Tag: self-definition

Persuasion (get over it)

I have been thinking about feelings. Which means, of course, that I have been having them, or rather, overwhelmed by them of late. I wouldn’t bother to write about them if they were good feelings. When I am in love, I tend to write less about that feeling, in part because my need to communicate to the world is being so generously satisfied by the person I love.  The feeling of being so thoroughly understood (she gets me!) is like putty in the gaps through which the words drift out (or in). The feeling of being misunderstood blows all the putty out.

I wonder what it would be like to write about love. I should try.

When there is anger, which almost always proceeds from misunderstanding, I don’t know how to speak to anyone I love. One former lover suggested that I should just “let her be” when she was angry.  I should know to do that, or something like that.  Active listening is an approach I have been trained to use by countless leadership and communications trainings. Yet, it is hard to apply my professional approaches to my personal life, because my personal life is so much more consequential than my professional life, and because my personal life is so, forgive me, personal.

When a congregant, a colleague, or a student is angry, it matters, but not in any kind of existential way. I can pull aside a student several days later, ask what was going on, and suggest what their angry display had the possibility of doing (how it might impact the relationship he has with adults or classmates). Because students are young and impulsive, most do not hold onto their impulsive anger in a lasting way, and most can offer a genuine “My bad” after the fact. They do it days later, and sometimes hours later. Adults hold their feelings longer. With adults, some formulation of “I hear you” and “I hear that you feel strongly about that” is my trained response. And is usually answered with “You’re damn right I feel strongly about that” followed by a lengthy restatement of what the person just said. In my professional capacity I have listened to many explanations. Accords follow later, if they follow at all.

I wonder why adults hold their feelings more dearly.  I think, and I could be wrong, that we live in an age in which the truth of our feelings is valorized. We pick facts that confirm our feelings and change the facts when needed. We organize the world to suit our feelings, and when the two don’t jibe, we seek to change the world and not to change our feelings. I don’t know why this is.  I hold with Rilke, who advises the young poet not to focus on his feelings, but to pay attention to things.  I think today we take our feelings to be as immutable as chairs, or oceans, or stars.

In Rhetoric Aristotle argues that “modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art [of rhetoric]: everything else is merely accessory.” (He also states, “things that are true and things that are just have a natural tendency to prevail over their opposites.” Oh, for that simple time.)  Aristotle divides the approach into three: the character of the speaker, the state of mind of the audience, and the proof of “a truth or an apparent truth by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question.” These days it seems that the state of minds of the audience has taken precedence over truth or character.  I think this is true in our political rhetoric, but it is also true in our professional and personal lives. What matters most is neither your character, nor the validity of your argument; it is how the people or person you are speaking to feels.

However, the feeling of being misunderstood, especially by a person I love most (most intimately, most personally, most romantically), completely upends me.  And so, I try to persuade or explain, which is a fool’s errand, mainly because I am angry at being misunderstood: “How can you NOT understand me, oh person I love?” All that person can hear is the anger, and all I can hear back is more misunderstanding. So, like the tourist who cannot make himself understood in a foreign land, I increase the volume, either the number of proofs (See?) or the protestations with regards to my character (I am a good person). And I fail.

Anger over being misunderstood is my Achilles heel, and should immediately disqualify me from being a teacher, a writer, or a lover because misunderstanding is the common currency of an expressive life. I could say “Yanni” and someone will hear “Laurel” or something else that no one has imagined as a possibility yet: “Bluebird,” “Sarsaparilla,” “I hate you,” or even “I love you.” And yet, here I go, plunging into another teaching job, trying to write this down, and remaining open to the possibility of being misunderstood by someone I love. A cynic would tell me that therapy can help break this cycle, but really, all a therapist will do is help me make peace with the fact that this is my cycle.  I better learn to love it.

What I Watched about Love—Petulia

What Resignation Means

Petulia (1968)

Directed by Richard Lester

Starring

George C. Scott as Archie Bollen

Julie Christie as Petulia Banner

There’s a reason why Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” resonated with me as a senior in high school, and part of that reason is Petulia, which I had seen some late Friday night before then. George C. Scott, who I had seen in a number of movies (Patton, Day of the Dolphin, a television movie called Rage, and, of course, Dr. Strangelove) is an unlikely leading man. Because he is not handsome, he is genuine. Julie Christie is a vision, and now, should remind us how much more difficult a job a beautiful actress has, because her authenticity must shine through her dense surface beauty. It’s hard to tell who plays Prufrock and who plays the mermaid in this film, because no one hears the singing, and if they do, they hear the song while bound to the mast of a sinking ship.

This is at once a fanciful and a grim movie. The pace is jaunty, and the editing jumps the viewer forward, back, and side to side. Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead perform in the film. Lester creates momentary tableaux that are discordant and arresting. A happy person, well ensconced in a healthy relationship would dismiss it as an over-intellectualized and cynical film. Since, at 17, I was neither particularly happy, and never had a relationship, it struck me as a warning about what waited in adulthood, and what a horrible warning it was.

Archie, a successful surgeon is in the process of divorce. When asked by his best friend, “What was it Archie? The sex bit?” Archie answers, “Barney, what would you say if I told you that one day I got very tired of being married… I know what I want. To feel something.” How is it that marriage and success did not give Archie a place to feel?

In Moments of Being, Virginia Woolf writes how the men of her class are fed into society as boys and emerge as cabinet ministers, or generals, or heads of colleges, and that they don’t have any real say in what they become; they are simply shot out. They do not have the opportunity to feel, and feelings are antithetical to their professional lives. Archie faces a similar challenge. He has been trained to rise above feelings, to perform medicine dispassionately. When he tells Barney that he wants to feel, Barney answers, “Grow up,” then asks, sadly, what he is going to do about his wife.

The film is set in San Francisco, and is populated by characters who act out and on their feelings. Archie is surrounded by a perpetual theater of feelings and opinions (and by the gruesome broadcasts of news from Vietnam). Lester’s film frames these performances as shallow, even callous. When asking for help speaking with a Spanish speaking man, one cool answers, “I only know Polish.” That’s how it is: the joke’s on you.

When Archie meets Petulia, she too speaks in cool shorthand, “I’ve been married six months and I’ve never had an affair.” The thing is, Archie is already cool—ice cold—and answers, “It’s been known to happen.” Petulia persists, and Archie resists. Finally she says, “Archie, why do you play this dumb game, this crappy pretense of resisting the beautiful lady? You should be jolly lucky I’m even talking to you.” She’s right, of course, but Archie doesn’t budge, until of course, he does, sharing a personal detail from his life. They make an abortive trip to a hotel. He sends her away. But they are far from done. “I’m trying to save you, Archie,” she implores later, “I’m fighting for your life.”

Petulia has a secret. She is fighting for her life. She witnessed Archie perform surgery on a small boy she and her husband became tangled up with—fixing the mess she and her husband made. Her husband abuses her. Archie is the solid, generous, and cool alternative to the privileged, abusive, and secretly volatile world she inhabits. She shows up at Archie’s bachelor apartment, bearing a tuba. Romance of a sort follows. And ends. Archie is perplexed, and then angry that Petulia stays with a man who beats her. And then knows there is nothing he can do.

I’m not sure how to manage the feelings of hope and resignation, but at 17, the balance was on hope. Mostly. 17 year olds can harbor a bent idealism that finds its respite in sarcasm and cynicism, but it’s an act. Real resignation must be earned and waits at the end of a long driveway. I fought against it. I still do. Petulia was a message from adults who were not pleased with any of the alternatives for adulthood being put forth at the time. I’m not sure if it appealed to me, as much as it haunted me. How could one lead an authentic life? And what was the place of love and marriage in such a life? I thought about that often at 16 and 17.

On Being Known

IMG_2982Is there anything worse than being mis-known? Than someone making a claim about how you feel or think that has almost nothing to do with your actual thoughts or feelings? I remember an occasion after one of our Thursday night poker games in Binghamton when some poor soul ventured that no matter what I said, he knew that what I felt in my heart was different. I don’t even remember what we were discussing—maybe Moby Dick. My friend Brian looked at me at that moment, acknowledging the serious breach that had been made.

And of course, there are worse things—1,000 worse things involving the obliteration of the physical being. However, our ability to say, “This is who I am”—to define our mental and spiritual being (which exists fully in concert with our physical selves), is of tantamount importance, especially in a world in which our physical beings are fairly secure. We are privileged to be able to assert this side of our being. But even when chained, we need this self. Both must be unbound.

For the most part, and it almost hurts to admit this, I do not expect to be known in the world. I rarely put the full force of who I am and what I think and how I feel on display. My writing, and these blog posts over the past few years are a first step. But, whether it is a function of the way people know each other, or the fact that, over the years, I have learned to restrain myself in order to fulfill specific tasks in the world, I no longer expect to be fully known. I feel sometimes caught between the poles of Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and the bounty of Whitman’s Song of Myself—either worrying about being misapprehended, or standing in a field of grass beckoning “Here I am! Here we are!”

The Eliot pole—and he is not holding Prufrock out as an exemplar, but as a warning—burdens me with the sagging weight of doubt that any connection is ever possible. Even the sirens will pass me by. I feel, at times, profoundly sad that anyone, really, ever knows another. This suspicion is tied up in the gnawing Weltschmerz that descends upon me and sends me reeling into the worst and most stupid kind of isolation. When so gripped, I guard myself with cynicism or sarcasm. But those moments are my worst, never my best. They are too easy.

The Whitman pole buoys me. The contradictions don’t matter; in fact, they are an essential part of me, and the world, the great breathing, aching, loving, ecstatic, terrible world surges through me and restores me. My “I” ceases to matter. I become a vessel for a song made up of all the voices of all the things and all the people. I tend toward those voices with ferocity and devotion. Bring it on! “The dancing wagon has come! here is the dancing wagon!”

However, and here is the rub–I am too full of contradictions, too connected to a world outside myself. I feel afloat in a world that values certainty and consistency. Most people seem to seek firmer ground, to limit voices of dissent. I don’t know why, not exactly, not when we are beings of such profoundly possible connection. I have “everything” tattooed around my right ankle. Then I remember Prufrock. Do people live with such doubt? Do they never explore and expand to meet the world like lovers, ready to be torn to shreds and remade by love. Damnit all. Go!

Maybe we are never sure, never sure enough, and especially not in the presence of love. I know that my greatest struggles with being known have come in the presence of more singular love, when there is one person who must bear the shaking I experience between the poles, and then must love the contradictory, magnanimous, possible heart I carry deep inside. And perhaps this is asking too much of one person to be the secret sharer of this heart. I feel difficult, even to myself, and am not sure whether I am knowable or lovable on my own terms, not in a one-on-one kind of way. Maybe the way I am precludes this. Maybe I am best known facet by facet, and not all at once. I am fifty five years old; time passes, slowly and quickly.

Still, I hear the voices, and sing the songs, and cherish the world that is always there, no matter how great the hardship, no matter how awful or wonderful. And I chose, for better or for worse, to write, to scribble down thoughts and ideas and images and characters and stories all in the hope that they would come alive in some stranger’s mind. I do not sing this world to the angel, unless the angel is you, unless we are all, already, angels.

And in some small and not small way, the hope of being known—asserting myself—seems almost like a betrayal of my charge. Sing the world, you man. Give it up! Disappear! You will never disappear! Keep singing. Keep telling stories. Keep connecting. Know the world and love the world.  Find yourself there.