Sherlock: What is the nature of healing?

 Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Series, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Mystery, Psychopathy, Psychopathology

 

Usually I find a movie made from a book to be disappointing.  The book seems so much richer – it is filled with inner thoughts, but perhaps most importantly, I have seen – envisioned – the environs so clearly and accurately that the representation that is on the screen is disappointing, sometimes jarringly so.  One exception to this was the Harry Potter series of movies.  Somehow, they seem to have gotten the visuals right enough – they weren’t the same as mine, but they were somehow proper.

I liked reading Sherlock Holmes books when I was a kid.  I didn’t love them – I liked them.  Detective novels, mysteries, have never been my genre.  But Sherlock I admired.  He could observe things and make deductions from his observations.  I think I saw him as very smart and, growing up in a family that admired smarts, I admired him and wanted to emulate him, but feared that I could not.  He was too reserved to be the kind of person that a wild thinker – an impulsive individual – like me - could ever grow into being.  I also found the stories somewhat formulaic and lost interest in his ability to deduce things from simple observation.  It felt like a nice party trick, and I think I was frankly too young to understand the backstory that was also being told that knit together the individual elements of the manifold cases that were presented, so I did not become a fan.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered the series Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock and  Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson.  Admittedly, the visuals from my 10-year-old brain have faded quite a bit in the ensuing decades, but I still vividly recall the sea of red headed men waiting to apply for a job in one story.  What is refreshing about this series is that it creates a novel palette – not only does it update the London Environs, its characters are contemporary with contemporary concerns, and this, I think, humanizes the story.  This is an instance of a movie making characters more, not less, robust – more three dimensional, at least for me.  Even though I had not been a fan, I recognized something of the characters in their contemporary versions.  I vaguely recalled that Dr. Watson had been a military doctor, and, while it never occurred to my ten-year-old self that two gentlemen roommates might be considered gay – that might have been a private thought of an older reader; here it is a theme the series publicly repeatedly plays with.

But what was most gratifying is that these two men are not stodgy at all in the ways that I had imagined them from the book – yes, they are middle aged, living in London and solving crimes with no apparent compensation (which could have been a sign to an older reader that this is partly a fantasy), but the two of them are more like impulsive little boys recklessly careening about town, Sherlock showing off his brilliance and, in the process, alienating everyone within earshot, and John being well intentioned and smart, but very much put off balance by this creative ball of energy – Sherlock – that only he and their landlady seem to be able to tolerate much less embrace, and he finds himself consistently apologizing for Sherlock and trying, as best he is able, to manage him.

The series is four seasons long with three or so episodes per season.  The reason to blog about it has less to do with the visceral pleasure of the series, which is considerable (this is good television), and more to do with what I think the central question that the series asks.  I think this series wrestles with the question of what evil is.  And I think it is wrestling with a particular type of evil – cruelty.  “What is the basis of cruelty?” ultimately becomes the question that is addressed in the final season – and I have to say that the final episode contains so much cruelty that the reluctant wife, who enjoyed the series as a whole – wished she had not seen it, even though we were both enthralled and couldn’t wait for it.  She said, “There is no redeeming artistic value for being that cruel,” by which she meant being that cruel to the viewer.

I will try to avoid spoilers while talking about the underlying dynamics.  I don’t know that I will be successful.  I will also acknowledge that the elder reluctant stepdaughter let me in on some of the back and forth between the writers and the public – the fanbase – and some of the concerns about whether the writers respected their audience.  I think this question is relevant.  Less relevant is the information that this was Cumberbatch’s break out role and Freeman, who was forever endearing in Love Actually, is still physically endearing and uses the same physical humor but adapts it to playing a very different role.

There are three other central characters in the series: Mycroft Holmes (played by Mark Gatiss who is also a co-creator), Sherlock’s older brother; Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott), Sherlock’s arch enemy; and a mystery character, another Holmes sibling, in the final season.  Each of these characters are critical to fleshing out the concept of cruelty.   Each of the characters is also a member of a very exclusive stratum: they are members of the upper classes (or live as if they belong to that class – without having to earn a living) and are each much more intelligent – and manipulative – than the people around them.

One implicit question that the show then asks is whether the brand of cruelty that is depicted and explored here is garden variety evil or whether it is a special class of evil; for instance, a type of cruelty that is only available to those with the high class intellect, cold hearts, and substantial means to play out this type of cruelty.  Indeed, is this a type of cruelty that only the Brits, the most brutal of all colonial societies, could mete out?  And, indeed, is it the type of cruelty that only high class Brits – those who are raised by nannies, or wish they had been – could mete out?

Sherlock describes himself as a “high functioning psychopath”.  Technically, psychopathy is characterized by a lack of empathy – an emotional connection with a victim would interfere with the desire to harm the victim – though in fact there is, I think, in lived psychopathy of the cruel sort a great deal of empathy – the psychopath, especially the sadistic psychopath, enjoys the feeling of mastery over the terror that he evokes in the other.  There is a sense of not being at the mercy of forces that are outside of one’s control but instead being the master of the experience of terror that others are having.

While we are diagnosing the characters, Sherlock could also be considered to be Aspergerish – or, using more contemporary language – being on the spectrum.  He has the cold logical quality of Spock, but also Spock’s emotional transparency – his feelings are every bit as on display as his brilliance, even though he himself – perhaps through denial or simple thick headedness – does not seem to be nearly as aware of this as those around him, including the audience.  This is, I think, part of what makes watching him feel so compelling instead of repulsive – we want to reach out; as Mrs. Wilson, the landlady/housekeeper who has a history of being married to a drug lord, does and as Watson constantly has to.  We want to take Sherlock under our wing and soothe the disturbance which he radiates but seems oblivious to.

His older brother is cut of the same cloth, but instead of careening without regard to the ways in which his actions affect others, as Sherlock does, Mycroft is cautious.  Arguably brighter than his brother, he is not the lone wolf his brother is.  Quite the contrary, he is a company man.  He serves the Queen and uses the resources of the government to keep an eye on his brother – to keep him out of trouble.  Mycroft sees in Sherlock the potential for great evil, apparently because of Sherlock’s obsessive interest in solving cases.  What Mycroft doesn’t see is that keeping Sherlock’s past from him confuses him rather than protects him and makes him more vulnerable rather than less so.

Moriarity, in this mix, is utterly unhinged.  He is truly a psychopath without a connection to others of any sort other than the power that he exercises over them.  Insanely self-obsessed, his toxic narcissism leads him to demonstrate how uniquely evil he is.  He engages Sherlock in play, promising to harm people if Sherlock cannot solve his puzzles fast enough.  And Sherlock takes the bait.  Indeed, play is a consistent theme in the series – not just between Sherlock and Moriarity, but also between Sherlock and John and Sherlock and Mycroft – but it does have the feeling of English boarding school play – where cruelty is woven into something that should be an analogue for harming others – not the thing itself.

I am reminded of a friend who went to Harvard.  He said there was a consistent experience that he observed there among the students; it was a sense of here I am, one of the best and the brightest, I am among the best and brightest – is this all there is?  There is a kind of disappointment that, despite our tremendous gifts, we are still human, and still vulnerable to ordinary human experience.  By being outrageously cruel, perhaps we gain control over our surroundings and experience ourselves as being god like – and therefore a bit immortal.

Moriarity’s compulsion to cruelty is presented as a kind of fun house version of Sherlock’s drive to solve crimes.  Sherlock is drawn to the game – to figuring out what is going on – by a sense of boredom.  He turns down cases that are too easy.  We get the sense that he is both tortured by his brilliance, but also only happy when exercising it.  His intelligence is an itch that constantly needs to be scratched.  Moriarity, on the other hand, seems to be entirely interested in setting up the game.  In doing this, he is untethered and enjoys exercising his power to terrorize as a means of keeping his boredom and disdain at the human condition (and perhaps his own mortality) at bay.

Sherlock is exposed, when John marries, as deeply connected not just to Watson, but to Watson’s wife.  This gives the lie – perhaps – to the psychopath label.  Isn’t one a psychopath not because he cannot empathize – we are all born with the potential to care for others (though that would be a question - if Sherlock were born on the autistic spectrum might his genetics inhibit his ability to empathize?).  Might we all be generally equipped to empathize at the get go, but learn to override that ability – to not attend to that information rather than not having that information at least theoretically accessible? Is Sherlock deeply defended against how deeply he cares about others?  If so, this, on some level, he must realize, is his kryptonite, so he works to build walls against experiencing his concern for others, all the time expressing that concern by taking on interesting cases – ones that require that he think about the motives that drive people to be cruel and help him to provide those who have been wronged some measure of justice – some sense that the cruel person has paid for their cruelty.  

Holmes’ interest in mysteries is, it turns out, rooted deeply in the central mystery in his life, a mystery that has haunted him since he was quite young.  I am not going to reveal it – it is too delicious (and cruel) to spoil it if you haven’t seen the series all the way through, yet.  I will let you know that Mycroft plays a hand in keeping this mystery from him, but most telling, it is Sherlock’s own mind that has deceived him across the course of his life.  He is not just emotional disconnected from others, he is deeply disconnected from himself.

So, it makes sense that Sherlock is forever searching for clues – making sense of every everyday mystery that surrounds him, as if he is reassuring himself that he will not be deceived again.  He blames his deception on his senses and his reason, and he tunes them to a fever pitch in order that they (he blames his senses, I think) will never disappoint him again.  His ability to piece together clues reassures him not just that his senses can’t deceive him, but that he can’t deceive himself (and, in this, it turns out he is gravely mistaken).

In this internal battle, Sherlock is a lot like Freud.  Freud imagined that we have veridical memories of all that has taken place in our lives.  It probably didn’t hurt that Freud had a prodigious memory – he spoke English so fluently that he enjoyed Shakespeare without translation (Shakespeare is an author that I, as a native speaker, struggle with).  But there were many mysteries in Freud’s early life – indeed in all of our lives – that he, and we, using his techniques and ideas, tried and try to ferret out.

But back to Sherlock.  The essential problem is that memory is, as Elizabeth Loftus has famously (and sometimes infamously) reported to us, transformable.  We do not recollect so much as reconstruct. Freud, according to Mark Solms, suggests that memory’s primary task is to predict.  We gather information not so much to know what has happened as to figure out what will happen.  So, Sherlock stuffs his mind with facts which he uses to solve crimes – and famously avoids those facts that aren’t relevant to crime solving (in an example from the original, which shows up in the series, Holmes does not know that the earth revolves around the sun because it couldn't help him solve a crime).  Sherlock therefore imagines the mind as being limited.  It has only so much RAM and he doesn’t want to clog it up with useless information.  This, by the way, also suggests that memories can be jettisoned forever, Sherlock believes he can not know (while Freud believes we cannot not know). 

Apparently Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a physician himself, modelled Sherlock on one of his medical school professors who would diagnose his patients not from an interview, but from a careful physical exam as they walked into the examining room, making all kinds of uncanny deductions about their habits, aptitudes and failings based on their physical presentation.  I remember once that someone at the Menninger Hospital commented that David Rapaport, a psychologist and psychoanalyst who studied psychological testing there, hoped that we would one day be able to diagnose someone “by the part in their hair.”

Sherlock’s ability to take others as objects, and to divine their intentions – to dive deeply into their souls in search of motivation – is, it turns out, the result of having been deceived.  His affections for another was the catalyst for the one who felt spurned to do horrible things.  I am being somewhat coy here, and this is where the backstory re-emerges.  The authors of the miniseries publicized that the elements of the backstory were present in the earlier seasons and the fourth season should have be soluble by the fans.  The fans dutifully concocted theories about what had happened but, as in all good mysteries, they were apparently and generally wrong.  Unfortunately, the authors expressed disdain for their fans, and the fans cried foul – stating that they had been had.

But isn’t that the nature of mystery?  Do we ever quite nail who the perpetrator was until things get narrowed down significantly and couldn’t it often have been someone else and we are right more by chance than by really figuring out the motives of the killer?  Perhaps that is because we are all capable of murder.  We do all have the motivation to kill everyone else in the room at any given moment, but we are held back by a variety of forces.  On the most primitive level, we fear retribution or censure for doing something bad or wrong.  On a more advanced level, we are ambivalent about most anyone who is important enough for us to want to kill them – we also love them and would miss them if they are gone.  But perhaps most importantly we have learned to manage our ambivalence – in a whole variety of ways.  We bury ourselves in our work or convince ourselves that we are all working towards common goals and that we need everybody on board to reach them.

I think that Sherlock is the more interesting of the characters because he is closest to losing the ties that bind us to each other.  His interest in crime seems to be a thinly veiled attempt to sublimate his interest in murder – he seems to over rely on the defense of reaction formation; working in the area that is his biggest interest and the thing that he most needs to defend against.  Try as he might, he ultimately can’t jettison the memory of what happened.  He transforms it – he reconstructs it into something different – but, in his heart, he retains the essence of the primal betrayal.

Holmes, then, becomes a very Freudian character.  He has deeply buried his long-lost memory, but it will out, showing up in ways that shape his very character and his choice of profession.  He keeps picking away at the thing that he would pretend is gone.  He does this incessantly, constantly and, apparently unconsciously.  The need for maintaining this unconscious schism is revealed in the final episode.

There was talk of an additional season after what proved to be the final season, but there would, in my mind, be no need for it.  Holmes has been cured.  He no longer needs to keep his secret and to fondle it at the same time.  If he were to continue to use his gift to solve crimes, it would be an empty exercise, not the one driven by the compulsive need to know.  The tragedy has been resolved, the tension is gone, and, as Freud famously said of the result of psychoanalytic treatment when the neurosis has been cured, Holmes has been freed to lead a life of ordinary misery.

What we might have witnessed would have been the processing of his grief.  In solving the central mystery in his life, Holmes would have come to realize that it involved losing not just one, but two of the most important people in his life.  These losses would be caused by something out of his control – the envy of one for the other.  To connect with more than one person presents a particular kind of danger – the danger of the Oedipal triangle – and part of what this series shows is that the Oedipal triangle does not just play out with our parents but with every significant set of relationships in our lives.  By virtue of being in contact with others we imperil ourselves, but we cannot live without those important others, so we lead lives of restraint, hoping that the intensity of our affections does not end up causing us unintended consequences.

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Trust - Despite the title we meet four unreliable narrators.

 Trust, Novel, Hernan Diaz, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, tragedy

This Pulitzer Prize winning novel is actually four books in one.  The relationships between the books -  the first book, a Roman á clef, is followed by a somewhat hackneyed revision and response to the Roman á clef in the form of an unfinished memoir by the pilloried main character , then a revelatory memoir by the ghost writer of the revisionist memoir and then a very brief set of journal entries by the surprise character of interest – is, I suppose, somewhat like a set of nesting Russian dolls, but the focus of the books changes across the four books, so the minor character in the first proves to be, by far, the most interesting, powerful, and enigmatic by the fourth.

The character in the fourth is the wife of the wealthiest of wealthy financiers – a man known for his uncanny ability to predict the stock market and seemingly the one person who profited most from the economic downturn of the Great Depression – and indeed, perhaps and according to some, the one who caused it.

The style of the first book – the book that tells the tale of the financier through a thin veil – is sensationalist and gripping.  It feels a bit like Citizen Kane, but on the east coast.  The primary characters, the financier and his wife, are each interesting in their own right and there is a sense of pleasure at watching the train wreck of their relationship and realizing that all the wealth in the world could not bring happiness to the couple.  I felt a little superior to them – as they were caught in the amber trap both of their wealth but also of their time.  They were trapped in their humongous house on fifth avenue – certainly the equal of the Frick mansion, and isolated from everything that makes life wonderful.  When the wife went mad at the end of this tale and the husband isolated her in the hospital where her father had died of a schizophrenic like condition, there was a sense of symmetry to it. 

Written in the style of the 30s, the very language seemed to both reveal but also hide who these people were.  The economic genius seemed totally devoid of the ability to connect meaningfully with others, so his deeply felt but clumsy attempts to give his wife the best treatment felt almost cruel in his misunderstanding that she needed, not drugs, but human contact.  It seemed to foreshadow the whole Sackler debacle that would play out 50-90 years later, in part because the financier owned the pharmaceutical company and then he bought the hospital and insisted on the kind of treatment she would receive.

The financier’s response, an attempt to clear his name, was bloated and approximate – and he seemed, at best, a pale imitation of the man who was pilloried in the initial novel.  He was less interesting, crude even, and his genius seemed somehow to be more limited, when it was observed in the first person, than when he was being pilloried.  The question became, “Can it be so easy to be a plutocrat?”  He seemed to be inordinately thick and simple minded, and yet we already knew that he was tremendously successful.

In the third book, we are introduced to the trappings of power.  In retrospect, the powerful plutocrat decides exactly who should write the book for him and he has the resources to discover her – especially in the depths of the depression.  She is smart but not schooled or knowledgeable – someone who should be manipulatable.  She is the daughter of a communist – and that weirdly makes her ripe to take on an uber capitalist and write a hagiography.  But he dies before the project is completed, but not before the ghost writer becomes intrigued by the wife, and by the all but illegible journal she has kept.

So, the fourth book is that journal, which tells a very different story – clarifying that it was the wife who was forced to use the husband as the conduit for her genius, which she exercised both in the stock market and in the arts – and that she died, not of madness, but of cancer and the hospital where she died was a medical, not a psychiatric facility.

So, on the face of it, this book is an articulation of the ways in which women have been overlooked.  First the minor character, a man, who wrote the attack novel missed the central story by not understanding the role of the wife.  Then the one living person who knew that story, the husband, suppressed it in an attempt to aggrandize himself and erase his wife from the narrative, an attempt that failed.  In the process of doing this, he hired a woman who ended up discovering his wife, figuring out both how to access the telling document and how to decode it for publication.  All hail to the sisterhood!  (That all four books are the creation of a man is an interesting wrinkle on this narrative).

But from a psychodynamic perspective, I think the deeper story is a question of how well known any of us can ever be – not to posterity (certainly a question that is posed here), but to those in our lives who are, or should be, close to us.  The wife is the daughter of a man with odd but interesting capacities, and she herself (we piece together after the fact that each of these narrators, each unreliable in their own way, have contributed important  as well as distracting information) was a mathematical savant.  As a girl, she was a kind of one person freak show, reminiscent of Mozart as a child.   Perhaps the one person who might have understood her, her father, became unavailable to her through his madness and then death (again something that we rely on the first narrator to have accurately reported).

She is not understood by her mother – an outgoing person who uses her as a bauble to attract interest to her parties and to support her lifestyle of mooching off others.  Then her mother arranges her marriage to an already well – heeled man who would become fantastically rich but his self-absorption  would keep him from getting to know her – ironic because that self-same absorption left him feeling isolated and lonely.

Part of the pact that allows the wife to earn money for her husband is that she can never speak of her role in doing that.  For this reason alone, none of the artists that she supports and engages with get a chance to know her and the potential she has realized.  They are appreciative of her support, but hardly intimate with her.  Her description of her idea about how to cheat the system – one that is realized by her husband, is lucrative but is more on the crafty side than indicative of brilliance. 

The wife’s description of how she anticipated the stock market crash that would lead to the great depression and what she did to profit from that is intimately tied with her thinking about music.  It is not unusual for those with great mathematical ability to have considerable musical aptitude, but her description of the way music led her to anticipate the crash seems pretty simplistic to me.  Yes, she did see something that others did not, but in retrospect many have seen it as essentially inevitable.  Was she as overly enamored of herself as her husband was?

I did not set out with this conclusion in mind.  What I intended to conclude is that she did not know herself, in part because she had no relationship with anyone through which she could discover herself.  From this perspective, the imagined conversations with the psychiatrist, in the first story – conversations that she seemed to profit greatly from, but that the ensuing books prove were completely manufactured – might be seen as the opportunity to know herself, an opportunity that simply never occurred.

I do think that the tragedy that is at the heart of this book is the failure of the characters to know each other, but also to know themselves.  Whether that is aided and abetted in both the husband and the wife by the primary attribution error – we assume that things that we have successfully accomplished are due to our abilities and those that we have failed at are due to circumstance – and the subsequent narcissism that can occur when we are extremely successful is operative in the wife as well as the husband is not a thesis I am willing to defend to the death, though it may have been something that the author was pondering.

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My Fountain Pen Life: Psychologist Heal Thyself!

 

Fountain Pens, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Goulet Pens, Anhedonia, Hobbies

Last night, I received a box in the mail.  It was filled with a cornucopia of stuff: A fountain pen from Germany, ink from France, paper from Japan, and envelopes from Belgium.  What a miracle!  I felt happy and excited as I unboxed a present - one that I had paid for - but one that was the result of the labor of many people across the world.

I first became intrigued by fountain pens when I was in the fifth grade.  The disposable fountain pen, available at the local grocery story in the school supplies section, allowed my hand to glide effortlessly across the page when writing.  It was a really cool sensation.

My handwriting, by the way, has always been terrible.  I was held back from learning cursive because my printing was so bad.  My students have for years complained that they can’t read my writing and when I write notes on birthday and Christmas cards, my kids strain to be able to make sense of my scribbles.

Despite my continuing to be challenged at writing, when I began to practice as a psychoanalyst, I began to write a lot.  I started taking verbatim notes of psychoanalytic and then also my psychotherapy sessions, just as I had always taken verbatim notes when doing psychological testing – like when administering the Rorschach.

Fifteen years or so ago, looking for a smoother writing experience, I went into a high-end pen store in Washington D.C. while there for a convention or something.  I was now writing for a good portion of every day, taking notes that were as close to verbatim as I could get them while listening to patients and while doing psychological testing.  I hoped to find something more sophisticated than the ball point pens that came my way seemingly without any effort.

For whatever reason, perhaps because I didn’t want to spend much money, the salesperson led me to the roller ball case.  The experience of writing with the sample pens was much better than writing with a ball point, so I bought one – a pen that was made of stainless steel and cost much more than I expected to spend.

I rediscovered fountain pens a few years after that (and not so long ago) when I was at a charity silent auction.  Someone had donated some boxed high-end pens that I entered the winning bid for. 

Once again, I experienced the sense of ease and delight in writing that my fifth-grade self had so enjoyed.  It was even better than the roller ball experience, even if not quite as reliable and straightforward.

I needed ink for the pens, and discovered that we had a local store that sold pens.  After buying ink and asking for help with my pens, the proprietor proposed that I buy pens from him rather than buying vintage pens at auction because he would provide service if the pens failed to serve or were substandard when I bought them. 

I began buying student pens and worked my way up to much more delightful (and expensive) pens rather quickly.  I was in search of a writing experience that would become unconscious – one where the words would flow as easily and effortlessly out of the ends of my fingertips as smoothly as they had entered my ears.

Under the proprietor’s guidance, I found what I have since learned is referred to as a grail pen – a Pelikan 600 special edition – and I achieved the nirvana writing experience I was looking for.  Because I write so much, the nib of the pen (the part of the pen that touches the paper) quickly became even smoother than it had been at the beginning, and writing became effortless and automatic.

There were days when I was completely and totally unconscious of writing, but there was a record of the session on the legal pad I was holding.

I was so enamored of this pen that I carried it with me everywhere – including on the weekends when I was wearing shirts with no pockets and put the pen into my jeans pocket.  I had not been warned that this would stress the pen, but this is exactly what happened and soon it was leaking and then it became separated along the seams of the ink window.

Remembering what the proprietor had said, I returned to him, pen in hand.  He took it from me, and mailed it off to the manufacturer to be repaired.  Then COVID hit.  I was without my favorite pen, but had a other pens that, while not as satisfactory to use, would do in the pinch I was in. 

With everything else that was going on, I could survive without my favorite pen for a while…

But that time stretched.  When I checked in with the proprietor he explained that COVID was causing havoc with the factory’s ability to fix the pen – and there were also shipping problems.  In any case, my pen was not coming any time soon, even as the pandemic was waning and we were returning to more or less normal operations all over the world.

I wanted that pen feeling back, so a year ago, feeling stuck in limbo, I went to the pen store where they reassured me that the pen was on the way but didn’t know when it would appear, so I bought a replacement Pelican 600 from the proprietor’s assistant assuming that a regular 600 was the same as a special edition 600, but it was not.  The pen neither wrote as smoothly (it was not, in the parlance that I am now speaking, as wet) nor did it maintain the ability to write when my patients were silent or I didn’t take notes during a few minute interchange.  It had, after those times, what I have now learned to call a hard start.

When I took it back to complain about it, the proprietor explained that I had simply not bought an equivalent pen (even though it cost the same amount of money).  Apparently the nibs on the special editions are superior to the nibs on regular pens, but he assured me that my pen would be returned “the following week”. 

I haven’t yet explained that a grail pen is expensive.  Really expensive.  And buying two of them is more than I can justify to myself. 

So, I was in a pickle. 

Not only was my pen not available, we had been in lockdown and I was having a hard time feeling comfortable moving back out of it, my case load had ballooned as the COVID crisis strained the mental health system, the reluctant son, who had moved back home during the pandemic, moved out for good, and the reluctant wife took on a position that involved commuting to DC most weeks every month.

Life lost some of its zest for me.  I became what we call anhedonic – I did not have interest in things that had formerly been interesting to me.

But I was still looking for a better pen experience.  I was still intrigued by the prospect of finding the elusive grail pen that would bring writing nirvana back to me.

I started exploring the pen world, and I discovered online pen stores.  These seem to have emerged as the fountain pen world (not unlike the psychoanalytic world on a somewhat regular basis) seemed poised on the brink of extinction.

I found a particular retailer, Goulet Pens, that was started out of the owner’s garage as the internet and e-tail were becoming a thing.  He began posting educational videos that also educated the viewer about his products, and I began to listen to the Goulet Pen Cast on a regular basis.

I was learning about pens and paper and ink.  And I was, without quite knowing that I was doing it, joining what they refer to as the pen community.

I bought a book by Michael Sull, master penman, on the Art of Cursive Writing.  Using this book, I practiced the Palmer method of cursive writing, a system that was developed in the 1880s as typewriters were first emerging. 

The Parker system is a system intended to simplify former methods of cursive writing and to make cursive writing as fast as typing (I’m nowhere near as fast at writing as I am at typing on a modern computer keyboard – though I might be able to keep up with myself on an old manual typewriter).  The Parker system includes learning about the mechanics of writing – that are based on how the fingers, wrist, arm and shoulder should be involved in writing, and proper writing posture is an important component of the system.  And the heart of the system is practice.  The book is replete with examples of cursive writing models to copy and multiple exercises to limber up the writer to engage in writing.

I dove into learning a new skill. 

Muscle memory, I was learning from neuropsychoanalysts, is hard to lay down.  This is the memory that they talk about needing 10,000 repetitions to put into place.  It is the memory involved in riding a bicycle.  Once learned, it is hard to forget.  So I was learning a system to replace an old (problematic) system that kept interfering with the new learning.

Suddenly, instead of writing faster, I was writing much more slowly.  I had to think about how to form each letter.  One of the reasons my handwriting was so bad, I learned, is that once I started writing a word – and before I finished it, I began thinking about the next word.  This meant that I didn’t pay much attention to the word I was actually writing.  That was no longer possible when I was trying to write each letter in each word.  I was now much more present to the process of writing.

I was engaged in a practice of mindfulness.

Mindfulness was actually always at the root of the reason that I was taking notes in sessions.  Taking notes did two things – it made sure that I had a record of what the patient said, and it preventing me from jumping in too quickly when they were done speaking.  I had to catch up when writing and while I did that the patient would often take off with their next thought – and this is what we call free association – the thing that we are trying to promote in a psychoanalytic treatment. 

Meanwhile, the argument against writing down what our patients are saying is that it interferes with our own evenly hovering attention – the state that we try to achieve when we are listening to our patients.

In part because I am pretty distractible, the writing down of what patients are saying actually helps me remain hovering in the neighborhood of what is on the patient’s mind rather than becoming more caught up in what is going on in my mind.  And if I do begin to drift, which is not necessarily bad – my associations to the patient’s material are relevant - I can catch up by glancing back at what I have (unconsciously) been writing to see where the patient’s material has taken them.

Of course, once I started paying attention to the individual letters that I was writing, it became more difficult, for a while, to hear the content of what the patient was saying.  I was also writing down less of the material because I was writing slower, not faster.  Also, it was harder to attend to my own thoughts.  I was like one of those old spinning plate jugglers trying to keep everything going. But I have been at this new way of writing now for four or five months and, while not back to my former speed or level of unconsciousness of the writing, I am able to be mindful of both the writing and the material in a more balanced way.

Meanwhile, I have become caught up in something I had not expected.  I am avaricious about pens and pen products, but angry enough at my local supplier that I have turned to the on-line retailer to supply me with new material. 

At first, as I listened to podcasts about pens, I was disdainful of the attention to pen colors and to the variety of ink colors and to the quality of the paper that people use to write.  I said to myself, “Give me a bottle of blue ink, a legal pad of paper and a pen that functions well, and I am in good shape.  I am here for the functionality of pens, not for the aesthetic quality of the experience.”

But I began to sense that had never been true.  I like the tactile qualities of writing.  I like the feedback from pen on paper.  I also prefer a brilliant blue ink on white paper to muddy blue on yellow paper that becomes a dull green as a result of the combination of colors.  And I like grey ink, and green ink… I found that the quality of the writing experience was affecting my mood.

I am still somewhat disdainful of the color of the pen as a drawing card, and I am careful about my investments in pens themselves, but I now have an array of ink colors, my wife bought another grail pen for my birthday, the Pilot Custom 823, which has both a soft nib and a large ink supply in the pen so that I don’t have to refill the pen in the middle of sessions – I can just refill it once a day.  And I have begun to be sensitive to the smoothness of the paper that I write on.  Some legal pads are smoother than others and there are papers that are designed specifically for fountain pens.

And, truth be told, avarice has always been a part of my attraction to pens.  In fifth grade, when the pens I used ran out of ink, I would steal a replacement pen on my walk home from school when I made a detour to the grocery store.  My analyst was very interested in this behavior, and I still am.  I’m not quite sure why I didn’t ask to buy replacement pens (or perhaps ink cartridges – the details of my life of crime have become murky at this point), but I think it felt self-indulgent, something that was frowned upon in my family.

Of course, thinking about the symbolism at this moment, it would be possible to think of the pen as a phallic symbol and one could offer the interpretation that stealing pens was a way of covertly asserting my masculinity, but that doesn’t fit with my lived experience of the aesthetic pleasure of the pen and the writing experience.  I think the ink, which I have heard described in some case studies as being like sperm was, for me, more like liquid love (though some people may equate those two thoughts).

In any case, what was remarkable for me about the writing experience as an adult is that it drew me back into the world – a world that our senses pull us towards by offering delightful aesthetic experiences.  And writing with a fountain pen (and acquiring pen, ink and paper) were certainly part of that.

Of course, mindfulness is also a way of drawing people back into the world.  I expect there was a synergy between the sensual and the cerebral.

So, I was not surprised to read in a random posting for public consumption that symptom focused psychotherapists recommend that people with anhedonic depression pick up a hobby.  Becoming interested in something, anything, stimulates (from a neuropsychoanalytic perspective) the seeking drive (and the sexual drive, from the neuropsychoanalytic perspective, is a subset of the seeking drive).  Once we get the seeking drive fired up again, we may start seeking many other things, and hobby, or art – or a beautiful sunset – may help us get out of a funk and become curious about the world and the people in it again.

Before I wrap this up, I think it important to note that there was another effect of using fountain pens.  I became interested not just in taking dictation, as it were, from my patients, but in writing using a pen.  This turned out to be much more difficult than I expected.

First of all, taking dictation from my own mind is more complicated because I am not just taking dictation, but helping to form the thoughts.  It is harder to do both of those things at once.

A friend and former roommate from graduate school – now an English professor and professional essayist, had once proposed that we correspond.  Intimidated by his superior writing skills, I had demurred, but remembering his offer, I proposed that this would be a good time to try that.  We have been corresponding regularly since then and writing letters is much harder when using a pen than when composing an email.

Writing with a pen requires forethought.  As the bard once stated, the pen having writ moves on.  Cutting and pasting with actual paper is laborious and makes for a terrible letter.  Having an idea in mind, or a set of ideas, and then figuring out how to structure them together and how to structure each on of them individually before setting pen to paper is a challenge.  No wonder outlines used to be recommended as a means towards writing a paper. 

When writing an email, I can mask my task focus by inserting a query about how an ailing friend is doing – or congratulate them on something they have accomplished after having stated my request or whatever other business I have, discretely inserting it above the request so that they don’t know quite how tactless and boorish I actually am.  With pen and paper, I have to bring the person as well as the request to mind if I want to write a letter that includes my genuine concern.  I must become mindful not just of the result that I want, but of the person I am writing to.

The investment of time and energy, and the mindfulness required to write letters is paying off over time as I become more cognizant of just how to planfully communicate.  It is also exciting again to go to the mailbox.  There might be a letter there from my friend – or from another friend or relative to whom I have written and who may choose to write me back, rather than the usual mess of junk mail.

One of the unexpected side effects of learning a new style of writing is that this has been disorienting to some of the readers of my letters.  Who is this person, they ask, those who are familiar with my old style of writing.  Doesn’t a person’s handwriting tell us something about that person and feel familiar – in the way that their features and even their smell can feel familiar and comfortable?

As a further complication, a young cousin who received a card on the occasion of her wedding confessed that she could not read cursive.  The fountain pen apocalypse may, in fact, be - just around the corner!

But in the meantime, the pleasure of receiving a letter is akin to the pleasure of receiving a box full of pens, ink and paper – and it is more directly an experience of being loved, which is, I think, what the material goods are almost certainly a substitute for  (I am still not sure why I could not ask directly for pen and ink as a symbol of being loved when I was a fifth grader, but rather felt that I needed to steal them and the love that they probably represented).

On the other hand, for a while I was trying to write my first draft of these blog posts out by hand.  What a mess.  Mostly because I was then having to retype what I had already written, more than doubling the time it took to post – something that is partially responsible for the relatively few posts that I have been writing over the past six months.  But also because my writing of these posts is partially a free associative process, so as I copied the writing into the computer that would spark new directions in my thinking and I would begin to stray more and more from the original thesis and suddenly I was confronted with two parallel texts, each of which had strengths and weaknesses, and reconciling them is more difficult than just editing a prior version on the word processor.

So, my primary use of the fountain pen is still as a tool to help me better listen and respond to my patients.  The  Pilot pen is delightful, and I am getting better at using the Palmer style more and more unconsciously, but I have not yet experienced the nirvana convergence of pen, ink, paper and mind that allows for a totally unconscious writing experience, freeing me up to be even more present to the experience of another human being.

The reluctant wife has confronted the local proprietor (confrontation is not my strong suit) and he has a agreed to an actual timeline, rather than the imaginary “next week” timeline that he continues to espouse, to produce the repaired pen or replace it (To be fair, he has come through with repairs to other pens in the past).  Meanwhile, I will be ordering a pen from another German company with a reputation for a smooth writing experience.  While the Japanese pens are quite smooth, they are, at their heart, designed for a culture that writes characters.  The Germans are writing for a population that writes in cursive and their nibs are intended to create an experience of flow rather than precision. 

I trust that I will soon return to the occasional nirvana state that I formerly achieved, but with the benefit of greater legibility (truth be told, I was often unable to read my own writing, and still struggle with it at times – but it is much better).  Even if I don’t obtain writing nirvana, the hope that I may has improved my general mood, and that seems to me to be a justification for the investment of time and energy in mindfully putting pen to paper.  In addition, the feeling of being gifted by both the material goods and the activity of writing is passed on to others in my improved listening and the sending of legible letters to populate the mailboxes of friends and family.

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Geraldine Brooks' Horse is a good read, but a deeply flawed novel

 Horse, Novel, Horse Racing, Race, Racism, Fantasy, Geraldine Brooks

If you read this book, you will like it.  It is a compelling story, well told, by a competent author – she’s a former Pulitzer Prize winner (for March) after all.  But it is hard for me to recommend it because it contains a fatal flaw – well two of them.  I have complained of this flaw in other books – most recently Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – but I write about it here both because I think my understanding of the flaw has improved and because the consequences of that flaw in this book are more damaging.

The flaw at the center of this book is that two of the central characters are two dimensional.  The characters are, in a word, unreal.  Doesn’t that happen a lot in books?  Indeed, doesn’t it happen in all books – can the complexity of the human experience be captured on the page?  Why would I bring this particular flaw in this particular book to your attention? 

The more central reason to bring this flaw to your attention is that it has to do with race.  In an attempt to be politically correct, I think the author has practiced a particular form of racism that, while well intended, does not serve the greater good.

The proximal reason has to do with a friend’s characterization of a character’s actions in a lesser book, a book not worth reviewing, as betraying that the story was a fantasy.  This led me to think about the nature of fantasy.

Now, I have nothing against fantasy.  Reluctant or not, I am a psychoanalyst and fantasy is part of my stock and trade.  I am curious about other people’s fantasies and look to my own fantasies as a means to better understand the world. 

But there are different varieties of fantasy.  Tom Ogden describes three types of thinking in the fantasy world: magical thinking, dream thinking, and transformative thinking.  When most of us talk about fantasy, we are referring to the first of Ogden’s types.  We are talking about imposing our will on the world as if we could magically make the world conform to our wishes.  The underlying wish is a wish for a kind of omnipotent control.  This is the thinking of the daydream where we throw or catch the super bowl winning touchdown pass, or we are receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for having negotiated peace in the Middle East.

Dream thinking, which is also a kind of fantasy, is different from this.  It is integrative.  It brings together different parts of our experience in novel, and frequently coded ways.  We are testing hypotheses with dream thinking rather than coming to solid conclusions.  Of course, dreams can be driven by magical thinking, but they can also move towards transformative thinking, which is a problem-solving technique where our redefinition of the problem can lead to new approaches to understanding and solving the problem.

Ah, so, the book.  Horse weaves together three plots – two major and one minor, across three time periods.  The central story is of the titular hero – the horse.  An historical horse, Lexington, bred in Kentucky during the waning days of the antebellum period, it was the fastest horse of its day when horse racing was the NFL of today (though at that time, there were no other channels – Horseracing was not competing with baseball or basketball for the attention of the viewer.  And everyone had a horse!).

Lexington, the horse, was bought – or finagled - from its Kentucky owner and raced in New Orleans, where it won all but one of the races that it was placed in, and then was the most successful stud horse in the history of horse racing, having the most offspring win the most races in 16 years – 14 of them in a row – about double the next best horse in history.  About 80% of current racing thoroughbreds can trace their lineage to Lexington.

Lexington was so famous that, when he died, his skeleton went on display at the Smithsonian Institute as one of our national treasures.  After horse racing lost some of its luster, Lexington’s skeleton was relegated to a closet, and the second major plot in the book is a constructed story of an Australian woman who works in the bone lab at the Smithsonian and her chance encounter with an African Art History student in the United States who happens upon a long lost portrait of Lexington.

There is a third minor thread in this tapestry.  This is the mostly true story of an actual portrait of Lexington that a New York art dealer buys from her African American House Cleaner.

The author’s task in this historical novel was not an easy one.  She had to tell the story of a horse with very little documentation of how that horse was cared for, raised or trained.  (There are newspaper stories articulating the horse as a phenomenon – including the horse’s role in bringing stopwatches into our lives.  As he posted incredible times in races – three-mile races compared to our one-mile races of today – fans would purchase stopwatches to come participate in the race by timing him.)  The author did have evidence, from the skeleton, of Lexington having had a debilitating eye disease that led to blindness and caused his early retirement from racing.  And she thought, and I certainly agree, that she had a compelling story to tell.

So, the author states that she decided to tell a story of racing, but found that it was impossible not to tell a story of race.  She invented an African American slave, the son of the trainer for the original owner of Lexington, and had this boy, this late adolescent, grow up with the pony who would become the greatest horse of all time. 

This device, gave us a couple, rather than just a horse, to follow through a coming of age period.  But the author, I think, felt inhibited.  She did not feel comfortable, I don’t think, fleshing out this boy coming to be a man’s character.  I think she wanted to avoid painted him with racially based stereotypes – things like powerful feelings that might have been stirred by the way he was treated when the horse, which had been promised to his father, was stolen from him, or how he might have felt when he was sold along with the horse and therefore separated from his family.  She appears to have felt compelled to have him be unrealistically stoic, unflustered by a wide variety of insults and injuries that come his way.

The impetus for this seems to be explained by the interaction in the second story between the woman who is the expert on reconstructing bones and the man who is the art history student.  They meet when she mistakes his unlocking a bike that is exactly like hers from the rack next to hers, which they both take to be evidence of her racism.  Though, they move past that to become lovers, the original misunderstanding haunts their relationship.

Now I don’t think that mistaking someone for taking a bike that is exactly the same as one’s own is inherently a racist act.  It is an honest mistake.  Whether there is a racist component is completely an internal experience, as it is portrayed here.  But I think it is possible for this to be discharged as an honest mistake if the person making the mistake is comfortable with their misreading of the situation as also having racial overtones.  It is the discomfort with the attribution of judging someone with stereotypes that seems to be at the heart of the problematic interaction.

I think the author’s discomfort with, for instance, portraying an African American as angry, something that is done stereotypically (and frequently as a result of projection on the part of members of the dominant culture), she overcorrects, portraying her main protagonist as neither a masochist who is taking pleasure in his mistreatment, nor even a saint, who is aware of the injustice, but able to forgive it, but as something else entirely – as a kind of other worldly being who is both aware of but unmoved by the injustice that he suffers.  Someone who is aware of the parameters, careful to avoid them, but not incensed by the ways in which those parameters harm him. 

Ironically, this gets played out by the boyfriend in the second plot.  He, too, is weirdly unaware of the perils of being a black man, something that leads to his demise, yet he has had ample evidence that he can be mistreated because of his race.  As a foreigner in America, his African American friends try to warn him, but his boy scout like adherence to a code of caring for others ends up being his tragic flaw.

Boy, if I’m going to have a tragic flaw, that would be it.  I would love to be remembered as too trusting, too caring, and too available to help others….

These characters who are unrealistic are, therefore, fantasy characters.  And they are not the kind of fantasy characters that allow us to think about race and the impact of slavery on slaves themselves and on the present-day impact of the racism that is still rampant among us, but they encourage us to think magically about those who are black – to think that they are unmoved by what befalls them. 

One of the complaints that African Americans have about the medical establishment is that physicians and other health professionals act as if they don’t feel pain – or that they have a high tolerance for it.  This book suggests that the pain threshold for each of the characters is incredibly high.  True, at the end of the book, after the civil war, the former slave moves to Canada to avoid the racism in the States, and he articulates his displeasure with the treatment that he received, but this feels like an almost intellectual anger rather than a visceral one.  He knows that he has been treated poorly, so he takes his gifts and talents elsewhere.  This feels like the world of fantasy to me.

The problem with this in a regular novel is that the novel doesn’t help us deal with whatever conflict is at the heart of the novel in a mature fashion.  There is a magical solution.  I don’t suppose that is such a bad thing for a summer read – for a reading that we are doing for pleasure or to pass the time.  Does it hurt us to imagine winning the Kentucky Derby?  I think daydreams serve a kind of purpose – a means of allowing us to break from the realities around us.  But when those realities are as harsh and important as the impact of slavery and racism, I think we need to be prepared to interrogate that impact seriously, and to risk engaging with the subjects of those experiences realistically.  Or, we can, like the author of The Help, avoid the interior experiences entirely and simply describe the behaviors – taking the implicit position that, as a member of the majority culture, we can never actually know what a member of a marginalized culture experiences…

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COVID Chronicles XXX. It’s not dead yet!

 COVID, psychoanalysis, psychology, resurgence, post pandemic, endemic

I thought perhaps I had written the last of these COVID Chronicles, but the virus itself had a thing or two to say about that. If I wrote a piece, I thought it would be a wrap up and I imagined writing about the palpable excitement in the classroom this fall, as the students seem to have returned with a new level of enthusiasm – perhaps even a notch or two above pre-pandemic levels.  A fellow faculty member, talking with his students about AI, was told by the students that they had heard that some of us were afraid we were going to be replaced by AI bots, and they reassured him that they had experienced remote learning, and they were really glad to be in the classroom with living breathing professors.

At my annual physical this summer, I asked my PCP whether it made sense to get a third dose of the last inoculation or to wait until the new dose came out this fall, which would include active defenses against more recent variants.  He counselled to wait, which I agreed with as a strategy until fellow faculty started reporting on the number of students that were showing up sick with COVID in their classes.

I started feeling a bit sick on Tuesday night of last week, and wore a mask to class and with my patients on Wednesday, just to be on the safe side.  I tested negative on Wednesday and thought I just had a head cold, until I got into bed that night feeling bone tired and then was us up frequently through the night to cough before falling fitfully back to sleep.  By morning I was too congested and weary to think about seeing patients or teaching.  This was the first time in our seventeen years together that my wife had seen me cancel a class.

Cancelling classes and patients took about all of my energy and I was not surprised to test positive in the middle of the morning.  Though I did remotely teach a couple of classes at the institute on Friday (it was the first day of class for the school year and for some students, their first class – and it was too late to find a substitute), I cancelled the rest of my day on Friday and spent the better part of four days sleeping or watching a little mindless TV between naps.  I barely had the energy to do much else.

By Monday, I was well enough to teach class remotely – the rest of the class was in the classroom, and I resumed some of my clinical duties remotely.  People were very interested in the quality of my experience and I gave them essentially the details that I have reported here.  I think, though am not certain, that we have all kind of come to think of the endemic stage of the pandemic as the period when COVID is no longer a thing – or if it is a thing, it is not a dangerous our threatening thing.

While I don’t think I was in danger of death – not even close – it was a much more powerful hit than I had imagined would be the case.  The Reluctant Wife, who was also infected, also experienced tremendous fatigue and flu like symptoms, including muscle aches.  We both registered low grade fevers at various points that we treated with analgesics.

One interesting thing about the state of being in an endemic stage is the reporting.  We had been exhorted by our chair to report our COVID status to the powers that be at the university throughout the year last year.  When I sent an email to the designated place, they responded that they were only interested in hearing about students and that I should contact HR.  I reached out to our HR department and they reported that they were not accepting information about faculty and referred me to our website which, in turn, referred me to the CDC page for how to handle quarantining. 

At this point, as both the CDC website and my physician pointed out, there is a recommendation to isolate for five days and then to wear a mask in public for the next five days.  I have let my students know of my diagnostic status, and some have chosen to be masked in class or to zoom into the classroom, which I have set up for them as, for instance, they are caring for immunocompromised family members.

It is interesting that the very close oversight that the university offered, including telling me exactly what kind of alternate classes to offer if I was unable to teach, has simply evaporated and we are in the situation that was in place pre-pandemic, though with guidelines and various technical opportunities that are available in the classroom that weren’t there before the pandemic.  We now use the zoom screens and cameras for a variety of purposes and have become as reliant on them as any other classroom technology – so I assume we will be maintaining that technology as we move forward.

What we seem to have lost is the oversight.  I won’t know which of my students have been diagnosed and whether they are following the isolation and masking protocols or not.  I hope that we have not lost CDC interest and following of the bug – we need to keep coming up with new vaccines and also to know if there are long term effects in various systems – cardiovascular and neuro systems seem to be the most likely candidates.   

I am hoping that my illness and the disruption in meeting has not dampened the enthusiasm of the students.  Attendance continues to be excellent and the students are doing the assignments at a rate that perhaps I have never seen.  I’m not sure that we ever quite value something as much as we might until we have lost it, and having regained the experience in the classroom, I am hopeful that we can hang onto some of the enthusiasm as we navigate changing health patterns and the normal disheartenment of the semester turning into a bit of a slog.

There has been a kind of dark cloud hanging around the edges of my classroom, my consciousness, and my experiences with various people in my life.  I am hopeful that, while I don’t think we can banish it, we can, on more days than not, appreciate the largely blue skies that are encouraging us to recommit to addressing the various ills and joys that are part and parcel of the lives we are currently living.

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Oppenheimer: Good versus Evil can be confusing and enlightening.

 Oppenheimer, power, atomic bomb, movie, psychoanalysis, psychology

I have been pleased and surprised that Oppenheimer – along with Barbie – has been a blockbuster hit this summer.  Who would have thunk it?  The New Yorker characterized it as a history channel movie being told with flashbacks instead of in straight narrative form.  Actually, I think it is much more subversive than that.  I think it is a story of good and evil, but our American expectations of what is good and what is evil gets stirred up in ways that are, in the American Exceptionalist Lexicon, heretical.

Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, is a brilliant, but therefore otherworldly person.  He can feel his way into the quantum world of the atoms that make up our world.  Elements that give the illusion of solidity to a world that is, in actuality, mostly empty space.  Atoms deceive us, apparently, by the speed of their revolutions and the intensity of their bonds with other elements.  Oppenheimer can feel the intense, energy filled field that gives us the illusion of a pleasant, serene landscape.  But he is also smart enough in the world of symbols to be able to learn a foreign language in two months to a level of mastery that he can deliver a complex lecture on physics in that language, so he is not stuck in the world of feelings and intuition, but can function in a world of politics and problem solving. 

So, in some ways, its not surprising that this hero, who is labelled as exceptional from the get go, has novel ways of approaching both personal relationships and political ones.  He imagines, at some point (and the movie is taken to task for dramatizing this moment with less historical accuracy than most of the other moments) that he can eliminate someone through poisoning them.  Fortunately (which is a matter of perspective), the poisoning does not take place, and (again in something that is not included in the movie’s narrative) the authorities who discover this aberration decide that his virtues outweigh this lapse of judgement and allow him to move forward in his life without punishment.  But we know that he is both exceptional and has an odd sense of judgement – and an odd faith in his ability to allow his feelings to inform his actions, even to the point of engaging in what traditional values would categorize as immoral activity.

For example, we are asked to evaluate his morality when he woos a married woman and steals her away from her husband.  The marriage he breaks up seems to be one of convenience and he seems to genuinely be interested in the woman.  She is not fleshed out in the film except as an alcoholic who is not a very capable mother and she is someone who is humiliated when Oppenheimer’s affair is brought to light in the inquest that is set up by his one-time supporter but ultimate nemesis Strauss (pronounced Straws, and played by Robert Downey Jr. who gets to show off his acting chops) who sets up a kangaroo court to get Oppenheimer removed from the Atomic Energy Commission because they disagree, and to get Oppenheimer back for having publicly made a fool of Strauss.

If that last sentence was too much – whether or not you’ve seen the film – it clarifies that there are many moving parts here.  One of the reasons that Oppenheimer’s wife’s character is not fleshed out, I believe, is that there simply isn’t enough room in this film for all of the historical characters who are portrayed and who are necessary to the creation of a world changing instrument.

The Atom bomb was not created by a few tinkerers applying Einstein’s theory to bomb construction.  There were hundreds of minds, and many more people working to get the raw materials – the fissionable uranium – to come together in a highly crafted package with multiple complicated systems leading to detonation - with uncertain effect.  And there was a cataclysmic shift in our relationship to the universe and to each other when they successfully accomplished their task.

The task that this movie set for itself was to help us be able to feel as viscerally as Oppenheimer did, what that shift means to us.  I think it succeeded.

We saw this film on vacation at a run-down theater in a relatively small town where every seat in the theater was sold out.  We were just down the hall from the theater showing Barbie, and some pink clad kids snuck in to catch the double feature (they must have had some kind of pass or paid for both films because all seats were assigned and filled).  When the bomb exploded – and I don’t think that is a spoiler – we do have nuclear weapons and used two of them in the Second World War – the silence in the theater was deafening.  I don’t know that I have ever been in a room with that many people who were that rapt.

Of course, the silence of a nuclear explosion is followed by a deafening roar.  Sound doesn’t travel as fast as light, but when it gets there, it is as loud as the explosion was bright – and then there was more noise at the raucous celebration of the success held by those who had worked on the task.  That celebration felt out of place to me – and clearly to Oppenheimer – the orchestrater – the person who had the greatest right to feel proud and even jubilant about their shared achievement.  But he did not.  He felt not just the room shake from the applause cascading down from the wooden bleachers, but the world itself vibrating with the realization that a new power had been unleashed on top of it – a power with the potential to annihilate everything else of beauty that this world had created in the billions of years since it first started spinning as a molten rock around another nuclear reaction at the core of its planetary system.

I want to go back and watch the film again.  We had hoped to see it in IMAX, the medium that was used to shoot it, but those screens were sold out until the end of the run by the time we returned from vacation.  But it was not the spectacle that I want to return to.  This is a complex film with hints about how to decode it.  Strauss’s perspective on events are shot in black and white.  Oppenheimer’s are in color.  But we had to figure this out in real time – no one gave us a program that explained that.  There were competing ideas about how best to accomplish the goal of the weapon – fission versus fusion.  There were children not being tended to and spies being protected and things going on all over the place.  The fog of war seemed to be not just on the battlefield, but in the preparation for it, and in deciding how to manage the aftermath and the specter of living in this brave new world.

I think I got most of the pieces, and probably could have written a cogent summary closer to seeing the film, but what sticks with me a month and a half later is the affect, not the politics.  It is the feeling that we are no longer masters of the world precisely because we have mastered one of the world’s great secrets.  Yes, this group of people needed to work on a doomsday device to prevent a very different kind of doomsday, but having the destructive power that we now do, it feels not like whether we will use our doomsday devices again, but when.  And that is chilling.

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