House of Cards Final Season – Are you still there?

HOUSE OF CARDS, POLITICS, ROBIN WRIGHT, CLAIRE UNDERWOOD, DOUG STAMPER, SEASON SIX, PSYCHOANALYSIS, PSYCHOLOGY, BINGEWORTHY, STREAMING, WOMEN IN POLITICS, GENDER PERCEPTIONS

It is a wintry long weekend here in the Midwest and the reluctant wife and I had planned to settle in to watch Kenneth Branagh’s four hour Hamlet, which had been streaming free on Netflix, only to discover that it was no longer running there and we couldn’t even purchase it on Amazon.  We were ready to watch before dinner and after dinner – so we had a chunk of time available (a rarity) and we considered various options, then remembered that the last season of House of Cards had dropped in October.  We had watched a few favorite series installments in the interim, including the Marvelous Mrs. Mazel’s second season as soon as it dropped in November, but we had been putting House of Cards off. 

House of Cards lost much of its luster as a bizarre tale of intrigue in Washington when reality began to compete with fiction and we had a real estate magnate running for president – and then to become far stranger as that man’s Presidency unfolded – and the penultimate season seemed to be stretching itself just a bit too far in trying to keep up with and perhaps top the very real crazy doings in Washington by having President Frances (Frank) Underwood (Kevin Spacey) appointing his wife Claire (Robin Wright – who is also a producer of the show) to become Vice President with the understanding that she, when she succeeded him as President, would pardon him for all his crimes (including multiple murders) and misdemeanors on her ascension.  On becoming President, she let Frank twist in the wind while she decided whether to pardon him or not.  The season ended with Claire as President and Frank on the outside after she had declared, through the fourth wall, “My turn.”

Meanwhile, out in the real world,  the me too movement happened.  Kevin Spacey was accused of sexual improprieties with a young man, and then other young men followed, and then Spacey was no longer going to be a part of the final season.  This final season was shortened from the previous usual number of thirteen episodes to a tighter eight.  And so we watched all eight shows of the final season last night in marathon viewing that kept us up past our bedtime.  One of many cliffhanger questions that kept us in binge watching mode was the overarching question: Who killed Frank Underwood? 

When, in the first episode, Claire broke the fourth wall to ask, “Are you still there?” I realized that I had avoided watching the show not just because of how crazy it had become, but because Spacey was no longer the star.  And an implicit question – will men watch “male” themed show with a female lead became explicit.  And the show depicts a presidency with a woman at the helm where that woman does not at first appear to be functioning on her own – she has borrowed or stolen or inherited the presidency from her male predecessor and we watch her grow into it to see her put her own stamp on it.  As the President does this, Claire also grows into Spacey's role by continuing to use his trademark asides to bring us into her world through that fourth wall. And the auxiliary question that is being asked within the show itself, "Will men allow a woman who has become president, whether because she was elected or assumed the presidency, allow her to govern?” So the question becomes: does a woman - to succeed in Hollywood or in DC - have to emulate the men who have preceded her in order to succeed at their business?

This series, in my mind, is intended as a kind of yin to the West Wing's yang.  Where the West Wing was too warm, too positive, too idealizing of the way the White House could and should be, this is too cold, too calculating, and too incisive about the kinds of people who rise to the top of the political heap.  If there is a political spectrum from ideal to feared, these two complimentary shows span that arc.  And if the task of a President is to run a marathon – with his staffers performing sprints that keep him or her afloat while burning themselves out (as was depicted in the West Wing), the House of Cards demonstrates what it would be like to be President without a team – to be one against the world  constantly sprinting and having very little room to appreciate that this is a marathon – which feels increasingly like the situation of the current White House.

When it is one against the world, it is important to have an aide who is indispensable – someone who would live and die for you and who will do your dirty work.  The constant through all six seasons – the person who has been there since the beginning for Frank and, to a lesser extent, for Claire, is Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly).  This character, who plays the role of fixer and then of fall guy – is deeply connected with Frank.  He is the son that Frank never had – indeed, in this season, it is revealed that Frank writes an 11^th hour will leaving his entire estate to Doug.  This is largely, like so much else in this series, a plot device – and its presence allows Claire to override it both by stealing it from Doug before he can know about it – though like so many secrets in this season it gets exposed in due time – but also by allowing her to trump it by carrying Frank’s child to term – which will override Doug’s claim while also allowing her to masquerade as caring mother-to-be to the country.  This particular plot twist feels forced - and I think it is an effort to make something happen that can't quite work - the way that dreams - right before they fail - try to insert something that will somehow keep the dream going no matter how preposterous the dream.

The irony, of course, is that Doug is, in fact, the rightful and sole heir to Frank’s estate.  He is the one who is concerned with preserving the memory of Frank as the President who accomplished all that he did which is the only estate that really matters - the material things will rust.  He is the one who would protect Frank’s legacy, not only by taking the fall, but also by keeping all of the skeletons hidden.  When he negotiates to do dirty work, he is negotiating nor for himself, but for Frank - making sure that the Shepherds will fund Frank's presidential library.  And he is the one who would seek revenge on the person who led, in his mind, to Frank’s downfall – Claire.  From this perspective, Claire is seen by Frank as Macbeth’s wife, urging Frank (as Macbeth) on to do things that lead to his ascension, but that also involve both of them being drenched in the blood that gets them to the top.  And she deserves Doug’s wrath and intended retribution for having besmirched and failing to protect her husband’s legacy.

The issue of Presidential pardons is central to this thread of a very complicated tale.  Doug insists not only on his being given a pardon, but on Claire bestowing a posthumous pardon on Frank.  We are also, of course, living in a real world where Presidential pardons could loom large in the question of whether every citizen must abide by the rule of law.  Trump could wield pardons as a mean of springing those whose misdeeds are being used by Mueller as leverage to learn about Trump’s possible misdeeds.  From that perspective, pardons are, like so much else in this series, simply means to an end.  But this series, for all of its starkness and for all of the meanness of its characters, turns out to be about much more than just achieving a means to an end – and the issues of loyalty and redemption lie very close to the heart of what it is about – and what, in the end, redeems it as a series and, indeed, as a work of art.  And how much the redemptive process that is spelled out is about the President, how much about the world of Hollywood, and how much about the reaction of the show to the behavior of its star all overlap in the delicious ways that creative works - our own dreams and works of art - seem to.

Claire is presented as the first female president – and she is presented as needing to be ruthless in order to function in that role.  There is great irony here.  When, in an incredibly staged counter coups, she fires her entire cabinet and replaces them all with women – it is very important (this is a small but not emphasized point) that they are all functionaries - they are career bureaucrats; long term employees and leaders within the agencies that they head, and while she is pushing forward a woman’s agenda that follows the gender stereotype of working cooperatively with others rather than going it alone she is also supporting a culture of rewarding hard work and dedication to an organization with opportunities to lead that organization rather than plopping in political cronies who have not earned, by virtue of their work in the organization, the position that is bestowed on them.  She is embodying (as she does with her pregnancy) the anti-Claire.  This Claire sees the opportunity for a new world – one that is not run by the vile and despicable predator types that include Frank and her current nemeses – Bill (Greg Kinnear) and Annette (DianeLane) Shepherd.

Bill Shepherd is a billionaire scion of a chemical and oil and gas family who is dying of cancer and riddled with the fear that his high handed disregard for the environment and safety that has lined his pockets has also ruined his health.  Annette is his sister and a college intimate of Claire's.  Her meanness and moral depravity is captured by her attempt, despite her right-to-life stance, to kill Claire’s unborn child.  From this perspective, this series becomes a morality play, with Claire’s lack of apparent conscience seeming to be a foil to protect her from truly evil others – whom she immorally disposes of so that she can achieve a greater good.  Though this is present, it is a thin read.  There is much deeper and therefore more complex and difficult to read stuff going on here than a simple good vs. evil with good having to compromise to defeat evil moral.

We revisited Robin Wright in her early days when the Reluctant Stepdaughter’s latest enthusiastic partner joined us over the holidays and mistakenly stated that he had never seen The Princess Bride.  We were so enthusiastic to show him this shared family treasure that, by the time we had it cued up, it had progressed too far for us to undo it once the boyfriend revealed he had seen it before.  So we once again watched Robin as Princess Buttercup be protected by the dread Pirate Robert – who was a better swordsman than the great Inigo Montoya, outfought Andre the Giant, and outsmarted the brainy Vizziny to ultimately be able to wrest her from the odious Prince Humperdink and ride off into the sunset with her. 

For Robin to move from the dependent and helpless – if likeable and spunky Buttercup to the President of the United States, and for her to move – as Claire - from the pretty prep girl who must choose to forego an excellent sex life to marry the ambitious but self-infatuated and conniving Frank rather than charting her own path to power – she must come to grips with a world that is not filled with good hearted farmhands like The Princess Bride's Westley who only seems to be evil as he inhabits the role of the dread pirate Robert, but instead with the boys in the House of Cards flashback who cut her dress off when she is a tween in order to ogle and perhaps do more to her, and with women like her House of Cards mother who berates her for seeking revenge against her brother who led his friends to do this deed.  She must, one supposes, also come to grips with Kevin Spacey's behavior - and who knows what behavior she herself has more directly faced in the Hollywood culture that Spacey and other's behavior has recently uncovered.

There is, then, a deep fracture in the character of Claire (even if she had never, in real life, been Princess Buttercup).  Whatever maternal feelings she may have towards others feel like they will betray her and keep her from achieving the ends that she has in mind - ends that might right some of the wrongs in this world, because the softer feelings would allow her to be used and discarded by those whose ends are nefarious.  So she must lose that which is most precious to protect it.  And it is in the final scene of the series that this becomes evident (and yes, if I haven’t already spoiled enough, I am about to spoil the whole thing, so be warned…).

Pain is described by Frank as being divided into two types – that which makes you stronger and that which is useless.  Claire amends this to say that pain is of only one type – the useless variety.  When Claire confronts Doug in the final scene, Doug is in pain.  Doug’s pain is the pain of having lost a father – and he lost Frank as a father when Robin froze Frank out of the White House driving Frank to become frenzied and irrational.  Frank was returning to the White House – perhaps to kill Claire.  Doug desperately wanted to head this off.  In order to protect Frank's legacy, Doug chose to kill the person who was threatening it – Frank himself – and Claire divines in the instant that Doug tries to kill her that it was Doug who killed Frank.  Doug confesses that he messed with Frank's meds so that Frank had what appeared to be a heart attack and Claire could claim that he was sleeping beside her when it occurred.  But Claire can see that the pain of killing Frank is something that Doug believes he can only erase by killing her.  To see her as responsible would absolve him of guilt.  But she sees beyond that and realizes that this is a false solution.  Doug, unlike Frank, is attached to Claire - and he can't kill her.  Also, unlike Frank, Doug is connected with all people, especially Frank, and feels, in fact, guilt.  And this is a pain that he can't get rid of himself.

This scene is a powerful one that is hard to reconstruct as I write about it (and I have liberally interpreted what passes between the two of them).  Doug has returned to the White House with the intent to assassinate the President.  She knows this and she has ordered the secret service members out of the room to confront her assassin directly.  She has lied to Doug repeatedly and Doug has brought Frank’s recorded memoir for her to listen to.  These are recordings in which Frank recounts his crimes and misdemeanors and implicates Claire in them.  Claire points out that Doug’s name does not appear anywhere in Frank’s rantings – even though it was Doug who carried out many of the deeds.  Frank has erased Doug and overlooked him.  Doug – whose life revolves around Frank – does not exist as an entity in Frank’s life.  Doug’s deep and powerful love is not reciprocated by a man who cannot love in the way that Frank so desperately desires.

Doug wants to kill Claire – because he blames her for having ruined Frank - and to relieve his own guilt.  But it was Frank’s failure to be the person that Doug wanted and needed him to be that is causing Doug pain.  Hardened Doug – Alcoholic, AA surviving Doug – fixer Doug – unattached Doug – this Doug feels deeply, longingly connected to the slick and competent star that is Frank – a person who was able to trick and deceive people – and one who let Doug see who it was that he really was – and this opening to Doug felt like an act of love – but it ended fueling Doug's desire for intimacy and love - not addressing it.  And killing Claire is not the solution – so when she brutally and lovingly kills him – when she puts Doug out of his misery with the murder weapon that Doug inherited from Frank and attempted to use against her – the letter opener that Doug used to carve his initials in the Roosevelt desk – the instrument that he used to say, “I was here, I mattered,” she was able to end the pain that involved his feeling that he never really had been here – that he didn’t in fact matter.

So Claire’s statement, “No more pain,” with which this series concludes, suggests that she has walled herself off from pain – but that she has also been able to be open to her own pain enough that she can engage in a tremendous act of empathic generosity and put someone who is in unresolvable pain out of his misery.  This kind of twisted, powerful, perverse maternal figure – one who would create space for a new, more feminine based means of engagement – can only, it seems, in the universe of the House of Cards, which seems to oddly parallel our own universe, assert that new femininity from a decidedly warped version of masculine power and control.  To end the reign of masculine depravity, one must be not only depraved, but also care for others - one must not just have more strength, but address the true needs of others - to end their hopes for a fairy tale - for a clean and simple world of white hats and black hats, to help them quit desiring something that does not exist.  What she does not go on to do is to articulate how to train a new generation to recognize that we are all compromised, but that we do the best that we can out of that compromise.  I think maybe her all female cabinet will do something she can't do - advise her on how to be a compassionate woman.

If we are still here – can it be we who remain?  Do we want to see women take on masculine roles and carry them out, as it were, with a vengeance?  What does it take for a woman to stand up to a man like Putin?  Or the Koch brothers?  Or to Trump?  Or to Spacey?  Or Harvey Weinstein?  What will we lose in the process of gaining a new, better, more powerful and authentic voice that will lead our organizations and this country?  How will we be able to stay in touch with our deeply based Democratic ideals as we become more powerful and more transparently vulnerable to corrupting influence than we may be able to stomach?  Are we still here is a question to be asked indeed.


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Lucky Boy – A Tale of Attachment

LUCKY BOY, NOVEL, SHANTHI SEKARAN, PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, ATTACHMENT, IMMIGRATION, IMMIGRANTS, NOVEL, MATERNAL BOND, PATERNAL BOND

Shanthi Sekaran’s novel Lucky Boy is an easy read, even if it is long and too artfully and self-consciously constructed to be engrossing.  It tells the tale of two women – Soli, a woman from absolutely nowhere Mexico running to the United States for a better life – and Kavya – a first generation Indian American woman married to Rishi – also a first generation Indian American.  The novel alternates between chapters describing Soli’s trek from Mexico towards the United States and, inevitably, Berkeley, where her cousin lives with her cousin’s two children, and chapters describing Kavya’s life, which includes working as a cook for a sorority at UC Berkeley and trying, without luck, to become pregnant with Rishi.

The Lucky Boy of the title is Soli’s child – who is conceived on the road to the US – perhaps through love and perhaps through rape – both befall Soli on the way.  It is inevitable, for almost three hundred pages, that the lives of these two women will intersect through Ignacio, the lucky boy that is born to Soli.  While reading these pages I both considered giving up on the book – it was pleasant enough but focused largely on telling about the lives of these two women from an objective vantage point – I didn’t feel like I was really getting much access to them – and I was convinced I would not write about it.  There was little here of merit.  That changed at the moment Ignacio was born.

There is something very strange about having a child.  It alters you (or at least it altered me) in the most fundamental ways imaginable.  I was now connected to another human being in a way that I had never been connected to anyone in my life before.  As I have mentioned before, talking with other parents, they get it – but it is like a secret club – you have to have had a child to belong.  Sekaran takes the reader through three very different processes to achieve this result.  Soli’s experience of giving birth to the child she calls Nacho, Kavya’s experience of choosing Ignacio to foster parent and hopefully to adopt, and Rishi’s coming around to connecting with Iggy as his father, long after Kavya has given herself over to him.  The description of each of these three very different but parallel processes of attachment rung very true to me and each of them were emotionally evocative in ways that I had not anticipated they would be based on the writing to that point.

I cannot know if the powerful emotions evoked in me would be evoked in someone who has not gone through the attachment process with a child.  That attachment process, as exemplified by Kavya and Rishi, does not have to be a birth process.  I think that my sister went through a similar experience as she became the aunt to my son, and I know that my friends who have adopted describe a similar fundamental shift – a seeming movement in the cosmos.  Everything feels different as a result of this attachment.

Sekaran uses the attachment of each of these people to this boy to play out the plot in the second half of the book.  The attachment is the glue that holds the last half of the book together.  What that plot is does not, on some level, matter.  What matters is the glue and Sekaran's ability to describe it in such a way that I remember such silly things about my own attachment process as hearing every love song on the radio as the song expressing the love of a parent for a child – and avoiding watching television for a year because the violent deaths of every person on every show depicting it were the deaths of someone’s child – and that I remembered much more solemn things – the sense that my life was no longer my own – that I was living, at least in part, very much for someone else and that I could no longer treat my life with the same casual disregard I once had done.  And it is this solemn attachment  that drives the drama of the last half.

I am dismissive of the particulars of the drama, but appreciate that they exist at this moment on another level.  Despite my observations about my own sense of attachment to my son in the immediate aftermath of his birth (and vestiges of that still bind us together twenty years later), I found myself disconnected from the immigration crisis and the forced separation of children from their parents.  I’m not sure what kicked in for me during that process – how it was that I did suddenly become aware of the cruel implications of what we were doing – how it was that I somehow hadn’t known before at all either professionally (see my post about Daniel Stern’s work) or personally (see the paragraph above) just how devastating the impact of that separation would be on the infant and on the parent. 

This book, at times with too much detail, works hard to humanize its protagonists.  We cannot dismiss Soli as an other - as someone essentially foreign to us, nor Kavya, nor Rishi.  I think we identify with them through something much more powerful than the laboriously drawn descriptions that Sekaran provides – though the background may be important.  I think that we connect with them through the descriptions of their reactions – the felt experiences that they have in the context of having a child enter their lives in the way this child enters into each of their lives.  I think we would have had that experience based on Sekaran’s ability to create within us the feelings that she is attributing to her protagonists.

That said, I think that the long read is not wasted.  We learn a lot about these three people, imaginary though they may be.  We also learn about the experience of being both a documented child of immigrants and an undocumented immigrant and we learn about the justice system, including the various injustices that it metes out.  But all of this is ultimately in service of learning, once again, that it is the bonds of attachment that connect us and that this boy – whom some might pity based on all that befalls him – deserves to be considered lucky because of the attachment that he has experienced with these three adults.  

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Springsteen on Broadway - Appearances Are Deceiving

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, BROADWAY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, PSYCHOLOGY, AUTHENTICITY, SELF PRESENTATION, ROCK AND ROLL, FOLK, PERFORMANCE ART

First a disclaimer.  I am not now nor have I ever been a true Bruce Springsteen fan.  That said, while Springsteen’s music has not hung in the place of honor, it has been the wallpaper in more than one room of my musical life’s home.  His reputation as putting on the best live show of any rock and roller of his generation has also made me feel guilty about never having scored a ticket.  The friend from whom I cribbed the disclaimer at the opening of this post is a fan, and he is convinced that in one of the shows Springsteen picked him out as one of the people that he was singing the show to – and – whether that was true or not – I think it speaks to a particular connection that audiences have felt to Springsteen in his performances – they have felt a particularly close bond to him as a performer and as a person.

The recording of the Broadway show, recently released on Netflix, which follows on the heels of and apparently plays with themes from Springsteen’s autobiography, itself starts with a disclaimer.  Springsteen claims that he is a fraud.  He has written lyrics about things – like being a factory worker – that he has never been.  He presents himself as a Carney – telling the people what they want to hear - and says that this is a magic trick, but then he proceeds to put the songs that he has written into the context of the life that he has lived in a way that allows us to glimpse their integrity, honesty and genuineness – or he is one hell of a liar.  And it is hard to imagine that he is not also that – he notes that in coming to the theater every day for this show is the first time in his life that he has worked a steady job and he acknowledges that he doesn’t like it.  And being as bare and raw and intimately connected as he is with the audience in this performance night after night, working from a script, is he talking to us?  Is he performing for us?  Or is he playing a part?  Of course, he is doing a bit of all three – and he is convincing in each role as he plays the parts.

The songs that he performs are acoustic versions mostly of his standards that are sometimes hard to recognize because of the arrangements.  He uses an acoustic guitar or a piano to accompany himself and, on two songs, he and his wife Pattie Scialfa.   There is no band and no screaming from the audience – they don’t even sing along.  His music struck my ear, in this setting, as folk or maybe blues based, and the reluctant wife heard the tunes as sounding more like spirituals.  The music though, is largely secondary.  What is primary is the talking – the storytelling.  In his autobiography, Springsteen reveals that he has been working with a psychoanalyst for the past twenty five years.  This performance does not feel like psychoanalytic free association – but it does feel free – the words trip off his tongue effortlessly and you would think that he would take more pleasure in the poetic turns of phrase that he includes, but his mood is somber.  Indeed, his bearing is very much like what I would expect from his father – a hardworking and hard-drinking Irish Catholic man from small town southern New Jersey – at the end of his life. 

It felt like a completely different guy that we found on a Youtube rendition of his “Dancing in the Dark” video where as a young cute guy with a cute curl over his forehead, he pulls a starry eyed  Courtney Cox (before she was on Friends) out of the crowd to dance with him.  He is now old, tired and somber.  He still takes great joy in life, but it is circumspect joy.  He weighs the joys of life against the difficulties that come with it.  He acknowledges how hard it was to be his father – and to be raised by him.  But he is also able to share something of his mother’s joy – her pride in her work as a legal secretary and walking buoyantly home with her – head held high – after a day at work.  And he remembers her dancing - something she does even now that she is 93 and stricken with Alzheimer’s.  Her presence is an energizing counterpoint to his father’s gloom.

In another special we watched recently, Ellen DeGeneres’ Relatable, DeGeneres begins by noting the concern that viewers will not relate to her stand-up routine because her net worth is so much different than ours.  Well, both she and Bruce are estimated to be in the 450 million dollar range – and Bruce does not talk about raising kids with all of that wealth – and all of the complications of being a father with whom many millions of people feel like they have a personal relationship.  Instead he relates to us as if we do, indeed have a personal relationship with him – and talks about something that we can relate to – the years when he was growing up and then, once he was grown, how hard it is to love and be loved.

Like seemingly all modern pop singers, love is at the heart of Springsteen’s songs and his rendition of his life, but Springsteen’s love is not the light and seemingly effortless love of someone like DeGeneres – and perhaps his mother.  Springsteen’s position in the show and in his music is that letting someone else have access to the parts of oneself that one doesn’t even like about one’s self is, to say the least, difficult.  So instead, we present brilliant disguises to each other and hope that the other sees through them but simultaneously fear that they will.  In order to love each other – as he and Scialfa have done – we need to be tougher than the rest.  And the love that they portray, as they sing the duets together – is one that has some rough edges.  There is affection – and wariness – and even a little awkwardness.  I found myself thinking of the relationship between Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash as portrayed in the biopic I walked the Line.

There is a level on which this performance feels very real and a level on which it also is very much a play – a construction that we are witnessing.  It is both an intimate view of the most private parts of the artist – and there is a ton of who we know that he must be that is not included.  We don’t hear about the glitzy parties and hanging with other celebrities – we hear about growing up one hour from New York, but it might as well be on the other side of the moon from it – no one would think of going there.  We learn about all the uncles and aunts that lived within a two block radius – but we don’t hear – as we do with Ellen – what it is like to skooch across a thirty foot bathroom on the bathmat because the marble floors are too cold to walk on…  We also see someone acting and being (in some odd combination of both) sincere.

And there are also moments where we don’t have access to important – even critical - pieces of the narrative – moments when Springsteen hides in plain sight with a brilliant disguise.  He is clear, for instance, in his description of writing “Born in the USA” that this is not his song – he puts to music the experience of others – in ways that are, I think, deeply satisfying to them – to him – and to us.  But as he is talking about Vietnam – and losing friends who died there – he is also talking about being drafted and going with two of his friends to the draft board and they all did what they had to do to avoid being inducted.  He shifts from this quickly into a description honoring our veterans so that we almost don’t see the sleight of hand where we don’t know what he did to avoid serving.  Now, to be clear, I am not trying to judge him, but I do think he is avoiding the potential judgement of his audience through a finesse.  He keeps parts of himself hidden – parts that he might not like – and that he fears we might not like as well.

And yet this show is deeply satisfying.  The person that is revealed to us – certainly not the whole person – is a person that has a certain kind of integrity.  It is a version of the person that we know this man to be and a credible one.  He tells a narrative that hangs together.  In a text that I am teaching psychoanalysis from, Morris Eagle is talking about “narrative creation” as one of the ways that some have come to characterize the goal of psychoanalysis.  And creating a narrative description of our lives that holds together is, indeed, useful – but also, I think, a useful fiction.  A grander, more romantic integrity – one in which this man who looks like an aging steel worker but who is also an aging rock star and is also a caring and devoted (or intermittently so) husband and father and is also a ne’er do well (I am making this up) and a poet who is proud of his poetry – and is whatever else he might be – is a kind of integrity that analysis – in Freud’s mind before he invented it – might have afforded.  But in the modern and post-modern world, such an integrity is harder – perhaps impossible to achieve.  Indeed, Freud himself came to think of himself in a much less romantic – much less grandiose way – after writing what, ironically, he thought of as his greatest work – The Interpretation of Dreams.  There he proposed that we are inevitably and inexorably internally inconsistent.  We are neither simply heroes nor villains but both and so much more – and while Springsteen tells us that he lies to us – that he portrays people he is not – we also see that he has lent himself – or part of himself – to the portrayal of these people – including the person that he is portraying onstage – and that this is part of what makes his songs, his concerts, and this stage performance compelling.  He lets us in on the joke, but tells it none the less – and can’t not tell it.  No matter how he portrays himself it will not be who he is.  And we walk away humming the tunes of our life, enjoying a well told tale – with just a few whiffs of Sulphur to interrupt the pleasure that we feel in having gotten to know someone so intimately – and so partially.

As I reflect on this piece, which emerged in a way that is different than I expected it to, I think that what kept me from thinking about the piece in the way that I have written it while watching it is Springsteen’s sincerity.  He really wants to be who he is portraying himself to be – and he really wants you to connect with that person and there is actually a deeply winsome quality to the way that he performs.  He wants us to take him at face value despite his warning that we should not do that.  The lyrics to his songs – and the closed captioning helps me hear them – sometimes for the first time – tell a story of duplicity and complexity – while his talking, singing and, in his concerts, dancing and performing, tell a much simpler story – of a person who values connection – and values being loved by you and will do just about anything to get that love from you and to connect with you so that you will give it freely.  And I think we really want to give it to him, even though we all know that on some level it isn’t quite what it appears to be because he is not, and we are not, quite what we appear to be – despite our best efforts.

Addendum:  So, a friend read this post and let me know that the memoir addresses many of the aspects that I have noted are left out of the performance - including the details of draft dodging and the raising of kids - including hiding their parents fame from the kids for as long as they could!  Tough job, that.  While I may get to the memoir at some point (my friend highly recommended it), I think the points that he makes about what is included there that is not included here actually underscores the challenges of a performance piece - including the need to connect with an audience on a different level - one that requires certain sleights of hand that aren't necessary in a written piece.  There is room, in a written piece, to operate inside the mind of the reader - within limits - to create psychological and emotional space.  When performing, the performer (same person, in theory, as the memoirist) is experienced as an other - as a separate person - not as the narrator within the mind of the reader.  And the savvy performer - which Mr. Springsteen certainly is - takes this into account in the way that he crafts the presentation - there is a need to be winsome in a different way - not through appealing to rational/cognitive empathy, as one can do in writing - something that is analogous to the way we engage with our own thoughts, but by appealing to the desire to connect with another, the way that we do with our children when we know that they have done something bad but we continue to love them in spite of that. 

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The Madness of King George - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Observes Executive Function

I watched this film when it was released in theaters in 1994 and what I remember of it is that one of the friends that I watched it with, the chief psychiatry resident at the hospital where I worked, was able to remember that the obscure skin disease diagnosis that the film offers, porphyria, for King George’s madness was something that he somehow managed to remember from medical school based on its key identifying symptom – porphyria turns the patient’s urine blue – a symptom that King George manifested.  Now, many decades later, when the reluctant wife suggested that we watch it, I was intrigued, hoping that it would provide information about how King George’s madness was tied to our own revolution from the king, something that I had new interest in partly based on the musical Hamilton. 

Well, as a potentially historical film, this was a disappointment.  The events chronicled were at best loosely tied to historical moments.  This is a psychological study of a man – a character – who is perhaps the first of the kings whose job was less to govern than to reign – to serve as a figurehead who has a constitutional role, but a limited one.  This would become an art by the time Elizabeth II would ascend the throne.  But George (played by Nigel Hawthorne) was, unwittingly at times, creating the role of a non-interventionist but essential component of the governing structure of England – and his madness was a component of that.  The emphasis of the title clarifies that this is primarily a film about madness and only secondarily about History.

Madness is an interesting thing.  We are, and this is well portrayed in the film, not able to regulate ourselves when we are mad.  Antonio Damasio, in The Strange Order of Things, proposes that evolution has selected us to be able to regulate ourselves homeostatically.  From this perspective, our emotions are intended to give us information about internal and/or external states being out of whack.  When we are no longer able to use our feelings to exert the kind of controls that we would ordinarily assert – when, instead, those feelings propel us into being unbalanced, we are mad.  Thus, in this film, the king of England is suddenly taking his attendants – in their sleeping garments – for romps in meadows and, once assembled there, this deeply monogamous king is assaulting his wife’s lady in waiting openly trying to have sex with her with multiple onlookers present and in the light of day.

But madness, as portrayed by the author of the play the film is based on (Alan Bennett), does not divorce us from our essence.  As the king is returning to his senses his aid says, “Your Majesty seems more yourself.” And he responds, “Do I? Yes, I do. I've always been myself, even when I was ill. Only now I seem myself. And that's the important thing. I have remembered how to seem.”  This seeming – this appearing – is an important part of our “healthy” functioning.  We “appear” to be civilized – and in control – when actually there are all kinds of primitive and powerful thoughts and emotions roiling just under the surface of that seeming control.  When we are kings – or, in the current day and age, empowered in whatever way we may be, we may allow (or fail to control) our bestial selves – our uncontrolled and chaotic selves – to reign, imposing chaos on the world around us.

The remarkable thing about being king, then, is that we do exert control – that we function in the role of king on behalf of those we govern – that we don’t exert our will in selfish and immature ways but in ways that are in the better interests of those we are governing.  The subjects of a monarchy don’t choose who will govern them – the governors are born not elected.  So the Prince of Wales (also named George, played by Rupert Everett), the man next in line to be king, chooses to step in – he attempts to assert himself as regent – to take over for the unbalanced king.  He has a coterie of supporters who would emulate the United States and move further away from the rule of a king and move towards having those who are elected have greater power.  King George and his henchmen buy off the current representatives with titles and favors, ensuring their ability to exert monarchical rule in a nominal democracy.  Presumably his supporters see the younger George as more sympathetic to their cause – though they don’t seem to see that he has self-interest very much in mind and might become even more despotic than his father.

The prince states that “to be Prince of Wales is not a position - it is a predicament.”  Like the party that is not in power in our two party system – and like the Vice President – who is essentially a president in waiting without any true power in most administrations, the prince is simply waiting for the death of the king.  But this prince is not just making a comment on the position, but on his relationship with his father and his father’s consistent efforts to foil his activity – as if his father fears that his foppish and un-self-governed son would act madly if given the opportunity.  So it is with some trepidation that we see the son feeling that he must step in to restrain his father when his father is running amok – this becomes a family matter rather than a matter of government, he maintains.   The question that he raises is a very current one – both for those who are mentally disordered and for those who are governing in ways that others see as unbridled- is the man fit for office and if he is not, should he be removed?

OK, spoiler alert, in the film, King George, due to the cyclic nature of his disorder, returns, as referenced above, to “seeming” himself – and when he does this, there is no grounds for installing his son as regent.  Historically, this occurred a number of times, suggesting to me that the hypothesis that George suffered from Bipolar disorder in addition to or instead of porphyria.  Some have surmised that his blue urine may have been caused by some of the herbs that he was treated with rather than being a symptom.

In addition to the threat to his monarchy that comes from his son, King George has to confront Francis Willis (Ian Holm), who is called in to treat his madness.  This man, a former clergyman who knows nothing of Shakespeare or, apparently, the soul, runs a farm where the mad are treated.  He knows how to use punishment – strapping the King into a chair when he won’t control himself – as a temporary means of reinstating the King's ability to exert some authority over himself.  Dr. Willis states, “If the King refuses food, He will be restrained. If He claims to have no appetite, He will be restrained. If He swears and indulges in MEANINGLESS DISCOURSE... He will be restrained. If He throws off his bed-clothes, tears away His bandages, scratches at His sores, and if He does not strive EVERY day and ALWAYS towards His OWN RECOVERY... then He must be restrained.”  To which, George responds, “I am the King of England.” And Willis rebuts, “NO, sir. You are the PATIENT.”  Eli Zaretsky, a historian of psychology, cites Willis and his treatment of George as an example of the enlightenment approach to treatment - based in Lockean principles of associationism, it is an attempt to appeal to the little rational part of the mind that is still present.

While Willis' approach affords some nominal level of control, it is the King’s wife, Queen Charlotte (Helen Mirren) who, despite being kept from him by Dr. Willis during the latter stages of his madness, maintains a sense of who the King is – not just what he seems but who she essentially knows him to be – someone whom she loves – despite his flaws – and someone she supports.  And when he is returned to “health” and is confronting his son, it is she who is able to guide the King through the homeostatic process of forgiveness and working from a position of love – helping to guide emotions that are now more clearly shakily in the King’s control – the way that all of us exert rather shaky control over our feelings when we are functioning at our best.

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In MY Lane: Gun Control, the NRA, and a Personal Psychoanalytic Response

The psychoanalysts depicted in New Yorker cartoons have almost certainly never shot a gun, and you may be wondering where it is that I, as a psychoanalyst, have the wherewithal to weigh in on something that is so completely out of my purview.  The NRA, in fact, has determined that ALL health and mental health professionals should not weigh in on gun control – they tweeted on November 7^th (My father’s birthday) that "Someone should tell self-important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane".  

So, first of all, let me state that I live in a flyover, red voting state – and that my family on both sides has hailed from the Midwest for generations (and has generally been dead red in their voting habits).  My Mother and Father went bird hunting together when they were dating – a sport each had learned and practiced with their parents.  Even when we lived in Florida for a time when I was growing up, I hunted ducks and mourning doves (yes, we hunted mourning doves – and ate them, too) in Lake Okeechobee and rice fields respectively.  I am the proud holder of what I think used to be called a Riflery merit badge (it is now called a Rifle Shooting  merit badge – if you scroll to the end of the linked BSA site, you will see an NRA banner) and learned to shoot a revolver as part of earning that badge.  I am also proud to say that I winged a bird – an actual bird called a snipe, not the fake kind you chase after on Boy Scout camping trips – the first time that I shot a shotgun, but more about that later.

The “stay in your lane” comment is one that the NRA made in response to a physician writing with concern about gun violence.  Within the psychology/psychoanalysis field there have been a number of professionally based responses.  Jane Tillman has written about this issue as a citizen and a suicide researcher and Todd Essig has charted in a Forbes magazine blog the ways in which the NRA and the politicians that they have supported have undermined our ability to use data to argue for gun control by preventing federal monies from supporting research on the relationship between guns and violence or suicide.  This post is more personal – coming from someone who has a long relationship with guns – including both the good and the very bad ways that they can affect a family (more about that later), but beyond that I would like to use my psychoanalytic mind to attempt to better understand some of our apparent irrationality about exploring the limits of our second amendment rights.  There are of course many reasons for the attitude that “we will only let them pry our guns out of our cold dead fingers” exists – I will not talk about all of them, but most of them are far from irrational.  But I do think that some of them– such things as profits that gun manufacturers make, while significant, are likely less important than what I am about to discuss.

My grandfather killed himself with a shotgun.  He did this shortly before my parents were to have married – they had to postpone their wedding in order to have the funeral.  There was some question about whether his death was a suicide.  He shot himself in the shoulder – he was dressed in formal wear (a tux, I think) in preparation for a celebratory dinner of some sort.  My father’s younger brother, my uncle Peter, found him and called for an ambulance.  There was an inquest because his life insurance policy would pay double the face value if it was an accidental death and nothing if it was a suicide.  Ultimately the insurance company split the difference and paid the face value of the insurance, but the record of the inquest remained and I was able to read it as an adult after my clinical training.

At this point, you might think that I would make a plea to prevent the sales of all guns so that catastrophes like the one that ended my grandfather’s life would never happen.  My intent here is different, though.  I would like to clarify two things – first that events like suicide and murder, have impacts across generations.  And second, to clarify, but this will take some time, what I think are some of the motives that lead gun advocates to be so rabid about avoiding what appear to be common sense limits to weapons proliferation – something that is relevant to my grandfather’s death – but likely not in the way you are thinking at this moment.

My father denied – in the court documents and throughout most of his life – that his father committed suicide.  He maintained that his father’s death was an accidental death - period.  And he did this quite vehemently.  Reading the court documents made it quite clear that, while the triggering of the weapon at the moment that it was triggered may not have been the moment that my grandfather intended to kill himself, he was quite likely intent on killing himself.  He may, for instance, have tripped on the way to killing himself or to storing the weapon for later use in killing himself, as my uncle Peter has surmised. 

My grandfather was the owner and proprietor of the family business – a department store that his father – my great grandfather – had started.  This business had survived the depression and was now, in the 1950s, a going concern that supported my grandfather and his family.  My father was employed at the store.  But a fire at the store about a month before my grandfather’s death had created a crisis for its continued viability.  For three weeks after the fire, my grandfather had been inconsolable – he blamed himself for the fire – fearing that he had not closed the grate on the furnace before going home on the night when the fire occurred.  For the last week of his life, he had returned to being himself and his mood seemed buoyant again. 

Reading the above account from the court documents as a clinician, I was struck by how frequently a positive change in mood occurs when people who are depressed have made a plan to kill themselves – they see a way out of their predicament and their mood lifts.  I became convinced that my grandfather had killed himself. I guessed that my grandfather felt something like, “I have gone from being the breadwinner for my family to having endangered them.  They would be better off if I weren’t here.” 

I am aware of having gone into more detail than I needed to in the story of my grandfather’s death.  I think I did this in part to give you context, but also because I needed to convince you that his death was somehow justified – or understandable.  I think that, though I never knew him, I am protective of him and that I want to prevent your negative judgment of him – and I think that betrays that I have judged him – I think I feel ashamed of having a grandfather who killed himself.  And if that is the case, I believe that it is even more the case that my father’s denial of his father’s suicide was, in large part, a way to avoid feeling the tremendous shame that I feel to a much smaller degree. 

I knew very little about my grandfather from my father.  He almost never spoke about him.  One little thing that I knew about him from Dad was that he wrote Dad a letter every week that Dad was in college.  I knew this in part because my father felt badly that he had not done the same with me.  But it was only when Dad was digging around trying to find evidence that he had been in the army because the records of his service had been lost in a St. Louis fire that I read the letters his father had written.  My father had letters that were written not only to him, but also to his mother and to another family member – in one case three letters from the same week.   Each of the letters was very warm and focused, despite being written in the same week, on very different events that had occurred in town.  Each letter was tailored to the interests of the reader – and my grandfather clearly had that reader in mind – weaving their interests into the stories that he told.  But it was not just that grandfather used content that was of interest to the reader, but he also clearly and warmly expressed his affection for the reader – talking about shared experiences and the way the reader had brought him joy at some point in his life.

It was very odd to discover that my grandfather – a person that I knew so little about other than the fact of his death – was such a warm and caring person.  I should have known that from the way that my family operated.  Despite his three sons having moved to very different parts of the country, we all regularly got together at Thanksgiving at one or the other brother’s homes.  Grandmother was always there as well as most all of the first cousins.  We generally had between 18 and 22 for dinner and the annual football game.  All was not peaches and roses – there were regular dust ups and a fair amount of bullying – especially at the football game – but there was also a lot of warmth.  And there was a contrast between the warmth of the family and the feelings between my father and his children.

My father, after he left the family business, became a travelling salesman, using the electronics skills he had learned in the military to sell electrical systems to engineers who were largely working to improve the functioning of automated factories.  This meant that he was generally on the road for two to three and sometimes four nights a week.  He was largely physically absent.  But he was also psychologically absent.  He had a hard time connecting with his children about their day to day lives – whether that was our sporting events or our homework and school achievements or our social lives.  At home he would frequently spend the weekends immersed in tasks that involved fixing things and our helping him frequently involved holding a flashlight so he could see his work better, but rarely involved interacting in a more give and take manner.

Now, we could just chalk his emotional distance up to his being a typically emotionally remote man of the mid twentieth century except that he could be remarkably interested in others and quite compassionate in his engagement with them.  This included both friends that he made through work and through his engagement at church, but also with our cousins.  At a recent family reunion, the spouse of one of my cousins talked about the importance of the letters that her husband frequently received from my father while my cousin was in college as helping to sustain him through difficult and lonely times, something I did not previously know about.  Additionally, there were things that my father could teach us – and teach us well and warmly.  One of these was skiing.  He was a good and patient teacher and truly enjoyed being with us and talking with us when we were riding up ski lifts together.  And I think it important that this activity was one that he learned on his own – this was not a family activity for him growing up.  It was also the case that, as the result of consistent efforts on my part, he and I became, as adults, quite close and were able to establish the kind of relationship that I had longed for as a child.

My hypothesis about the primary reason for my father’s physical and emotional distance when he was more actively parenting (or not parenting) my siblings and me is that this would have involved remembering his father and the interactions that he had with him as a son – and that this was too painful for him because he was, on some very deep level, profoundly ashamed of his action and, I think, he felt betrayed by his father’s choice to leave him through suicide. 

I have some support for my hypothesis.  As a result of my conversations with him, my father ultimately acknowledged that he had always believed that his father had committed suicide.  Unfortunately my father died before I talked through with him his reasons for denying his father’s death to be a suicide for as long as he did.  I tried out my hypothesis on my Uncle Peter recently, and he felt that it had some merit.  Even if it is “true”, there were certainly other factors that accounted for his emotional distance – I’m sure Freud would want us to work on the Oedipal elements, and personality theorists would talk about his being primarily introverted (though functioning, as a travelling salesman, as an extrovert).   I’m sure these and many other factors played into our relationship.  But I think his father’s suicide was a very important factor and one that was largely hidden from my – and likely from his – view.

So the point of this lengthy tale is that suicide has an impact to the third generation.  Indeed, I’m sure it is a factor in the relationship between my son and me.  And this in the context of a family that apparently recovered well from it.  The land the store was on was owned by the family and through a series of real estate deals, it became a consistent source of income for my grandmother who was able to live independently (and visit us regularly wherever we were in the US, and sometimes abroad) for the rest of her life.  For many families a suicide can have much greater and easier to track deleterious economic effects and these do not take the kind of psychoanalytic sleuthing I have engaged in to discover subtle impacts across time.  Neither suicide nor murder is good for the families in which they occur. 

So, to reiterate, this story is not that this suicide could have been prevented.  Suicides are as variable as the people who engage in them, and I think, for reasons I will spell out shortly, that my grandfather likely would have figured out how to kill himself without having access to guns.  But for many people, easy access to a means to kill oneself can be demonstrated by how suicide rates plummet when those easy means are not accessible – as a New York Times Sunday Magazine article articulated ten years ago.  All that said, I can’t help but wonder if my grandfather would not have taken his life if he did not have such an easy means to do it with.  But the point of the story is that suicide (and murder) are complex physical and psychological events that we should work to prevent with whatever means we have available to us.

Have you ever held a loaded weapon in your hand?  There is an awesome feeling of power that goes along with it.  There is also an awesome feeling – or should be – of responsibility.  This is related, in no small measure to fear – fear of what could go wrong if this thing fired unintentionally or hit and unintended target.  There is no going back from the impact of the bullet. 

If you have ever been trained in using a weapon – as I have – the first and most important part of the training is gun safety.  Recently I was talking with two men who first held guns in their hands in the military.  Both talked about how the rigidity of basic training became ramped up when gun training began.  Those in charge of the range laid down the law about when and where a weapon could be pointed.  In my own training the first and foremost rule was never ever point a weapon at another human being.  After that, there were many rules about keeping weapons unloaded except when prepared to fire them, etc.  As I later learned about the treatment of suicidal patients, the first three rules were safety, safety, safety and then, after that, other things could be introduced.

Weapons are very powerful tools.  Remember the snipe I injured the first time I shot a shotgun?  I found it on the ground flapping its one good wing and running in circles as its other wing dragged, broken, on the ground.  I felt terrible and wanted to put it out of its misery as quickly as possible.  I loaded my shotgun and shot it from point blank range, shooting its head clean off its body.  I was quickly told that this is not the way to humanely end the life of an injured bird – it is a waste of ammunition and can make the bird inedible as it is destroyed rather than killed.  The proper means to kill a wounded bird is to pick it up and beat its head against the butt of the gun until it is dead.

If you are not a hunter, that last line may have come as a bit of a shock to you.  It may feel brutal and inhumane.  In fact, it is very quick and effective and becomes common place when hunting.  It is also something that is a common part of consuming meat of any kind – most domestic animals killed for consumption are killed with blows to the head.  We, in picking up already butchered meat at the grocery store, are protected from the course of events that has led to our being able to eat another animal.  But hunters are not.  They are engaged in the control of the life and death of other animals on a regular basis. 

How individuals respond to this – the ways that they differ from each other and the different ways that each of them responds to it – is something that is worth studying – and here I am asking you to consider the manifold responses in a psychological thought experiment as an important aspect of the psychology of our attachment to firearms.  There is a feeling of power, as I mentioned earlier, and control that is certainly part of the process of hunting (and I assume, though I have never served in the military, that this is true of being trained to use weapons to kill humans and actually using them to do that).  There is also a level of comfort with our basic biologic being and with – as we prosaically call it – the circle of life.  We live until we die.  And death is a part of our lived experience when we hunt in a way that it is not when the dead are only occasionally confronted on our grocery shelves and in funerals.

When Essig, in the blog cited above, wonders about the irrational position of the NRA that the answer to gun problems is more guns, I think it may help to understand the psychology behind the NRA’s huge funding, the tenacity and shrewdness of their lobbying, and the appeal of their message to a broad swath of the American people.  As Antonio Damasio has recently pointed out in The Strange Order of Things (following and updating Freud’s insightful but flawed analysis in Civilization and Its Discontents), we have only been “civilized” for the past 10-15,000 years.  We have millions of years of evolution that selected us before that – and Damasio maintains that evolution consistently favored those of us (he starts with bacteria) that could band together against a common enemy over those who did not.  We formed clans or family groups long before we began to build cities, much less states and countries.  The sense that we will prevail by banding together in order to have greater strength against a foe is deeply coded in our DNA. 

My position is not that there is a simple solution to the impasse about how to properly manage the second amendment, but that our search for something workable may be more fruitful when we acknowledge the roots of apparently irrational positions like some of those of the NRA.  The second amendment was put in place to protect our ability to protect ourselves against an imperial and corrupt power that would control us from without – as England controlled the colonies.  As we self-styled educated folks band together to attempt to eradicate a force that threatens us (the NRA and unregulated guns) and we use the power of the pen (and word processor) to fight that dangerous and corrupt force, it might help us to realize that we are functioning, in that banding together, just as they are and that we may be driven by the same primordial forces that have kept us “safe” for time immemorial.  If we can view the NRA and its adherents as people who are driven as we are to protect ourselves, and if we see them as being as committed to safety as we are, we might be able to find some common ground – some way to assure us all that we are all better off with limited but powerful safeguards – the kinds of safeguards that are woven into all sanctioned forms of weaponry training.  We – both the NRA and those of us who do not believe that unlimited proliferation of weapons will protect us – want to live in a world that is safe.

My grandfather came, I believe, to see himself as being a source of danger to his family rather than being a force for good.  I feel great sorrow that he felt that to be the case – or something like it, I cannot know what he was actually thinking.  I think that when we are able to see each other as allies rather than enemies – when we are able to envision the world as an organic whole that it is ours to preserve and protect (and I know of no greater advocates for the environment than most hunters), we, together, can figure out how to better protect ourselves.  If we can delay the action of suicide, we can work to help change the perspective of those who believe that it is a rational action.  Over time, the formerly suicidal person can come to realize the value of their contributions and can become generative – and support that generativity in their offspring.  We can help them move from a position of feeling isolated and alone to a position of feeling connected - the best way to prevent suicide - and war.  I’m not sure that the kind of help that my grandfather needed to make this transition was available to him – not just because his small town likely did not have a psych ward, but because he likely did not feel that he could confide the things that he was feeling in others.  I think he, himself, likely felt both shame, but also reassurance at the course of action that he mapped out - he had, on his own - worked out a solution.  If we fail to connect with each other, to see each other as allies against what is truly threatening us, we sow seeds of poison that can take generations to purify. 

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), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...