I
woke up this morning with this idea: there are three fundamental interrelated
reasons why things matter – why we pay attention to them at all. They’re
interesting and they’re dangerous and they’re beautiful.
Actually
what I woke up remembering was how enthrallingly whomped I was by my first
encounter with Freud, whose work I started reading – when? 1989, I think (jeez,
could that have been 27 years ago?) when I began my extended moment, through the
early ‘90s, of attending Shrink School (The Center for Modern Psychoanalysis, a
training institute for psychoanalysts). Reading Freud caused my continents to shift.
Far
from dismissing his theories as antiquated or irrelevant the way so many others
seemed bent on doing, I was completely won over by his audacity: inventing a
fresh vocabulary to explain, or at least attempt to explain, why human beings
behaved as they did: terms which really turned the prism on how we think about
how we think. I fell on his language like a starving tiger falls on prey. It
wasn’t so much a matter of believing I’d found ‘the truth’ about anything – I
mean I was already in my forties and I’d developed most of what our culture
holds to be a requisite skepticism about any claims to ‘truth’ – that
everything was a matter of perceptual relativity. But, whatever the final
verdict on their genesis or efficacy might turn out to be, Freud made the
ingenuity of our self-protective & -defining strategies seem inarguable and
gave us new less charged ways (beyond reflexive moral condemnation) to start to
talk about them: those endlessly inventive mental shenanigans we conjure up for
skewing our thoughts, feelings, points-of-view, attractions and repulsions so
that they became either more bearable or more beautiful or more persuasive – or
all of the above. Look what Freud said dreams do! Superego vs Id wrestled in sleep
like dark angels until Ego woke up and wrestled with both of them in waking
consciousness. It was like the Christian Trinity gone mad. We wrestled with our
wishes (battling varieties of mostly unconscious ambivalence) all the time.
That
seemed about right.
Although
I’ve long since fallen off that – or any – single ideological bandwagon, not so
much because none of them persuades absolutely as because it’s no fun to limit
yourself to one doorway into the odd infinity of the mind, I still think the
sense of human ingenuity in reconfiguring “reality” I got from Freud is
spot-on. That ingenuity is unendingly interesting to me.
“Interesting”
may seem a colorless word: but to me it’s full of power. If something truly
interests, it absorbs you in a flash: curiosity is ignited, extraordinary
prospects await. If people are interesting, they’re
interesting in every dimension, including the psychoanalytic (with its
attempted deep dive into the dynamics of what makes them ‘run’). Happily, the catholicity of true interest, the all-encompassing curiosity it
engenders, can free psychoanalytic terms from their supposed therapeutic
purpose, to be enjoined instead as part of an almost esthetic
investigation into the nature of what makes the person miraculous: unique – and
therefore, in my view, beautiful. Of
course Alphonse is caught in an Oedipal web: the particulars of which
create such a strange intricacy in his life, balancing the bewildering tugs of
his opera singer mother and his circus acrobat father, each of whom he
alternately loves and hates. He’d never eat a prune in his life, so dependent
was his constipated mother on them, and don’t get him going about his father’s
rank post-circus sweat! – sometimes he felt like Lady Macbeth trying to wash even the memory of that taint off
himself. (Damn that it turned him on.)
But
when you wonder about what’s going on with and in Alphonse – after you’ve
managed to drop assumptions that any of this is a problem, or that Alphonse
needs to be “fixed” – you’re inviting yourself to look at his inner ‘scape’
with brighter less inhibited sight: not so much non-judgmentally (we depend on our judgment for sense and
direction) as full of a freer and finally more pleasurable discernment, more to
do with form than with pathology. Indeed, 'interesting' no longer is a
euphemism (as it reflexively can be in American minds) for pathology, to which the
only conscionable reaction is "fix it." There’s no reason to fix
Alphonse because there’s nothing wrong with him. There’s nothing wrong with
anybody.
“Dangerous”
matters in some obvious ways. Look out for that gun! But a
kind of danger always invades and infuses the Interesting too. As dispassionate
as 'esthetic investigation' may seem as a phrase, it ushers us into impenetrable
darkness no less than if we were inspecting it for what was wrong with it. If Keats
is right, and beauty and truth are interchangeable, oh my – what a
many-splendored conundrum of darkness and light life becomes! Indeed the
'shadows' to be found here are more harrowing because they require they require
looking at whole. They’re part of the template of being. How much can we bear
to see? Think of the danger in that. And the beauty of its
inimitability – a beauty which transcends any facile notion of surface appeal.
The
Interesting and the Dangerous and the Beautiful. Sounds like an awkward title
for a soap opera. (Right after The Young and the Restless and the Boring.)
Anyway,
welcome to what it’s like to wake up from,
to and as me. Wheee!
.
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