COVID Chronicles XXI: It’s baaaack… Joy and Horror and Maybe a Ray of Hope….

 COVID-19; University Administrative Responses; Junior faculty and women at risk; psychology of pandemic response; psychoanalysis of pandemic response..

What a joy it has been to be back in the classroom the past two weeks.  Frankly, I was unprepared for how much fun it would be.  For a year and a half I have missed the hum and buzz in the background of the classroom as I set up to teach and field individual questions and comments from students while others – many of them – talk in the background.

I had also missed the back and forth of a live classroom interaction – being able to see and read students' body language – to be able to call on them when they are incubating a response but don’t yet have it in final form, but are itching to be engaged.  The classroom feels alive again, even if we are all a bit muffled by our masks. 

It has felt like what being at Opening Day must feel like for true baseball fans.  Throwing off the winter of our long COVID doldrums, we could once again hear the crack of the bats (OK, maybe it was the crack of someone’s bubble gum) and feel the promise of summer following spring (OK, we started early in August to get out of school by Thanksgiving in order to beat what we assumed in spring would an early winter spike in cases – if one were to occur – so it is the cool fall nights that we are looking forward to).

Our stats looked good going into the first inning (to beat this analogy to death).  Eighty five per cent of our faculty and staff are vaccinated as is 77% of the student body.  Our new president announced that we would be the first local school to require immunization before students could register for spring semester.  Oh, there was much joy in Mudville.

But in the top of the second inning, with our best pitcher on the mound, we ran straight into trouble.  Actually it was the second week of school and we had 11, then 23, then 51, then 87, then 123, then 140 cases reported among our students on successive days.  Though our faculty and staff numbers have stayed relatively low, we are suddenly reeling.

On Wednesday, the latest day for which we have stats at this point, I sat with 7 of 8 students in a small seminar class that met for two and one half hours.  The eighth student, the roommate of one of the others in the class, did not come to class because they had “the sniffles” and decided to get tested rather than come to class.  Bravo, I thought, that is the responsible thing to do, though I also naively assumed the chances of their testing positive were nil because the data always lags a few days as we collect it and “the sniffles” hardly seemed to qualify as something to worry about.

Well, you guessed it, the roommate tested positive.  Ugh.  Am I a carrier?  I am masked when I am teaching, but my glasses fog up when I breathe – clearly stuff is getting around my mask.  Am I now passing things along to the students in my (for our campus) relatively large lecture class the next day?  What should I do? 

Oh, btw, two students stayed home from that class because they were in quarantine.

The guidance from the lame duck and tone deaf university Provost arrived on Friday in the form of an email to all faculty.  In it we were encouraged to be flexible in responding to student needs.  We were encouraged to support our students who need accommodations because they are in quarantine and a variety of options were offered but we were explicitly instructed that moving to an all remote zoom class was not available to us as an option without the dean’s approval and our having completed a course in teaching pure remote classes – something most of us have not done (though most of us having been teaching in split classrooms and/or remote only for the past year).    

In other words, we were to be flexible, but the administration would not be flexible in allowing us to make decisions about how to assess what is in the best pedagogical and health interests of our students.

In a brief conversation with our Dean, where I made it clear that I would NOT be asking permission for any actions I would take in regard to making decisions about what is best for my students, she noted that none of us anticipated that this surge would occur.  Indeed, this seems to be a much more virulent uptick in cases than anything we experienced last year, and none of us were vaccinated then. 

I get it.  We are unprepared.  We are making decisions on the run.

I also get it.  I am in a position of privilege.  I am tenured.  I know the Dean personally.  I can tell the Dean what I will be doing without real fear of reprisal.  Everyone in my home is vaccinated.  And I am not caring for an infant at home.

Junior faculty who are not tenured are likely to have children at home.  Some of them have had daycare cancelled without notice because their children’s teachers have tested positive.  If I had an 18 month old that I had to care for alone – without family in the city because I had moved here for a job and I was told that I could not teach from home – and the university could terminate my contract because I am not tenured and we were living through times when there are concerns about the budget – what would I do?

I know that I would lose sleep over whatever it was that I was considering.

The University is mirroring the Culture as a whole in putting its youngest, female members most at risk of additional strain (and illness – we are in much closer contact with young children who are not yet eligible for vaccination) as the pandemic drags on and spikes again.

Meanwhile our state legislature is trying to pass laws that would prevent requiring inoculations and mandatory masking and our governor, who was an early leader – and an admirable one – in responding to the pandemic, fears he cannot lead because his own party, of which he is nominally the head, is at odds with him because they are striking a populist note rather than convincing their constituents that we need to pull together to beat this thing.

A writer in the Atlantic has taken the position that the end game of this pandemic is that COVID is so threatening now because it is novel COVID-19.  Once it passes into the annals of being the same old COVID-19 – once our bodies have learned to how to react to it either through inoculations or through repeated exposure to it – it will likely be like the flu (which was once much more lethal than it currently is) and the common cold – something that knocks us out for a few days, but is generally not life threatening.  We are trying to get from here to there and if we take precautions, we can get from here to there minimizing additional loss of life, economic peril, and creation of new and more problematic strains of the disease.

Oddly, our system of self-government, on a local, state, regional and national level seems, at first glance, to continue to be allied against our doing what is in our best interests.

Fortunately, my department is not going along with the herd.  In the last two days, junior members of the department have begun work on a communication system so that we can share resources, support each other both tangibly (teach each other’s classes if need be, deliver groceries and food if needed) and socially (have each other’s backs if individual choose not to follow stupid directives from the administration).

One of the concerns that I expressed to the Dean was that the administration’s failure to support especially our junior faculty is against our long term interests of the University.  We function best when we support each other in the difficult work that we do.  Fortunately our junior faculty are stepping up and doing that, despite the apparent vacuum in leadership in some parts of the administration.  There is hope yet – we might build a new culture out of the ashes of the old one that mirrors or even outshines what we once had and thought was pretty good - until it was tested.  We might actually emerge stronger from this maelstrom as we cast off old top down ways of doing things and take matters into our own hands.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text. 

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

  

The Vegetarian by Han Kang: Madness is at Our Core

 Psychoanalysis of the vegetarian by Han Kang; Psychology; Schizophrenia in the Vegetarian; Psychosis in the Vegetarian; Analysis of the Vegetarian

The vegetarian at the center of this story is a Korean woman whose meat-eating family cannot understand her decision to refuse to eat meat.  They are right to be worried – her shift, precipitated by a vivid dream filled with the blood of dead animals – is not just a choice of what she will and will not eat, but the beginning of a slide into madness. 

Young-hye, the vegetarian, could be dismissed as simply being a person with catatonic schizophrenia.  All of the symptoms that are needed are present.  She can become rigid.  She is worried that any activity on her part will cause damage to others.  Though this now rather rare variant of schizophrenia is rarely seen in its full splendor because the major tranquilizers knock out the most characteristic symptoms quite quickly and effectively, the diagnosis is a poster child for the problem with modern psychological nosology (classification of disorders).  As is often the case in the DSM, a term that describes a pattern of symptoms is used to identify a disorder, but then it is also used as if it were the cause of the disorder. 

Young-hye could be dismissed in the following way:  Who is she?  She is a catatonic schizophrenic.  Why?  Because she has the same symptoms as other catatonic schizophrenics.  What causes her to be this way?  Catatonic schizophrenia.  Fortunately this book, unlike the DSM, does not do reduce her to a diagnosis.  Quite the opposite.  It invites us to imagine the person who is at the heart of the madness.

In this book, we come to appreciate the complexity of the central character almost exclusively through the eyes of three important people in her life, each of whom misunderstands her in his or her own unique way.  Each of these people is also, in his or her own way, every bit as mad as Young-hye, though none of them will be hospitalized for any length of time and none of them will be treated.

We get direct access to Young-hye’s dreams and little bits of what she says, but mostly we hear how other people observe her, and we build, across time, our own version of her internal world – and perhaps only become conscious that we have done this when the protagonists badly misunderstand her internal world in the manifold ways that we perceive them to be doing.

At the same time, I think that we become more and more suspicious of our own ability to build a veridical model of Young-hye’s internal world – or we should be.  And, since the central character is mad – and has a particular diagnosis – catatonic schizophrenia – we might begin to question what we know about madness – and we might begin to wonder about own madness.

So – the story is told through the eyes of three people.  Roughly a third of the book is devoted to each perspective and the story generally moves forward in time, though the second and third stories revisit events previously told so that we can understand the perspective of the new individual on what happened earlier.

Yeong-hye is the vegetarian.  She is initially seen through the eyes of her husband Mr. Cheong.  This third of the story is told in first person, but we barely get to know Mr. Cheong.  He is so intent on being ordinary that he has all but stripped himself of personality.  He has chosen Yeong-hye because she, too, appears so ordinary that she would never attract anyone’s attention – including his.  He is, therefore, free to live his life unencumbered by her.

This sounds strange and perhaps Korean-typical to my western ear, but it is also not all that different from the ways that some of my (mostly male) patients have presented over the years.  They turn out to be much more interesting than they allow themselves to be at first, but the effacement of self cannot, I don’t believe, be attributed entirely to our stereotypes of the orient.  That said, this man’s inner life cries out for us to imagine him as devoid of any special attention – except perhaps our revulsion that his central wish is to live a life that is entirely unremarkable.

This book could easily be read as a feminist tract – there are essentially no good men in this book and the vision we have of a society that caters to these dominant but ineffective men is revolting.  But it is not just revolting to our feminine selves.  The men, despite being in positions of power, are far from happy.  Their attempts to deny the passions that would make their lives human is deeply disturbing.  And Young-hye’s father, whose abuse of Young-hye both as a child and as a vegetarian is harsh and disturbing, lives a life that is far from enviable.

When Yeong-hye has a dream – a vivid, horrifying dream – she decides to become a vegetarian.  This is horribly unwanted in Mr. Cheong’s life.  It is as problematic to him as her decision not to wear a bra – but much more public and therefore disruptive.  He is ashamed both that his wife does not wear a bra and that she refuses to eat most of the meal at a company dinner that he has finally been invited to, and then he enlists the aid of her family to convince her to become normal again – to eat meat.

Here we learn that Yeong-hye has more to her than the bland appearance and bland life that Mr. Cheong describes.  Her father is and always has been brutal and dictatorial.  He attempts to force Yeong-hye to eat meat – and she, through clenched teeth, refuses.  We realize that control over what goes into her mouth, the most basic control an infant has, may be an important symbol of her assertion of herself as something other than the property of her father – or, perhaps, her husband.

After a tense standoff with her family, Yeong-hye uses a knife to cut her wrists, and she is carried to the ambulance by her brother-in-law.  We never learn his name, but the next segment of the story, while told in the third person, is told from his perspective. 

The video artist, married to Young-hye’s sister, In-hye, has been derided by Mr. Cheong as a do nothing who sponges off his wife and pretends to be artistic.  When he takes over the narrative, we don’t disagree with Mr. Cheong’s perspective, though we do have more access to and sympathy with the artist’s aesthetic perspective.

The artist has a perfunctory relationship with his wife.  He realized quite early on that he was much more interested in her sister than he was in her because of her sister’s physical features – he imagines her to have been his truly intended, but this thought disappears from his consciousness until the sister becomes a vegetarian and he witnesses her being forced to eat meat and then cutting herself in his home.  There is something enlivening to the artist about her plight – and taking her to the hospital covered in her blood.

Even more exciting is the Mongolian Mark – a blue birth mark that is common to most Asian people – but one that generally fades.  When the artist learns from An-hye, his wife, that her sister Young-hye’s birthmark has never faded, the artist becomes obsessed with imagining it – and imagining painting flowers all over Young-hye.  In his imagination, the painting of the flowers is ethereal, not pornographic.  But he is also terribly aroused by the thought of painting her and of filming the painting and of filming her having sense – a non-sensual sex – with someone who has painted flowers all over him.  There is a deep split within him between his high minded aesthetisicm and his visceral sexuality - which is complicated by the ways that both use the same sensual pathways.  One and the same thing is both (in the western vernacular) holy and profane. 

That he could get his sister-in-law to consent to all of this seems very far-fetched.  He offers to check up on his wife's sister, now that Mr. Cheong has left her, and his wife is surprised and appreciative that he would do something to help her in any way (she is the bread winner in the family – and appreciates that her husband lets her work outside the home, but we continue to see him as more of a leach than his wife appears to).  When he goes to Young-hye's apartment, the artist discovers that Young-hye prefers to be naked at home, and he discovers that she is amenable to being painted.

One of the virtues of this book is that what I am writing here that sounds pretty preposterous actually makes sense.  Young- hye is open to the world at this point in a way that mirrors the artist’s openness, and also seems more genuine.  The artist is conscious of trying to represent something, but he doesn’t quite know what.  Young-hye is not trying to do anything except perhaps to live in the moment and to accept what that moment has to offer – as long as it is not meat.  At this point in the book, she seems serene to the point of being close to enlightenment - especially through the eyes of the artist, but also through the eyes of the third person narrator.

Long story short (which is weird to say about a book that is less than 200 pages), the artist paints Young-hye, then another artist, and video tapes all of this.  The other artist refuses to have sex with Young-hye, because it would be pornographic, so the artist paints himself - presumably in order to be able to realize his artistic vision - but also because he has been sexually rebuffed by Young-hye because he is not painted.  He and Young-hye have sex in all their painted glory and In-hye discovers the videotape of this the next morning and calls the health authorities to take them away.  The artist considers killing himself by throwing himself off the balcony, but does not.  He is briefly hospitalized, but Young-hye is now deep within the clutches of the mental health system and is hospitalized at a long term care facility.

It is now time for the last third of the book, told in the third person from the point of view of In-hye.  She divorces the artist, who becomes a marginal person, barely able to care for himself who is estranged not only from In-hye, but from their son.  He is too ashamed to object to the divorce.

In-hye becomes the caregiver for her sister who begins to refuse to eat not just meat, but food of any kind.  She believes she will become a plant and be able to live on sunlight alone.  We no longer see this as a sign of being enlightened but as a symptom of being mad.  In-hye reflects on how she was able, as the older sister, to duck the violence from their father, and to watch what happened to Young –hye without intervening.   This leads her to feel less guilty – though there is certainly plenty of that – than a deep sense of empathy with Young-hye – so deep that she herself becomes suicidal and begins to have the kind of burning images that have haunted Young-hye’s sleep.

This book supports Harry Stack Sullivan’s one genus hypothesis – that we are all, including those who are most disturbed, first and foremost human and therefore more alike than different.  In fact, it goes Sullivan one higher, suggesting, I think, that that we are all first and foremost mad, and in that way more alike because we are fringy rather than alike because we are mainstream.

Setting this book in a collectivist culture that values conformity makes this point all the more stark.  Setting this book in a culture that views mental illness as deeply shameful because of its profound aberrance from the norm drives home the point that we can’t escape our essential humanity – and therefore madness.

This book is written by a Korean woman who spent some time learning her craft at the Iowa writer’s workshop.  It is translated by an English woman who was more intent on translating meaning than slavishly transliterating language, so it has been called, by some, an adaptation rather than a translation.

Just as it is hard to know Young-hye because we see her, largely, through other’s eyes, so it is hard to know the author as a representative of her culture when we hear her in loose translation and when she has learned her trade outside of her culture.  What is the Korean position on madness?  In what ways does this book represent that?  I don’t know.  The book was, not surprisingly, not well received in Korea, where it was seen as transgressive.  It has been awarded a Man Booker prize in translation, perhaps in large part because of its transgressive nature.

I think that Mr. Cheong is intended to be (I’m not sure to what extent by the author and to what extent by the translator) the stereotypical Korean man.  He is focused on fitting in and, in the process, creating a space for himself that allows him to become so invisible that he can do what he wants to do without interference from others.  This may sound foreign, but I continue to think that this is actually a way that people – perhaps men more than women – operate much more frequently than we might imagine.  I think the author and/or translator wants to point out that this way of being – far from being healthy – is deeply pathological.  Mr. Cheong cannot empathize with his wife – he all but berates her for the manifold ways that she interferes with his ability to serenely detach from the world – and when she doesn’t support him in his effort to do this, he divorces and abandons her – presumably to search for someone who is actually as bland as his wife appeared to be.

The artist, rather than being driven by an internal vision of himself as Mr. Cheong is, devotes himself to being open to the world.  This openness means that he is not a reliable partner to In-hye and it resolves into a position of being as unempathic towards her as Mr. Cheong was to Young-hye.  And let’s not even talk about Young-hye’s father and his crazy wish to force people to conform to the types of behavior they should emit.  If Mr. Cheong is remote and clueless, the artist is sensitive, but only to what the world evokes in him, not to what is occurring inside of others in the world around him.

In-hye, who becomes more sensitive to her feeling states, becomes overwhelmed by them.  Her son senses this – tuning into her suicidal thoughts – thoughts that In-hye doesn’t quite let herself acknowledge that she has.  Figuring out how to live within the confines of a culture, a family, and the parameters of our own mind, is incredibly challenging.  This book helps us appreciate just how difficult that can be.

I don't know whether it might not also be suggesting that enlightenment might be greeted as madness if it comes in the form of a woman, a vegetarian, or perhaps just by virtue of its being an aberration from what we expect.  Further, enlightenment might become madness as a result of our efforts to treat it - to drive it from the person, rather than helping them embrace and explore what it means to be serenely unaffected by the world; to realize, perhaps in part as a result of being traumatized and feeling angry and aggressive in return, that we are violent creatures and that we should consider trying to re-work ourselves in ways that might be considered to do violence to who it is that we are expected to be.  The danger of the diagnostic system that I referenced at the beginning of this post is that when we reduce our patients to being the symptoms with which they present and we then work to eradicate the symptoms, the patient can experience us as trying to eradicate them, which is, I think, how Young-hye experienced the mental health system.  In so far as she did, this was a re-enactment of her father's attempts to annihilate her and exacerbated her difficulties rather than helping her recover. 

As we sit in a world that is ravaged by a pandemic that we can't seem to take seriously enough to kill and by an environmental crisis that may be beyond repair, this book seems to offer an interesting perspective on our seeming inability to accept how radically we may need to rework ourselves in order to save our species - and how unlikely it may be that we can do something that will be viewed as madness by so many of us.  In-hye's final, empathic connection with Young-hye's dreams - something that is clearly too little too late, should be a warning to us that we need to here those among us who are having nightmares and acknowledge that we share them - before it is too late.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text. 

  

COVID Chronicles XX – The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the “Time In Between”

 

We thought that the pandemic had come to an end and was winding down.  Or, more precisely, we hoped that was the case while fearing that we were, in fact, not there yet.  The 2020 Olympics - put off until 2021 - loomed as the moment when the world would celebrate a return to normalcy after the “games” had been put off for a year.  But the “games” – a euphemism that implies something fun, lighthearted, gay and childish – rely on fans in the stands waving national flags and cheers and celebrations to maintain that façade – and they have been strangely absent.  Early on it seemed that Jill Biden and Francois Mitterand seemed to be the only fans actually at the games, underscoring the games geopolitical and elitist background and function.  The heat and exhaustion caused by scheduling in the tropical summer underscored the economic foundation in American Television as a prime driving force.  And the presence of a spate of new sports – from skateboarding to surfing to karate underscores a seemingly desperate desire to captivate any and all audiences and to bring even the renegades under the umbrella of the IOC.

I grew up loving the Olympics.  Essentially the only time that my mother and grandmother would watch sports on TV (though my grandmother did take me to see Ernie Banks play for the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field when I was very young), there was a sense of togetherness both as a family and as a nation as we watched the US team compete against others.  The politics was played out in front of our eyes as the Eastern Bloc Countries would mark down our athletes best performances and our judges would retaliate, and the low scores would get thrown out and somehow it seemed that, generally, the best athletes would somehow be given the medal.

Of course, what was on display were the cultural differences – and our culture was held up on our TVs as the best.  Our approach to sport was based on the myth that kids would play what they want and the good ones would rise to the top as naturally as cream rises to the top of milk.  Our culture, we told ourselves, values freedom and competition and those who compete in the games are our young meritocratic nobility.  The Olympics – and other forces – spawned legions of soccer Moms (and Dads) (I was one of the latter) sitting in sling chairs, rooting on their children on weekends and – for the select few – driving them around the country to compete with other selected ones to fight for college scholarships and/or to toil, largely in anonymity, and, for those who had the greatest gifts and toiled the hardest, they would be rewarded with trips to far off places and the accolades and cheers of family, friends, and country.

Their culture, by contrast, was painted as the heavy handed state identifying talented youths and shipping them off to sports camps to be used as propaganda hounds.  Shot full of performance enhancing drugs, these half human half cyborg monsters would compete against our lovely lads and lasses in a contest of good versus evil – so that we could root for our kids – with their compelling back stories told in detail – and feel justified in our otherwise unseemly haul of medals.

The truth (whatever that might be) is, of course, much more complex.  The narrative I have related above continues to be spun, with the Russian and Chinese political machines as the bad guys and their athletes the hapless victims of the relentless drive of authoritarian regimes trying to pretend that their system is superior when they are clearly cheating in order to achieve a competitive advantage, while we have wholesomeness and light on our side.

Of course, we are also a waning super power, at least in some areas.  Our pursuit of leisure is now being mirrored by people in multiple countries, especially as the middle class spreads (like a virus?) from our own country to others.  And the prisoners of that system – the kids who are sent away to tennis “schools” - toil away at sports that they are adept at, but engage in with wildly varying passion.  And there are kids who are talented and privileged enough to devote a considerable amount of time to pursuing areas that may eventuate in competing on the world stage.  And the sheer variety of sport (How many ways can we use to propel an object with a racquet or a paddle?  How many ways can we come up with to advance an object towards a goal line with rules that determine how this particular way of doing that is different from this other way?  How many ways can we come up with to celebrate the manifold ways we can twist our bodies through space?) is both staggering and somehow reflective of our desire to create order out of a world that once presented infinite challenges to our ability to survive.

But the truth of the matter is that our ability to survive hinges now not so much on our ability to navigate space and forcing an object over a goal line as it does, perhaps, on limiting and capping our desire to do the very things that have propelled us to this place of unimaginable wealth.  We are wildly successful at managing the challenges as they were constructed in their old form.  We can kill the wild beast, grow the needed crops, and utilize the resources to create an economy that, at least for some of the population, affords the leisure for athletic, but also artistic and intellectual pursuits and especially the latter fuels our ability to achieve new levels of success.  But our doing this without limit is, ironically, now what imperils us.  And our failure to individually and collectively rein in our striving to overcome, to achieve, to have and consume more is likely to be our downfall.

Individually, we don’t want to impose discipline on our actions.  We don’t want to wear masks or to take shots that will protect us – but that also remind us that we are dependent on others.  Somehow it is better to depend on them when we become sick because we have not taken what has been offered to protect ourselves from complete dependency.  Collectively, we feel threatened that, if our economy does not continue to expand, we won’t have the necessary capital to attend to our needs.

Failing, however, to curtail our actions leads us to have a communal celebration of what we have individually accomplished – we build huge stadia that stand largely empty and hold only the select few to observe our triumphs.  Collectively, we may well drive ourselves off a cliff clad in what we believe will be a suit of armor that will insulate us from the perils that building that suit has caused. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not stating this from a position of being above it all.  I have toiled throughout my life to achieve my own certainly more limited Olympian heights.  I have followed the received wisdom of how to construct a life – how to build a base for my family to thrive – and how to dedicate myself to helping others achieve the same goals.  I have not, like my sister, opted to live in a tiny house, close to the land, using minimal resources to survive.  I have a large carbon footprint.

I am struggling with the overarching message of the Olympics as much as anyone else – I deeply believe that my investment in my individual well-being will be good for all.  And I don’t think that the Elon Musks, or the Henry Fords, or the Henry the VIII’s of this world have or had an evil plan to subdue us or knew the costs of working our way out of being at the mercy of the natural world that can be cold and unforgiving and that will, in the end, be the death of us all.  But we are increasingly conscious of the costs of maintaining what has become more clearly visible as an illusory narrative.

Closer to home, I will be back in a classroom in two weeks.  At this moment, the plan is for me and for my students who are vaccinated to be unmasked – and those who are not vaccinated to wear masks.  Students will be required to attend class in person.  There will be no zoom alternative.

Of course, this week the CDC has acknowledge both breakthrough cases – people who are vaccinated are seeming to be increasingly vulnerable, especially to the delta variant – and that vaccinated people, even when they are not infected themselves – can be carriers.  I don’t want to teach behind a mask.  I don’t want to teach over Zoom – especially to a mix of people in person and on screen.  And I don’t want my students to continue to experience a surreal college world – where they are there virtually in person.  Aargh.

This second summer of COVID is beginning to look more and more like an all too brief intermission in a very long playing and very dark drama.  Perhaps we need to have the denial of our interconnectedness pointed out to us again and again and again….

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text. 

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

  

   

Roadrunner: Anthony Bourdain’s Life and Death

 

Road Runner, Anthony Bourdain, Suicide, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Anger, Pride

Roadrunner: Anthony Bourdain’s Life and Death

My first job, like Anthony Bourdain’s, was as a dishwasher.  I was paid two dollars and five cents an hour. After six months, I was given a nickel raise.  I have continue to be paid – in part of my life – by the hour.  And I continue to think of my value as hovering around two dollars and five or ten cents an hour, though my hourly fee is much higher than that. 

In the film Roadrunner, Anthony Bourdain is asked how he can put up with being a celebrity and having people he doesn’t know greet him on the street.  He answers that, if his life has not taken this turn, he might well be a line chef working hard to meet deadlines and not being able to pay his rent – so greeting lots of people is a small price to pay for the life he has.

I don’t disagree with him, but I do think that there is a tension between his self-valuation (and mine) and the work he does on screen to help us realize the value of the people whose lives our wars have upended or maimed or ended.  He judges those who are in power – noting that they have not done enough to value those who are affected by their power, but he undervalues himself and judges himself not worthy – in his case, initially he decides he doesn’t deserve peace and quiet, and ultimately he decides he doesn’t deserve to live.

When I worked in a psychiatric hospital that treated very ill people, I was in a meeting in the wake of a patient suicide.  Sadly I did not recall the patient whom I had tested 6 months earlier.  But I do recall the meeting.  Fred Shectman, a dear friend, led the meeting.  He was not on the team that had treated the man, by design.  It was an opportunity for us to discuss what we might have missed (and, apparently, I missed a lot, not remembering the man). 

Fred noted that in the wake of suicide, two things happen.  One is that we feel guilty.  The other is that we look for someone to blame.  And we tend to move back and forth between those two states – using the one to ward off the other and vice versa.

When I heard that Anthony Bourdain had killed himself, I was really angry with him.  I guess I blamed him.

Though the filmmakers say that they wanted to talk about Anthony Bourdain’s life, it is impossible to do that without talking about his death and, thankfully, they do that.  The reluctant wife, who was a big fan, had read that this movie feels like therapy for those who lost Bourdain.  I agree with this statement.

 Even though I was not as obsessed with him as she was, we both deeply respected him and the work he did.  We admired his ability to connect with people, and to enjoy living – and especially eating, including the weirdest, most off-beat food.  And we admired that he enjoyed street food and local food – and, though he appreciated haute cuisine, that he wondered at the complexity, the expense, and perhaps most of all the tiny portions!  And we vicariously enjoyed how much he enjoyed ingesting good food – and talking with people – the people who made the food and the people ate it with him.

His death came as a shock to both of us.  He seemed, in my memory, so grounded and sure of himself.  This film helped me realize that, though he was grounded and sure of himself, part of that was a mask; a pretense.  He was primarily a writer – and he was introverted as so many writers are – so that initially he stepped into the limelight reluctantly, but once there he was, according to many in the film, in his element.  He could command the screen (and the people who worked with him to create the show) the way he commanded the word on the page and the way he could, as head chef, command the work in the kitchen.  And he became addicted to doing the show.

One of the episodes that I remember fondly was an episode where Tony talked about his addiction to heroin and about beating that addiction.  He was less focused on his having beaten it than talking about how powerful the drug was for the many who had no hope.  At least that is how I remember it.

Some of the people in the film made the case that Tony never actually gave up his addiction, but that he shifted from being dependent on heroin to being dependent on writing to being dependent on being Anthony Bourdain, world traveler and bon vivant.  I don’t disagree with this assessment, as far as it goes.  But I think there is more.  Another mentor at the same hospital that I mentioned once suggested that, in suicide, the person who kills him or herself has condemned him or herself to death for some kind of crime they believe themselves to have committed.

I think Anthony Bourdain was angry at the world - and angry at himself for the part that he played in that world.

I don’t think that all suicides can be explained as capital punishment, but this description came to mind as Tony evaluated and found fault with so many people in the world at large and, at what would be the end of his days, in those around him who had been dear to him.  This was, they noted in the film, projection.  But they didn’t quite clarify that he was projecting a negative evaluation – a devaluation of himself that led to his devaluing others as a means of desperately trying to avoid the self-devaluing – as if he could, by saying, “You’re bad” say, “I’m good.”  Of course it doesn’t work that way. 

Ironically, his downward spiral happened in the context of a love affair – but a love affair with another person who, like himself, needed to be at the center of all that was going on.  Tony was quite the tyrant in his group, and he fell in love with an equally tyrannical woman. 

I am not, and the filmmakers do not, blame this woman (any more than we have to whenever there is a suicide).  As one of his friends said, the person responsible for Tony’s death was none other than Tony himself.  No one other than he put the noose around his neck.

And we feel, I think, tremendous sadness at what appears to be a true tragedy – someone who wanted desperately to be loved, to be valued for who he was and what he had to offer – who could not, ultimately, use the love that others gave so profusely to overcome the inner judgement that he was lacking – that he was, ultimately, a line cook who had a crazy moment that took him into a new space, but one that he felt no more comfortable inhabiting – in fact less comfortable inhabiting – than his earlier life as a big fish in a little pond.

Tony also, somehow, could not see that we were dependent, each in our very small way, on his love for the world and his energy in exploring and reporting on that world.  It was not just that we lived vicariously through his travels, but we lived vicariously through his jaded love of the people and places he discovered.

In an alternate universe somewhere, Tony Bourdain is holding court, telling his bawdy tales of kitchen life, to a small audience of fellow cooks, the people he claimed as the audience for his first book, Kitchen Confidential.  These cooks are matching him (it is a large group) story for story.  And they are all angry – but they transform their anger into a shared disdain for those they serve and those who are supposed to serve them better, and they feel satisfied in the superiority of their own lives – and in the superiority of their comradery.

Following this line of thinking, we can imagine that Tony lost the comrades that would have helped him survive this messy thing called living by reaching for the ring that he thought he couldn’t, but in fact could reach.  The ring was being the smartest guy in the room – complicated by his realizing that the key to getting there involved becoming the most humble one.  But he was also falsely full of himself and, when he tried to prove his value by finding a peer who could shine his light back on him, he failed to live up to his false image of himself, and judged himself lacking.

There were a number of false scenes in the film.  No, I am not referring to A.I. voice overs of Tony reading his own words.  That does not feel false to me – it feels like using the usual artifice that film makers use to enhance our experience and sell their version of events.  The particularly false scenes where the ones where Tony appeared to be in some kind of therapy.

In one therapy scene, Tony appears to be at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting – and he is telling of his addiction – but he is talking not of its power over him, but of his ability to beat the addiction.  The camera catching this clarified that it was staged – and if the others in the room were addicts, they were too cowed by being on stage to confront him as addicts in a “real” NA meeting would have done.

The second therapy scene, a staged and filmed individual session, again felt false.  Tony was engaged in introspection.  Real though the introspection may have been, it occurred in the context of a staged relationship with a person who, no matter her therapeutic credentials, was a prop.  Real treatment requires authentic engagement between two people who both feel scared about what they are up against.

Tony’s gift to us was his confidence – in himself, in his words, in his ability to capture a moment.  Unfortunately, Tony did not value that as much as we did.  I think he believed himself to be a glib but insincere person in a world full of people who were insincere.  He wanted to be sincere – but I think that he felt that those who knew him knew he was not.  And, of course, he wasn’t.  Not all of the time.  And he was duplicitous and complicated and all of that was part of what made him all the more lovable.  We could relate to him – because we, too, are duplicitous and complicated.

The greatest tragedy, of course, is that the connection with his daughter was not enough for him to realize how genuine and essential love is – and how genuinely important he was in her eyes.  A recent meme points out that if you quit your job, they will replace you, but you can’t be replaced in your family.  The funny home videos they made will never substitute for going out to dinner with him.

I heard about the film as I driving back from a reunion with some friends from graduate school.  Fresh Air replayed an old interview of Bourdain – after he had published a book on cooking at home, something he had never done until he had a child.  He was adapting commercial kitchen techniques (cooking bacon in the oven) to the home environment.  And he was adapting himself to being a father.  And he was clearly taken with being a Dad – one of the most transformative transitions that can take place in a man’s life. 

I was angry that he had not realized his importance to his child.

This film helped me appreciate that Tony’s death was not an aberration, but was continuously connected to the life of a man driven by the wish to escape the paltriness of his existence – and tempted by feeling that he was so close to achieving that, but ultimately believing that whatever he would grasp was not genuine, not authentic, that he was not who he cracked himself up to be, even in the eyes of his daughter.

As someone in the film noted, Icarus should be measured not by the fact that he fell, but by the fact that he flew.  Would that Tony could see, as we did, just how high and wide he had flown and that his wings – though powerfully able to get him there - needed some repair work to bring him home in one piece.  He needed some genuine humility – not an easy thing for a man of his stature and ambition to express.  But who would have said no to helping him?

We left the theater feeling oddly satisfied.  As if we had consumed a good meal.  I know that sounds strange to say, but we had, I think, felt haunted and left up in the air by the announcement of Bourdain’s suicide.  It seemed incongruous.  The movie provided context.  It provided a narrative that made sense.  And that is, I think, a part of what good therapy does.  It provides a narrative – a way of stitching together the sometimes randomly seeming elements of our life into a sensible story line.  When we have that, we can put to rest something that has been bothering us.

We didn’t leave Bourdain at the theater.  We carried him home with us.  I have ordered Kitchen Confidential and we will likely watch episodes from his oeuvre that we might otherwise have skipped.  We have been able to mourn his loss – and can move forward, including him again in the figures in our entertainment world with whom we can engage.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text. 

  

Stranger Than Fiction: The Human Condition

 

Stranger Than Fiction Movie; Will Ferrell; Psychology of Stranger than Fiction; Psychoanalysis of Stranger than Fiction; Meaning of Stranger than Fiction

 

Stranger Than Fiction has been recommended to us so many times that when the Reluctant Wife and I talked about watching it, we assumed we had.  It is Will Ferrell’s “serious” movie and many many have suggested it is worth viewing.  The particular suggestion this time came from a patient who was noticing the ways in which episodes in his life kept repeating themselves with variations and suggested it as a work that played with the issues that are part and parcel of time travel.  A quick read of the plot synopsis clarified that we hadn't, in fact, watched it.  Intrigued, we decided to enter the world of Harold Crick (Ferrell).

Harold Crick is an IRS agent.  He is meticulous, organized and bland.  He has no significant attachments to anything or anyone except, Emma Thompson’s narrating voice-over seems to intimate, his watch.  That this mechanical man should be connected to a mechanism makes sense in a sort of sterile and reductive way.  Is he really this bland?

By the way, I used to live across the street from an IRS agent.  She was anything but bland – and her husband – OMG – he was brilliant – he had written some amazing books – and tempestuous.  He would fly into a rage on regular occasions when people would turn around in his driveway (we lived at the end of a dead end with no turn around).  While the agent was not as volatile as her husband, she was not nearly as bland as Harold – they were an intriguing, vibrant and slightly scary couple.

The odd thing about the narration of Harold’s life is that not only can we hear it, he can, too.  When he stops the actions that are being narrated (like brushing his teeth while he counts the brushstrokes), the narration stops, too.  This is, not surprisingly, eerie and more than a bit distracting.

Wanting to get at the basis of what is going on, Harold consults with a psychiatrist.  She, rather flat-footedly, diagnoses him as schizophrenic and wants to prescribe anti-psychotics to make the voice stop.  Harold, to his credit, does not agree with this diagnosis.  She, somewhat oddly, then suggests that he consult with a literary maven (though I am a psychologist, I would have talked to the guy.  Was this a commentary on the state of psychiatry where, if I don’t have a pill to help you, I can’t be of use?  I know that some psychiatrists are much more versatile than that, but I do think this may be a common perception of the field at this point…).

Thank goodness, for the sake of the movie, Harold finds Jules Hibert (perfectly played by Dustin Hoffman), a professor of English Literature.  They engage in a conversation and matter of factly conclude that Harold is a character in a novel – and that he should find the novelist in order to find out what his fate will be.

Meanwhile, Harold has been assigned to the case of Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a quirky baker who, on a variation of Thoreau’s moral rejection of the government, has intentionally not paid her entire tax bill because she only wants to support a portion of what the government is doing (though I think she significantly understates the portion of the federal budget that is related to the armed services).  The mechanical Harold is, of course, taken with the do-gooding Ana and, this being Hollywood, the do gooding, vivacious and attractive Ana is curious about what sort of heart beats in the breast of this mechanical man.

Harold’s research with Hibert, meanwhile, takes a dark turn.  As he tries to determine whether he is in a comedy or a tragedy – and sees signs of both (e.g. this must be a comedy because he is smitten with Ana and she might be with him), Hibert delivers the judgement, once they determine that the author is Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson, of course), that he will die – soon – as all of her characters die at the end of her books.  Hibert enjoins Harold to live the remainder of his life as fully as he can, Crick proceeds to do this – while also setting off to be in touch with his author.

We, of course, have been following the author, Eiffel, as she tries to figure out how best to kill her character.  This dilemma has caused her to miss deadlines that the publisher has imposed and so they have sent out Penny Escher (Queen Latifah) to help her finish the book.  Eiffel has the elements – there is a little boy, and a bus driver, and a concerned father – and there is an apple, but how these elements come together is escaping her – tormenting her even.  Escher doesn’t care about art or hang ups – she is a midwife and works to get the baby delivered.

Just as the ending has fallen into place, and as Eiffel is writing it out, Crick calls.  Unnerved, but convinced that she is actually talking to her character, Eiffel gives him the manuscript.  Crick, unable to read it himself, delivers it to Hibert. 

Hibert, with a straight face, pronounces it Eiffel’s masterpiece and he clarifies to Crick that he must accept his fate, which is to die, because to do otherwise would interfere with the artistic integrity of Eiffel’s work.  In order to create an immortal version of himself, Crick must die.  And, by the way, he will die anyway – so why not die heroically?

Meanwhile, Crick has stated his desire for Pascal.  He has also played the guitar and sung for her – and Pascal has discovered that his heart is not just interesting but desirable, and they have become lovers.

Crick, by virtue of having set his watch wrong, arrives at the bus stop early, in time to be able to save a boy from being run over, but puts himself in harm’s way in the process.

This should, of course, be the end of the film and we should get a voice over from Eiffel that will wrap this up and we will understand something about the human character that will, from the perspective of Hibert, be masterful.  But that is not what occurs.  Eiffel is impressed that her character, despite knowing his fate, has accepted it.  She has a crisis of confidence. 

How many other characters has she killed?  What has been the cost of that?  But more, centrally, who is this character named Crick.  As she was narrating his life, he was an automaton.  He brushed his teeth 37 (or was it 87?) times on each side.  He was as mechanical as his watch.  Or was he?  Did he not fall in love?  And, more centrally, did he not embrace his fate – not simply have it happen to him?

The questions in the last paragraph are mine.  What occurs onscreen is that Crick wakes up in a hospital bed (improbably but quite beautifully looking down on the Wrigley building in Chicago).  He has been saved by his watch which has miraculously broken apart and inserted itself into the severed artery that was to have killed him but, thanks to its intervention, his life was spared, though he will now have to be nursed back to health by Pascal.  We are left to puzzle over this turn of events.

Hibert reads the book that includes Crick’s survival, and Eiffel asks his opinion.  He deems it a good effort – but it is clearly not the masterpiece that it would have been.  Eiffel acknowledges that she has discovered that Crick was more than she had measured him to be, and sparing his life and ruining the masterpiece became necessary.

Btw, before turning to an understanding of the film, we were very glad to have watched it.  I think it, like the book, is not a masterpiece (and I will get to the virtues of that in a second), but it is a deeply textured film and the characters are quite delightful.  But the reluctant wife and I agreed that the best part about it is that it is layered – and that the pleasure of watching it is going back over those layers to think about and discuss them.  In what follows, and in what I hope to be the spirit of the movie, I hope to get at a few of those layers, but implore you to enjoy experiencing the layers that I have not included, have missed, or that you experienced differently from me.

The character names to this story are, I think, important.  They are all famous scientists.  Eiffel is the author – or chief engineer.  She would create a monument – austere in its perfection.  Hibert is the mathematicians who posed 23 problems at the beginning of the twentieth century, most of which were solved, but some still await a solution.  Can Eiffel prove what she sets out to?  Pascal is the father of modern science and sets it all in motion, but I am struck by his wager – that it is better to bet on God existing, for if he does, you will profit in the afterlife and, if not, you have not lost a great deal.  Escher, of course, creates (resolves?) paradoxical images, and Crick discovers the blueprint of being human.

If Eiffel’s vision of Humanity is that it is a mechanism – one where we run like clockwork - Crick proves her wrong – destroying the symmetrical and therefore beautiful elaboration of the human condition.  The way that he does this involves embracing his fate – saving the boy at the risk of his own life – not reflexively and thoughtlessly, but knowingly.  He knows that he will die, but chooses to save the life of the child anyway.  Not because he is programmed to do this by his reflexes, but by something that lies much deeper in the DNA of his character – valuing human life.

Eiffel’s vision, then, must be one that Crick, the character in the novel and in the film, fits perfectly.  We are pre-programmed to function in the ways that we do.  Indeed, Crick seems to be a cyborg – he can perform mathematical feats without batting an eye, routinely solving complex multiplication and division problems for his fellow auditors – but only until he begins to worry about his fate.  As he discovers his humanity, he becomes distractible and distracted.  He no longer runs as smoothly as he was before.

Was it just me, or was the intimacy between Crick and Pascal improbably comfortable?  Even as he was portraying a man who was awkward, the time spent with Pascal became increasing natural.  Will Ferrell, the comic actor who plays absurd situations with a dead pan normalcy, seemed in his element here; unfazed by the improbability of the love that emerged from within him – but also that emanated from Pascal.  Doing his job, which he did with a kind of arch disregard for the characters that he caught cheating the government, led him into a warm haven – the baker provided the cookies and milk that his mother never had – and he blossomed.  It was as if a natural developmental path that had been blocked by an impersonal world had created an attachment in a person who had been devoid of an awareness that attachment was of value.

I think that the underlying theme of this film (and many others) is that it is attachment that makes us human.  Eiffel is moved – she becomes attached to her character – by his heroism.  We know even less about her back story than we knew about Crick, but she is clearly wrestling with the inevitability of death – in her characters’ lives, but also, we assume, in her own.  She chain smokes throughout the film, something that is no longer chic in the movies and looks, in her character, to be a driven need – a deeply felt addiction – rather than a tool to elongate a scene or to enhance the mystery of a character, as was the case in Hollywood of old.

Eiffel resolves the dilemma of death much as Hibert does, by thinking about it as an inevitability and one that forms the structure of our life.  Crick’s DNA, which leads him, with the help of Pascal, to a different conclusion.  This means that Eiffel has to restructure her understanding of the human condition (Hibert seems less convinced), and so we are left to wonder, how much does Eiffel rewrite her character so that he becomes worthy of saving?  This is the time travel wrinkle that my patient was referring to.  But that opens up a whole new door.

The patient was experiencing aspects of his life as he has experienced them before, but he was getting a second chance at them, or a third or fourth or fifth.  Partly we re-experience our lives through transference – we recognize in our current relationships aspects of previous relationships.  And in this déjà vu, we get a second chance to work through what we have done before.  We count on this in therapy, where the patient experiences the therapist as a person from their past, and the therapist teaches them new dance steps, or they figure them out together, as Eiffel and her character seem to do.  Couldn’t this dance end in a different way than all the previous ones?

But we also get a chance to rework those steps within the relationships that we are lucky enough (or cursed enough) to experience across the span of our lifetime.  A parent or a spouse or a child can be re-experienced and known in a new way for the first time.  I had this opportunity recently with my mother – whose character I thought I knew well, but in a conversation, one like many many we have had before, I heard her describe herself in a new and different way, and this helped me appreciate her in new and different ways, and this required that I rewrite the ways in which I had been characterizing her at various significant moments in our shared lives.

So, in this way, Eiffel, who is worrying over her character throughout the film, would have had to rewrite her character once having met him.  She would have had to have him meet Pascal, perhaps for the first time, and realized that he was capable of much more than she had given him credit for.  And she would have, in the process, provided him with the kind of person who could care for him, who could nurse him back to health after having been injured by Eiffel. 

So, did Eiffel discover Crick’s humanity not from his interaction with Pascal, but from his decision to follow through with his death – with his fate – knowing that this was what Eiffel had in mind for him and doing it anyway?  Was it Eiffel’s becoming attached to her character that led her to fail to produce the great novel and movie, but that humanized her instead – and she thus ended up being able to be generous with him because, after all, we do die, but it is how we live that is the measure of our character, not how we die. 

So, if this is the case, this is, indeed, a comedy.  It is a celebration of what life has to offer – not a tying together or our fate, death, with the failures in our character.  Yes, we will die.  Yes, we have flaws, including humming through life mechanically, not noticing the loveliness that is all around us.  None of us can escape our fate.  And our fate – death – can be associated with our flaws.  And we can celebrate life – though this is messier, and the symmetry is out of balance, it is lighter – it is a comedy.

But just because it is a comedy – just because a little bit of therapy has helped us avert a lonelier and more noble end, it doesn’t mean that it can’t be complex and filled with twists and turns that fold back on themselves and that have both a certain symmetry and a certain pleasure to discovering their nooks and crannies, even if they don’t have the catharsis of the discovery of our limits.

OK.  That should be a wrap, but I have to confess to something.  Writing this piece in the second summer of Black Lives Matter going mainstream, waiting for the other shoe to drop on COVID with its delta variant, and watching the world rev up to reanimate our self-destructive plunge into global warming, I had an inkling, as I started this post, that there was something off about it.  That it was out of step with where I am, and where we are.  That we are, or should be, in a place of disruption – moving from something that is broken to something that is fixed.  This movie provides what is, in many ways, the same old fix.  We need more loving.  Don’t we need a new paradigm is what I think I was feeling as I started into this.

Having arrived at the end, I’m not sure that there is another one that will work for us.  We are mammals.  We are pack animals.  If we can learn that we are all of the same species, if we can move away from thinking of ourselves as divided into races and sexes and diagnoses (if this film had been made now, Crick might have carried a diagnosis of or might have had more aspects that suggested he was on the autistic spectrum), and we include each other in our definition of who should be loved – is that enough?  Shouldn’t we have to wrestle with the demons that have put us in this place? 

Of course we have to wrestle with our demons to achieve a new ending.  We have to engage in the dance again – and again.  But we also have to have a sense of why we are engaging in that dance again – and why we keep trying to figure out how to learn new steps.  We need to know that there is a space – an imaginary hospital be in the old building across the street from the gleaming white Wrigley building – where we can convalesce and discover within ourselves a new life, where we can transform our mangled but heroic selves into the people that we were meant to be.

 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.