The Trouble with Fundamentalist Religion? God is a Rorschach…

 Religion, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, God, Government, Church and State

I was raised in the Episcopal Church.  For those unfamiliar with it, it is a protestant denomination – the American arm of the Church of England.  The protest that was mounted was by Henry VIII who wanted to divorce his wife against the wishes of the Pope, so the church broke from the Catholic umbrella, but largely kept to the form of the church, and the church services feels familiar to Roman Catholics who attent them (and vice versa).

As part of the service, congregants recite the Nicene Creed – a statement of beliefs that all are publicly acknowledging and sharing by reciting them together.  My mother, a strong Episcopalian, went to an Episcopal conference a long time ago – long enough that the speaker was using an overhead projector instead of power point slides.

An overhead projector is basically a powerful light that shines up through a flat glass panel  and then the light hits a mirror and is directed onto a screen.  When you put a plastic sheet on the glass, anything written on that sheet shows up on the screen against a white background.

In the workshop, the leader passed out plastic sheets with the Nicene Creed written on it and he gave everyone in the group black markers.  He then instructed people to cover up with the marker parts of the Crede that they did not, in fact, believe in.  He then laid the marked-up creeds on top of each other on top of the glass.  Anything that was crossed out – anything that anyone in the relatively small group disagreed with – was “redacted”: there was a black mark where the words had been.

This is the Nicene Crede as written in the Episcopal Prayer book:

We believe in one God,
    the Father, the Almighty,
    maker of heaven and earth,
    of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
    the only Son of God,
    eternally begotten of the Father,
    God from God, Light from Light,
    true God from true God,
    begotten, not made,
    of one Being with the Father.
    Through him all things were made.
    For us and for our salvation
        he came down from heaven:
    by the power of the Holy Spirit
        he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
        and was made man.
    For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
        he suffered death and was buried.
        On the third day he rose again
            in accordance with the Scriptures;
        he ascended into heaven
            and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
   He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
        and his kingdom will have no end.
​
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, 
    who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
    With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
    He has spoken through the Prophets.
    We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
    We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
    We look for the resurrection of the dead,
        and the life of the world to come. Amen.

As my mother reported it, when the sheets were laid on top of each other, the only unredacted words were: We believe in God.  The rest was uncomfortable enough for at least one member of the group that everything else had been redacted.  And there is, to my eye, some pretty uncontroversial stuff here…

The point is that religious beliefs are varied, even when we get within one community.  It is also the case that the one thing they believe in; God, is hardly a univariate and consensual entity.  I think if we asked those at the conference to describe the God they believe in, we would find a great deal of variance.

On Rosh Hashanah of this year, I went to the morning service at Beth Adam, the humanistic Jewish synagogue that my wife belongs to.  There was a remarkable sermon (accessible at about 1 hour and five minutes on the link – though you might want to listen earlier to the reading and translation of the text).  The traditional reading, which the Rabbi commented on in her sermon, is the binding of Isaac.  The story in the Bible (Torah) where God instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son on an altar.

In the sermon, Rabbi Werber took the position that this Abraham, the one who travels a long distance with his son preparing to sacrifice him, this Abraham whose arm is stopped by the word of God in the very act of murdering his son at God’s command, is a fundamentalist.  By fundamentalist she means, someone who takes the word of God as permission to abandon their personal moral authority.  She cannot imagine, nor can I, a father of any sort, much less the father of a religion, murdering his son for any reason.

She went on to state that members of fundamentalist religions routinely outsource their personal moral authority to the word of God, using specific injunctions to justify heinous, immoral behavior.  As an example, she cited individuals opposed to abortion bombing abortion clinics – and killing people in the process of doing that.

For her purposes (she was trying to get a group that considered themselves secular humanists to reconsider themselves as a religious organization), she clarified that the fundamentalists in this country – and indeed throughout the world – have taken the position that if a religion is not fundamentalist, then it is not a religion.

In opposition to the fundamentalists, she defines a religion as a shared set of beliefs that include a moral code that is based in Justice.​  If we were to stretch that definition, science could be considered a religion.  Certainly psychoanalysis could be considered a religion (and it has been criticized by many for being a religion rather than a science.  How convenient, then, to clarify that all of science, based on a (largely) shared belief in how we come to know what is true, and the resulting culture necessary to support those beliefs, might be considered a religion as a membership in a greater order rather than one that is at variance with it).

Rabbi Werber proposed that the Abraham we should take as our model is not the Abraham who bound Isaac, but the one earlier in the Torah who took God to task when he threatened to destroy all of Sodom and Gomorrah.  That Abraham argued that God had no right to destroy the righteous along with the wicked.  “Far be it from you to do such a thing,” he says.  “Shall not the judge of all the earth deal justly?”

Even God, in this version of religion, should be questioned and held to the standards that God has set.  Even God, implicitly, can be unjust – can be wrong.  We cannot take even the word of God as the gospel on what should or should not be done.  We need to evaluate it against our moral code – especially if that moral code originates with God, and we should all be held accountable to it, no matter how complicated that might become.

In the United States, the constitution is our operating manual.  But it relies – heavily – on the individual moral authority of those who would operate the mechanism of government.  It allowed for punishment to those who violate the manual, but that is not really the mechanism that the framers intended to make this country great.  As I have argued elsewhere, we fought a revolution to secure self-government, not no government.  

Our current government is riddled with appointees who are a strange mixture of clearly self-interested leaders and fundamentalists – including those who appear to worship at the altar of the office of the President.  Many of these individuals within the executive branch are operating with impunity – as if they have no obligation to the other branches of government nor to the people they are governing. 

The advantage of redefining religion as a shared set of beliefs is that it opens up the body politic to a dialogue about what it is that we share as a polity – as a body political.  Certainly Justice is at the heart of it – and the Justice system – the courts and the enforcers are at the heart of that, but we also share a belief that because these arms are manned by humans, they need oversight.

As a teacher, as a psychologist, as a psychoanalyst, as a father, as a partner, even as a child I need oversight.  My motivations are complex and not always clear to me.  I know what I would have myself do – I know the kind of person I would imagine myself to be.  And I know how complicated it is to achieve some semblance of that person.  In addition to an awareness of my drivenness, I am aware of my laziness.  I am also aware that my drivenness can drive me into places that I would rather not be and create blind spots that are problematic.

I hate having someone look over my shoulder.  I am so self-critical that I assume that others with be equally critical.  This can keep me from checking as often as I should, but also from asserting my position clearly so that others can evaluate it.  It also means that I shy away from recognizing that to act in any way is to risk acting immorally from some perspective, but that should not keep me from acting, for that is also immoral.

I am aware of my tone becoming increasingly religious.  I am, apparently, working to match the Rabbi’s sermonic tone.  But I also hope to be connecting with her position that overreacting to the current moment – becoming dogmatic to fight dogmatic fundamentalism – trying to match the idealizable fundamentalist vision with an alternate ideal vision (something I think I am routinely guilty of in these posts) may create an equally inhuman picture of the complexities of governing and being governed; of being a governor and of being a citizen.  We will certainly not be perfect, but that should not stop us from striving to make the world a better place by finding principles we are willing to work from and being open minded about how we interpret them, but not so open minded, as my wife points out, that our brains fall out.

When we appeal to God, or to God's word as the definition of a religion, we are engaging in a feint, in an untruth. We are pointing to an entity that is, by definition, unknowable by most of us.  In those who do have a personal experience of God, that experience is exactly that, a personal experience that can be reported.  Moses, when he comes down from the mountain, can tell us what he saw, but he does that as a messenger.  Even Jesus, in so far as he was God incarnate, communicated with us as a human being - a person. 

We, as human beings, need to acknowledge each other's humanity and, I believe, in doing that we should recognize that another's conception of God may be valid.  That said, when I worked at an inpatient psychiatric hospital, we often referred patients to have a chat with the chaplain about whether their beliefs were, indeed, shared by others.  A religion requires community, it is not the creation of an individual.  It is when, in that community, that a member references God with certainty, especially about specific human affairs that we, as members of that community, should carefully and fully evaluate the validity of the position.  We should avoid using God as a Deus ex machina.

Addendum: I wrote this post yesterday and it feels more unfinished than most of my posts, which always feel a bit unfinished.  I don't think that I clarified that I think - I'm not sure if the Rabbi would agree - that fundamentalist religions are NOT religions.  In her definition, religions are a shared set of beliefs.  I think the Episcopalians do have a shared set of beliefs - overlapping Venn diagrams, if you will.  If we compared any two of the slides, I bet there would be more agreement than disagreement - both about what was included and what not.  

I think that what I am struggling with is that a religion must needs have disagreement.  If there isn't disagreement within a religion, that isn't a religion, it is brain washing.  It is a denial of the human qualities of the members of the religion.  I don't believe I could have faith in a God that didn't respect humanity - that is the quarrel that the other Abraham has with God about Sodom and Gomorrah.  That Abraham is having a dialogue with God, not mindlessly following him, and he will have a dialogue with the other members of his religion, and it is this that entitles him to be the father of sea of faiths.  I suppose I am proposing that dialogue is essential to the human condition - and therefore, to be considered a religion, the religion must needs recognize the condition of the members of that religion.

Of course, that both of these versions of Abraham exist, clarifies that there is a desire for the kind of faith that would erase our humanity.  As a reluctant psychoanalyst, I can resonate with that.  I wish that the human mind weren't so complicated and convoluted that we need psychoanalysis.  I also wish that faith weren't so complicated that we have to be uncertain while we hang onto it and wrestle with it, but ultimately I believe that to be the case.

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Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove: The Wild West and Mortality

 Lonesome Dove Novel, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Character, Prejudice, The American Dream, 

The reluctant son and his steady were reading the Lonesome Dove and invited me to join them on the adventure late this spring.  Eight hundred and fifty some pages!  It was a pleasure to be invited, but I am not a fan of long books. I aspire to hang in there with these tomes, but often fail to make it over the hump in the middle.  A couple of summers ago I got started on Moby Dick, but the seas got too choppy.  A few years before that, a friend liked a post on the Hobbit and suggested I try the ring trilogy, but I never got through the first book…

Reading a much shorter novel, A Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion, she referenced the book in an interview with Studs Turkel.  In the interview, she talked about her characters, her delight in them, and her ambivalence about killing them off, noting that McMurtry didn’t seem to have any such compunction in Lonesome Dove.  Then Virginia Evans, in her book The Correspondent, had her hero write to Larry McMurtry after her third reading of the book – and she talked about how it spoke to her in different ways at different times in her life.

OK, I thought, its not just the lovely invitation from my son and his steady, but the Universe itself that is encouraging me to read this book.  As summer turns to fall, I am finally straggling into the corral, having enjoyed the long ride more than I would have expected and the book did, as Virginia Evans’ character described it, roll out of me, rather than coming in.  There is something essential and visceral in these pages and these characters and they speak to me as Achilles and Odysseus must have spoken to the Ancient Greeks; it seems to be telling – or even allowing me to tell – the story, not just of my life, but of our lives.  It is the history of a people bent on getting there at any cost – and the price they pay to do that.

As both Didion and Evans agree, this is a brutal book.  McMurtry clearly delights in his characters.  They come to life slowly, in the sleepy town of Lonesome Dove in the middle of nowhere South Texas on the banks of the Rio Grande.  We meet Augustus McCrae, a talkative, seemingly lazy, often drunk retired famous Texas Ranger who runs the Hat Creek Cattle company with his partner Woodrow Call, the silent, hardworking, co-leader and equally famous ex Ranger.  The group they oversee and live with are largely remaining members of their ranger company, plus a few strays who have joined them along the way.  Gus and Call are the bright lights in this box of otherwise dim characters, each of whom seems a bit more myopic and dopey than the one before. 

Gus spends a bit of time in town with the local whore, Lorena, but, unlike the naïve cowboys, he does not idealize her or put her on a pedestal but connects with her as a person, in addition to paying to poke her, something they both see as a reasonable business transaction after a game of cards. 

It is hard to imagine that this motley crew is really of much interest, but then Joshua Deets, an African American member of the gang returns from doing the group’s banking in Dallas (Gus assumes that others think that no one would trust an African American to carry money, so they won’t try to rob him) and brings with him a card shark and lady’s man and ex-member of the Rangers group, Jake Spoon.  Jake takes up with Lorena and convinces Call that Montana is Shangri- La, and pretty soon we are mounting up for an epic journey.

A note here: Josh Deets is not referred to as an African American anywhere in the text.  The language that is used to describe his ethnicity is true to the late 1870s, but not language I will use here.  He is, as are all of the characters in one way or another by the end of the book, heroic.  Unrealistically so.  In this, McMurtry seems to be echoing Mark Twain, but also the heroes of films about the old west.  They are larger than life – but therefore, somehow, truer to life than the muddled figures that most of us experience ourselves to be.

The western is not my preferred form of literature (or film - though I haven't widely sampled either genre), but I do love the novel Shane.  Unlike Lonesome Dove, it is short and very spare.  But the characters are similar, and the time frame and the context are similar.  Shane, however, is like Tom Sawyer.  The story is told from the side of the farmers who are putting up the barb wire that will spell the end of the epic cattle drives and lawlessness of the wild west.  And the story is circumscribed.  I like the comfort of a story that stays put.  I suppose the Iliad, focused on the battle between the Trojans and the Greeks and between Agamemnon and Achilles, is similarly circumscribed.

Lonesome Dove, like Huckleberry Finn, blows the doors off the small town and takes us out into the world where we are confronted by dangers unknown in the small town.  It explores racism, as Huck Finn did in antebellum America, and includes anti-Mexican and Indian racism, but does so more by embodying racist ideas than by confronting them.  But the threats of weather, animals and humans are real and vividly portrayed.  Life certainly wasn’t safe in the Iliad, but there was a strange kind of order, while The Odyssey, Huck Finn, and Lonesome Dove throw us to the wolves and raise questions, because we leave it behind, about what home is and what we are looking for when we go in search of it.  

On one level, the characters in Lonesome Dove – even those that are deeply drawn, like Gus, Call, Jake, Deets and Lorena, are two dimensional.  They read like they were written for the screen – and for particular actors to play them.  And they were.  Gus was written for John Wayne and ultimately played by Robert Duvall in the mini-series after Wayne passed on the script for a movie because he found it too dark.  And yet that allows for something to occur that pulled me away from philosophy and into psychology.

The questions that are being asked in this book are deep, existential questions.  And the answers, such as they are, are varied.  There is no cookie cutter answer to the nature of a human being and his or her quest. They vary based on our character – including things like our gender – and on our individual lived history – a history that has unfolded in the context of a particular culture that reacts to the gifts that we bring to it in very different ways in different times and places.  Psychology – and psychoanalysis perhaps even more – in the study of personality and psychopathology, focuses on the individual and their functioning – it does not focus on us as a unitary species but a species of particular individuals who have been born into a culture that has been woven together in a particular way.

One of the ways that I read this book at this time was through the eyes of a man pushing seventy.  A man who used to think that seventy-year-olds were ancient and largely irrelevant, and who thought that seventy years was an unimaginably long period of time.  One way of reading this book is that it is a protest against the end of an era – a very brief era – one that the chief protagonists – Gus and Call – fought tooth and nail to bring to an end, but they also didn't want it to stop.  They lived in and for the flux - the change - not for the desired end state.  They sought to tame the west – to bring law and order, though the brutality that they used to do that echoes down through the ages from long before the Iliad, through the Roman Pax Romana, the Mongolian unification of the steppes and forward into our own teetering post world war role as brutally benign enforcers of a post second world war “peace” that allows for unprecedented global commercial integration and prosperity – especially for those already wealthy.

And suddenly two thousand, or four thousand, or even six thousand years – the time since the trojan wars were fought and the pyramids were built, does not seem long at all – but a mere blink of an eye.  Call’s excitement about Montana, though never explicitly stated in this way, evoked for me the hope that there is still a frontier – still a place that hasn’t been conquered, and I – western hero that I am – am not dead yet.

The irony is that Call has never been, on some level, alive at all.  His bewilderment at the end of the novel – his existential despair is confusing to him because he never knew what tethered him to life – what made living worth it for him.  Gus did.  He was careless because he valued life so much more than Call seemed to – not because he valued it less.  He wanted to suck every last bit of goodness out of it – and, in doing that, he was conscious of its transience.

Before I leave this lovely book with many aspects of it necessarily untilled, I do want to comment on the sex and concomitant gender issues in it.  As I was just starting the book, I commented to the reluctant son and his steady that there was a lot of sex in a book that only included one female character.  They, who had finished the book a while ago, agreed, and warmly recalled the characters.  They went on to let me know that there would be more women – and more sex.  And there were and was.

The author paints the women – they are not all prostitutes – as understanding the power that they wield over men.  Indeed, it is remarkable that this book gives the impression that the woman who are being used in various ways by many men are disempowered only in the most brutal of conditions.  At that point, when they have become traumatized and need to recover – sensitive men can help them do this.

While this narrative arc captures an important aspect of the empowerment that women have always had – especially from the position of the male gaze – it minimizes the impact of treating individuals as second class citizens based on an aspect of their identity.  This is equally the case for women, Mexicans, Indians, and African Americans.  It is also the case that the empowered white men are disempowered each in their own way by the particular character flaws with which they have been gifted or have crafted for themselves.

That paragraph leads me to conclude that the privilege of the white male in this version of the history of America is to be foisted on his own petard, rather than a predetermined petard that others have forced one into.  The author, I think, highlights the virtues of the marginalized characters (the whore with the heart of gold is the standard here) to highlight their individual triumph over the stereotype, but this relegates them to a relatively narrow fight – to not be true to type – rather than the broader lack of type – the individually determined character – that is only afforded to the white males who are at the center of this epic tale.  None of the minorities, for instance, have sex with white women, or even expresse dreams of that - unless they are brutally raping them.

Of course, I may have spoken too hastily above.  It might be that McMurtry is pointing out that the white male is cursed to believe that heaven on earth is possible and therefore we search for it – in idealized women, idealized places, in wealth – and only the rare characters, the Guses of this world, can overcome that class based prison, and realize that the world as it is, as complicated, wet, dark, and dangerous as it is; is more than enough.

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Covid Chronicles XXXII. What are the lingering effects for particular cohorts?

 Covid's long term effects; covid's impact on relationships; hook up culture; relational fears, psychoanalytic theory building, psychoanalysis and social science

I met with a supervisee for the first time yesterday (in September of 2026).  She works with college age kids and she has noticed some significant shifts in their behavior in their behavior.  We traced those shifts, in our musings, to the isolation of sheltering place during Covid.  I thought I would share our very idiosyncratic thoughts that are based on a convenience sample and some wild speculation.  I do this not so much for the particulars of our observations or our speculations, but because I think that the impact of social events on the functioning of people, including our patients, is something that we have been increasingly drawn to look at, and the arc of the Covid lockdown and its lingering effects is one such place that calls aspects of traditional psychoanalytic ideology into question – opening it to connect with other fields that observe human behavior.

As I age, the people that I treat have aged with me.  Some of that is because I engage in longer term treatments and some of my patients have been with me for years, but also because the base of people who refer to me – my peers and my patient’s peers – have been aging right along with me and their contacts are older.  A big chunk of my caseload currently are Medicare cases.  So I have grown out of touch with the college population – a population that I used to treat directly and then supervised the work of graduate students as they treated this population.

This new supervisee, who is immersed in the treatment of college students, suggested that, post-Covid, the functioning of students at a large state University has changed considerably since she was a student not so very long ago.  Where once Wednesday through Saturday nights were considered party nights and students spent them surfing from bar to bar and occasionally including frat house or other parties in the loop, the dominant entertainment now involves staying in with friends – largely on Friday and/or Saturday nights.

The supervisee and I agreed that this not necessarily a bad development – indeed, on the surface, we welcome it.  Isn’t it better to develop close and deep relationships and shouldn’t we be done with the hook up culture?  But leave it to analytically oriented thinkers to consider other possibilities – specifically that these students are afraid to connect with peers who are strangers.

As we thought about that possibility, we imagined what this cohort lost during the Pandemic.  We imagined them to be in 9^th and maybe 10^th grade then, and imagined that they were working from home during a particular developmental epoch.  This epoch is the period that immediately follows middle school.  Middle school for the two of us, members of very different cohorts, was a terribly difficult period, and I remembered a study from my high school days where the researchers proposed that 99% of middle schoolers felt that they were not part of the in-group.

At the time, I was skeptical of the assertion that virtually everyone experienced themselves as an outcast, so I approached one of the people that I just knew had been one of the cool kids in middle school and asked her about her experience.  Sure enough, she stated that she did not believe that she had been in the in group at all.

Now, as I said at the outset, I don’t think we should use this very anecdotal information as the basis for anything like policy or as a basis for a particular theory about this cohort, but it didn’t stop the supervisee and me from putting these “facts” together with her observation of the shift in behavior for some? Many? Certainly not all, but a significant portion of individuals in this cohort compared to previous ones.  

Based on our conjecture, lived experience and ancient statistical and anecdotal data, we wondered if the healing impact of the transition to high school, where some of the jostling for position dies down and people find peers that they connect with and begin to experience themselves (as a collective whole – there are huge individual differences here) as more competent and, importantly, confident in their ability to connect with others – in a word – to trust them and, if others fail them, to trust in their own self esteem to see them through a difficult encounter until they can make it to the safe waters of a friendship where they can process the annoyance of someone trying to shame them.

Without the healing magic of being able to connect with a coterie of like-minded friends or pals as Harry Stack Sullivan would call them, they may be trying to catch up by identifying such folks later and hanging out with them, or they may have missed an opportunity to do that and they may be particularly susceptible to the current mass (social) media fed concerns about the malevolent intent of anyone who is not immediately known or kin.

Objectively, I do not put much stock in these musings, though I am subjectively attached to them enough to subject you to them, but I do this in service of what I hope will be a greater good.  Psychoanalysis has long suffered from overgeneralizing from the individual to the masses and from Freud’s over identification with Darwinian principles of selection and the assumption that we are all sprung from the same biological roots and playing those out in our development.  From this perspective, developmental hurdles like the Oedipal complex are universal and determined by the infant, not by the configuration of caregivers that they encounter. 

We, as a discipline, should continue to be open to modifying our theories based not just on who happens to be lying on our couch (even thought these speculations arise in large measure from just such a set of chance encounters), but from the burgeoning data about the influence of varying cultures on the minds and character of the people who have been raised within them, including their relationships to the dominant cultural figures and norms, and the influence of changes in the social and relational climate, including from overarching events like a pandemic.

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The Correspondent: What is our writing if not the tracing of our soul?

 

The Correspondent, psychology, psychoanalysis, communication, handwriting a letter, typing, emailing

My Reluctant Mother recommended this book a while ago because I have been writing snail mail letters for the last three or four years and she thought I would have an interest in a fictionalized account of a series of correspondences from the same author.  I think she also thought I would enjoy the articulation of this particular character – Sybil Van Antwerp -  from her letters – including her growth as a person.  And she was right (as usual).

This book asks the reader to follow multiple threads as this woman corresponds with her children, her close friend, her neighbor, her godchild, and various mysterious others, including an unnamed correspondent whose letters are never sent.  As we do this, we learn about the author of the letters from the way her thoughts are presented on the page and we also, implicitly, learn something about the relationship between the use of language and character formation and expression.

Without too many spoilers, this woman is adopted.  She is adopted into a Waspy family, and she writes like my very Waspy Maternal grandmother.  In fact, she reminds me of her a lot, and to a lesser extent, she reminds me of my reluctant mother, her daughter.  Grandmother learned to write – letters of the alphabet – from her grandmother, and her penmanship was excellent.  But she also learned how to think and to think about the world from that same grandmother, who home schooled her for a chunk of her childhood in Wisconsin.  Her letters were things of beauty.  She learned and used the Palmer method of cursive writing, and all of her letters look the same – eminently legible. 

In addition to their appearance, my grandmother's letters also have a similar structure, one that is present in the letters in this book.  There is an acknowledgement of the person they are writing to and any previous correspondence, especially the most recent.  Then there is the main body of the letter – articulating what she is most interested in communicating.  It may be a response to the other’s communication, or it may be a new topic, and, in either case, there is an effort to be clear about the intention of the communication and to provide enough context that it makes sense.  Then there is a closing – perhaps an entreaty, a summary, or a question to evoke a response.

The exceptions to the standard form vary from unremarkable – the single paragraph of an email requesting information – to the urgent, where the need to communicate overrides the nicety of an introduction and the immediacy of the concern is portrayed not just by the words, but by the violation of the standard letter protocol.

That said, these letters are far from form letters.  My father’s father wrote a lot of letters.  My father remembered his writing every week when my dad was in college.  I read a collection of the letters he wrote one week to a variety of family members and friends – and the content of the letters was remarkably varied, as was the style of writing – even within his own standardized format.  My grandfather’s wife was out of town, and he told her about news of the garden club, he wrote to my father about hunting and fishing with mutual friends, a mutual interest of theirs, and he wrote to others of business dealings that they were involved in.  Similarly, Sybil writes of aspects of her life that are germane to the person she is corresponding with.  There is some overlap between letters, but it is remarkably limited.  Part of the joy and challenge of reading this book is putting together the pieces and figuring out the relationships between the people that Sybil is corresponding with – and her relationship with each of them.

A friend who read the book fantasized about reading the letters at the pace that they were mailed.  It would have taken him the better part of a decade to finish the book – and the memory of a particular letter, not held together by any connection with the person outside of the letter – would likely have made this an impossible task: he wrote after confessing this fantasy to acknowledge that he had finished the book the next day.  I took a very different tack than he and occasionally read ahead along a single line of correspondence.  I was anxious to figure out how this particular aspect of the book/correspondence developed and didn’t wait for it to unfold organically.  When I told other friends about doing this, they were appalled.  I was violating the form and structure of a work of art!

Writing snail mail letters is different than composing an email.  Especially when you write them out by hand, you have to think about what you want to say before you say it – you can’t edit after the fact, the way you can with email.  Generally, I also have a length in mind.  I want to keep most letters to the front and back of a single piece of stationary, or, if I am writing a longer letter, I am still thinking about how the end will line up with the next piece of paper.  In other words, there are constraints that don’t exist with an email, which can be one line, or a tome.

Sybil Van Antwerp frequently writes drafts of her letters – one or two – before she sends the letters out.  This is a constraint that I don’t include – much to the chagrin of my correspondents who note missing and illegible words as well as misspellings and ask me to at least read over a letter before sending it.  I do work through at least two and often three or four drafts of a blog before posting it, but this does not prevent all kinds of odd locutions, typos, and some bad grammar and mistaken references to characters showing up in the final product.  And in reading The Correspondent, despite the effort that goes into crafting the letters, we still get a sense of the underlying (human) clutter, concern, anxiety, and uncertainty that undergirds the crafted letter.  While emails are often about transactional matters – when should we meet, what should we wear, how should we solve this problem – and they verge on conversational gambits, letters are a step removed from that.  We are composing something that is, ultimately, a one-way piece of communication and we think more carefully about the impact of that communication on the receiver (notwithstanding my lack of care for the incidentals of a particular letter).

This woman’s character; she is an attorney who worked hand in glove with a judge as they decided how to mete out justice – a task that she took very seriously professionally but also in her personal life, is measured.  She is thoughtful – and to a psychoanalyst, this means that she works to manage her feelings – to take them into account – to let them inform her decisions, but not to let them drive her decisions.  The words in her letters are clearly driven by feelings, but they have also clearly been filtered through a process of determining how they will land, that includes a complicated measuring of the mind of the recipient and how that recipient will appreciate what is being said.

What becomes clear, again – to the analyst, is that, despite her best efforts, her feelings actually play a determining role not just in her letters, of course, but in pivotal moments in her life, and the plot of the book, when it emerges, is based on how she manages to address the guilt that she feels about the mistakes that she has made – mistakes made based on mismanaging competing feeling states, something that becomes apparent only in retrospect – and the efforts she engages in to compensate for these mistakes, and her efforts to manage feeling states in her current life, as she continues to live, despite having retired and working actively to put to bed the unresolved issues from earlier in a life that might seem all tied up.

Through her correspondence, we become quite fond of her – or at least I do.  Others I have talked to found her irritating, and I get that.  I think my fondness (and irritation) is driven in part by my familiarity with the cultural position from which she is writing.  I am very much at home in a WASPy world.  It is important, I think then (spoiler alert), that when we discover her birth history, a picture develops of a person who does not look like the person that we have come to know on the page.

If this book is put on the screen, the casting director will be tempted to cast Francis McDermott, who was miscast as Olive Kitteridge because, though she could portray Kitteridge’s grumpy gruff affection, she simply couldn’t be the physically massive woman that Olive was – and her physicality was essential to her character.  In the correspondent, the character is inconsistent with her physicality.  We don’t discover her swarthiness until we have already gotten to know this person through her writing.  Perhaps if they cast a swarthy woman, we can have lots of voice overs of her letters before we meet her – but please don’t cast someone who looks like she sounds – Francis McDermott would be great for that - we need to know that the author wants us to know that her character is the product of her adoptive family, not her birth family.

Ultimately, this book is of interest to me less because of my letter writing – I am OK with my family and friends intuiting my character from my letters – isn’t that what we do in all of our interactions?  But I am more concerned about the ways that strangers may intuit who it is that I am from my blog posts.  Especially, I guess, because I intuit so much about the authors of the books that I read from the material that they write.  I initially posted anonymously to protect my patients, should I write about them.  But I have only written about patients in a very broad and general sense, not in any way that they would be identified.  Increasingly my anonymity is protecting myself.  Recently, I wrote about a family member who was very critical of being included in a post, even though I had cleared it describing the result of a conversation with them ahead of time.  I think they felt exposed to have been featured here.  I have had extended family ask me not to write about them in writing that I do for the family.  The issue of the privacy of our character when we act publicly is an interesting one.

Sybil Van Antwerp, the correspondent, tackles this issue head on.  She writes to the authors she reads.  We read her correspondence with Joan Didion and with Larry McMurty (I am currently reading Lonesome Dove on the recommendation of a family member, and had the story spoiled – or perhaps had my heart prepared for it by Sybil’s correspondence with McMurtry).  She writes to them as fellow human beings as she writes about their books.  My guess is that this has stimulated a lot of correspondence for Virginia Evans, the author of The Correspondent.

I have sent links to some authors after I have posted something about their works, and I have corresponded with some of them about their work.  And it feels uncomfortable to do that.  I have a relationship with them that they are not quite privy to.  I have read their work, I have formed an opinion not just of their opinion but of them, and I am now in their presence.  Perhaps that is part of why fan behavior is so odd – we are interacting with someone we know who doesn’t know us. 

I think this generalizes beyond the book world.  When I worked in an inpatient psychiatric setting, the recreational therapists would interpret patient (and staff) behavior when we played together.  I think we can judge athletes character from their play on the field.  Whether accurate or not, we feel that we know them.  In High School, when I played the part of David in the play David and Lisa, a play about patients in a psychiatric institution, my director's mother would regularly ask about whether I was doing better.  She knew that I was his student, and that I had played the part, and certainly I brought something of who I was to the part - and the part informed me, but the director recognized that the line between me and my character had become too blurred in her mind. 

It occurs to me that fan behavior is a little like a child interacting with a parent – at least after a certain point.  At first, the parent knows more about the child, but then, certainly by adolescence as the child builds parts of their character that are inaccessible to their parent, but they continue to observe and know their parent, they begin to interact with their parents, but with others as well, as if they know them.  In the case of interacting with parents, that may well be the case.  Children see their parents at their most unguarded moments.  And then, through the magic of transference, they begin to see others as defined by that paradigm.

 

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Chloe Zhao's (and our) Hamnet

 Hamnet, Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Function of Art, Grief in Art, Universality of the Human Experienc

I have watched the movie Hamnet three times now.  First, we watched it as part of a marathon of watching almost all of the movies nominated for best picture of the year.  I had been curious, but was closed to the film.  Reviewers had raved about the emotional impact of the ending of the film.  When I read the book, I was impressed with the claustrophobic nature of the long struggles with the children’s illnesses, and I saw the film as similarly claustrophobic, spare, and therefore, on some level, cold.   Recently, I watched it again with our local “chapter” of the Association for Psychoanalytic Thought (Apt).  The discussant was a local English faculty member who really liked both the book and the movie.  She ended her brief presentation with four questions, one of which I will use to organize this post, though all were thought provoking and inspired a lively conversation about the film.

The third viewing of the film – a private one that the reluctant wife and I did after the public showings – in which we watched the film with the commentary of the director (and co-writer of the script), Chloe Zhao – opened an emotional space to welcome the experience of parental investment, loss and grief that I had not been able to access in my reading of the book or the previous viewings of the film.  Don’t get me wrong, I cried when I read the book and at each showing of the film.  The final scene in the film is, indeed, one of the most powerful (I think) in cinema, but I had a hard time feeling this wash over me in the way that I fully expected a book or a film with this theme that was clearly so excellently rendered to do.

The question that the English Professor asked was something along the lines of: "Shakespeare’s name is not used at all in the book and only once in the movie.  What’s with that?"  Chloe Zhao’s commentary on the film did not address that question at all.  It was mostly focused on the technical details, but focusing on those details helped me understand the choices that she was making - including the framing, especially of the interior shots, where she was making them into stage sets, with a stable camera and a full frontal view.  This was an homage to Shakespeare and the tradition of setting theatrical performances on a stage rather than using a more fluid medium. 

Zhao acknowledged that, as a Chinese woman, she does not know Shakespeare – neither the plays in depth, nor the oeuvre that is certainly part and parcel of every English speaker's vocabulary.  We may never have seen the plays but we have heard his words spoken and even spoken them ourselves without knowing who we are quoting.  He is, as it were, a kind of ghost himself – someone who has insinuated himself into who it is that we are.  One answer to the English prof’s question is, then, when we never utter his name when we use his words – why would we need to do that here?

Zhao let her actors, particularly Paul Mescal, who plays Shakespeare and is a trained Shakespearian actor, choose the lines that are quoted in the movie.  She also learned from someone that, to follow a Shakespearean play, you don’t need to listen closely to the language; words that can be dense and obtuse, but, she says, you should follow the emotion.  And she hopes that she is able to do that in her films as well.  It is not an academic exercise to engage in watching a movie, but an emotional one.  We should give ourselves over to our feelings.

A second answer to the prof’s question is that not naming Shakespeare allows Agnes (beautifully played by Jessie Buckley) to take center stage.  We see her first in the film and we see her as an organic being, someone who is deeply centered in the life of the woods, who is connected to the underground – the caves that are at her woodland home – but also the sky – the falcon that she tends – and the surface of the earth – the herbs that she mixes into potions that address the maladies that children and adults face.  If she is a witch, it is a good thing to be a witch.  She is carrying on the tradition that comes from her mother of opening her heart to the world, even when, or perhaps especially when, this is difficult to do.  How did the Shakespeare from Avon know about the vast variety of plants that he cites in his plays and that are planted in Shakespeare gardens outside places that honor him?  Clearly it was Agnes who was teaching him.

David Lindsay-Abare was at a talk back with a group of analysts in New York after his play Rabbit Hole was performed.  He reminisced that, when he was a student at Julliard, his teacher told the class to write about what terrifies them.  He remembers thinking, “I’ve got nothing.”  Then he had a child.  And he wrote Rabbit Hole, a play about the impact on a suburban couple when the unthinkable happens; their child is run over while playing in the neighborhood and dies.  I was not blogging when I saw that play, but it comes to mind in this play as these two parents, who clearly love each other and their children, are torn apart by their individual grief – a grief that, for a bit of relief, leads them – especially Agnes – to blame the other or to see the other's grief as not as deep or powerful.  As if they are in two separate hells rather than realizing that they are in one shared hell.  To not call out Shakespeare’s name is to see him, not as someone other – William Shakespeare, the Bard, but one of us.  We feel his (and her) pain as our own. 

Perhaps the depth of the pain is part of why it took me so long to come on board with this film.  When my son was born, I found it hard to watch TV for more than a year.  I had never noticed before how often someone dies on TV shows and in movies.  And, during that year or more, I felt the grief of the parent for every NPC who bit the dust.  The child who dies in this film is far from an NPC.  He is a beloved character who is cute and alive and heart warming and who gives himself up to save his sister.  How can you not feel for him?  But how can you open your heart to this much pain?

The book and film ask you to do some gymnastics.  They ask you to think that Hamlet is not about a boy losing his father, who is now a ghost and wants retribution, but about a father losing his boy.  Chloe points out that a happy accident allowed the movie to underscore this important bit.  The young Hamnet is, in this retelling, brought back to life by his father in the role of Hamlet – and he gets to strut upon the stage the way that the young Hamnet dreamed that he would do.  The actor who plays the young Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe)  has an older brother (Noah Jupe) who stepped into the role of Hamlet when the actor cast in that role became unavailable at the last minute.  The resemblance between the two closely related actors makes the uncanniness of Hamnet’s reappearance vivid.

It also helped to be walked through the complications of the this narrative and the complications of bringing it to life, but most importantly, it helped to hear one of the artists involved in the project talk about the ways in which the narrative was consistent with and underscored deeply held personal beliefs and perspectives.  One of those beliefs is that chance is not random, but an opportunity to allow the world around us to participate in the work that we are doing.  The availability of the older Jupe brother is just one example of this, the invitation to the actors to choose the Shakespearean lines another, but the openness to improvisation, to letting the story grow, to seeing how embodying the roles allows the actors to feel their way into the organic truth of the story, all of this made this film feel less like a construction of a master who would instruct me in how to feel about the world, and more like the product of a confederate feeling her way into a world that we both inhabit together.

Perhaps the discussion of the creation of the final scene, that tremendous moment of contact between audience and actor, playwright and wife, mother and son; the shared experience of a grief that we cannot bear alone and that is both amplified and softened by the connection with others feeling it, each in their own way – this moment was not scripted, but developed.  Agnes barges into a place that is foreign to her.  She has no interest in sharing her experience with others and she is not conscious of their presence.  She acts without pretense – she acts intuitively, instinctively, feeling her way onto the stage with her son.  Her action draws others in.  Those in the moment, and we who are spectating the spectators.  We feel the pull, and all it - the movie as a whole and this very moment - is is pulling us in.

So my final answer to why the name William Shakespeare shows up only once in these two articulations of this narrative is that it is not the soul of the author that we go to the theater to explore, but our own soul.  The author, the actors, our fellow viewers – they are all instruments – coconspirators, in helping us better know what lies just beneath the surface of that veneer that we have created for this event, and for our lives in general.  We are, beneath it all, vital, alive, and intact subjects, who are deeply engaged in the process of living.  The play is a conduit to that experience, helping us reconnect more deeply with ourselves and, in the process of doing that, with each other.

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Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey for Our Times

 Odyssey, Movie, Christopher Nolan, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Modernity, 

I read the Odyssey forty-five years ago as a very naïve 17-year-old preparing to go off to college – not knowing that college would be my own Odyssey.  I also had a basic misunderstanding of the text that Christopher Nolan’s new movie (Wow!) helped correct.  Odysseus  (Matt Damon) was not just lollygagging on the way home – he was confronting and dealing with obstacles to his return from a war that, at least according to Nolan, he hadn’t wanted to engage in to begin with.

The movie version of the Odyssey differs from the text in numerous ways – and I have this on authority of many reviewers, but also of the classics scholars at my University (I am clarifying here that I am not solely relying on my decaying memory of a misreading of a text here).  While I rely on others for the context and, to some extent, the original text, it is I, myself, who disagree with the critics that Nolan shouldn’t refresh the Odyssey.  I think that, just as Shakespeare refreshed others’ texts to address the political realities of the England he lived in, Nolan should do the same.  I also think that Nolan, intentionally or not, made his refreshes both in the spirit of and in alliance to the original purpose of the text, at least as I understand what the classicists told me.  Further, as my reluctant brother-in-saw proposed, this is a myth to begin with; we are not alterring history!

In the wake of the movie, I have learned a ton of Greek history that I had not previously known.  The Iliad and the Odyssey tell the story of the fall of Troy – one of the leading Mediterranean centers during the first golden age of Greece – the bronze age.  During this period of time, the Greeks had their first written language – crude, but useful for tracking trade, and they had a kind of civilization that we can guess at based on the archeological evidence.  Historians have surmised that it was a palace culture, with the palace of the epicenter of all trade.  If you produced beans or shoes or wool, you delivered them to the palace.  Anything you needed was then supplied by the palace.

This culture, if indeed this is the way it was organized, relied on a benevolent, if autocratic leader and its limitations were that there were no connections between people except through the center -so if the palace fell or the leader was corrupt, the system would fall apart, and, apparently, the entire system did fall apart – perhaps hastened by the fall of Troy, a critical and problematic trade hub, but also serving as a communication and trade center between hundreds of city states like Ithaca.

As Homer and Nolan tell it, Representative leaders and men of many of the affected city states were gathered under Agamemnon’s ( Benny Safdie) leadership to attack Troy, apparently in retribution for the theft of Agamemnon’s little brother Menelaus’s (Jon Bernthal) bride Helen (Lupita Nyong'o) (who, according to Shakespeare, anachronistically quoted in the movie, launched those thousand ships or, as Nolan adds, at least 500 of them).  The war was mostly a bloody siege and multiple battles on the plains outside the city as described in the Iliad.  It lasted for ten years and ended only when the wily Odysseus devised a plan to leave a parting gift of a gigantic horse when the Greeks apparently left the battlefield.  Of course, the hollow horse contained men who emerged after being taken inside the walls of Troy.  They emerged at night from the horse at night to open the gates and let the Greeks in to slaughter the Trojans.

After this, in the dark ages that followed the bronze age, when the proto-alphabet was lost, before the second golden age, when Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and then Alexander the Great would help create, benefit from and forward the Greek foundation for Western Culture that came to be known as Western Civililization, reciting the epics was a way of keeping alive a vision of an idealized world – one in which heroes, born of Gods and watched over by them, led states that could work together to achieve greatness.  And one of the critical elements in those two poems was that the leadership of the heroes was dependent on the will of the people, of the polis, to govern.  That is, the democratic principles that would flower in the second golden age were preserved in nascent form from the first golden age in the amber of Homeric poetry.

Troy was strategically located near a narrow strip of water that was essential to trade in the ancient world, much like the strait of Hormuz in our current world.  One of Nolan’s theses is that the heroes’ moral compromises, including the malicious use of a gift filled with the seeds of destruction and Agamemnon’s decision to sacrifice his own child Iphigenia (the closer to the heart, the greater the sacrifice) to get favorable winds to sail to Troy, along with the destruction of a critical trade center and, presumably, seat of civilization, led to the dark ages.  The failure of the heroes to function heroically, then, pre-dates a dark age.

The Odyssey is also an anti-war movie.  The book was not.  It is also an anti-religious movie.  The book was not.  When Odysseus disavows the Gods, one of my classics friends stated that the hair on her arms stood up.  And her point is well taken – Odysseus is the only character in the film to converse with a God (Athena (Zendaya)) and the Dead.  Nolan is telling a modern tale, and it is a godless Odysseus who leads us from the ancient to the modern world, and we are led to wonder if Athena is actually a goddess or merely an hallucination – a kind of Post Traumatic ghost haunting Odysseus through the rest of the movie – trying to help him get back on morally solid ground after losing his way in precipitating a battle where women were raped and civil society destroyed.   

We are moving from an objectively defined world, one where our accomplishments are honored, and these, in turn, are driven by striving to be virtuous by living up to an externally imposed moral code, to a subjectively determined one, where people are driven by internally felt drives such as love and attachment; in Odysseus’ case feelings towards his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland).  This transition was one that Shakespeare first imagined, but Freud put into motion by listening to the ideas of his patients rather than simply diagnosing them based on objectively determined criteria.

In creating a modern movie, one that predicts our own coming dark ages, Nolan creates a hero that looks like Homer’s and one who, like Homer’s, is fighting like mad to get home (not lollygagging as I mistakenly thought – though both Nolan’s and Homer’s heroes taking up with multiple women along the way home offended my modern suburban sensibilities, if not my psychoanalytically informed ones).  Odysseus is not returning home to regain and retain what is rightfully his, but to assuage the guilt that he feels for having abandoned those he loved for so long.  And when he returns home, he sees his task as restoring the order that was disturbed by his violation of the laws regarding civility, generosity, and honoring the dead.  Further, he chooses to engage in the peaceful (by Greek standards) transfer of power – recognizing that a legacy is one that extends into the next generations – we do not simply take all that we can in any span of time.

OK, I said I wasn’t going to rely on my memory, but I don’t think either the Iliad or the Odyssey depict the actual fall of Troy.  But the movie does.  It is at the center of the film and the formation of Odysseus’ moral quandary.  He develops the Trojan horse, he lies to the person who would have held his confidence about his presence in it, and he feels the moral responsibility of the rape of the Trojan women and the destruction of their Temples.  He feels, the reviewers point out, PTSD – something that will not be invented for 4,000 years.

More importantly, Nolan is trying to induce PTSD in us.  We are meant to feel the waste, the loss of a moral center, the trials of warfare.  In the wake of World War II, one of the elements that prevented nuclear warfare was rumored to be the Russians’ experience of the brutality of the war with Germany.  The leaders of Russia knew what a post-apocalyptic world looked like and they did not want to create it (again).  The question was whether subsequent generations would feel similar concerns.  And that question is very much alive today.  Nolan's answer is to deputize us all through the narrative of the film - we will realize that the destruction of war is a dangerous thing to unleash.  

So, one of the factors leading Odysseus to become woke is that he has survived the trauma of war – but in order to do that, and to survive the trauma of losing his men as he worked to get them home (I will skip that part of the story – though some of the most interesting scenes are here, including Cerce (Samantha Morton) exposing the men’s true gluttonous selves – removing their “costumes” of being human to reveal them as the pigs they are).

After the war and losing all of his men, Odysseus can’t face his memories, and Calypso (Charlize Theron) helps him forget by feeding him lotus flowers (this helped me realize why so many boats are named Calypso – I assume they were named by divorced men fantasizing about a woman feeding them lotus leaves to help them forget their first marriages).  Ready to acknowledge his part in bringing about the devastation on multiple levels, including the chaos at his home (palace) that has gone unmanaged and been filled by indolent and incompetent suitors who have not had a mentor (OK, his sone Telemachus does get a little bit of time with the original Mentor – Mentor himself – but not enough to figure out how to succeed his father and govern in his stead),  Odysseus returns, disguises himself so that he can check out the situation (and his return is also a return to the opening scene in the film, with the suitors maltreating a beggar who, it turns out, is Odysseus himself), and devises a succession plan.

Odysseus’ succession plan is different in the film than in the book.  In the book, the hero reinstates himself in his right and entitled place – he becomes again the King of Ithaca and order is restored.  In the modern version, Odysseus cedes his place to his son.  He does the heavy lifting to get him there – he is the one who continues to violate the law of Zeus by killing the houseguests/parasites/suitors.  He then sails off with Penelope to the West, as she had proposed they do when he was called up for the Trojan war. 

If Odysseus had just followed Penelope’s advice to begin with, all of this mayhem could have been avoided.  Without their best general, and the one that finally came up with the plan that led to Troy’s downfall, the Trojan war would never have been won by the Greeks.  The old system could have stayed in effect – which would have prevented (in my reading) the renaissance following the dark ages that allowed Greece to become our moral and philosophical cornerstone. 

Sometimes things need to come to a head, despite the turmoil that will ensue, so that we can pursue a new course. Nolan’s hero is invested in creating a better world for the generations that will follow – generations that will spring from the loins of his son.  Nolan has rewritten ancient history, so we know he is talking about our history.  Is he hoping that our current leader will let go of power so that the sons of liberty can move our country and with it, the world, forward?  Are we to learn that we should take care of our own mess, steer our children clear of our work, and cede the business of governing to them as we head into exile (we could just call it retirement) without burning the place down?

Nolan is notoriously cagey about interpreting his work, leaving that to the viewer (a very modern, or even post-modern, approach).  If I were to take this down to the micro level, I think that my retirement(s) from professional life might also include a retirement from my paternal role in the family; or, at an even more micro level, I need to get over myself and my aspirations and to turn towards enjoying and living more fully in the moment, living in the pleasure of appreciating the setting sun pulling me forward into those remaining days that I have, each more precious than the last, less for what I might do and more for what I might experience.

 

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Douglas Stuart’s John of John

 Douglas Stuart, John of John, Booker Prize Short list, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, repression, love, homosexuality, fathers and sons

The reluctant son has a new enthusiastic girlfriend, and she is a voracious reader.  She suggested that the three of us read a new book by one of her favorite authors – Douglas Stuart, a Booker Prize winner.  John of John is the story of a father and son and their coming of age.  How better to introduce herself to this father of her boyfriend?  They sent it to me, via her mother’s bookstore (heart emojis here) for Father’s Day (more heart emoji’s)… 

When we first discussed the book (by telephone, I still have not met her in person), the enthusiast introduced the book  by outlining it as a work about fathers and sons and their contentious battles – and she wanted to reassure me that she was not weighing in on the relationship between her boyfriend and me.  I launched into a counter-reassurance that turned into a bit of an unasked for sermon about father-son relationships, stating that a son is necessarily experienced, through the father's love, as a narcissistic extension of the father – and that part of the coming of age process is the son’s assertion of who it is that he is discovering himself to be, separate from who the father imagines him, as a reflection of the father, to be. 

I apologized for pre-interpreting the book, and hoped that the ethusiast did not experience me as simply a narcissist, but could understand that we all have threads of more or less healthy narcissism in our character.  If we have solid self-esteem, in this context, we have healthy narcissism.  I was both reassured and somewhat concerned to find that the author was pretty explicitly in agreement with me about this basic tension.  John is the father, and his son is also named John, but goes by his middle name, Cal.  On page 67, the author explains, “John saw Cal as his property, or as an extension of himself, and his father was less inclined to listen to him simply because he would always be the child.”  OK, this is a bit more on the "unhealthy" side, but the idea is there.

That said, this father, like me, also cares deeply for his son based on who it is that he actually is – and, despite living in a puritanically repressive corner of the Outer Hebrides, he expresses that, as a single father, in physically and psychologically tender, but also explosive ways.  This book, like the book and movie Hamnet (in which I have also been recently immersed), explores the interior architecture of paternal love with achingly accurate sensitivity.  In discussing the book with the reluctant son, we agreed that these characters, as repressed and seemingly publicly inarticulate as they are in the book (and, at times, in our own lives), express aspects of our relationship in uncanny fashion.

As the reluctant son also pointed out, the characters in this novel; taciturn, isolated, and prejudiced, at first seem closed and inaccessible to the reader, but, as this master story teller fleshes out their characters, they become, if not always likeable, knowable and lovable because of their familiarity.  They are like the members of our family who have quirks and oddities, but are clearly connected to us – or, in the context of the book, each other, even when, or perhaps especially when they are at odds with each other.

These characters are not only at odds with each other, but with themselves.  Both John and Cal are closeted gay men.  Cal has left the island and pursued an education, demonstrating a gift for designing women’s clothing, something he abandons when he returns to the island, ostensibly because his maternal grandmother is dying.  When Cal arrives home and finds his grandmother in good health and is close to being ostracized from the tight religious community that overlaps with the social community, we wonder about his motivation to stay.  Especially after his father, the lay spiritual leader of the church that has a travelling priest join them every three weeks, beats him mercilessly, splitting open his face requiring his maternal grandmother to stitch him up using needle and thread without anesthetic. What kind of sado-masochistic world are we being introduced to, we might imagine...

Slowly, almost painfully, the author introduces us to not just John (the father) and Ella (the grandmother), but to the children Cal, the son, grew up with and to their parents, and we get to know the people in the village by fits and starts.  We also meet Cal’s mother, who lives across the island with his Uncle and their illegitimate children after she abandoned Cal and his father when Cal was nine or ten.  Again, we could judge and dismiss her, but the author doesn’t quite allow us to do that.  If anything, we feel somewhat puzzled that Cal doesn’t visit her more often.

Slowly, perhaps, it dawns on us, that Cal is his father’s son.  Like his father, he must hide who it is that he is, while also acting on it, but his identity is tied up not just in feeling his father’s and his grandmother’s love for him, but his place in this community that, if they fully knew him, would reject him, just as he fears his family would.  This quandary, of feeling both known and unknown, accepted and rejected, feels like a deeply familiar aspect of social life in a small community.  And, while it is perhaps most purely represented there, I think it generalizes even into our more complicated lives, where, at times, it seems like we have a relationship with a culture (whatever that is) rather than a community.

The reluctant son and I agree that the scene that is the high point of this book involves this close=knit community confronting Cal – not directly about his sexuality, but demanding of him that he put the needs of the community before his own needs in a way that they believe will be consistent with who they know him to be (without actually knowing either his actions or his inner life).  This meeting is a dreadful and beautiful thing as the men in this community navigate between what is known and not known and as they  gather enough information to be able to, somewhat surprisingly, profoundly respect Cal’s autonomy. 

We both found it deeply moving that deeply felt experiences could be contained in ways that allowed the community to stay together despite the imagined terrible consequences that would emerge from acting with integrity, and their choosing, both Cal and the community as a whole, to stick with their integrity: to protect the right of the individual to act on his own and to know himself.  We didn’t expect that, but, in retrospect, could see that this was the necessary and consistent outcome of this community’s modus operandi.

What was more confusing was how two closeted gay men could spend their entire lives together and not sus out each other’s sexuality.  The reluctant son and I agreed that Ella suspected Cal’s sexuality because of his effeminate qualities, and John, who was the hardest of hard men, would simply have been embarrassed by this aspect of Cal and expected and exhorted him to grow out of it.  Ella and John’s mother had caught John in the very act of adultery, leading John’s mother to leave (and Ella to stay – to raise Cal), but Cal only experienced his father as the stern, demanding man who was angry at his mother for betraying both of them by leaving – so, by the plot, they were protected from knowing about each other.  But still…

The reluctant son and I agreed that the intensity of the love of the father for the son, and the love of the son for the father would necessarily have an erotic charge.  And this charge needs to be repressed – all incestuous desires need to be.  So the act of denying the (could we call it) Oedipal love might blind them to the erotic life of the other.  What child does not cringe at the idea of their parent in the sexual act?  And what parent does not do the same when thinking of their child?  The answer to that is that those who don’t cringe have, at least momentarily, lost the repressive barrier that is so strongly represented in these individuals and in this community – and in our much faster paced culture, where we can imagine a whole range of things that would once have felt unimaginable.

This book, written by an openly gay man, clarifies that one’s sexuality, if one walls oneself completely off from it, has consequences that tie people up in knots.  At the same time, I think he also recognizes and supports the idea that unbridled sexuality is equally problematic.  We become lost – as various characters do pursuing sexual “liberation” and the liberation of libation – when we don’t retain our connections to each other, connections that require some measure of repression.  This challenging mix of knowing and not knowing, of freedom and restraint, leaves us in a world that is confusing, dangerous, but also potentially enriching.

We are left, at the end of this book, not with all of the loose ends tied up, but with questions.  How does one come of age, at any age?  What does it mean to (finally) own oneself?  How can we do that in the context of a community?  What should we do if the community cannot comprehend us, but we need to comprehend ourselves?  What damage does self-ownership cost – and is the value of that self-ownership worth the cost?  Can we express love from within a divided self?

The book does not provide the answers, but it better equips us to know the forces that will inform those answers – and the types of answers that different individuals will seek out, and the cost of doing that.  I think it is in a position to do that because the author was willing to have his hero engage deeply with the question of who he is – and to acknowledge that to do that, he needed to wrestle with that question in the context of the family and the community that had shaped the parts of him that were opposed to those parts he knew that he could not deny.

I hope that the reluctant son and his enthusiastic girlfriend are able to wrestle with similar questions, but hopefully without some of the culturally imposed restraints that were detrimental.  Of course, I also hope that some of the constraints allow for the retention of the familial bond through and beyond the process of coming of age.

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