at the suggestion of her uncle – my brother-in-law – she did the reading based on a card for Foundation, a card for Transition, and a card for Enhancement. 

Dali Three of Cups

The first card was the three of cups.  The card deck she was using was one that Salvador Dali painted and it was unfamiliar to me.  We had purchased it when we were together at the Dali museum in Sarasota Florida – and she has been working from this deck, but it is mostly novel to me.  She asked for my thoughts about the card as I looked at it.

The card has three women on it.  It has been a couple of days and I have lost some of the visual details, but there are many.  My first association to it was to a recent book that I read, These Ghosts are Family (that I posted on last week).  In that book, three girls are stolen away from a funeral at the beginning of the book and at the end of the book they haunt the ancestral plantation on Jamaica from which the family at the center of the story originates.  I concluded that the card seemed, indeed, to be related to the early components of myself.

What I didn’t recall in the reading is the psychoanalytic importance of the number three.  This is an indication, for psychoanalysts, of the movement from pre-oedipal (dyadic) relating – Mommy and me, to Oedipal level relating – Mommy and Daddy and me have to figure out how to be in relationship to each other – I have to include a third in my understanding of how I relate to you – both in the family and in the world out there.  It’s not just me and you, but us.

The reluctant daughter pointed out that cups are a suit that indicates emotionality and love in particular (there are four suits in Tarot, just like in playing cards, but instead of face cards there are Major Arcana – what Jung would call archetypes).  This led us to discuss the ways in which my foundation, despite my being reasonably smart, is, somewhat confusingly, emotional.  I didn’t say this at the time, but it explains my primary professional interest in the relationship between feeling and thinking – I frequently find that my feelings override my thinking, which is confusing.  Psychoanalysis has helped me have my feelings inform my thinking – though I still cry at Coke commercials…

Dali Two of Cups

So, the second card, the transitional card, was the two of cups.  This card had a picture of a cupid rising out of a bed with a woman lying asleep (or perhaps satisfied) on her back.  I noted that this looked like the card in the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) with a man standing, leaving a woman in bed – perhaps to work.  This card is generally interpreted as being related to romantic love and connection.

The Rider deck shows two people in balance with each other.  The Dali deck, with cupid leaving, seemed particularly apt to me.  I entered into a marital relationship and left it – I failed to achieve the kind of idyllic connection promised by the idea of a soul mate.  That led me to a second marriage – one that has been more complicated – and one in which I have learned that soul mates are forged in the context of relating to each other, not on the basis of some kind of received, preordained connection.  Though some are lucky enough to find magic, in my experience, magic is made, not discovered – and that was an important transitional discovery for me.

Dali Two of Pentacles

So, the enhancement card was the two of pentacles.  This card was a dynamic, vibrant card with all kinds of elements in relationship to each other.  One of the thoughts about the pentacles versus the cups that my daughter offered was that this suit was more focused on things than on feelings.  The two of pentacles is often seen as related to juggling various obligations. 

What I came to was that having both an academic and an applied career has meant that I have been juggling a lot, but one of the enhancements that has emerged from that at retirement time is relative financial security – something that has addressed a central concern of a child of depression era parents.  On the other hand, I was concerned that my devotion to my profession had interfered with my being as available to others in my life, especially family.  (The FTE (usually short for Full Time Employment or Equivalent - something that I have usually been at between 1.5 and 2 FTEs in my life) seemed symbolic of this).

At this point, my daughter suggested that sometimes she will include a fourth card if there are questions that have emerged from the reading.  My concern that the reading was suggesting that I might have betrayed my emotional foundation a bit by pursuing the pentacles/ money/ multiple obligations in my life seemed like a legitimate question.

Rider Five of Cups

So, I drew a fourth card.  It was the five of cups.  This card includes three cups that are empty, or upside down, and two upright, or full cups.  On the Rider deck, the person on the card is looking at the three spilled cups and ignoring the two full cups behind him.  The message here seemed pretty clear: there have been losses based on choices I have made, and I can dwell on them if I want to, but I will miss out on what has been accomplished and fail to celebrate the ways in which I am a good representation of myself – something that I am very prone to do, all in attendance agreed.

This reading was, then, a high point of the weekend for me – along with many others.  Just like in a marriage, I don’t think the message was in the cards, but in the use that we put to them.  I was particularly impressed by the clinical skills that my daughter is developing – and that were on display in this interaction.  She was present to the cards and to me, and she offered support and interpretation without determining the interpretation.  We worked on the interpretive work together.  She brought what she knew about the cards – and, to a lesser extent, what she knew about me, and I brought what I knew about me, but also what I perceived in the cards – my knowledge of them has waned in the many years since I had a passing interest in them, but they are powerful symbols that interact with what I know about the human condition – and she and I used our shared knowledge about that condition to sympathetically explore hypotheses about the psychological space that I am occupying on the eve of a transitional moment in my life.

While the reading was, on the one hand, private – it was an interaction between the two of us (like the twos of pentacles and cups), it was also public (the three of cups) – the family gathered to observe and, occasionally, comment on the material and the interaction.  The reading felt like a microcosm of the weekend – a celebration of us – those of us who have been able to hang out with me (including myself) – as much as it was a celebration of who it is that I am.  In a word, it felt like a three of cups event – a return, if you will, to my foundation.

As to the reading itself, I have often found myself in readings being fascinated by and hoping for the major arcana to appear (those face cards that are archetypal).  Though the cards go up to ten, this reading’s highest card value was five, and the other three cards were two twos and a three.  In poker, I would have had nothing – a pair of deuces.  But the value of the reading was not in the cards, but in the interpretation of them – in the connection between the reader(s) and me and in connecting them to the life I am leading.  And while the reading was apparently not about the clash of the Titans – the big things that determine our lives – that did not make it any less relevant and consequential.  Perhaps our lives are as meaningfully constructed out of the smallest components as they might be by the big flashy elements. 

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These Ghosts are Family: How the past continues to reverberate in the present.

 

These Ghosts are Family, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Maisy Card, Brutality, Trauma, Memory

 

Hans Loewald characterized the psychoanalytic goal as “turning ghosts into ancestors.”  In her debut novel, Maisy Card clarifies how, without some kind of intervention, ghosts go on influencing us for generations.  Though the novel ends with a Jamaican ghost story that is incredulous to us, even after our immersion in Jamaican slave culture and its after effects, the ghost stories, and the way they are intertwined throughout the novel induce (in at least this reader) the experience of being disoriented, confused, lost and, in a word, haunted by what has gone before.

Card begins the book by asking us to imagine ourselves as first one person and then the next.  These are people who are briefly introduced, people who will all become minor characters in a novel where it is the family – the composite picture – perhaps even the culture, that is the major character.  As we are asked to identify with first this and then that character – on the day that a father will finally meet his daughter; the day of his death – perhaps, he wonders, at her hands – we are misled into thinking that the novel will reconstruct this man’s life and we will be led back to this moment with greater understanding.

O.K., we can return to that moment and it will be much richer for having read the novel, but the point is not to understand this man – in fact he, and perhaps all of the main characters, remain somewhat mysterious.  Those who are written about most distinctly – the white descendant of the slave trader who ends up marrying into the slave side of the family – are clear, but also somewhat cartoonish in their clarity – those least tainted by the brush of the collective trauma are the least mysterious and therefore the least interesting.

If the story were told in a straightforward, linear fashion, it would be a much easier read.  An Evil Man, a slave owning Englishman in Jamaica, running a sugar plantation, is presented with a lily white 14 year old wife from Iceland who produces a daughter and then a son before killing herself.  The son dies at a young age and the daughter grows up believing she can do no wrong – her best friend from next door gets blamed for all her transgressions.

The best friend, it turns out, appears to be white and is a ward of the neighbor, who is employed by the slave owner to keep the books on the plantation which, unlike the townhouses that the central characters primarily live in, is located deep in the bush of Jamaica.  After a slave uprising, when the plantation is burned, the girls get caught up in a plot to kill the plantation owner – a plot that is based in part on the anger of former worker for the plantation owner – and this former worker is, perhaps, the father of the neighbor girl and he is certainly the one who reveals to the neighbor girl that she is not white. 

And already things are starting to get murky.  Why would a daughter want to kill her father?  Could it be that the two girls are sisters?  Part of what unites them in apparent murderous rage against their father(s) is, for the acknowledged descendant, a hatred of the man who never really sees her, for the next-door neighbor, the realization that she is not white – and then disgust that her caregiver, who was rebuffed by her mother, has now proposed to her.

As confusing as that last paragraph is, it actually makes more sense when we finally arrive at this information in the penultimate chapter – in between we have seen the impact of the slave and plantation system and its dissolution on the family – and on the little town that emerged around the destroyed plantation, and on a wide variety of characters, many in the present, who are dealing with the impact of what happened almost two centuries ago. 

That said, the threads connecting those long-ago events with what is happening currently are as fragile, disjointed and unintelligible as the lives of the people affected by them would be if we didn’t have the backstory to make sense of who the people are now.

This house of cards is built through a series of short stories – or chapters – that center around one or another member of the family, and the reader is constantly referring back to the rather sketchy and confusing family tree at the beginning of the book as an essential means of keeping some kind of balance and orientation in a book that is incredibly well planned and executed and is, I believe purposefully, completely confusing.

The reader is confused, on purpose, as a means (I don’t know whether intentionally or simply through artistic voodoo) of inducing in that reader the lived experience of being this or that character in the novel.  To pick a character at random – the son of the man we are asked to imagine ourselves to be at the beginning of the novel (the man who is about to die) – his son (the person I am referring to now) was born and spent the majority of his life in Jamaica.  He assumed that his father had died long ago, in part because he was raised with the money that came from the life insurance his mother had taken out as well as insurance from his father’s job when his father was working in England to send money home to the family, and was reported to have died. 

Not aware that his father was still living - that the death occurred to another man that the white owners of the company confused with his father, and his father, believing he was releasing his wife from a husband she despised, took on the identity of the man who actually died; the son went to Brooklyn – where his father now lived – after his mother died.  He discovered there, on the streets, the man who, when he was a boy, had performed an exorcism on his mother – and the son only now is able to recover the memories of that horrible event.

Did I mention earlier that this is a brutal book?  It is…  And the brutality is essential.  The slave owner was cruel beyond belief to his slaves.  Enslaving others in the Jamaican fashion and that of the American South was brutal.  The exorcism was brutal.  We are subjected to those brutalities – both in the exposure to the descriptions of them, but more essentially in the confusion that we feel, just as the son does, about who did what to whom when.  This patchwork experience of remembering the book mirrors the patchwork experience of memory that these and other trauma survivors experience.  And being essentially foggy – about who it is that I am, how I have come to be this way and what will happen next – does not allow us to turn ghosts into ancestors – it preserves the ghosts as ghosts, and we feel haunted by what occurred, it lies outside of our consciousness, but impacts our actions, and also what we inherited, unseen, from our forebearers and their experience – their being haunted by their own ghosts.

So the ghosts at the end of the novel – three little girls who run away from the funeral of the mother of the son, the mother who had an exorcism and claimed in the middle of it that those around her saw her as possessed because they couldn’t recognize what a free woman looked like – those three little girls ran back to the place from which all of this brutality emanated – the plantation town, now a little bit of rural nothing in the middle of nowhere.

The girls, two sisters and a cousin, lured away by the lover of the exorcised mother – a man who felt spurned by the mother’s denial of him as her lover and a person who was disposed of now that caring for the mother was of no use to the family – took these members of the family back to the ancestral home to forage on their own – and they transformed into the ghosts of Jamaican folklore.  Cared for by everyone and no one, not sustained by meat and vegetables, needing blood to survive, these vampiric creatures preyed on the townspeople until they were forced to kill them – but, of course, you cannot kill ghosts… they are family.     

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Eddie S. Glaude Jr.’s Begin Again – An Odd Place to Learn about The Virtue of Trumpism

 Begin Again, Eddie Glaude, James Baldwin, Trump, Psychoanalysis of Racism, Psychology of Civil Rights

The Reluctant Wife asked that I read Eddie S. Glaude’s Begin Again because it is rich with psychoanalytic insight about Race and America without directly referencing psychoanalytic terms or concepts.  She thought it might be helpful to me as I struggle as an analyst to articulate how to understand Race in America.  As usual, she was right on the money.

Eddie Glaude is an African American professor at Princeton who has been puzzling, as many of us have been, over the rise of Trump.  He turned to James Baldwin’s path through the civil rights era and his navigation of those complicated waters as a guide to thinking about his own reaction to and experience of Trumpism.  Because this is a very personal narrative, it contains some of the perambulations and idiosyncrasies that writings of that sort, including this very blog, include.  Despite that, or maybe in part because of it, the book is a powerful reflection that gains momentum and power the deeper you get into it.

The original premise did not feel novel to me – The United States is founded on The Big Lie.  What is the big lie?  It is actually a whole bunch of lies, many of which are wrapped up in American Exceptionalism – that we are the land of the free and we are, first and foremost ethical, rule of law people where all creation is treated equally under the law.

Well, from the perspective of the white male, this may appear to be the case, but to maintain this lie requires a great deal of effort.  And, much later in the book, as he is describing James Baldwin’s series of exiles, it requires a kind of out of body experience.  In order to be the country we imagine ourselves to be, we have to overlook all kinds of things, like our treatment of African Americans and Indians over the last four or five hundred years. This parallels the psychological gymnastics we all need to engage in to maintain a sense of integrity despite our mistreatment of others (including by, sometimes, being too nice to them – putting women on a pedestal, for instance).  Closer to my home, psychologists might, for instance, need to interrogate their role in torturing detainees at Guantanamo Bay. 

Glaude makes the case that European Americans (white people) have been exiled from Europe and have continued to feel dislocated for our entire existence.  We have been fighting to show that we belong – perhaps.  We were, in the person of Hamilton, trying to create a monarchy, but this time to do it right.  Perhaps, and I will develop this later, we were trying to prove that we didn’t rely on Europe, but were independent – something that is an integral component of the Big Lie – that we are ready to move forward on our own.

Regardless of what is the case, we have dissociated ourselves from the messy, problematic aspects of our functioning from the very beginning.  The lie becomes that we knew what we were doing from the beginning, that we have always acted with integrity, and that we are continuing to do so today.

In the psychological world, the problem with self-analysis is that we can’t trust ourselves.  We necessarily tell the story in such a way that we are the heroes.  We did everything right.  And so we keep crashing ahead in our lives blindly assuming that we are doing things correctly, and that the world is messed up and not responding appropriately to our actions when it rejects us or tries to give us the message that we are not all that we have cracked ourselves up to be.

It takes a lot for us to go see someone else to help put ourselves right.  Trusting someone else to give us feedback about ourselves is a scary thing to do – are they really going to have our best interests in mind?  Can they accurately understand us?  In psychotherapy, we talk about this as the precontemplation stage of psychotherapy.  We aren’t even thinking about starting psychotherapy – why would we?  We are perfectly competent and able to manage things just fine, thank you very much.

The contemplation stage starts when cracks appear in that façade of self-righteous certainty.  We start to feel that maybe we aren’t so certain about the correct course of action to take.  Maybe we begin to realize that we are injuring people that we love.  We begin to question ourselves.  This is a critical moment that precipitates the contemplation stage.  Maybe we should do something differently.

Glaude doesn’t spend much time on this important developmental aspect of the civil rights movement.  The Brown vs. Board of Education decision (1954), the Civil Rights act (1964), and the Voting Rights Act (1965) were all responses to the realization that we had a flawed system.  Glaude references Baldwin as seeing that these were not going to be enough.  These were fix ups – in my therapy analogy, they were ways of staving off actually going into therapy and doing the work that we needed to do to undo the lie.  These were actions that allowed us to remain dissociated.

We have integrated our schools, we have made amends for past wrongs, and we have empowered the disempowered.  See, we are self-correcting!  We can be proud of ourselves for adhering to our values – for moving forward with integrity – as we have always done.  We fold the actions that we have taken in reaction to the big lie to actually reinforce that very same lie. 

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violent movement was based on helping the white man see that he was violating his own principles in segregating blacks and then beating them and shooting fire hoses at them.  This movement was founded on the principle that the white man is, in fact, a moral person who wants to act in moral ways.  When we can illustrate his immorality, he will be appalled and work with us to fix that.

This led, in Baldwin and Glaude’s minds, to characterizing King and others in that generation as Uncle Toms.  White men are not, in essence, simply moral.  They are complex critters, as we all are.  They, no more than we, do not have to be perfect to be loved.  But neither they, nor we (as we imagine King), know that.  We are seeking a more perfect union.  And this perfection is likely to be the death of us all! 

Glaude’s position, following Baldwin, is that we need to leave the country to really see it.  When we are inside of it, even if we are feeling alienated, we cannot see the source of the alienation.  We need to enact our alienation by travelling elsewhere – we need to become exiles.  For Baldwin, this meant travelling to Paris, but also to Istanbul – to being in an entirely alien place where the language is unfamiliar and we can be isolated, from our own country and the country we are living in.

I think that what Glaude helped me see about Trump is that he has created the sense of isolation – the sense of being a foreigner in one’s own country.  We can’t believe that he was elected.  We can’t believe he is being nominated again after he made such a mess of things and led an insurrection.  He is a felon, for God’s sake, and sees himself as the anointed one.  What kind of country do I live in?

Glaude sees Trump as the second wave of defense against the reformation of our country that the Civil Rights movement promised.  When the Civil Rights movement collapsed, when Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, when the younger, more radical members of the movement were chased off or imprisoned by the FBI, when the faith in government was brought into question by Nixon’s actions, Glaude sees our choice to replace Carter with Reagan as the death knell to the possibility of having made the needed transition.

Electing Obama provided the possibility of moving in the direction of the transition, but instead it put into place our wish to return to the way things were, and Trumpism – the three nominations of the man, the first nomination of a convicted felon (something Glaude could not have foreseen when this book was published in 2020), clarify that a huge portion of our population endorses an abhorrent individual with abhorrent beliefs – but because of the popular support, they are not aberrant beliefs; they are widely held ones.

I have observed, by the way, in years of watching faculty votes on various issues that we generally act based on consensus.  Most of the time, when we vote on something, we all agree.  When we vote on something about which we are torn, this generally does not represent a true division among us, but the actual vote ends up being a measure of the aggregate individual ambivalence.  That is, if the vote is 6 to 4, we are, on average, leaning towards the measure with 60% of ourselves.  Of course, there is some variance – 4 of us were at least 51% opposed – but we are generally not divided.

The watch word currently is that our politics are very divided.  What this book is helping me see is that we are not as divided as we imagine.  We are torn.  Individually and collectively.  If Trump stands for the Big Lie, we are enticed by that lie – we want to believe it – and we recoil against it to varying degrees.

We want to believe that we have pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps (and don’t remember that MLK told us that it is cruel to expect someone without boots to do just that). We want to believe that we are rugged individualists – and we don’t want to acknowledge that we are also needy and want and need the nurturance and care of those (women and POC) who we say are dependent on us, to care for us.  Were we the essential workers?  Some of us, yes, but many of us were non-essential.  We want to get rid of the safety net, and are afraid to admit that without that net we will work ourselves to death out of fear that if we don’t have enough to last three lifetimes, no one will care for us.

Trump speaks to our insecurities in highly coded language.  We fear the outsider – the one who will come and take what we have away from us.  Of course, at the moment that I am writing this, Joe Biden is enacting that same fear.  He appears to no longer be as competent as he once was, and yet he believes that no one else can defeat Trump.  More to the point, he believes that he embodies the antithesis to Trump rather than being a participant in the Big Lie.  His position that he is the ONLY ONE that can beat Trump is a participation in this lie – though so was his handling of Anita Hill when she was testifying against Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court hearings.  It was painful to hear him try to articulate how a proper woman could possibly have heard the words “Long Dong Silver” by any other manner than to have Clarence Thomas utter them. 

Anita Hill was a woman in addition to being Black, part of what made her hard for Biden to manage.  James Baldwin was gay as well as Black.  Baldwin was arguing against identities, and I don’t mean to be pigeon holing him by articulating this identity, but clarifying that being this and that affords multiple perspectives from which to see things.  Glaude did not say this explicitly, and I am not familiar enough with Baldwin to know this, but the prejudice of blacks against homosexuality must have helped Baldwin see that Blacks participate in the big lie too – we all do.

In the book Don Quixote, the broken-down old man riding a broken-down nag with a dimwitted sidekick atop a donkey while simultaneously pining for a bartending prostitute imagines himself to be a young Knight Errant with a sprightly page by his side, fighting dragons on chivalrous behalf of his royal lady.  He is not defeated by the windmills he imagines to be the dragons, but by the knight of the mirrors.  Seeing himself as he actually is turns out to be more than he can bear.

Donald Trump’s mirror is not a funhouse distorting mirror, it is veridical picture of the aspects of ourselves that are (at least slightly uncomfortably) owned and acknowledged by half of us and but they are present (to some extent) but disowned by the other half who would distance themselves from Trump.  Glaude’s prescription – based on Baldwin – is that we should acknowledge that Trump is accurately portraying aspects of ourselves, and that when we come to own that vision as an aspect of ourselves we will have begun to be able to acknowledge the big lie and to have a more realistic self-appraisal. 

I think the question is, how close have we come to a tipping point?  I don’t think that we are ready to acknowledge the disavowed aspects of ourselves – those of us who are slightly on the Trump side of the divide disavow their attachment to the basic principles that Glaude and Baldwin would have us embrace – that we love all people because of their basic and shared humanity. 

Those of us who are never Trumpers – who feel alienated in our own country and are contemplating self-imposed exile if he is elected again - are defending against their disowned prejudice – but expressing it in their hatred and mistrust of Trump and his legions.

We are still in the contemplation stage.  We are not ready to acknowledge that we are imperfect – and loveable in spite of that imperfection.  We are not ready to love one another despite, or maybe even because of our differences.  We are not ready to remember what we have endured – the pain of being beaten, but also the pain of beating – and we are not yet ready to take to heart Baldwin’s message that the only value of that pain is to connect with the pain of the other so that we are not alone.

We are not yet ready to realize that, no matter how far away we get from this country, we carry it within ourselves.  That, at the end of the analysis, whether it is a psychoanalysis or a truth and reconciliation commission process, we are more like ourselves than not, but that we are more capable of accepting ourselves and others when we are able to acknowledge and bear our pain and use it is a conduit to be in contact with and care for others, while being open to being cared for ourselves.

In closing, I should acknowledge that when I talked through a version of this thesis with the Reluctant Wife, we switched roles.  She agreed with my belief (only after reading this book – I did not hold this before) that Trump is doing us a service by exposing our disavowed selves, but she does not imagine that we are ready to engage in the painful and difficult paradigm shift that this realization might precipitate. 

Realistically, I agree with her.  Nevertheless, I think that realizing that we need therapy – realizing that there is a significant problem – and realizing that WE need therapy – not that they need therapy – is a huge step.  I am, I suppose, a bit giddy at this realization, and, like the pageant queen’s promise to achieve world peace (or Trump’s platform plank plan to End Crime), I believe that, if I can see this, other’s can to.  A guy can dream… 

If that dream is to become a reality, we have to realize that the leadership that will lead to the solution is unlikely to come from a nationally acting leader – at least initially.  LBJ knew that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were the right things to do (and the latter was certainly self serving), but he needed MLK to push him.  Could someone like Oprah push an agenda that would be palatable?  I’m not sure who is going to help the white man see himself – and help him realize that, despite the ugliness that is necessarily part of the picture, he is still lovable – more so for acknowledging the ways in which he is fallible, needy and aggressive.  Perhaps it will take a white man, one who is secure in his masculinity and aware of its limits as a means of engaging with and shaping the world.

After thinking about this overnight, I realized that while a leader or a group of leaders would be important, the important work has been done - curricula have been developed, books have been written.  Trumpers have tried to ban some of these books - sometimes successfully.  In my experience there is no more effective way to get someone curious about a book than to ban it.  I think that Trump's (or the 2025 project's - I'm not sure which) plan to do away with the Department of Education indicates just what a threat education is to repressing/suppressing/denying our history. 

Education is what is making our individual psyches cringe at a world that is and/or is not run by Trump.  Our ambivalence is fueled by what we are coming to know about ourselves - and would rather not, thank you very much.  Ultimately the changes that Glaude and Baldwin (and I) would hope for and aspire to will come not because a few leaders have convinced a few people, but because leaders have embedded leaders throughout the system, including in elementary school and junior high school and high school class rooms that espouse different approaches to the world - approaches that are more inclusive, less shaming, and more accepting of others, but also of ourselves.  These individuals go on to take government jobs, corporate jobs, and to move from the suburbs back to the city and to do so, we hope, with the intention of living with rather than displacing those who remained there (not always the case, I know, but someday we can hope that our children will be sitting in classrooms together connecting with each other, not because of a court mandate - which has not worked - but because we want them to).

The changes that are being talked about are both on a large political level, and, for them to succeed, they need to take place on the small individual level.  We need to wrestle with our racism, homophobia, and etc. on a global, but also on a very local level.  One of the revelations to me was that George Wallace, the racist governor of Alabama who was shot and paralyzed while running for president, had a personal transformation after he was shot.  He apologized for his racist past, ran for governor on a reform ticket, and was elected and placed qualified blacks in positions of leadership in his cabinet.  He was positively eulogized by leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.  This is an important part of Civil Rights story that should be more broadly known - we can reform ourselves!

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What is the threat that Neuropsychoanalysis poses?

 Neuropsychoanalysis, Mark Solms, Antonio Damasio, Threats to psychoanalysis, purity 

Neuropsychoanalysis is something that I am drawn to – I am a big fan of the Neurologists Mark Solms and Antonio Damasio; I think works like The Unconscious Id and The Hidden Spring enhance our understanding of the mind – and provide an empirical basis for some of Freud’s basic ideas, while extending and expanding them. 

But there are many who are unsettled by the assertions of Neuroscience.  They fear that neuropsychoanalysis will be a necessarily reductive undertaking, with the neuro part of the portmanteau overwhelming the psych(e) part of the neologism. 

This came to mind when I was listening to a podcasted reading of one of Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; when Freud is describing the centrality of wish fulfillment in the interpretation of dreams.  Especially listening to his words being spoken in a slow and steady cadence and without a hint of defensiveness, I became aware that the roots of the concern about the relationship between biology and psychology run deep and are integral to Freud’s conception of the mind.

My own concerns – stirred by the objections of others – were soothed by a new appreciation of the model that Freud was working from – one that clarifies the ways in which he had to move from the topographic to the structural model of the mind and helped me also understand how the structural model (despite the criticism of authors like Phillip Adams) retains and even deepens the psychological complexity rather than mechanizing it.

I have not read the Introductory Lectures in decades.  Hearing them again, I realized that I did not get the intent of Freud’s telling a fairy tale – even though I very clearly remembered the fairy tale.  Just as Freud is about to explain how we arrive at the explanation of why and how wish fulfillment is at the base of “corrupted” dreams (dreams that don’t appear to be based in wish fulfillment), he breaks off to tell a delightful story.

A man and his wife are granted three wishes.  The wife, smelling sausages being cooked in the neighbor’s house, wishes she could have sausages, and they appear on a plate before them – and they have used one wish.  The husband, angry with the wife for using up one of the wishes, wishes that the sausages would hang from her nose – and of course they do.  Two wishes.  Of course, because they are hanging from her nose by magic, they can’t be severed, and because the man and his wife are actually a unit, they agree to use the third wish to remove the sausage from her nose.

Now when I read this the first time I was probably 20 years old and not very wise in the ways of the world.  I got stuck in an identification with the husband, and - I hate to admit this – didn’t see the necessity of removing the sausages from the wife’s nose.  In addition to this betraying something about the immaturity of my character, it led me to miss the point of the story.

Freud was explaining how the fulfillment of a wish for one person could bring unpleasure for the other, and then he clarified that we have multiple subcomponent parts that have separate and distinct agendas, but they are, ultimately, inextricably bound to each other: they are all part of the same mind.  The husband was meant to portray, essentially, part of the dreamer (his or her ego, let’s say), and the wife was another component (the id, let’s say).  Both of these parts are unconscious components of the person’s psyche.  And Freud acknowledges that his critics are going to have a field day with this.  Not only are the critics going to scoff at the idea of AN unconscious – he is now positing multiple unconscious elements!

As if this weren’t complicated enough, he then adds another metaphor.  Freud suggests that the creation of a dream involves a capitalist, who provides the wherewithal, and an entrepreneur, who pursues how to achieve the end that the capitalist has in mind.  He suggests that the feeling state forms the wish.  This is the latent content of the dream.  The entrepreneur constructs the dream to meet that wish – with the caveat that the construction likely needs to hide the actual intent of the wish fulfilling aspect from the censor.

Freud is saying that the entrepreneur, who is constructing the manifest content of the dream, can have all kinds of motives in his or her constructive process.  They may engage in a variety of problem-solving techniques, a warning, a reflection with “pros” and “cons”, but, he says, analysis always reveals that underneath these is a wish.  And the wish is generated in the immature part of the mind – the id.  This place that Solms and his colleagues have called the emotions.

The wish is the capitalist.  And the wish will out.  The entrepreneur, at least in this essay, is the day residue – the stuff that occurred in the day before sleeping.  This stuff from the day before becomes the building blocks that allow for the wish to be played out.  That said, the entrepreneur is also an active agent, the architect that arranges the building blocks, taking into account the building codes and the limitations of the site.

So, there is an emotional seat – a wish that is expressed by a feeling state – I want or need this.  The emotional seat is the core of the Latent Content of the dream.  But, the latent wish that I want fulfilled may be problematic for a number of reasons, and the entrepreneur/architect/dreamer must figure out how to construct a dream out of the available materials that will meet the needs of that underlying feeling state – that will, in a word, fulfill the wish – without tipping off to the censor that the wish has been granted, because the desire is disruptive.

Now Freud worked for a long time with only one drive – sexuality.  During the first world war, he was forced to add a second; he called it the death drive, but this morphed into an aggressive drive.  He was able to get pretty far with sex and aggression.  What the neuropsychoanalysts (and others) have added are a plethora of additional drives.

Using the work of Jaak Panksepp, Mark Solms has proposed that we have Seven Drives.  I think that this means that we have seven suspects for what may be driving the dream (and no one has said that only one can be in play – so I think we probably have seven factorial possibilities to consider).  So instead of a single capitalist, multiple capitalists are in play.

I think the emotional systems, in so far as they are universal in their functioning, would be the aspect of the “mechanism” of the mind that would be most concerning to those who object to neuropsychoanalysis.  They fear we would be reduce ourselves to these biological mechanisms that are driving our behavior (including our dream behavior – Freud generalized from dreaming to symptomatic and then to general behavior).  Even if we leave out the tremendous variation between people about the apparent strength of these drives and the manifold differential ways that they can be shaped by both biological and psychological genetics, the variety of possible combinations of drives bearing on any given behavior should give those with concern pause.  This is not a simple system.

The kicker, though, is that how we juggle those drives has everything to do with how we psychologically construct ourselves in the world.  Information comes in, managed psychologically.  I attend more to colors – you more to sounds; I listen for threat, you listen for warmth.  Our perceptions of the world are also determined by our biological and psychological genetics.  Once the perceptions have come in – once the day residue has occurred (in the case of dreams), the emotions drive the construction of those “facts” (and, of course, this happens on a moment to moment basis during the day – we may find ourselves “triggered” by this or that keyword or event, and we may experience (or not) the raw feeling erupt – or creep - through our defensively constructed exterior to assert itself).

This process of construction – while it takes place (when we are thinking as neuroscientists) in the brain, are determined by the psychological rules – the defenses, but increasingly analysts are recognizing, by the culturally formed aspects of our psyche – and we react based on an incredibly complicated and ever shifting algorithm.  Might we decode that algorithm someday?  Might we reduce ourselves to a program?

The aim of psychoanalysis has always been different than reduction (at least among its best practitioners).  The aim has been to recognize the patterns that are the result of the algorithm – to notice how they play out in various settings (including in the relationship with the analyst – the transference) – and to create a space where we can be curious about this and to interrogate it, while simultaneously practicing new ways of interacting – laying down new interactional patterns.

The neuropsychoanalytic contribution to the analytic process seems to be enhancing both the connection to the biological substrate, but also the psychological components.  I think it is also clarifying that the intermingling of the psychological and the biological is complex and, far from reducing us, it helps us appreciate our complexity, diversity, and the ways in which we are all derived from the same complex genus.

Freud’s wish at the beginning of this exercise, was to be able to describe human functioning as a result of neurology.  We might think of that as the wish of the housewife and neuropsychoanalysis is in the process of delivering this sausage on a plate.  Now we can either savor it – and incorporate it into the psychological structures that Freud was forced to elucidate when the neurology of his day was too primitive to describe the functioning of the mind, or we can wish it away – just have it hang from our noses – unintegrated, but also unremovable, when we will be forced to use our third wish to undo the mess (as we did with Freud’s wish to ignore any other empirical instrument than analysis to evaluate his hypotheses, letting that wish hang on our faces so long that we almost became irrelevant). 

Let’s learn from the past, embrace this new way of thinking and allow it to be another springboard to move our ideas forward.

  

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Amor Towles Table For Two: Is there room for reality?

 Amor Towles Table for Two Psychology Psychoanalysis Patriarchal Constraint

Amor Towles Table For Two: Is there room for reality?

Amore Towles is a clever and hardworking craftsman.  The short stories and the novella in this collection of works are as well-crafted as the studiolo he describes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Towles writes:

…The studiolo … is a rather unusual installation, even for the Met.  During the Italian Renaissance, it became quite popular for gentlemen of standing to have a private room in their home into which they could retreat.  In order to inspire creative meditation, these rooms were often decorated in a manner that celebrated the arts and sciences…. The Met’s studiolo is not much bigger that…[a] pantry…  its walls had been finished with an intricate design of inlaid woods that gave the appearance of cabinets filled with scientific devices, musical instruments, and books.  In the creation of this delightful illusion, the artist used over twenty species of trees and all the same tricks of perspective that were employed by the Renaissance painters.

The studiolo is used in this short story as the vehicle for helping the retired art dealer to change his nephew’s mind about the importance of sharing a piece of family art with the human community – a shift that will bring the art dealer a 25% commission.  Like many of the short stories here, and in general, this one hinges on the character of the art dealer, but also on the character of the nephew and the nephew’s family.  The art dealer, as a man of the world, is disdainful of the nephew’s character and that of his family.  They represent something that is out of his reach – human connection and even warmth, all while they are teetering on the edge of financial ruin, because they run their lives on principles that are “sweet”, but not serving them well.

Towles invites us to join with the crafty art dealer against the guileless family, all the while feeling that the crafty man is hollow, empty, and exudes a certain kind of out-of-date cool that we would admire if we weren’t, ourselves, feeling disdain for the erosion of the world around him and his own erosion at the center of that world.

The moral tension in this story is played out as a variation on a theme – in The Bootlegger – where the protagonist – in this case an Investment Banker (Towles profession before turning (back to) writing) – takes the moral high ground against a man who turns out to be engaged in a deeply moral – though illegal – activity. 

Spoiler alert: In each of these cases, the hollow shelled person ends up getting their comeuppance and all is put right in the world – but the heavy-handed morality that is dealt out – the sense of right and wrong – is so powerful that my guess about Towle’s former profession was that he was an attorney.

 Before leaving the short stories, I was surprised by the ending to one in particular.  It was a delightfully told story of a high-class man admiring a warm-hearted individual when they were stuck together when a snowstorm that shut down LaGuardia.  They got a room in town, started having drinks together, and because of the stranger’s warmth, there was quickly  a group of people surrounding them in the hotel bar having the best of times. 

By getting their cell phones mixed up, the high-class man started talking with the warm-hearted man’s wife in Chicago who was deeply concerned about her husband because he was an alcoholic who had been sober for a year, but clearly had just fallen off the wagon – hard.  It turns out that the warm-hearted/ husband/ alcoholic had recently started working in his father-in-law’s company and his wife was very concerned and instructed the high-class man in a very controlling way on how to control her out of control husband.

I was expecting, at the end of the story, that the high-class man (again the narrator) would tell us that it made sense with a wife that controlling her husband would lose control when he got a whiff of freedom, but the high-class man expressed envy of the warm-hearted/ husband/ alcoholic for having a wife who cared about him that much.

My objection is not that I’m right and Towles is wrong – it is that I think we are both right.  And I think that living within the strict guidelines that the wife (and the man’s alcoholism) dictate is difficult – and will have a good outcome because of her vigilance, but there will also be a cost.  In a word, the world is not as neat as the studiolo would suggest.  It is messy and complicated and there is much more ambiguity and confusion than the pat answer provides.

Which leads us to the Titular Novella.  A lovely compact piece, written in the style of Dashiell Hammet – a Noir crime thriller – but starring a woman as the mastermind who untangles the complicated actions of the sordid denizens of Hollywood in the late 1930s.  This piece is a page turner, not least because it includes Olivia DeHaviland as she prepares for her role in Gone with the Wind.

In my role as a psychologist, I have worked in forensic settings, in inpatient settings with hospitalized patients, and have seen many patients and supervised the work of many clinicians and consulted on cases in a wide variety of settings, but the most unusual individual that I have met was a friend of a friend.  The friend was in town for the weekend and I joined her when she called on her friend, an artist.  The artist and her husband ran the local art film house.  We went up to the apartment the artist shared with her husband.  It was actually two apartments that had been put together – and it had two kitchens – a regular kitchen and her poison kitchen where she was baking her current art.

She was a feminist who was interested in the history of women’s rights and she discovered that, when women could not divorce or if they could divorce, they would be forced to live without adequate support, their recourse was often the use of poison.  To publicize this sad state of affairs, she would bake arsenic cakes and publicly display them.  When asked if I wanted anything to eat or drink, I politely begged off.

The strong woman – Evelyn – at the center of the story Table for Two, is both self-possessed and unmoored.  Having called off a marriage (again, this is the 1930s) in New York, she travels back home to Chicago, but at the last minute decides to continue on the train to LA.  Along the way she meets an ex-cop who teaches her how to use a Mickey.  She uses this weapon twice to protect Olivia DeHavilland (and the second time, herself), and she supports both herself and DeHavilland becoming as free as they are able to be in a patriarchal society.

Evelyn/ Eve’s struggles are, I think, a version of Towles’ struggles.  On his website, Towle states that he was recognized for his writing ability when he was an undergraduate at Stanford, and pursued a Master’s in writing at Yale, but became an Investment Banker at his father’s insistence.  After he became “fabulously wealthy”, he returned to the writing craft. 

Towles writes of the wealthy and of Eve’s wish to visit monuments, but then points out, “True, the men who had built these monuments (or, rather caused them to be built) were gone….  For the world to have any sense of justice, a team of artisans had to come forward with their hammers and their paintbrushes and pumice stones in order to patiently unmake the palaces of the proud.”

Towles should have added pens to his list of tools that the artisans would wield.  What is interesting about him as an artist, I think, is that he would deconstruct the world that he has inherited, but he is very ambivalent about his role in doing that.  His identification is with the very world he would deconstruct – not just because he is a member of the monied class, but because he believes that the world should be an orderly place.  He states that he labors over his stories, writing detailed outlines of them so that they are as tight as a drum.  I imagine that, on some level, he is threatened by the possibility that someone would find his stories to anything less than extremely well crafted.  In a word, I wonder if he is afraid to be vulnerable.

I am not criticizing him for this.  In fact, I empathize with his position.  I blog anonymously for many reasons, but one of them, surely, is that I am uncomfortable with how others might critically appraise my criticism.  I, like Towles, am a member of the patriarchy.  If we are to unmake the palaces of the proud – if we are to create an inclusive world in which the contributions of all are recognized – and recognize that the efforts of all are necessary for us to create the monuments of which we can all be proud, we need to figure out how to unmake and remake ourselves. 

This is a complicated task.  It might be the work of our mature selves rather than our younger selves.  We may need to spend the better part of our lives reinventing ourselves – and support the next generation's efforts to do that as well.  What we venerate, what we hold dear, are the very things that we need to question.  And it is not so much the products that we need to remake, but the way we make the products, and that is a scary proposition, because it means leaving behind what we know will work and moving towards doing things in ways that are novel and uncomfortable.  We need to support each other as we do this – both by acknowledging that we are turning the ship – as I think Towles is doing – and by pointing out that there is a lot more turning to be done for Towles and for all of us.

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