hawleythoughts

2009-11-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

Soulful Love:
The Beautiful Problem

There is probably no more vivid evidence of the soul at work than the experience of romantic love. We recognize the story every time. We understand it perfectly. But when it happens to us, we are astonished. We are never prepared. If the current of this love is not shared and reciprocated, we are seared and scalded, helpless and bereft. When the feeling is shared and returned, we ascend, we unfurl. There is nothing else like it. When Juliet realizes that she loves Romeo and that he loves her, that the exquisite possibility has become real, she bursts forth:

…I long but for the thing I have
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite. (II, ii, 132-35)

Romantic love is both ecstatic and restless. Souls in love, like Juliet, long for the thing they have. In The Symposium, Plato’s dialog on love, Socrates suggests that this ecstatic longing is the soul’s attempt to mediate between the earthbound condition and the divine. The beauty of one’s beloved is seen as a soulful glimpse—as is the condition of being in love itself—into the source of all Beauty. Consciously, lovers feel as though their souls are somehow trying to leave their bodies, to merge physically and finally into the soul of the beloved. The intensity of this drive often propels the lovers, especially in love’s first thrall, past boundaries of propriety. Perhaps for the first time, propriety feels insubstantial. Freud and his disciples reduce this condition to an epiphenomenon, or “sublimation,” of the erotic drive, but doing so fails to recognize the psychological independence of soulful-relatedness and Eros. Eros is indeed the agent that attracts and unites the bodies of soulful lovers in orgasmic rapture, but the union of souls can and does occur before, after, and otherwise independently of erotic feeling. It is perhaps more helpful to see Eros as the bodily expression of soulful love. In service of such love, Eros produces an altogether different dimension of experience and pleasure than it does merely discharging its own gratification.

In his novel Refiner’s Fire, Mark Helprin describes two soulful lovers engaged in a night-long sexual frenzy, each feeling as though he or she were trying not merely to penetrate or receive the other, but to pass through them entirely. The notion that souls in love are seeking to achieve a prior merger or unity is of course ancient. In The Symposium Aristophanes offers the charming myth of a pre-human race of spherical, hermaphroditic androgynes who are severed apart by the gods and who spend the rest of their days desperately seeking to reunite with their other halves. Soulful love does indeed feel this way: fated, discovered, foreordained. One not only aches for union with one’s soul mate, one aches to get back to a blissful and perfect condition. Coming to rest in the arms of one’s beloved is, among other things, a profound homecoming.

Probably because of this restless dynamic of soulful love, a number of voices in the late twentieth century are pressing the case that soulful attraction is an expression of incomplete transactions in past lives. Whether formulated by pop spiritualists like Shirley Maclaine or by contemporary interpreters of the Ohio mystic Edgar Cayce or by “multiple regression” analysts like Brian Weiss, the “past lives” view sees soulful attraction as a working out of the soul’s unfinished business in former incarnations. While it would take this reflection off course to assess the validity of the reincarnational premises of past-lives theorists, it is important to note that even if one accepts that one’s soul and its longings have a long and interesting past, such knowledge sheds little or no light on the living, waking experience of being soulfully in love. In other words, to draw on examples cited in Brian Weiss’s work, knowing that my beloved and I once trysted among the pyramids of ancient Egypt or that, more recently, she was my sister, does not help me to negotiate my way forward in love. Nor does such awareness expand or deepen the love that I feel – for soulful love by its very nature feels boundlessly rich and deep, often unmanageably so.

Perhaps no modern thinker has cast a brighter light on the phenomenon of soulful love – and its distressing consequences – than the Jungian writer Robert Johnson. His study, We, is a careful explication of the medieval story of Tristan and Isolde, and Johnson sees in the unfolding of their fabled liaison no less than the release of an entirely new psychic force in the western world. Tristan and Isolde’s fatal attraction is the prototype for romantic love itself. It is a love that comes unbidden and unexpected by lovers who are honorably committed to others. Indeed, on the world’s terms, their love is all wrong, and the pair has more practical reason to be great enemies than great lovers. But when they are fated to connect, in their case through the agency of an accidentally consumed herbal potion, they cannot and do not resist each other for the rest of their foreshortened lives. Told and translated well, the twelfth century romance is still stirringly beautiful, as is Wagner’s operatic treatment of the story.

Johnson does not claim that Tristan and Isolde are the west’s first star-crossed lovers. He proposes, rather, that their story released – irrevocably – the notion of soulful love as the ideal form of loving relationship, one that demands our ultimate allegiance, however terrible the consequences. Despite its deeply embedded place in western culture, the habit of idealizing romantic love causes enormous, unsolvable problems. Soulful lovers do not seem to live happily ever after. Tristan and Isolde themselves faced great dangers, suffered terrible wounds and illness, betrayed spouses, broke sacred promises, endured agonizing periods of isolation and loneliness before dying prematurely and unfulfilled. Tristan’s very name derives from an early French word for sadness. And this is the ideal at the heart of every popular love song! Despite such monumental evidence that Romeos and Juliets do not fare well or long in the waking world, the expectation of romantic love has become a cultural norm. In the face of terrible evidence, couples considering making a life together hold fast to the standard of romantic love – to the extent that anything that feels less soulful and profound is thought to be an indication of a bad match.

Romantic love has come to be irresistible, although, as Robert Johnson reminds us, it is a terrible problem. But a problem is not the same thing as a mistake. The release of the romantic ideal in the west is not something that can be called back or contained. Romantic love can be seen more or less clearly, but it cannot be seen through. It is real, powerful, a condition souls know and to which they fatefully conform.

The achievement of the Tristan and Isolde story, again, is not the recounting of a great, ill-starred love affair; it is the suggestion that such love, once experienced, can stand up to custom, law, honor, and duty and – heartbreakingly, catastrophically – claim a higher place. “Hang up philosophy,” Romeo rages to Friar Laurence, if it cannot produce a Juliet. Later, when he believes he has lost her to death, Romeo defies “the stars” themselves. In Wuthering Heights Heathcliffe forsakes Christian or any other salvation in his relentless, lawless pursuit of Cathy. It appears that nothing in practical, waking reality can intimidate or diminish true soulful love. In the wake of Tristan and Isolde, a terrible freedom is born. A kind of permission has been forever granted to the soul to meet its beloved other.

The stories of Tristan and Isolde, Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet are so unutterably beautiful – but they are all disasters! Occasionally in the early Greek and Roman myths a mortal would aspire to love a god in the flesh, which is something like falling in love with the very source of love, only to perish in a flash of white heat. The unleashing of the romantic impulse in the west threatens lovers with the same fate.

In an especially apt analogy, Robert Johnson likens romantic love to plugging into a 10,000 volt current when one is wired only for 110 volt household use. But soulful lovers do not, cannot heed high voltage warnings. They have been liberated to love not just judiciously or moderately, but to seek the source of love itself. In Dante’s great vision of love in paradise, beloved persons are seen as celestial windows through which the ultimate can be glimpsed. For lovers in the thrall of romantic love, the beloved person is the ultimate.
Nothing is more transporting, more thrilling to the soul than experiencing the other as the ultimate. Yet, Johnson cautions us, this sublime condition, this peak experience is a mistake. It is a confusion of a powerful psychic inner reality with an outward form. The romantic lover projects his very soul – his anima – onto a mortal, flesh-and-blood person. Infinite desire and longing thus come to bear on a finite being, with disastrous results for one or both parties.

There is a point late in the story of Tristan and Isolde when Tristan has sorrowfully returned Isolde to her lawful husband, King Mark, and he himself agrees to marry a noblewoman from Brittany. For a moment there is a hint that the lovers will “get over it,” sadder but wiser – but no. The love of Isolde the Fair revisits Tristan in a sudden tidal wave of feeling. Defying propriety and safety, he makes yet another overture to reunite. This is the point, Johnson believes, where Tristan goes finally wrong.

He is called to give up his precious claim to the right to live his soul by projection. He is called to give up his demand that woman bear his unconscious life for him. If he could make that sacrifice, and make it cleanly, he would discover that what he thinks he has lost will be returned to him. His soul will be returned to him as an inner experience, and he will find that there is another Isolde, a mortal woman, who has been waiting for him all along… (We, 113-114)

Yes, there is another Isolde, Isolde of the White Hands, waiting for Tristan, and she is a woman with substance and beauty of her own, but she is not his soul mate. She is a valuable “other” but she is not his other. She makes perfect practical sense as a mate for Tristan, but no sense at all to a soul already in love. Johnson wonders at “the strange morality” that impels Tristan and Isolde to perpetuate a condition that hurts themselves while deceiving others. Johnson sees in this ever recurring Romantic Error a misplaced attempt to restore divine wonder in a culture that has lost its sense of divinity.

Romanticism seeks to restore our sense of the divine side of life, the inner life, the power of imagination, myth, dream, and vision. The tragedy that this portion of our story shows us is that we misuse the ideal of romanticism, misplace the divine love, and in the process we destroy our human relationships. We call “love” that which is not love, we reverse the meaning of “faithlessness,” and we pursue an ephemeral idealized image of anima, rather than loving a flesh-and-blood-human being. (We, 131)"There is the case, then, that romantic love is not love at all; the romantic experience is reduced to a projection of anima, which Johnson tells us, “must be experienced as inner person, as symbol.” (We, 133)Johson continues,"In the instant that a man falls “in love,” he goes beyond love itself and begins the worship of his soul-in-woman…Love is not love but a divine ecstasy; every sight of the beloved brings, not a quiet happiness, but unearthly bliss. But then… every mood becomes the occasion for a fight or a separation, every slight is the ultimate betrayal, every glance at another man or woman justifies blasts of anger and jealousy…"(We, 164)

What lovers held in the alternating ecstasies and agonies of soulful love can deny the condition Johnson describes? Yet to name the condition a human error is to stand outside of it, luckily (or is it unluckily) free of it. To stand apart, however, is to “know about” soulful love but not to know it. Someone could have sat Tristan down and talked perfect, uncontestable sense to him – indeed Friar Laurence did talk perfect sense to Romeo – but it would not have mattered in the slightest. The soul in love trumps analysis, trumps good sense, trumps the very will to live. The story of Tristan and Isolde is a shimmering instance of romantic ideal. It can be made into a cautionary tale, but it will have no force or power as a cautionary tale. The charge of “strange morality,” or even immorality, is both fair and beside the soulful point. With every successive popularization of the romantic love guest – in the fifties Sondheim/Bernstein’s West Side Story, in the sixties Eric Segal’s Love Story, in the nineties The Bridges of Madison County – critical eyes roll. How trite, how treacly, how sophomoric. But those who have had so much as an intimation of soulful love, and those who recall the condition, are transported every time.

As I write these words, a woman nearby is falling hopelessly in love. A happy, balanced wife and mother of three, she has always counted herself lucky in matters of the heart. She is an attractive, athletic woman of high color and high spirits. Friends and boyfriends always came easily her way – including the rangy young man she met in college who would marry her shortly afterwards. About her husband, children, place in the community, she feels somehow that all has been serenely scripted. The contour and texture of her adult life are eerily as she always imagined they would be. Her children engage and for the most part satisfy her, and she is demonstrably good with them. Her husband, should she stop to consider, makes her feel valued, right, and safe.

Together they have decided to investigate country properties on the outskirts of the city, and in the course of one morning’s excursion, she finds herself taken with the curly-headed estate agent. While mannerly and appropriately attentive, he is also very, loonily funny. “Oddly enough,” he tells her as he unlocks a home under review, “there is no kitchen, nor any bathrooms. The owners feel very strongly about this.” He made her laugh and when, laughing, she met his eyes, he seemed to be looking deep into her interior. Later, thinking about him, she felt the impulse to laugh but also something deeper and more unsettling. The first thing the following morning, she called to make another appointment.

This lovely and loving woman has begun to make a mess. Before long her husband will be by turns livid and bereft. Her parents, friends and in-laws will be incredulous. All of this will hurt her, and she will feel embarrassed, guilty, bottomlessly apologetic. She is propelled through chaotic days and nearly sleepless nights by a new kind of lift. She feels carried along by the force of her love. Occasionally she reflects with wonder on a phrase she had sometimes used to describe her condition: “safely married.”

This woman’s drama is real, and the consequences of her actions will be substantial and enduring for everyone involved. While it would do little to ease her passage if she knew it, her drama is also eternal, its structure embedded in the mythology of philandering gods and goddesses of creation. Only later would we discover gods, righteous father gods, bearing astringent commandments and laws. But somehow the sterner, Jehovan figures never quite succeed in supplanting the Olympians or in suppressing their unpredictable inclinations to fall inconveniently in love. Of course today’s gods and goddesses dwell in the empyrean of the tabloids: the realm where the married Prince has had a dalliance with another, while the dizzyingly beautiful princess is said to have bedded a stable hand. A beloved young president, a story-book family man, the arrangement of whose family is called “Camelot,” seems to have trysted with the Aphrodite of the film world – to have trysted, it now appears, with uncountable Aphrodites. On the undeniable evidence of the tabloids – and a strong case has been made that the whole of western journalism has become tabloid – we cannot get enough of the story of consuming, impossible love. Royalty, military commanders, presidents risk everything in its pursuit. A recent President seems to have been especially heedless in this regard, willing to chase the swirl of Aphrodite’s skirt into a White House lavatory.

We readers, viewers, critics, witnesses are simultaneously appalled and thrilled: there it is again! Prior either to our opprobrium or titillation, we know this story. Moreover, our souls know it is not always a scandal. The power and beauty of soulful love will endure long after the hiss and whisper of scandal has fallen silent. The tragedy of soulful love – of Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet – is that the heroic, if mortal, efforts of the lovers fall short. The tragedy is not that the lovers break moral rules or violate conventional standards. Truth be told, there is a persistent tendency in the western mind to scandalize and punish lovers far in excess of any offense or injury caused. Castigating lovers and debunking love itself are an integral part of the enterprise that would deny the reality of the soul and soulfulness altogether. But because the soul is true, and one of its irrepressible expressions is soulful love, the cultural forces in opposition set out to punish what they have failed to eliminate. Out come the stocks, the scarlet letters, the special prosecutors.

One does not have to be an ardent or a wounded feminist to realize that in standard western tellings, lovers who defy convention to seek their beloved – especially the women – are made to pay a terrible, unendurable price. They are scorned, cloistered, killed. Emma Bovary drinks poison. Anna Karenina jumps under a train. In our era, fatal attractions, as in the film by that name, are most likely fatal for the woman. There seems to be an abiding cultural terror of women loving forcefully and fully. That kind of power, if it cannot be suppressed or contained, elicits a deadly desire to punish and negate. Nowhere is this tendency more stridently evident than when women fall soulfully in love with other women. There is the strongest inclination to whisk such players off the stage or, like Thelma and Louise, to accelerate their automobile over the side of a cliff.
So soulful love does indeed have a hard time, but perhaps not impossibly so. Love does sometimes find a way. In fact, love may take more hope and comfort from the historical record than it can from the literary record. At least occasionally, it seems, real life partners love and win.
With the new millennium there has been an insistent and unashamed appeal to risk romantic love—no matter what the costs. To be held fast in love is to have crossed safe boundaries, to have trespassed. Just as Romeo and Juliet’s vaulting union arises out of the vulgar sexual badinage of Capulet and Montague kinsmen and retainers, the late twentieth century abandonment of propriety, standards, and restraint in sexual matters seems to want to open us up to something great and possibly unthinkable. Popular television now details the ways of “Sex in the City,” offers us sustained and unembarrassed helpings of “Real Sex.” This contemporary libertinism is novel in that is neither marginal nor counter-cultural; it is mainstream, and wants to engage everybody.

It is hard to know into what category to place the writings of Nancy Friday, but in her collections of women’s erotic fantasies and confessions, there is a strong suggestion that one doesn’t perish or go blind if one indulges forbidden ideas and urges. Pornography itself, James Hillman suggests in his essay “Pink Madness,” is a cunning aphroditic gesture to awaken dull and dormant souls. In her study, The Erotic Silence of the American Wife, Dalma Heyn offers a number of accounts of women who have loved outside the conventions of marriage and propriety – had affairs – and emerged feeling rather the better for it. Few readers with even a dull eye open to the amorous relationships of the adults they know need to be told that when already committed partners are beset by a new and powerful love, serious trouble lies ahead. But in addition to the trouble, and perhaps beyond it, may lie soulful love.

Not many affairs of the heart, including (and perhaps especially) the most inflamed, endure for life. Tristan and Isolde perish for the love of the other just before the three-year efficacy of their herbal potion was to run out. A few months to a few years seems to be a common duration for affairs. Not many souls seem to be able to bear the intensity of romantic love for long. The volatility of such love may subside into a more or less sustainable mutuality as the lovers mature. Such pairs may be said to live adaptively ever after. Those who do are likely to suppress their earlier, more soulful bond with a kind of amnesia, or, if they recall it at all, they regard it as an outgrown sentiment, a youthful infatuation. This view of soulful love has become conventional wisdom in the western world and seems to distance reasonable adults from the condition. But there appears to be no dismissing or condescending to the real thing. In middle life, especially among men, the romantic impulse is likely to reawaken the soul with a force and richness which, if anything, exceeds the intensity of first love. So-called mid-life crisis may be the price exacted for neglecting one’s soul: for forgetting that the soul, unlike the body or its persona, does not age, adapt, or grow weary.

Soulful Love Comes to the Roosevelts

Soulful love is rarely practically convenient, but the historical record suggests that, with grace and imagination, it can be integrated into even the most unlikely social configurations. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s remarkable study of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s era, No Ordinary Time, reveals, among many other things, the tragicomic interplay between soulful love and social convention. Looked at one way, the Roosevelts’ extramarital trysts carry the capricious charm of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; looked at another way, they are the stuff of tabloid scandal.

There were probably no more confining behavioral boundaries and social expectations in the United States than those of the New York patrician society into which Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt came of age at the turn of the century. Sara, the family matriarch, made sure her son Franklin was suitably matched to woman of his class, in this case to his cousin Eleanor, who shared the family name. Whatever mutual respect and comfort the young couple felt in one another’s company, theirs was not a love match. Under his mother’s attentive scrutiny, young Franklin rose to a distinguished post as Under Secretary of the Navy, and Eleanor began the arduous business of bearing and raising his six children. She would later confide to her daughter that the sexual dimension of her marriage was an “ordeal” she grimly endured. In September of 1918, when she was thirty-four and had given birth to her last child, she received a sudden and unsettling reprieve from her ordeal. Unpacking Franklin’s bags from a trip he had taken to Europe to review allied military arrangements, she came upon a packet of love letters to her husband from Lucy Page Mercer, her personal secretary and a much beloved fixture in the Roosevelt household. Lucy Mercer was a statuesque beauty, descended from a prominent Washington family. Just twenty-two when she came into Eleanor and Franklin’s lives, she brought with her a special intensity. Elliott Roosevelt, then only a small boy, recalled, “She was gay, smiling, and relaxed. She had the same brand of charm as father, and everybody who met her spoke of that – and there was a hint of fire in her warm dark eyes.” None of Franklin’s magnetism was lost on Lucy. Tall, fit, and exuberant in his mid-thirties, he attracted her powerfully. Years later Lucy would confess to a friend that she was drawn to him immediately. The excitement and sweetness of their mutual attraction seemed to permeate the household. Anna Roosevelt, still a toddler when the affair was discovered, recalled “feeling happy” on the days Lucy Mercer reported to work.

When the affair was discovered in 1918, Eleanor confronted her husband directly and offered to divorce him. This FDR declined to do, aware that a divorce would certainly curtail his future political aspirations as well as, given his mother’s firm disapproval, cutting off his family inheritance. Moreover, Lucy Mercer was a faithful Catholic, and his remarriage would not be allowed within the Church. For both Roosevelts, and for Lucy, it was a time of soulful reckoning. Later, Eleanor would confess, “The bottom dropped out of my particular world and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”

Eleanor was forever changed and deepened by her husband’s amorous departure, and so, apparently was he. Much has been written about how Franklin’s coming to terms with a crippling encounter with polio three years later brought forth an inner strength and integrity that would transform him into a fully realized man and a great leader. His closest friends saw the transformation begin earlier, in his reckoning with his affair with Lucy. Franklin’s friend Corinne Rolinson Alsop remembers, “Up to the time that Lucy Mercer came into Franklin’s life, he seemed to look at human relationships coolly, calmly, and without depth. He viewed his family dispassionately and enjoyed them, but it had in my opinion a loveless quality as if he were incapable of emotion…it is difficult to describe…to me it (the affair) seemed to release something in him.” Her husband Joe Alsop had a concurring impression: “He (Franklin) emerged tougher and more resilient, wiser and more profound even before his struggle with polio.”

But, one must ask, what of the love? What of the soulful relatedness? Franklin was sobered, contrite, hurt, deepened – and, the evidence suggests, forever and unalterably bound to Lucy Mercer in love. Eleanor was shaken to her existential roots. Consequently she chose to face the reality of her new marital circumstances honestly. Formally and politically she would continue to be FDR’s wife and, before long, First Lady of the land. Intimately, she would never have marital relations with her husband again. Lucy departed the scene promptly and discreetly, two years later marrying a rather older New York patrician, Winthrop Rutherford. For twenty-five years she would not be a physical presence in Franklin’s life, but she would return to him. She was improbably with him when he was stricken by a cerebral embolism and died. Very possibly her face was the last image he beheld on earth.

Three years after Lucy Mercer left the Roosevelts, Franklin contracted polio while on holiday at Campobello. The attack left him crippled to the extent that he was never able to walk unassisted again. The remarkable recovery of his spirits and the rest of his body has been commonly attributed to a congenital optimism and courage. There would probably have been no such regeneration, however, were it not for the soulful presence of another extraordinary woman at his side.

Marguerite “Missy” LeHand was hired on to do secretarial work for FDR in the course of his unsuccessful bid for the vice-presidency in 1920. Bright-eyed, pretty, and acutely intelligent, she made such an impression on both Roosevelts that after the election Eleanor invited Missy to come back with the family to the ancestral estate at Hyde Park where she would help Franklin with his correspondence. At these secretarial and other tasks, Missy soon became indispensable and, like Lucy Mercer, a warm and enlivening presence in the household. At Hyde Park and later at the governor’s residence in Albany and at the White House, Roosevelt’s professional colleagues, family members, and staff all sensed an uncanny personal acuity in Missy. When she spoke, she seemed to speak for FDR, and her credibility and judgment were not questioned. Without apparent effort or intention, Missy was assumed into Franklin’s most intimate confidence.
There seems to have been little that was subtle or clandestine in Missy LeHand’s relationship to FDR in middle life. “There is no doubt,” Goodwin quotes White House aide Raymond Moley as saying, “that Missy was as close to being a wife as he ever had – or could have.” Eliot Janeway confided to Goodwin in an interview, “Missy was the real wife.” Missy was a soul mate.

Being Franklin Roosevelt’s “real,” or soulful, wife would require its special compensations, and these would finally never come to Missy. Back in the twenties she had spent languorous, out-of-time months at FDR’s side as he tried to rejuvenate his legs in the spa waters of Warm Springs, Georgia, and aboard his commodious houseboat, Larooco, in Florida. Missy’s days were spent with Franklin on the beach or fishing over the rails of the anchored Larooco. In the evenings she was gracious hostess to intimate dinner parties. A photograph of the period shows Missy, Franklin, and a visiting couple seated comfortably on the sands of a vast Florida beach. Men and women alike wear the black bathing tunics of the era, and all four look familiarly at ease, glowing with health. Missy reclines to Franklin’s right, her image melding comfortably into his bronzed shoulder.

Franklin’s polio had not crippled him sexually. After his parents’ death, Elliott Roosevelt revealed that Missy and her father had most certainly been lovers. She was noticed entering and leaving Franklin’s room in her nightclothes. “I remember,” Elliott wrote “being only mildly stirred to see him with Missy on his lap as he sat on a wicker chair in the main stateroom (of the Larooco) holding her in his sun-browned arms…He made no attempt to conceal his feelings about Missy.”

In 1927 Franklin determined that is was past time to return to public life, and Missy had a severe nervous breakdown. She underwent bouts of delirium, and for eleven days she was unreachable. It would be months before she could return to her duties and to Franklin, who was now on the brink of accepting the gubernatorial nomination for New York. “Don’t you dare,” she is said to have told him. But of course he would dare, and Missy held on, serving in Albany and later in Washington as personal advisor, secretary, hostess, general factotum – and “real wife.” The compensation, she must have believed, would come later. Certainly it would come after two excruciating terms as President during the Great Depression and the ominous onset of world war.

As the President entered his historic third term, Missy LeHand faced the unendurable fact that her beloved would not descend from the public sphere into the private sphere of her longing. She had worked beyond her capacity on his behalf, but there was no end to this work. On June 4, 1941, after accompanying FDR to a musical party, she collapsed. Exhausted, she apparently suffered a kind of stroke, exacerbated by opiate medicines, which disoriented her. As in her previous breakdowns, she wept and wept, calling for the president: “FD, FD!”

She would never really recover. Sent back to her sister in Somerville, Massachusetts, to get well, she would live only a few years as an invalid in body and spirit. On the New Year’s eve of 1941, hopelessly exiled, Missy let the door of her soul open wide. Her sister wrote to the President:
"She started crying about 11:30, and we couldn’t stop her. And then she had a heart spell and kept calling 'F.D., come, please come. Oh F.D.' It really was the saddest thing I ever hope to see, we were all crying…"

In the summer of 1944 Missy LeHand went to the movies with her sister in Harvard Square. A newsreel featured shots of the President, and Missy was stricken to see his care-worn and ravaged condition. When she returned to her room, she rifled through an old photo album for pictures of Franklin vigorous and sunburned, of them together in the sun. Then her left arm, paralyzed for three years, began to move. Soon after she convulsed and died. She was forty-six.

Eleanor Roosevelt was not troubled by her husband’s relationship to Missy as she had been by the attachment to Lucy Mercer. She too was awakening to soulful love. In her new, purposeful immersion in political life, she had met and befriended a new kind of woman. These new friends included journalists, teachers, high ranking political operatives. They made their way in the world with a dashing independence, without husbands. Some of them lived together in, to use a term from the period, “Boston marriages.” Some of them sported mannish hair-cuts, male attire. Mother-in-law Sara was appalled that such company actually came to call at Hyde Park. Franklin and his cronies were not, according to Doris Goodwin, above joking about Eleanor’s “she-men” and “squaws.” Clearly unthreatened and far from disapproving, Franklin built a twenty-two-room “cottage,” Val-Kill, on the Hyde Park grounds intended exclusively for Eleanor and her female friends.

In 1932 as the Roosevelts were about to make the dramatic transition to the White House, one of those friends became, for the first time in Eleanor’s life, a beloved best friend. Lorena Hickock, then thirty-nine, was a remarkable woman. Arising from modest circumstances and an abusive household in Wisconsin, she looked after her own education and emerged, first in the Midwest and then nationally as a newspaper commentator of the first rank. An extroverted two hundred-pounder, she was comfortable in men’s attire, enjoyed bouts of poker and an occasional cigar. When Hickock was first assigned to “cover” the first-lady-to-be on a daily basis, Franklin cautioned Eleanor, “Watch out for that Hickock woman – she’s smart.”

More than smart, Lorena, called familiarly “Hick,” recognized Eleanor’s latent gifts as a promoter of liberal causes and as a writer. At first humbled by women who could make a mark in the world outside the domestic realm, Eleanor would, with Hick’s robust support, become such a figure herself. The first lady and the reporter assigned to reveal her to the nation fell soulfully in love.

As Doris Goodwin points out, no one before had pursued Eleanor in love, no one had put her first. By the time Franklin was inaugurated in March of 1933, Eleanor was wearing Hick’s sapphire ring. “I want to put my arms around you…to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it.” While apart, they corresponded daily. On the telephone in earshot of her family Eleanor could not tell Hick the depth of her feeling: “ Jimmy was near,” Eleanor wrote, “and I couldn’t say je t’aime and je t’adore.” When she could not kiss Hick, she confessed, she would kiss her picture.

Within a year Hick was consumed with her love for Eleanor to the exclusion of other worldly concerns. Too close now to her subject to risk betraying her “objectively,” Hick resigned her post as an AP reporter and took a government job with the WPA. Work of any kind came to feel like an intrusion on her time with her beloved. “Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time,” she wrote to Eleanor, missing her. “Most clearly I remember your eyes with a kind of teasing smile in them and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.”

Elated to be loved and in love, Eleanor rose to distinction and popular celebrity in the course of her first two terms as first lady. She commanded a then unprecedented $1,000 for speaking, and her column, “My Day,” was widely syndicated nationally. Confident now and gently charismatic, her straightforward and persistent concern for outsiders and underdogs, while consistent with New Deal politics generally, sometimes impelled her to press an issue on which her husband was reluctant to move.

But as Eleanor grew in private confidence and public stature, Hick, as is so often the case with those soulfully in love with someone the public adores, felt inevitably diminished. No longer a by-line in the national news, Hick was periodically identified in photos as a bodyguard or secretary to her beloved. Eleanor still treasured her special friend, but increasingly she seemed to love her public duty more. Predictably, Hick over-compensated, petulantly demanding more solitary time with Eleanor, time which Eleanor found impossible to commit. In 1941 some pressing financial concerns, combined with a desperate desire to see Eleanor at least glancingly, moved Hick to seek lodging at the White House. A small room near the President’s second-floor suite was made available, and for four years, Hick dwelled at least in Eleanor’s orbit, although her eccentric presence there became the object of increasing amusement. White House ushers called her “the enduring guest.”

In time Hick’s under-answered longing would flag. Her marginal place in the great household and the loss of her professional status only added to her conviction that she had lost her love. Once on a tour of Yosemite, she pitched a full-blown tantrum when she believed Eleanor was too preoccupied by reporters to attend to her. While she and Eleanor would remain forever close, Hick met another woman, a judge in the U.S. Tax Court, and shifted her ardor accordingly. For her part, Eleanor would no longer have to offer the prayer: “God give me depth enough not to hurt Hick again.”

Where does soulful love go? Souls touched by love – even the sting of love lost – seem to be so marked for as long as they live. Eleanor Roosevelt was thirty-four in 1918 when she read Lucy Mercer’s love letters to her husband. When she died forty-four years later in 1962, a faded clipping of a poem, “Psyche,” by Virginia Moore, was found on her night table.

The soul that has believed
And is deceived
Thinks nothing for a while
All thoughts sad and vile…

The soul that had believed
And was deceived
Ends by believing more
Than ever before.

Over the top of this verse Eleanor had inscribed : “1918.”

Franklin Roosevelt lost consciousness in the parlor of his Warm Springs retreat on April 12, 1945. In the mortal grip of events shaping the world at war, Franklin’s last year was lightened and sweetened by the reappearance of the widow Lucy Mercer Rutherford in his life. With his daughter Anna’s collusion Franklin and Lucy had been, unknown to Eleanor, seeing one another for months, always discreetly, always when the first lady was away. Anna, aware that her behavior approached treachery with respect to her mother, also sensed the deep communion his father felt in the presence of Lucy. Not without self-recriminations, Anna chose to serve love over propriety.

Lucy had come to Warm Springs with a portrait artist who was painting the President when he collapsed. Lucy was sitting across from Franklin when he fell. She evacuated her lodgings quickly, aware that family would soon descend. What good-byes she said or felt were abrupt and incomplete. Thoughtfully, Anna telephoned Lucy acknowledging the sadness Anna knew she must feel. Grateful to be able to express her loss to someone who might begin to understand it, Lucy Mercer wrote to console Anna on her loss – and in doing so seems to have revealed her own:

"It must be an endless comfort to you that you were able to be with him so much this past year. Every second of the day you must be conscious of the void and emptiness where there has always been – all through your life – the strength of his beloved presence so fitted with loving understanding…I have been reading over some very old letters of his – and in one he says: 'Anna is a dear fine person – I wish so much that you knew her' – Well, now we do know one another – and it is a great joy to me and I think he was happy this past year that it was so.

Forgive me for writing of things you know so much better than I – and which are sacred – and should not ever be touched by a stranger. I somehow cannot feel myself to be that, and I feel strongly that you understand.

My love to your husband – and to you – Anna darling, because you are his child and because you are yourself."

Like Eleanor’s verse about the soul deceived, Lucy’s letter to Anna remained on her bedside table for the rest of her life.

In the media climate of the late twentieth century, the amorous communions of the Roosevelts would have dominated the tabloids. Lucy Mercer would be revealed shielding her face from paparazzi as she alighted from a taxi. Hick would be belligerent with her former press colleagues when they asked exactly what kind of friendship she and the first lady shared. Some White House usher, lured by cash or the glimmer of celebrity, would tell all about late night goings and comings between the sleeping quarters on the second floor. Such exposure would certainly have aggravated the principals, but it would not have diminished or otherwise altered soulful love. The contemporary mania to expose private lovers is only partly driven by the desire to debunk public figures. More urgently, if less consciously, the media seem to want to expose the mystery of romantic love itself: its simultaneous personal necessity and public impossibility, its inevitability and disastrous consequences, the paradox of its rightness and wrongness.

Love comes to the New Yorker

Happy, by contrast, are the lovers – they exist! – who are able to live out the mystery safely distanced from the probes and glare of publicity. William Shawn, the decorous and very private editor of the New Yorker and Lillian Ross, a gifted staff writer for the magazine, were soulful lovers for over forty years. Their passionate and unconventional liaison – he was married, she was not – was deeply, soulfully gratifying and renewing to each until Shawn’s death in 1992 at eighty-five. Still wondrous at what they shared, Lillian Ross, since returned to the New Yorker, has written a memoir of her life with Shawn: Here But Not Here.

The genius of Shawn’s editorial work at the New Yorker has been widely remarked. Brendan Gill and the gnomic J. D. Salinger, among many other literary luminaries, have described and praised Shawn’s editorial gifts, but the practical, working man remains strangely elusive, mysterious. Outwardly reserved, but apparently unshockable, he welcomed a phenomenal range of originality and talent and seemed to bring out the truest and most distinctive in each writer. He wrote almost nothing himself: a few love poems for Lillian, scraps of song lyrics. His gift may have been to call out of artists the best that was in them, to let them know, usually haltingly and modestly, that he saw and felt what they did.

Shawn was a peculiar sort of heroic lover. He stood five feet six inches tall and was largely bald for most of his adult life. Photographs reveal an impassive, often bewildered face, lips rather full, eyes decidedly sad. He tended to both claustrophobia and agoraphobia, yet dwelled most of his life in Manhattan. He especially dreaded severe weather: thunderstorms and blizzards.

Lillian Ross was more robust. The New Yorker was a men’s preserve until the Second World War created staff openings which Lillian and a few other brave young women managed to fill. Since her school days she had been a resilient soul, a go-getter. A compact woman with lively features under a bob of dark curly hair, she was a hearty, life-long tennis player, comfortable living and working on her own for long spells of time. Among her family and other intimates, she was considered “cute.” Shawn saw her as “beautiful.” In college and as a young woman making her way in New York, she attracted the interest of young men, but she was always cautious about how a committed partnership might confine her.

She loved the New Yorker from the outset and felt at home writing her short, eccentric items. Shawn was part of the texture of the place. He was from the beginning an agreeable, welcoming presence for Lillian, but his full impact would only emerge gradually, rather in the manner of a photographic image becoming slowly recognizable under a bath of chemicals.

Shawn took an immediate interest in Ross’s work – but an interest clearly commensurate with its merit and promise. Later it would be Shawn who encouraged her to write sustained longer studies, such as her celebrated account of the making of a motion picture or her famous profile of Ernest Hemingway. Such projects would take Ross away from Shawn for months at a time, separating them even as Shawn was falling in love with her. With no record as a philanderer, this least impetuous of married men with three small children was supremely awkward in expressing himself to his beloved. When her long awaited piece on Hemingway was published in the magazine, Shawn took her to lunch at the Algonquin, an unprecedented treat for her, and in the course of congratulating her addressed her as “darling.” Ross was startled.

That afternoon Ross noted a gesture of Shawn’s – “choking back a sob” – that she would come to know well in the years ahead. In the weeks that followed, poems from Shawn began to appear on her desk. One evening, working together, he awkwardly blurted out that he loved her. To which, Ross wrote, “I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard what I had heard and got away as soon as possible.”

Ross’s efforts to resist Shawn’s love were substantial. Neither marriage nor an affair with a married man were part of her plans. She wished, in her words, to “go on being a selfish, quiet, dedicated, and free writer.” Slow to awaken, she knew also that she “was beginning to feel connected to him.”

In 1950, with Shawn’s assistance, Lillian took an assignment to go to Hollywood to profile the director John Huston who was then filming The Red Badge of Courage. The profile grew into a book, published the following year as Picture. The day before her departure for California, Shawn invited her to his summer residence in Bronxville to share a meal with his family. In the course of saying good-bye to her, he made his first physical gesture of love:

"He asked me to write regularly – I promised, feeling self-consciously as though I were being treated like a college-bound kid. He took my hand. His hand was clammy. He was trembling – Cecille, standing back at the house, was calling him. I was nervous and uncomfortable. I didn’t want to be there at all, yet I didn’t want to act uncaring about him. I found myself feeling sorry for him, but I admired him and loved what he was, and I was incapable of doing or saying anything falsely patronizing about him. I was bewildered. He suddenly kissed me on the mouth and made a hopeless gesture with his arm. I was in a kind of daze. Then I escaped."

Physically removed to opposite coasts for months on end, each of them preoccupied and busy, Ross and Shawn managed to grow more intimate. Hearing the sound of her ardent friend’s voice over the telephone made Lillian feel “comfortable and safe.”

"We had perfect communication. We didn’t confine ourselves to the subject of movie-making; we talked about everything. Without realizing what was happening to me, I began to cherish our talk. This man continued to understand every word I said."

When she returned to New York, her movie book a gratifying success, Lillian knew some kind of reckoning with William Shawn lay ahead. His poems began to reappear on her desk at the New Yorker. Then, quite definitively, it happened.

One day I was in my office, reading my New York Daily News, when Bill appeared. We looked at each other. It was late morning. Neither of us spoke. We went outside, got into a taxi, and, still without a word, went directly to the Plaza Hotel, got a pretty room, went to bed and stayed there for the rest of the day and evening. Everything between us was so natural, so easy, there wasn’t anything to say about it. It seemed that we had been together for years.

Now, irrevocably, they were lovers. They remained lovers for life – although not always easily or conveniently, especially at first. Almost at once Lillian felt everything a thoughtful woman feels when she finds herself actively in love with a man married and committed to someone else. They talked openly and at length about the impact of the affair on Shawn’s children. Both felt the sour weight of being dishonest. Shawn explained that he could not possibly divorce his wife and leave his family, even though what he called his “real self” was not at his home. His real self was with Lillian, and he could not imagine his life without her. Ross recalls wrenching moments from this period, especially when they would bid each other goodnight on the cold streets of Manhattan and proceed alone to their respective apartments. “Was I a dope?” Ross asks herself. “Was there a vacancy in me? Why was I not beset with guilt – or with resentment – about the woman who remained Bill’s wife?”

Something about the character and depth of Shawn’s and Ross’s love carried it beyond such common and understandable resentments. “Neither of us,” Lillian writes, “acted in these well-worn ways because we weren’t adversaries; we were lovers. We were unable to solve our problems, although we persisted in asking each other most of the unanswerable questions. I wouldn’t be spared rage or disappointment from time to time, but never, not for a moment, did I feel humiliation or pain.”

Shawn, the married one, most certainly felt humiliation and pain. Finally unable to bear the weight of so much deception, he confided his feelings for Lillian to his wife and proceeded to make arrangements to accommodate the affair into the established structure of his life. These included the installation of a separate telephone with a private line next to the bed in his room at home. From this phone he would greet Lillian on waking and would wish her a loving goodnight upon retiring. Later, he and Lillian would acquire an apartment of their own. They furnished and decorated it together, although Shawn could not always sleep there, and in time Lillian found, and the two of them raised, an adopted son from Norway.

In this greatly fulfilling, highly unconventional arrangement, Shawn and Ross managed to breakfast together frequently, take long, brisk walks in the afternoon, share intimate dinners in favored restaurants, attend the theatre, sit in jazz clubs, skate the city’s ponds and rinks, motor to country retreats on weekends. “I wasn’t aware of making any kind of fateful ‘decision,’” Ross writes. “He was in my life, as I was in his, and both of us moved ahead together. ‘For the time being’ turned out to be forty years.”

Over the course of that forty years Ross and Shawn were apparently able to sustain the pitch of devotion and intensity with which they began their soulful journey. Ross writes:

"After forty years, our love-making had the same passion, the same energies (alarming to me, at first, in our early weeks together), the same tenderness, the same inventiveness, the same humor, the same textures as it had in the beginning. It never deteriorated, our later wrinkles, blotches, and scars of age notwithstanding. We never changed."

If there is a formula for such sustained loving, Ross believes that it is “never knowingly doing anything hurtful one to the other.” “We must hold each other close,” Shawn told her, “as if there were no circumstances but only the single circumstance that we love each other and belong together.”

William Shawn was an extraordinary character. Unlike Lillian, who was a little slow reading the outward signs of his ardor and who, quite understandably, was at first bewildered once she did, Shawn never wavered in his soulful trajectory in her direction. His gift for recognizing and nurturing writers seems to have been matched with a gift for soulful love. Moreover – and consonant with the reports of many other romantic lovers – Shawn did not quite seem to feel himself, or much of a “self” at all, outside the thrall of his soulful connection to Lillian. She herself sensed this, although it is a difficult quality to transcribe. Often beset by deep melancholy, and a feeling he was somehow confined in a personal “cell,” Shawn would also experience ecstatic intimations, as when, perhaps, he would periodically “choke back a sob.” His writers sometimes felt he gave them their voice, that they were writing for him. Lillian felt that by loving her, he “gave her” what became her life. Touchingly, she refers to his “daily, improbably being.” He was grateful to her for helping him to maintain “belief in his own reality.”

“'Do you know who I am?'” he would ask me when we had made love. He would know the answer and he would say to me again, 'Please do not let me forget my own life.'”

Ross did not let him forget his life. Nor has she forgotten it. The year after Shawn’s death, she returned to work at the New Yorker. In 1995 she wrote a short incidental piece about private school fifteen-year-olds on the upper East Side. The piece, titled “The Shit-Kickers of Madison Avenue,” pleased her because the children interviewed were so forthcoming, so funny, such good company. “It was three years after Bill died,” Ross writes “and I could feel his delight in them. I could feel it.”

That real life lovers sometimes find deep, sustained fulfillment in one another – without forsaking the ecstatic pitch of their initial communion – contradicts the notion, proposed by Robert Johnson and other thoughtful Jungians, that romantic love is inherently unrealizable. Again, Johnson sees the problem lying in the lover’s projecting the very stuff of his or her immortal soul onto a mortal being. Mortals are assumed to be unable to bear such intensity and weight. In her 1993 study, Impossible Love: Or Why the Heart Must Go Wrong, Jan Bauer makes the strongest possible case for the inevitable failure of romantic love in real time in a real world.

The lovers go from the tropical heat of desire and fusion into the arctic cold of misunderstanding and separation. Work, familiar routine, and lukewarm, safe houses of friends no longer offer any comfort as the lovers ricochet back and forth between the equator and the antipodes. Not only the temperature goes through violent changes, but also our very sense of space. One moment all is huge; our hearts, our love, our souls, our minds expand to contain the entire universe…

Then, in other moments, it all retracts. We cannot share our life with that of our lover and feel a prisoner of tiny moments and tiny rooms…There is never enough time, never enough space – out there. And so the time and space grow greater within, and the passion takes up more and more room as it turns into obsession.

The point, Bauer feels, of romantic – what she calls “impossible” – love is never its own realization. The point, rather, is a necessary psychic transformation in one or both of the lovers. Just as Robert Johnson suggests that souls starved by a secular culture for intimations of divinity call on the power of romantic love as substitute, Bauer proposes that we fall into the grip of impossible love in order to change ourselves, to liberate some psychic potential which the lover is now ready to bring fully to consciousness. “Every love is a revolution,” Bauer writes, “in that genuine love always brings about deep change.” Romantic lovers are at once mesmerized by and worried sick over the startling inappropriateness of their situation: My student! My doctor! Wrong age! Wrong sex! Wrong race! Ineligible! Too good to be true! The abject unacceptability of one’s soul mate in the waking world hurts and chastens lovers miserably, but these very miseries and dislocations may ultimately awaken one to what is really coming to birth and what must necessarily die in one’s emerging self.

Seen this way, romantic love is a means or symptom of some larger, deeper psychological process. For actual lovers, however, it is always an achingly sweet yearning for the beloved. Moreover, as Lillian Ross’s memoir attests, that yearning is sometimes resolved in a beautiful communion. That communion is both in-the-world and out-of-this-world: in Ross’s words, “here but not here.”

It would appear that achievable soulful love is more likely to occur to lovers who are relatively lightly tethered to the “real” world in the first place. William Shawn, for instance, seems not to have been kidding when he asked Ross to help him remember he existed.

Tracy and Hepburn

The legendary film star Spencer Tracy seems also to have had trouble coming to terms with his existence. Outwardly, he was phenomenally successful. His long career first as a Broadway actor and then a movie star took no downward turns. His nine Oscar nominations for Best Actor are still the industry record, and critics were and are uniformly admiring. Fellow actor James Cagney noted Tracy’s uncommon ability to shed his own identity in a film role and enter completely into a character – a gift which made him, nearly alone among his famous contemporaries, impossible to mimic. This very gift made the characters he played seem utterly real on screen, his acting somehow effortless.

A heavy drinker given to periodic binges, Tracy was less gifted in managing his life away from the sound stage. He was unhappily and unfaithfully married when he met the love of his life, Katherine Hepburn, when they co-starred in the 1941 hit romantic comedy, Woman of the Year. They would never marry but remained devoted romantic partners until Tracy’s death twenty-six years later. Tracy and Hepburn were paired romantically in nine films over the course of their life together. Critics and viewers alike were stirred by an unmistakable authenticity in the underlying bond between their screen personae. Always discreet and undisclosing about their personal lives together, they managed somehow to convey a robust, legitimate, irrepressible love on screen.

In 1966 Tracy, who had been seriously ill for years, emerged out of convalescence to co-star with Hepburn in what would be his last film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In it Tracy and Hepburn play established, well-to-do parents of a much cherished only daughter who falls in love with a young black doctor and wants to marry him. As the film plots the course of the young couples’ parents coming to terms with an interracial marriage, Tracy’s character has occasion to tell the mother of his daughter’s suitor the depths of his feelings for his screen wife (Hepburn). To her accusation that he’s “a burnt out shell of a man who can’t even remember what it’s like to love a woman,” Tracy responds:

"You’re wrong as you can be…I know exactly how he feels about her, and there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, that your son feels for my daughter that I didn’t feel for (Hepburn). Old? Yes. Burnt out. Certainly. But I can tell you the memories are still there. Clear, intact, indestructible. And they’ll be there if I live to be110…The only thing that matters is what they feel and how much they feel for each other. And if it’s half of what we felt, that’s everything…"

At which point on film, on the set, and surely in Tracy’s deep personal interior, he is overcome; his voice cracks and his face is clenched at the brink of real tears. Everyone in the cast and crew was electrified, transported. No one in the studio doubted Tracy was talking about his experience of Hepburn. It is a remarkable moment, at once story and real life. Three weeks after the picture was completed, Tracy died.

Not long afterward, in a television interview, Katherine Hepburn observed, “He found life difficult…he found acting easy.”

Soulful love is never easy. The soul aches to love, but the searching, the longing, the ecstatic communion, and the unbearable prospect thereafter of anything less are often unbearable. So finally, love is indeed a problem, but a problem fervidly and fatefully sought. To deny or suppress love will send the soul into a frenzy. Outwardly moderate and disciplined lives will be undermined by strange callings, wanton desires. Puritanical regimens, whether personal or cultural, will inexplicably fester with promiscuity, pornography, every manner of forbidden desire.

To do the opposite, to affirm love, releases its own set of trials and rigors. Where there is love, there is trouble. But it may be trouble we need, and, blessedly, there is more than trouble. There is the release, the vivid experience of the most transporting ecstasy the soul can know. The beloved, like Dante’s Beatrice, can lead a soulful lover to the brink of real paradise and beyond.

The Soulful Beauty of Bad News: Ten Reflections

2009-10-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

The Soulful Beauty of Bad News

1. THE SMALLEST LUMP…
For years when I was a school headmaster I made it a personal mission to tell our students and – especially – their parents that they should not only expect bad news from time to time, but that they should treasure it for the opportunities it can provide to deepen them. We are a school, after all, and losses, set-backs, and outright failure are crucial life lessons. What frail contenders, what hothouse flowers you will be, I told my students, if you do not sometimes have to endure disappointment, inexplicable hurt, and even injustice. Spared such essential tests and trials, a person is likely to grow up unable to distinguish between a disappointment and a tragedy.

Not getting into a first-choice college, not receiving a good grade despite phenomenal effort, not making a starting line-up, not winning an election, not being asked to a dance, not getting a particular job or an expected raise – these are all disappointments, but they do not begin to approach tragedy. I had developed this take-your-lumps prescription into a rather fervent orthodoxy when, humiliatingly, I had to take one.

My oldest daughter was a senior in high school and was in the process of deciding on the colleges to which she would apply. This was a bright young woman with good tested ability. She had done rather well in her college preparatory program, and she had developed a precocious interest in stagecraft and literature. She was, I felt, a strong candidate even for very selective schools. At the time, truthfully, I was apt to describe her prospects more forcefully: my daughter was, considered fully and objectively, perhaps the best college candidate on the planet.

Quite thoughtfully, she had devised a list of colleges and universities, all of them quite good, with distinctive programs in drama. I looked at her list and advised that she apply also to Harvard. Why, my daughter wondered? My answer was certainly spurious and unhelpful. Why? Because (I never said) Harvard seemed Olympian, elite beyond elite, lofty, remote, rarefied, “the best” and thus, though I knew far too little about it, a suitable place for my first born.

Dutifully, if also bewildered, she did apply to Harvard, and when on the early notification date she was “deferred,” I literally lost my mind. My wife phoned me at school to tell me the news, and as soon as the message registered – deferred: not admitted yet or possibly ever – I put down the phone and made my way outside the building. My school is surrounded by an imposing forest of very tall maple trees, and I found myself pounding an erratic path through this forest in the damp grey half-light of a December afternoon. I don’t know exactly where I walked, but I walked for a long time, well into darkness. I recall that I was talking to myself, out loud. I addressed the several members of the Harvard admissions office. The sharpest, most withering of my observations would be retained in the letter I would write when I returned indoors. I struggled to stay on the civil high ground, though I longed to express my incredulity with the burning outrage I was feeling. Bright images inflamed my wrath: my daughter belting out “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” as the curtain closed on Act One of Cabaret; in her linen peasant dress confessing, as Juliet, the depth of her love for Romeo; at the kitchen table working so hard, so late, framed by haphazard towers of books; coaxing the inner city third graders through the play she had written for them; the inky column of her astonishing poem about the eternal ascent of Icarus. Buggers! Bastards! (Restraint failed me. Vast, knowing perspective failed me.) Didn’t I, of all people, know a Harvard undergraduate when I raised one?

I walked aimlessly through a darkened wood, fuming and spewing like a deranged person – no, not like one. It was hours before I was fit for human company, days before I understood just how far off center I had strayed; and even longer before I came fully to terms with the fact that I had taken the most workaday kind of parental lump with less grace than had any parent I have encountered in thirty-three years of school life. I am grateful that my daughter was spared the worst of it. That evening she explained to me that she did not really think Harvard was right for her, and she was not, given the quality of other applicants she knew, surprised she had been passed over. This, it dawned on me finally, was the measure of my daughter. This was her quality.

2.LONGING AND ACHING

We know we have souls, because we long for things, and it is the soul that is longing. It is sweet and renewing to evoke the soul’s longing – for what is beautiful, for what is vast, deep, and mysterious, for others we love. We also know we have souls because we ache. But we do not want to ache, even to think about or to remember aching. Except at very safe distances, we don’t think about aching, and when we do we are seeking remedy, to make it stop.

The biblical book of Job is a soulful and beautiful story. From a safe, fabled distance it tells of a God-related, thoroughly good man who suffers unbearable and undeserved injury, loss, and pain. Understood a little, Job’s story distances us from our darkest doubts and dreads. Understood fully, Job’s story opens up doubt and dread like a terrible, limitless cavern.

What exactly does Job teach? Is there wisdom, comfort, or any other good to be derived from the existential reality that, in the words of Rabbi Kushner's fine book, bad things happen to good people? Bad things certainly happened to Job. Without warning, catastrophe claimed his family, fortune, and worldly security. Before he could fully grieve for his losses, the same malignant force visited his body, painfully plaguing his flesh with suppurating sores. What could Job do? What could anyone do? He laments, he hurts, he asks out loud: why was I born? What is the point?

Like all mortals with a capacity to think, Job wants reasons, explanations. Of course there is a clear reason for his trouble. Satan himself has stripped Job of his comfort, health, and kin in order to prove to God that no mortal will acknowledge Him unconditionally. But while he is no more than a helpless agent in a Satanic test, Job would need a cosmic perspective to see this, and he is a mortal. Like the rest of us, he looks to the world he knows for answers. A number of friends, philosophers all, offer sensible explanations to the effect that surely Job did something to provoke such harsh treatment. Job’s interlocutors know that God is great and infinitely just. To be so terribly stricken, Job must have offended God. But the reader of Job knows that he did no such thing. Instead, he – or his rectitude – offended Satan, and Satan, himself a creature of God, is free to think and do as he pleases. As it happens, it pleases Satan to set up on his own prideful turf and to challenge God. Unaware of his part in the game, Job is left to suffer and ache. To his courageous credit, he is unresponsive to his friends’ bromides, and he continues to raise his soulful complaint.

Job complains until God answers him out of a whirlwind. In his terrifying majesty, God neither explains nor eases Job’s wretched condition. Instead he reminds Job of His vastness, complexity, and power, a context beyond Job’s, or any mortal’s capacity to comprehend. This Job understands: the limits of his mortal understanding. Nor has he been wrong to ache. To ache in such circumstances is profoundly, soulfully true. Seeing this, Job ceases to complain, though not to suffer, and humbly effaces himself before God. In the epilogue to The Book of Job, written, scholars believe, by another hand at a later date, Job’s fortunes are abundantly restored, suggesting in a reassuring way that God doesn’t let good souls down, even by worldly measures. The soulful lesson, however, is not the restoration but Job’s prior realization that abject misery and injustice may be beyond all intelligent reckoning: that while such devastation may not be fully understood, it may be fully felt. The very wrongness – and truth – of Job’s affliction lay not in a cerebral reckoning of the unfairness of what Satan did, but in what Job unflinchingly felt.

Western peoples enter the new millennium embedded in a culture that positively denies heroic feeling. It is a culture that wants its children to “grow up” out of such feeling into cool objectivity and productivity. When such feeling, the soul’s very language, cannot be denied or suppressed, the diverted and desperate expressions of that feeling are medicated into torpor or to death. A soul-denying culture wants no strong feeling of any kind, whether ecstatic, erotic, or horrific. A soul-denying culture does not want us either to long or to ache. I must hasten to add that the denial includes those pastoral and therapeutic voices that claim the curative benefits of “expressing your feelings.” Upon a little reflection it can be seen that the presumed therapeutic benefit of “releasing” strong feelings is that they will go away. This is the point of view that wants to see sexist cultural forces damming up little boys’ tears and fears to the point that they erupt in gunfire on school playgrounds. This is the habit of mind that believes once the dreadful feelings stored deep in the psychic pockets of the victims of every form of abuse are released in a satisfying catharsis – fountains of tears, deep exhalations, primal screams – a benign and viable Normality will prevail.

Such thinking misconstrues the true relationship between the soul and its practical circumstances, between feeling and real health. The point of intense feeling is not to obliterate itself. Nor is the point of feeling, however exquisite or aggravating, to change its bearers, to medicate them or to behaviorally reengineer them so that they no longer feel troubling or inconvenient things. The point of feeling is to register the soulful truth: thrilling alignment or worrying misalignment with essential realities and beauty, rapturous union with, or a despairing isolation from, other souls. Soulful feeling and only soulful feeling bears these messages. To ache and to long tell us the truth about where we stand in the world. There is no other way to know.

3. THE LOSERS WE ARE

Soulful feeling is intense and inherently dangerous. Such feeling registers all manner of trouble and uncertainty. But the feelings are not themselves the trouble; the feelings, again, let us know what is true, what is really there. To deny true feeling, a culturally normative reflex in our age, is to shoot the messenger bearing troubling yet important news. To reverse this soul-numbing condition, we must set ourselves to doing something likely to feel unfamiliar, alien. We must try to open ourselves to, even welcome, some very “bad” feelings and troubling conditions. We might begin to explore such interior states – feeling lost, at sea, contradicted, debunked, left behind, divorced, passed over, or fired – for what soulful messages we might be missing but badly need. Today the quickest way to dismiss another person on the street is to call him a “loser.” But the truth of the matter is that all of us are seriously lost at crucial junctures in our lives. Moreover, the depth and extent of our lost-ness is directly proportional to the saving value of what we find next. A good start to recovering soulfulness might be to recognize ourselves for the “losers” we periodically must be.

Very recently I found myself a big loser. Not incidentally, this occurred at a time when I was especially full of myself. It was spring break at school, and I had planned a solo vacation to Europe. The trip was to begin with some boys’ school business in London, then a first-ever trip to Amsterdam where a much anticipated train ride down the Rhine would take me to Munich to visit a few former students, then another leisurely train to Paris for a few days, then home. The prospect of this trip – the distance, the strangeness, the solitude, the fabled cities – thrilled me. Moreover, the actual experience unfurled before me with an eerily satisfying perfection. The meetings, connections, the striking look and feel of things matched my preconceptions of them with an almost déjà vu precision. I remember the agreeable realization as I was leaving my hotel in London with the collar of my dark overcoat turned up against the cold, that I felt like Harry Haller, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, moving anonymously between great cities.

As I anticipated, the greatest pleasure was the trains. For some reason, the sleek, velvety smooth trains I rode were nearly empty. I had an enclosed six-passenger compartment to myself on every leg of the trip. I lounged alone in the elegant dining cars with their wonderfully heavy plates and cups and silver. Outside the window, ancient winter light cast a steely sheen on the Rhine and helped convey the stony weight of the castles standing sentinel high over its banks. Exactly, I mean exactly, as I had thought.

Perhaps my sense of isolation, even my powers of observation, were heightened by the fact that I was in the process of writing – actually finishing – a novel. The novel told the story of a marriage from three different points of view, and I was very full of this story, and, again, of myself, as I penned page after page into my hardbound writing book, now and then looking up, as if in a dream, at window framed views of the Rhine Valley in late winter. By the time I left Munich, I had finished the novel, way ahead of schedule. I had placed my married lovers in a mythic structure, and my heart felt as if it were dissolving into that great form as I inscribed my final words. Moreover – blessedly – I could read it all over, savor it, on the all-day train from Munich to Paris.

In the compartment of that train, a few minutes before my arrival in Paris, I awoke from a nap. I began to straighten up and pull my things together. I had spread papers and books over the seats, and I clearly recall deciding to keep the magazines I had bought in London. The last item zipped into my bag was the Robertson Davies novel I was reading. No need, I felt, to keep the newspapers, and so I left them strewn on the seats.

I had not been to Paris in twenty-five years, but its settled, elegant whiteness came familiarly back to me. Yet again this trip felt as much a dream as waking reality. It was dark outside when I arrived at my hotel. As I unpacked my bag, I remember trying to name or classify what I was feeling, how I had been feeling since I awoke on the train. It was a good feeling, almost intoxication. I felt slowed down, full – and this was it! – too full of good things. When I had taken everything out of the bag and spread it over the surface of the bed, I knew. There was a terrible current at the back of my head, a sickening flash behind the eyes. There was no manuscript book. It was not there. A year and a half’s work.

Later I could be seen at the concierge’s station in the hotel lobby. An observer would have noted a tense, concerned man asking about how to contact the Lost Properties department at the Gard de L’Est. But earlier, as I stood over my belongings, my palms running horribly over the empty ribbing of my open bag, I was insane. For twenty minutes, like a robot, I placed all my belongings in the bag, zipped it up, then unzipped it and took them out again. Each time I did this my manuscript book was missing.

I was in Paris for three days, but I was not really, wholly there. I willed myself outside, to walk, to observe, once or twice a day to eat. I made, for me, elaborate, thoroughgoing attempts to recover my novel, and I must say the authorities were wonderfully, touchingly responsive. But I never for a second believed I would find it, despite its impressive heft and my name and address on the flyleaf. All I can recall is walking the peopled boulevards in the slanting sunlight of late afternoons, feeling something like a sack of feathery ashes where my heart and innards had been.

It was lost! I had lost it. I was a loser. Weeks, months passed, and I would still dissolve into this state of loss – I can feel it now, as I remember and write. Slowly, aggravatingly, I began honestly to ask myself why, not how. (How was obvious; it was under the newspapers.) Why? What did I need to lose? This book? The story it told? Myself as a writer? Myself who dreams on trains? Myself who feels too full, too full of himself? I will never know, nor does knowing matter. But I feel, still feel, the enormity of that loss. I have felt less, and for less time, at the death of beloved persons. And my loss was a kind of death. I would say that it was unbearable, but I bore it, bear it. I am not a crier, but when I lost my story – to me so nuanced, so surprising, seemingly pulled out of me rather than created – my deep interior cried and cried. I did not cry out, I cried in. And this is who I am now, a person who died a bit and felt it, who knows this, too.

4. NECESSARY DISINTEGRATIONS

It is our very nature to be lost from time to time. Arnold Gesell (1880-1961), the great American developmental psychologist, spent decades observing, recording, and filming the patterns of children’s behavior, and he arrived at a number of clear, instructive conclusions. The first is that, while genes and culture both shape a person’s development, the genetically encoded scheme is far more formative than are culture and environment. For one thing the genetic scheme unfolds in a fixed, invariable sequence. Just as the embryo’s heart always develops before the brain, and the brain before the limbs and extremities, essential behavioral patterns progress in a fixed order:
[The child’s] nervous system matures by stages and natural sequences. He sits before he stands; he babbles before he talks; he fabricates before he tells the truth; he draws a circle before he draws a square; he is selfish before he is altruistic; he is dependent on others before he achieves dependence on self. All his capacities, including his morals, are subject to the laws of growth.
(TD, Crain,18)

Environmental circumstances, Gesell maintained, can affect the extent to which a person’s developmental schedule is realized, but environment neither creates nor orders the sequence.

Put simply, Gesell held that human beings are more evolved than they are constructed. Moreover, their evolution reveals important structural patterns. Chief among them is the alternating recurrence of psychic stability and instability. As the body and nervous system become bigger and progressively more complex, and as the environment correspondingly demands new and more elaborate behaviors, a person necessarily undergoes periods of incoherence and uncertainty. Gesell and his associates interpreted such tempestuous passages as the “terrible twos” and early adolescence not as avoidable “problems” in development but rather as the necessary disintegration of a no longer adequate adaptation to one’s place in the scheme of things. The two-year-old is taking in data both from the environment and from his own interior that overwhelm the hard-won equilibrium of the one-year-old. With persistence and grace, the disintegration of the old scheme will be replaced by a more comprehensive, more adaptive, more conscious reintegration, but until that new scheme is familiar and effectively practiced, there is an all-being sense of frustration and loss.

The soul knows this. The soul feels the loss of the old order just as surely as it will one day warm gladly to the new. We ache, grieve, mourn, despair, grow fitful, endure periods of flat, numbed helplessness when we are temporarily or otherwise out of alignment with what we know best and need most. To live at all, or at all consciously, is to experience spells of misery and disorientation. In their published dialogue, We’ve had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, and the World is Getting Worse, James Hillman and Michael Ventura liken these dark and unsettling passages to “molting.”

Ventura: When you’re in your forties and you hit what they call midlife crisis, when you’re going through a kind of adolescence again, because you’re breaking a bunch of crusts – that’s belittled…

…And if you turn around and say, “You’re god damn right I am, and you’d better stay out of its way,” then you’re seen as nuts…But what you’re really saying is, “I’m molting.”

Hillman: “I’m molting, and I’m at the beginning of something, and when I’m at the beginning of something I am a fool.”
(H&V, 24)

Here Ventura and Hillman advance one of archetypal psychology’s most counter-intuitive and challenging themes: that the human trajectory is not necessarily forward, progressive, higher and brighter. The very idea of psychological “development” may be no more than a wishful attempt to keep the fullness of our being at bay. To accept the saving inevitability of bad news and that, in Hillman’s words, “growth is always loss” calls into question our era’s need, or at least eagerness, to see any troubled condition as a result of prior, and presumably avoidable, ill-treatment. As the cheerful juvenile delinquents in the musical West Side Story sing to the cop sent to correct them:

Dear kindly sergeant Krupke
Ya gotta understand
It’s just our bringing up-ke
That gets us outta hand
Our fathers all were junkies
Our mothers all were drunks
Golly Moses, naturally we’re punks…

The bright promise of history-as-causality, of seeing present stress as the (reversible) result of childhood deprivation and abuse, dims considerably with the realization that abusive parents are themselves former children with abusive stories to tell. As therapists and their clients move generationally down the family hall of mirrors, the assignable culprit, the clear cause, disappears into the mists of the remote past.

Hillman proposes an alternative view of the relationship of a person’s early life to his realized being. He resurrects, seriously, the Platonic notion that “the soul knows who we are from the beginning.” To take the soul seriously is also to take seriously the idea of personal destiny.

Hillman: …take Manalete who, when he was nine years old was supposedly a very frightened little skinny boy who hung around his mother in the kitchen. So he becomes the greatest bullfighter of our age. Psychology will say, “yes, he became a great bullfighter because he was such a puny little kid that he compensated by being a macho hero…”

…But suppose you take it the other way and read a person’s life backwards. Then you say, Manalete was the greatest bullfighter, and he knew that. Inside his psyche sensed at the age of nine that his fate was to meet thousand pound black bulls with great horns. Of course he fucking well held onto his mother! Because he couldn’t hold that capacity – at nine years old your fate is all there and you can’t handle it. It’s too big. It’s not that he was inferior; he had a great destiny.
(H&V, 18-19)

Archetypal thinkers like Hillman fault developmental psychology for its timid and ultimately unhelpful tendency to reduce the pains and losses essential to realizing our souls to symptoms and syndromes. In the prevailing therapeutic climate the emphasis is to counsel or medicate the person out of the problem instead of supporting one’s immersion into its meaning and value. In the developmental, therapeutic approach to well being there is a powerful, if unstated, assumption that we are not supposed to suffer wounds. But from a soulful perspective our wounds – including our most terrible wounds – define and complete our being. No humane person would want to deny the depth and awfulness of the abuses, privations, and neglect undeservedly visited on children – or on anybody. The soulful point is not that being undeservedly hurt is the crucible of personal fulfillment. But we must come fully to terms with such wounds when they are incurred – or else be forever crippled, life-long victims. And in fact, we all incur wounds. Hillman imagines himself as a figure in the darkest scenario: the son of an enraged, brutal father who beats and sexually abuses him.

"And I go on remembering those violations. I remain a victim in my memory. My memory continues to make me a victim…it continues to keep me in the position of the child, because my memory is locked into the child’s view…It isn’t that the abuse didn’t happen – I am not denying that it happened or that I need to believe that it did concretely happen. But I may be able to think about the brutality – reframe it, as they say – as an initiating experience. These wounds that he caused have done something to me to make me understand punishment, make me understand vengeance, make me understand submission, make me understand the depth of rage between fathers and sons...and I took part of that. I was in that…I’ve entered fairy tales and I’ve entered myths, literature, movies. With my suffering I’ve entered an imaginal, not just a traumatic world."
(H&V, 27)

Facing our own woundedness squarely allows us to commune with the great wounded souls who have preceded us; our particular complaint becomes historic, shared, universal. Often there is an intimation of greatness in this. Hillman likens our accrued wounds to rocks which, settled in our deep interior, become part of our essence. It is thus a terrible mistake to try to cast them out, smooth them over, or melt them away. Even while we learn the soulful lessons of our respective wounds, even as we learn to place them in larger, clarifying contexts, we must feel them, we must feel everything.

5. LONELY IN THE WORLD

In addition to our wounds, Hillman believes we must feel loneliness and isolation. This view, also, opposes him to our era’s therapeutic orthodoxies which aim for unbroken cheerfulness and togetherness. In an era which has reduced solitude to a pathology, the soul can find no quiet and still place from which to take stock, no perspective from which to see that togetherness is not the same thing as relatedness.

Hillman devotes a chapter of his book, The Soul’s Code, to the premise that we do not come into this world as a tiny bundle of psychic potential in order to “grow up.” Drawing on both Jewish mysticism and Platonist metaphysics in The Republic, Hillman makes the counter claim: that our souls are intact and profoundly complete even before they are embodied. The existential challenge therefore is not to grow up in an every more complex and demanding real world, but rather to grow down into the limitations and snarls of earthly existence when the soul would vastly prefer the paradise out of which it descended. This notion of growing down into the “real world” as a kind of soulful exile from paradise is supported not only by the Kabbalist book of Zohar and Plato’s myth of Er, both cited by Hillman, but also by the Freudian interpretation of the fetus’s expulsion at birth from a warm amniotic bath in which it floated in an effortless state of self-sufficiency. The soulful reality may be that Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden in the biblical Genesis is the lot of every man and woman.

To accept Hillman’s premise that the soul “grows down” into a bewildering and often unwelcoming world is to accept the fact of loneliness. To be human is to be at times profoundly lonely. This loneliness is not merely situational. It may be due to no assignable lapse in nurture or in societal care. Loneliness may be archetypal and thus unavoidable: a core component of being alive on earth. Hillman suggests that every child is profoundly lonely. Even as they mature, few people can find adequate words to describe the condition.

Moments of dejection drop us into a pool of loneliness. Waves of intense loneliness occur as aftershocks of childbirth, of divorce, of the death of a long-loved partner. The soul pulls back, mourns alone. Twinges of loneliness accompanying even a marvelous birthday celebration and a victorious accomplishment…Nothing seems to hold against the drop. All the networking that has interlaced our extension outward and downward into the world – family, friends, neighbors, lovers, little routines, and the results of years of work – seem to count for nothing. We feel ourselves curiously depersonalized, very far away. Exiled.
(Soul’s Code, 54)

Inspired artists and entertainers are sometimes able to give voice and image to archetypal loneliness – or, more specifically, to the intimation of the lost paradise which is at the heart of loneliness. Such artists seem to cast a kind of spell over us, to hold out, for perhaps the duration of a scene or a song, what Robert Johnson calls “slender threads” connecting us from where we are to the Golden World. Hillman contrasts the careers of two such soulful exiles of the mid-twentieth century, the child star and chanteuse Judy Garland and the exotic dancer Josephine Baker. From her earliest vaudeville turns as the toddler Frances Gumm, Garland was able to evoke an ethereal, better, lost world – somewhere over the rainbow, a place where bright, smiley youth win out, where the world could be transformed if you could only put on a show. Later in her foreshortened life, she would mesmerize audiences of sympathetic exiles, especially gay men stranded in homophobic mid century, by her wrenching evocations of being lost, left, stranded, broken. Baker too had the gift of lifting out of ordinary reality those who beheld her. In her case the promise was aphroditic liberation, unbridled sensuality, jungle fever.

Hillman suggests that her gifts, adoring admirers, and staggering celebrity aside, Garland could not finally bear to “grow down” into the waking world. The experience of workaday reality was too harsh. She sought instead good dreams, impossible love, narcotic and alcoholic oblivion. Even her self-destruction and flight carried her exile fans away.

Hillman contends that Baker was somehow more robust. She quite self-consciously elected to “grow down” into the world, to engage it practically in love and work. She forged intimate, often sexual, relations with hundreds of people, both men and women. She worked courageously for the French resistance against the Nazi occupation. She fought early and hard for African American civil rights. She adopted and brought up eleven children of different national backgrounds and races. In middle life the sex goddess foreswore beauty and vanity. She let her head go partly bald, reported her age as older than she was, lost herself in others’ needs. Baker, Hillman claims, may have discovered the secret for soulfully “growing down” into an imperfect world: “giving back what circumstances gave you by means of gestures that declare your full attachment to this world.” When unbearable feelings of loss and hopelessness opened up like a dreadful void, Garland searched frantically for a quick ascent; Baker let herself down and through the void, into history and the world.

6. BIBLICAL BAD NEWS

There are truly dark nights of the soul. The strongest narratives in Hebrew and Christian scripture make this case: that loneliness and suffering are central to life and that, experienced fully and consciously, suffering reveals the beauty and very meaning of being alive.

The first “historic” biblical narratives in Genesis are the stories of the patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph. Whether read as divine utterance, historical narrative, moral fable, or fertile crescent anthropology, the stories carry an unsettling psychological force; they resonate powerfully in this, and in possibly every preceding, historical era.

The ancient Hebrew figures with whom God established his covenant are decidedly un-heroic. The abiding reality of their lives was not glory or prosperity or even comfort; it was trial and loss. Abraham, to whom God first revealed Himself, was uprooted from familiar lands, troubled by his nephew Lot and was sadly without an heir and successor until in very old age, he is granted a son, Isaac. Then, inexplicably God called Abraham to make a blood sacrifice of his son. Seemingly because he was willing, however miserably, to do it, God spares Isaac, and great promises of future blessings and longevity are made to Abraham and those of his line.

Years later Isaac’s own twin sons Jacob and Esau would fall out over their birthright and inheritance. Jacob, the younger twin, is more cunning than his brother and, with his mother’s help, tricks Esau out of both his inheritance and his father’s personal blessing. But the plan is imperfect. Fearing his twin’s reprisals, young Jacob flees his home and treks hundreds of miles over uncertain terrain in the direction of an uncle who might take him in. Jacob’s short cuts and deceptions make an unattractive story – but we understand it, just as we understand his ensuing loss.

At the very dawn of his manhood, Jacob is reduced to nothing. Moreover, his prospects are terrible. An unattached youthful traveler was likely to fall prey to any number of calamities: wild animals, hostile tribes, murderers and thieves. He had lost his home and safety. He had lost his mother. There were hundreds of miles and countless days and nights in the wilderness ahead of him. On one particularly dark night of his soul, Jacob had a vision or a dream. It was a vision that would sustain him for a while and then, later, sustain Israel throughout the centuries.

"Jacob set out from Beersheba and went on his way towards Harran. He came to a certain place and stopped there for the night, because the sun had set; and taking one of the stones there, he made it a pillow for his head and lay down to sleep. He dreamt that he saw a ladder, which rested on the ground with its top reaching to heaven, and angels of God were going up and down upon it. The Lord was standing beside him and said, 'I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. This land on which you are lying I will give to you and your descendants. They shall be countless as the dust upon the earth, and you shall be spread far and wide, to north and south, to east and west…'

Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, 'Truly the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.' Then he was afraid and said, 'How fearsome is this place! This is no other than the house of God, this is the gate of heaven.'"
(Genesis 28: 10-21)

Alone and desolate as a young man could be, Jacob envisions a ladder ascending to heaven. While it is not yet his destiny to ascend himself, he is granted a rare and powerful insight: that the most dreadful place on earth is the very gate of heaven, and God is there. This experience deepens Jacob, but it does not comfort him: “How fearsome is this place!”

Jacob will survive and even prosper. In the years to follow he works doubly hard to win a wife and his uncle’s favor. Good fortune is followed by calamity. Later as a man of family and considerable means, he flees his Uncle’s house with the hope of returning to his ancestral home. His twin, however, is rumored to be marching to meet him with a small army. Homeless, deviled by both a troubled past and a dubious future, he endures another solitary night in the wilderness.
Genesis:During the night Jacob rose, took his two wives, his two slave-girls, and his eleven sons, and crossed the ford of Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the gorge with all that he had. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him there till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not throw Jacob, he struck him in the hollow of his thigh, so that Jacob’s hip was dislocated as they wrestled. The man said, “let me go, for day is breaking,” but Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” He said to Jacob, “What is your name?” and he answered “Jacob.” The man said, “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you strove with God and with men and prevailed.”

When Jacob is lost, when he is a loser, he contends; he opens himself up to terror and doubt for whatever he is meant to find in them. For his soulful tenacity Jacob is renamed: Israel, or “he who struggles with God.”

In the generations to follow, the Hebrew people will become Israel, and their story is an extended record of struggles with God. Jacob will live to see his beloved and favored son Joseph abandoned and sold into Egyptian servitude by his jealous brothers. In Egypt, Joseph is falsely accused of making unwanted advances on his master’s wife, and he is cast into prison for years. Only his gift for divining the meaning of dreams restores him to favor with pharaoh, and these very gifts save Egypt from a debilitating famine and the house of Jacob from extinction.

There is no biblical or historical end to Israel’s struggle with God – which, however unwelcome to modern western sensibilities, is the point of the narrative. Centuries after Jacob’s kin migrate to Goshen in Egypt, they are gradually enslaved. Moses’ heroic effort to unite and liberate them defines the very heart of Israel’s story. The Exodus has terrific cinematic appeal: an infant savior rescued in the reeds, God appearing in a burning bush, spectacular plagues visited on the oppressors, a divided sea, manna in the wilderness, water miraculously spouting from bare rock, a mountain shrouded by smoke. But at its core, the Exodus, too, is a story of relentless struggle and doubt. Moses does not believe he has the personal gifts to liberate the Hebrews in Egypt, nor, most of the time, do the Hebrews. Before and after the Red Sea parts for them, before and after food in abundance appears in the desert, before and after the Ten Commandments are imparted, the Hebrew people despair of their future. They long for their settled servitude in Egypt. When advance scouts reenter their ancestral lands in Canaan and take the measure of Canaanite inhabitants, their report back to Moses was that retaking the land of Abraham was impossible. Not one exiled Hebrew born in Egypt would live to enter the Promised Land.

For Israel and for, perhaps, all of us there is struggle forever ahead. Great opulence and majesty are achieved for exactly the historical duration necessary to create unbearable longing and loss when they dissolve into inevitable calamity, warfare, and civil strife. The glorious unification of Israel under King David and Solomon lasted for a mere seventy years before collapsing into ruinously divisive civil war. The divided states of Israel and Judah would in turn be overrun by Assyria and then Babylon. By the sixth century BC, even the symbolic center of the Hebrews’ faith, the temple built by Solomon, was razed to rubble by Nebuchadnezzar. Some Hebrews were assimilated, their heritage forever lost. The faithful were exiled and dispersed.

In this calamitous twilight of biblical Israel as a sovereign nation, a new and prescient strain of prophecy surfaced among the troubled Hebrews. Isaiah was a late eighth century BC witness to the political decline of Judah, the surviving Hebrew kingdom after its northern neighbor, Israel, fell to the Assyrians in 722. Little Judah had higher hopes. Capable, its kings believed, of effective alliances with surrounding superpowers, the political establishment believed it could negotiate a future. And didn’t Judah’s capitol, Jerusalem, house the Temple itself, and did not the Living God reside in its inner sanctum?

Isaiah saw larger forces at work. As a young man he had a transporting vision of God as the magisterial God of all creation, all peoples. Behind his anthropomorphic visage, the tribal God of Abraham was a mere mask for a staggeringly vast, supreme and only God.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts:
The whole earth is full of his glory.
(Isaiah 6:3)

This God was enormous, pervasive, ultimate – too complex and comprehensive to be wheedled for personal or even national favors. Isaiah saw the hand of God in the advances of the dreaded enemies. God, he proclaimed, worked that way, too. The appropriate response to such a god was to worship and submit, not to plot and strategize.

Tradition holds that Isaiah was executed by the royal authorities before Jerusalem fell. About a century and a half later, among the exiles in Babylon an unidentified prophet from Isaiah’s school, so-called Second Isaiah, advanced the notion that the accumulated suffering of Israel could not be tidily reduced to the sins of the fathers or to social injustices generally. Israel’s suffering was neither a great misfortune nor a punishment. The suffering was – and this could not have been easy to hear – Israel’s very purpose. Suffering is redemption, full human realization, the point. Second Isaiah establishes the redemptive nature of suffering in four strange and beautiful “servant songs.” The first Isaiah had years earlier prophesied that a redeemer of mankind would emerge from among the ruined and dislocated Hebrews after Israel and Judah were destroyed.

Then a shoot shall grow from the stock of Jesse*
And a branch shall spring from his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
A spirit of wisdom and understanding,
A spirit of counsel and power…
(Isaiah 10:33-4)

Christians of course believe Jesus is the Messiah prophesied by Isaiah. Moreover, Jesus is the suffering servant proposed by Second Isaiah:

Yet on himself he bore our sufferings,
Our torments he endured,
While we counted him smitten by God,
struck down by disease and misery;
but he was pierced for our transgressions,
tortured for our iniquities;
the chastisement he bore is health for us
and by his scourging we are healed.
We had all strayed like sheep,
Each of us had gone his own way
But the Lord laid upon him
The guilt of us all.
(Isaiah 53:4-6)

Christians the world over recite a creed on their Sabbath to the effect that Christ suffered and died for their sins so that they may have eternal life. This creed is more readily recited than understood. It is a true paradox and mystery – that suffering and death make life – and it is the core tenet of Christianity.

C. S. Lewis, a gifted explainer, sees the mystery of redemptive suffering as a means of escaping an existential hole or pit. An all-loving God creates humankind as a sheer gift. Part of the gift is freedom – freedom either to respond to life in God-serving and others-serving ways or to be delightfully self-serving. Because being self-serving is up to a point, delightful, it is easy and seductive to do so. Freely choosing self over God and others alienates one from God, however. We are, Lewis argues, soulfully aware of our lapses; we are chafed by conscience even as we drift pleasingly into self-satisfaction. The more pleased we are with ourselves, the more distanced from God we become, the more inclined to assume that we are self-created and thus responsible ultimately and only to ourselves. As we proceed into self-centeredness, our twinges of conscience become more urgent and disturbing. To rid oneself of such irritation, the self-centered being finally decrees his god-connection null and void, perhaps seeing through it as a superstitious anachronism. But if the initial theological premises – our creation in love by God and a prescribed (but freely resistible) return to Him which is the ultimate fulfillment – are true, then the self-server is in a double bind: first, he is following a life course that is finally unfulfilling; second, he cannot learn or know this because in his pride he has denied and lost his redemptive blueprint.

The problem, Lewis writes, is that only a bad person needs to repent, but only a good person can do it. The mystery of redemption lies in a good person’s willingness to suffer and repent for iniquities other than one’s own. Again the bad – self-serving – person has no motive to suffer or repent for even his own sins. The motive for taking on the sins and burdens of the world is sheer other-regarding love: agape. The point is not that we understand the beautiful-horrible image of an innocent Christ on the cross; the point is to accept the gift, to faithfully follow the example – “faithfully” because we cannot know. It is no more reasonable to love (and suffer) this way than it was for God to give life to human beings robustly capable of not returning the favor. Yet He did and, Christians believe, we must. Again, if Christian theological premises are true, suffering is purposeful and redemptive, not a mistake or mere bad luck. Theological premises aside, those who take on the burden of their own and others’ suffering are well along the road to soulful realization – because suffer we must.

7. BEING FAR FROM HOME

When we are in a state of longing – for what is distant, unattainable, long gone – our soul presses itself on consciousness; it is very near at hand. We are thus especially soulful when we are far from home. Being and feeling far from home is often unbearably sad, but at the core of the sadness is, paradoxically, an acute elation. Never is the meaning, the essence of home more vivid than when envisioned from great distances or spans of time. The heroes and questers of antiquity – Odysseus, Aeneas, Alexander – experienced their greatest heights and depths while far from home. And again, the central figures in the story of ancient Israel achieved their fullest realization as exiles, as strangers in a strange land. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least a numbing indifference to soulful relatedness. Absence makes the heart not only fonder, but paranormally conscious of precisely what has been lost.

The achievement of the greatest writers and artists of modernity has been to evoke the soulfulness of being far from home. Thomas Wolfe had to leave the piedmont in order to evoke it imaginatively; the essence of home is never so beckoning, so crystalline as when we realize we can’t go there again. American writers from Washington Irving to Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, and Paul Theroux have had to leave America in order to find it imaginatively. Similarly Joyce in self-exile forged an eternally living Dublin, just as Nabokov evoked the sweetness and twilight grandeur of tsarist Russia after the revolution exiled him for life.

The distance from home need not be geographical. For Proust the distance was temporal; past consciousness would, after a suitable period of distillation, surface exquisitely, heartbreakingly into the artist’s knowing. Some souls seem to know no earthly home. The writer V. S. Naipaul, an East Indian born in Trinidad, then educated in Great Britain, ranges the world noting what men and women call home, noting also what he calls “the enigma” of every arrival. Emily Dickinson, who sequestered herself at home for her entire life, managed poetically to mark the distance between her daily being and an elusive better world, her real home.

…As all the Heavens were a Bell
And Being but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race,
Wrecked, solitary, here --

We feel the distance from home as we catch present glimpses of prior light. A shaft of late afternoon sun flashes a crimson patch on the parlor carpet -–and you are transported in reverie to an afternoon many years ago, another parlor, another household, a history more vivid than any present reality – yet also, somehow, vanished. A scent in the air, a taste on the tongue, a phrase from an old recording – these too convey prior light.

There is the story of the esthete Marcel Proust who, toward the end of his life when he was ill and neurasthenic, would stir himself from the isolation he kept in his cork-lined chamber in Paris and ask to be driven to the Louvre. Inside the museum, looking neither to the left or right, he would proceed directly to Vermeer’s painting, A View of Delft. He would not look at the whole composition – a broad prospect of the seventeenth century town – only at a small patch of afternoon sunlight glowing rosily on a remote brick wall. It is said Proust would stare intently at this patch of canvas for about twenty minutes, then ask to be driven home. Proust needed to behold prior light.

Robert Johnson told me once that we are all born into paradise: into a state of all-being connectedness to everything and everyone. To develop, to mature, to “grow up” is to proceed out of this condition. Maturation and its consequent loss of relatedness are personally and culturally necessary. It is our lot to “grow” – but as Hillman writes, “growth is loss.” To grow up adaptively, to accommodate practical necessity is to distance ourselves from our first knowing.

Johnson describes the human life cycle as an ellipse. We begin at the paradisiacal curve of the figure, and we are projected out and away from that point with every discernment. Practical knowledge begins as the infant psyche first distinguishes itself from mother, self from world. From this psychic “detachment” follow all manner of distinctions and discernments: person from person, thing from thing, place from place, time from time, before from after, up from down, hot from cold, big from small, right from wrong, cause from effect. The more discerning we become and, with sophistication, the more analytic, the more power we are able to exercise over others and over the material world. True discernment is sound science, and a discerning person is adept at both “reading” and transforming the practical world. Science, enterprise, and political control belong finally to the shrewdest discerners.

But the very acts of discerning, ordering, analyzing, categorizing and organizing combine to fracture the paradisiacal wholeness which is our first condition. Each of us reaches a point in life, typically in early or late middle age, where we are as discerning – as worldly wise – as we are going to get. It is the time of our peak practical effectiveness, a time when we are likely to receive our highest accolades, our greatest popular recognition, our ultimate promotion. With our arrival at this stage in life, so accomplished and outwardly enviable, we enter the opposite curve of the ellipse. We are so far from paradise we come to doubt it exists or ever existed. In this condition it is easy to become jaded and impatient with optimists and idealists. At the far curve of the ellipse we come to resent, if we are not careful, the exuberance and dreams of the young, of even our own children. Entering the far curve of the ellipse, our deep interior feels, if we are honest, empty. There is some reassurance in executing familiar routines, but satisfaction even in these diminishes as the years pass; we affirm these routines, but there is a growing bitterness in the affirmation. There is the mounting psychic conviction that one’s – that everyone’s – life has not counted for much, perhaps alternating with spells of inflated insistence that one’s life has been exemplary, accompanied always by bottomless contempt for (or fear of) those who live otherwise. Entering the far curve of the ellipse, even the most wealthy, glamorous, and powerful feel barren and empty. This is the point in life in which it is seductively easy to slip into physical inertia, obesity, excessive drinking. There is at the same time the danger of desperate regressions: flight, promiscuity, simplistic creeds. Very often the arrival at the far curve of the ellipse is announced by an alarming health crisis.

The passage from paradise to doubt and emptiness is not an avoidable misfortune. But assuming, as Robert Johnson does, that the trajectory is not lineal but elliptical, there is hope. To journey soulfully on, to contend as Jacob did, even through what appears to be an endless wasteland, is to round the curve and proceed, but with expanded consciousness, back in the direction of paradise.

Not every man and woman has the courage, strength, and humility to round the curve. At the extremity, one neither sees nor feels the prior light. It is easy to picture impending death, and at the soulful level, we are indeed dying to something. The old war-horse of our persona, including our crowning achievements, perhaps our most entrenched and defining values, must go – or become integrated into a new, more inclusive context. This shedding of certitudes and orthodoxies can make us feel exposed, humiliated, and foolish. Many are unable to bear it; the loss of “what I have been” feels like the loss of everything, and desperate attempts are made to shore up the ruined fortress.

In early Nordic mysticism there is a tradition of Runes, which involves casting and arranging symbolic stones or panels to foretell the future. Perhaps the most austere Runic forecast is the one called Ice (also Standstill, That which Impedes). Ice, as it happens, is a precise description of the soul’s condition at the far curve of the ellipse:

"This is the winter of the spiritual life. You are in a situation to whose implications you are in effect blind… You are powerless; submit, surrender, be patient… This is a period of gestation that precedes rebirth… Shed, release, cleanse away the old. That will bring on the thaw… Submit and be still…"

Patient submission, willing surrender, dying to the old is the beginning of the soul’s return to paradise. On the return trajectory one passes over the defining discernments and achievements of the journey out – and the greatest of them are revealed to be insubstantial, fragmentary, perhaps inflated errors. We may find ourselves amused, perhaps fondly amused, at our driven former personas. As we return, we find ourselves giving up and shedding with more ease and less remorse. We find that what we are shedding is the merely personal. To lose ourselves is to find everything.

None of this should suggest that with a little patient forbearance, our mid-life flatness will open up into easeful serenity and that in our senior years we will glide seraphically back to the Source in a golden glow. The human record suggests pointedly otherwise. There is the prospect of Ice without end. One becomes the appalled witness to the loss first of certainty, then of vitality, then finally of health. Long before there is any intimation of a way back to paradise, we are lost, diminished, stranded. We lose a breast, a prostate, a colon. We know we could lose our grip on who and where we are even as we live. We may find ourselves babbling gibberish, suddenly unaccountably terrified, soiled in our own excrement. Like Lear, lost and forsaken on a desolate plain in the terminal Ice of his life, we may find our existence intolerable.

8. WHAT DESPAIR WANTS TO SAY

The passage through Ice, the slow and uncertain rounding of the far end of the ellipse, is perilous. It can be fatal. In the second half of the twentieth century western medical psychiatry has worked hard to isolate and treat what is clinically called depression. Manic depression, now called bi-polar disease, has received especially close attention. The low-energy, hopeless, flattened affect of depressives has been linked to depleted levels of brain chemical transmitters, and drugs which stimulate the production of the depleted substances are now massively prescribed. From the standpoint of practical survival, pharmacological interventions offer great promise and hope.

Philosophic psychology has long recognized a phenomenon called psycho-cerebral parallelism: that for every state of mind there is a corresponding state of brain. In other words, the writing of these words is accompanied by a brain state which can be described in highly specific electro-chemical terms. If my brain is electrically or chemically altered, so will be my state of mind – and vice-versa: as I write these words I am changing my brain. Psycho-cerebral parallelism does not, however, account for the causes of mental difficulty. While it is undeniably true that certain pathological mental conditions are apparently improved by the introduction of psychoactive medicines, the causes of those pathologies, whether depressive or delusional, are as likely to lie in the individual’s soulful misalignment with his world as they are in a genetic or disease-related deficiency. Medicine’s aim is and must be to restore the patient to social viability and health. The soul’s aim is to align itself with what is ultimately fulfilling and true.

Some nervous system disorders are undeniably congenital, others determined by trauma or virus; for these medical treatment may bring relief or cure. Just as undeniably there are troubled soulful states that are not finally treatable by medicines. Because a troubled soul slows and aggravates the body, it is easy to attribute this condition to conventional illness. But there is no pill or shot for soulful malaise. Indeed a tell-tale sign that the soul, and not just a physical system, is troubled is that the condition is chronic and mysteriously resistant to any kind of treatment. The Freudian era ushered in a new awareness of “psychosomatic” illness, but knowing one’s soul, and not a germ or wound, is causing the trouble does not of itself ease the pain.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that the present era in the west is a golden age of untreatable malaise. Tens of millions of Americans reportedly suffer from chronic fatigue, a bewildering array of pelvic/vaginal distress, anxiety, and depression – and the numbers are rising. Research initiatives are funded to find cause and cure. New miracle medicines flood the market. Diets recommend radically alkalizing the system, eliminating an entire food group, taking massive doses of a single all-healing herb. More conventional sufferers soldier on from day to day modified by Valium or Prozac. But again, when the trouble resides in the soul, no one seems to improve.

As previously discussed, a soul in Ice, at the far curve of the ellipse, is to all outward appearances clinically depressed. A person whose soul has arrived at this state is drained of energy, out of gas. Even ordinary action and resolution feel hopelessly enervating. Little or no pleasure is taken in art or music, in festivity or celebration, in food or company. This bottomed-out flatness carries with it a feeling-tone all its own. It is likened to sinking or falling into an ever-darkening abyss, to being blanketed from the rest of the world, to being helplessly and aggravatingly separate from everybody and everything. The very thought of forceful or therapeutic counter measures carries the sufferer into acute aversion and fatigue. The darker and deeper the descent, the more yawning the chasm of separation, the more guilty and shameful and unworthy one feels.

And then there is the resolution, however, unthinkable. The worst condition, as attempted suicides know, is not death but a harrowing realization that the present is undenurable. In the unendurable present the barrel of the revolver goes into the open mouth, the blade opens the vein, the last pill is gulped down. We turn the wheel, let go, jump – or not.

Or not. Hillman says we can drop through the very bottom of a depression and learn what it has to tell us. Perhaps this kind of dropping or falling through is, to risk confusing metaphors, the same thing as rounding the far curve of the soul’s elliptical journey. A therapist friend of mine opines that “falling through” a depression can be more deepening and healing than a medical intervention – if there is “support.” By support he means another attentive person or persons who believe your descent is as purposeful as it is troubling.

This same friend confided to me a depressive episode he experienced in his thirties. At the time, the outward indicators of his life and work were strong. He had married happily and started a family. He had a good job and bright prospects. He was a healthy, attractive, talented man – but then the bottom fell out. He was overcome with a dull, sickening feeling that nothing he did, nor any relationship he had mattered. He found himself profoundly unsure, doubting everything. His mother had also recently died, but he determined that his depression was not about her or losing her; his mother’s death, rather, beckoned him closer to an already widening void. He sought help from a psychotherapist, a woman, who, he feels now, said and did some wonderfully helpful things. At one point she asked him pointedly, “What exactly do you feel like doing right now? My friend answered honestly: “I feel like doing nothing. I feel like giving up.” He told the therapist he would like to go home, get into his pajamas, crawl into bed and have his wife take care of him as if he were a baby. To which the therapist asked him, “For how long? Years? A few months? Days?” My friend did not want years, or even months. It occurred to him that it was days he wanted, a few days of utter passivity and surrender. The therapist warmed to this. Days were quite possible! So why didn’t he go straight home, get into bed, and be a baby for a while.

As it happened, taking to his bed for a period of babying turned out to be beside the point. The healing or transforming effect of the therapist’s response, my friend feels, was that she helped him “lean into” the depression rather than to counter it, skirt it, endure it “with strength,” or to medicate it. This depressive felt he had permission to enter into the depression right through to the bottom, right into the crib, if necessary. With support, he was able to do this, and he has emerged, he feels, deeper and more durable and a more responsive therapist himself.

Of course not every depressed person would answer “days” to the therapist’s question. Some would ask for years or, like Hamlet, for eternity. They are anxious hostages in an unendurable present. The first seductive notion of oblivion begins to surface, then the formation of a plan, a highly specific plan. The specter of self-injury or suicide is never benign or frivolous. Robert Johnson believes that suicidal thoughts and drives have the potential for important psychic transformation; something needs to die all right, but not one’s whole being. With courage and support, one might “lean into” even self-destructive fantasies to learn what urgent soulful messages they want to impart. Jung himself wrote about a depressive, phobic episode he experienced in his late thirties. He found himself depressed, anxious, suddenly afraid to travel, even to go outdoors. He holed up inside. Suicidal ideas surfaced. He bought a revolver, loaded it, handled it, kept it close at hand. He made every effort to enter the new, unsettling condition in which he found himself. He leaned, he listened in – inviting even the deadliest impulses to come to consciousness. They were welcome, but they did not come, and Jung resurfaced into the light.

The soul seeks not equilibrium and ease but rather communion with what is ultimate. The soul does not always seek to feel good; it seeks to feel everything. It is practically inconvenient and often wildly inappropriate to feel everything – especially the extremities of feeling, agonies and ecstasies. Our greatest artists have attempted to expose a world in which the totality of soulful experience – from the diabolical to the divine – is at hand. Homer’s Odysseus has himself lashed to the mast so that he can hear and feel the Sirens’ seductive and deadly song. The whole soulful truth may involve periodic excursions into the very maw of hell. Two of the most expansive figures in Greek mythology. Dionysus and Orpheus, undertook journeys deep into hell as did the legendary Aeneas and, later, Dante’s narrative persona in the Divine Comedy. Two master painters of the northern renaissance, Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Brueghel, depicted hells of breathtaking vividness. Despite the painterly conventions of the period and the strangeness and perversity of the tortures and abominations portrayed, any child beholding such a canvas immediately recognizes that it is hell. Perhaps a signature of every great artist is the ability, when necessary, to impart an intimation of hell.

The soul does indeed know and recognize hell, but it also knows that hell is not and must not be universal. Hell on earth is an outrage, never endurable, always wrong. No matter how many tellings and recountings and dramatizations it endures, the soul cannot bear the Holocaust or any other manifest hell on earth. The Holocaust was hell on earth, hell made visible.

9. LOSING SIGHT OF BEAUTY

Hillman and a growing number of thoughtful Jungians are voicing a concern over the less visible or less clearly perceived hells mankind may be unwittingly creating. These writers ask whether the deprivation of natural and created beauty could be the cause of widespread soulful malaise, including depression. Romantic naturalists from Wordsworth to John Muir have celebrated the soulful power and majesty of natural beauty. Aristotle believed the alpine and maritime prospects over which romantics rhapsodize share an essential esthetic property: limitless enormity. The soul rises to the great and the vast: mountains and mountaintops, sweeping expanses of ethereal blue or star-bejeweled sky, oceans, deserts, endless prairies and plains. But the soul recognizes more than mere magnitude in natural beauty. There is the glass-clear pool in the glade, the darkening copse silhouetted against the twilit horizon at day’s end, the low murmur of a brook meandering among ferns and mossy rocks, the chiseled perfection of the face of every cat, the red-winged blackbird’s slivered gash, the transporting orange of the oriole, scarlet of the tanager, blue of the bluebird, the miraculous iridescence and pastels of parakeet and parrot, or saffron scaled fish against corral, a conch in a swirling tide pool, the craft of a nest, a bank of daffodils, the unearthly visage of an owl. Yes. But if the heart flies up and the soul unfurls to natural and crafted beauty, surely the absence or, worse, the ruination of that beauty will cause wounded contraction. Depression may well be more an esthetic problem than a neurological one.

Esthetic deprivation may also help explain depressive conditions that have no apparent domestic or situational cause. I can recall vividly driving in a car with my grandparents while on a summer vacation in northern Michigan. It was sunset, and I was alone in the backseat of the Ford, taking in the passing prospect with heightened feeling. I was eight years old. For a city boy, the surroundings were spellbinding: great outcroppings of granite bluff topped with forests of thick pine, then a break between rock faces and the appearance of still, glassy lakes made smoky and rosy by the declining sun. Stretches of meadow, too, and cultivated fields, and boundary hedgerows felt graceful and congruent. But then we would round a bend and enter settled territory and everything, it seemed to me, was ruined. The corrugated metals used to roof the farm houses and barns, the garish painted billboards, the rusted and skeletal tractors in the fields, the junked cars, phone and power lines slung blackly across the horizon – this was a mistake! I was eight years old, barely awake, unschooled and certainly unrefined, but I knew something was wrong. Why were the made things so awful? Why couldn’t they be made to fit? Each new harshness, each insult to treeline and sky felt like a clout to the head. It was sickening, it hurt, and nobody had taught me to feel that way.

Ugliness insults the soul. It was once believed that certain natural places – springs, streambeds, glades, forests – were so numinous in feeling that they continued to emanate their essence after they were razed, built and paved over. If an instance of despoliation, of ugliness, hurts the soul, pervasive ugliness overwhelms it and sends it into a kind of beaten grief. Environmental ugliness and ruin are depressive. Prozac and lithium may somewhat distance and detach the sufferer from the source, but drugs cannot cure it. For every practical reason, we have allowed environmental form to follow the soulless penchant for speed, portability, uniformity, and disposability – and in consequence have made sprawling, hideous messes. For mile after mile, mall after mall, the soul gasps for a beauty it can bear. Just as the soul seeks prior light, it seeks earth and grass underfoot, never pavement. It is long past time to ask if our chronic and elusive symptoms, if our depressions, are not the result of despoiling the soul’s natural home. What if greater forces than abusive parents, bad marriages, unemployment or faulty neurological wiring are at work in our depressions and anxieties? What if the Styrofoam cup, vinyl desk top, fluorescent light, and fiberboard ceiling panel are making us sick? Where the devastation is so massive and pervasive it feels irreversible, accrued horribly over generations, where the very elements – water, air, earth – seem fouled past cleansing, the soul folds its head under its wing and wants to die.

It is time, Hillman suggests, to consider the aesthetic basis of mental illness and its accompanying physical unease:
"Suppose we are being harassed, as much by the form of things as by their material, where form means their aesthetic quality…

Plotinus makes this clear (On Beauty 1.6.2): 'The things in this world are beautiful by participating in form… a thing is ugly when it is not mastered by some shape.' You and I are in psychologically bad shape because our physical world is bent out of shape. And, Plotinus says in the same passage, “this is because when the soul meets the ugly it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, out of tune, resenting it.” Plotinus here describes the clinical condition of the psyche turning itself in for therapy: out of tune, withdrawn, resentful. The ugly makes us neurotic."
(H&V. 125)

10. SOULFUL SAFE RETURN

Trouble, pain, isolation, doubt without end – this too is the soul speaking. If we want to know exactly what it is saying, we must listen, surrender, even descend. The soul is our instrument for registering our fit in the ultimate scheme of things. Its vocabulary is as variegated and nuanced as feeling itself. The soul can only tell and feel truthfully. When one is out of alignment with or simply starved for beauty and harmony, the truth positively hurts. Yet, if the soul is capable of taking the measure of our periodic misalignment in the world, and if we have the courage to let ourselves feel it, we will not fail to register the renewing realignment when it comes. There will be a first glimmer of prior light, then the familiar brightening of desire as grace bears us homeward.

The breaking of boys and men: part seven

2009-05-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

BEYOND BROKEN BOYS

Contemporary culture has lost touch with its children, and as a result children are experienced as a proliferation of “problems.” The continuing stream of journalistic and analytic attention to perceived crises in children’s health, learning and viability intensifies rather than clears the fog. This is because the apparent attention is not really focused on children—that is, on individual beings with distinctive natures—but on the inconvenience, difficulty or threat children pose to civil order. To commerce children are a promising and readily manipulated market. To an educational complex dedicated to the maintenance of its established assumptions and protocols children present a collective bundle of under achievement, disabilities and behavioral management challenges. Medical and therapeutic establishments identify a bewildering profusion of new pathologies in children: rampant, lethal allergies, attention deficits and hyperactivity that must be treated with powerful psychoactive drugs. More and more children are reported to suffer from autism and Asperger’s syndrome, pathologies in which children appear unable to feel what others feel and to respond to them appropriately. Children are found to be profoundly susceptible to debilitating conditions formerly confined to adults, including addictions, severe depression, and suicide. Millions of children are lost to the world, transfixed before video or computer screens for most of their unassigned waking hours. Children give up their personal identities to groups and gangs. Children are in danger of being hurt or killed, of hurting and killing others.

In such a culture the remedies are as problematic as the pathologies and dysfunctions they set out to remediate. Parents obsessed over their children’s potential failure to gain impressive college admission pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for special tuition, test preparation, and college brokerage. They are called soccer moms and helicopter parents, providing and demanding too much of everything for children already overstocked with possessions and privileges and unnaturally buffered from developmentally necessary disappointments and losses. At the same time there are legions of “latch-key” children who are unstimulated, unsupervised and otherwise uncared for by working or otherwise preoccupied parents. As for pathology, suspicions mount that medicines are cause, not cure. Perhaps required inoculations cause autism. Perhaps antidepressants stimulate suicidal thinking. Perhaps the attention deficit prescriptions are medicating not a boyhood pathology but boyhood itself. Does a lack of scholastic rigor “leave children behind?” Or do we do children worse harm by hurrying them along? Is the school year long enough? Have we lost the pastoral ease and occasions for inventive play children experienced when school ended sooner and started later?

Not surprisingly, there are no satisfying answers to such questions, only mounting new concerns. This, again, is because these concerns are not really about children; they are about adult ease and unease. In this cultural climate the most urgent and compelling features of a child’s life will not be recognized or even seen. The problem of understanding a child’s experience is similar to the problem of understanding a prior historical period or a geographically remote people. We bring to the task the conceptual apparatus, language, and values we have acquired in our own time and circumstances. Without knowing it or even wanting to, our attempt to understand becomes little more than a reduction of the alien to the familiar, of their way to our way. Where reduction fails, we attribute the inassimilable material to inferior or primitive practice, or we simply fail to recognize certain features and practices at all. Thus it is with our attempts to understand children. This is not to say the enterprise is hopeless, just extremely difficult.

In order to understand and appreciate children, to love them and to help them make their imaginative and practical way, we must willfully suspend anything like certainty that we know what children are like and how they are supposed to think and behave. We must put aside, if not abandon outright, our most cherished notions of child development, of stages and phases. Our allegiance must be to children, not to conceptual models, tests, and norms. Even more important is a willingness to reconsider what constitutes data about children, especially if that term is regarded scientifically, as in measurable, replicable units of something or other. Pace social science, but reducing childhood experience to that kind of data contributes to the fog we are trying to dispel. Here one might well ask: what have we got then? This is what we’ve got. We have a loving disposition to actual, particular children, we have memory, and we have a treasure trove of stories. These are necessary but perhaps not sufficient conditions for understanding and appreciating children. There is also a biblical injunction to do something very basic and humbling—to become as little children. Perhaps the surrender of assumptions suggested above will, if it is a real surrender, amounts to the same thing.

Memory is crucial to accessing childhood, and memory is gendered. As a man, my consideration of childhood has taken me to boyhood where, in our era, all is far from well. Was it ever thus? No, it was not. Great and enduring stories remind us that boys once made rapt progress through beckoning worlds, worlds worth exploring, however perilous the way ahead. Memory, if we dare, will do the same.

Boy spirit is not understood through analysis but through witness. The first impression is more feeling tone than describable quality. We sense a spark, something infectious in boy’s urge to get up and out and away. He wants to move, to touch it, hold it, grab it, put it together, build it up, knock it down. He wants to make it move, get inside it, drive it, fly it away. He loves the look of it, the feel of it, the noise if it. He wants to take it outside, take you with him. He wants to show you, wants you to watch him. Maybe, for a minute, he wants you to help him. He wants to be amazed. He wants you to be amazed. He wants to run off, and he wants you to chase after him. He wants to get away, and he wants you to catch him. He wants to do it again.

He loves that you love him, and that is how he begins to love. In this he is irresistible. He is outraged but not cowed by meanness, neglect, and injury. He is neither aware of nor grateful for safety and comfort, but he thrives in them. Safety and comfort are the beginning of his understanding of home, of glad return. If he has been sufficiently loved and safe, if he knows home and loves home, he will play the hero and then one day possibly be a hero, a protector of loved ones, a savior of the city. He may also, even if he is safe and loved, play other parts. He may play villain or fool or rascal or wizard, but if he has been safe and loved, he will hold the hero above the rest.

He does not have to be taught place or how to feel about place. He is born prepared. His senses and his heart are keenly receptive to the print of places. Here you can serve. Take him outdoors, to parks, ponds, darkly canopied stands of trees, to stream beds studded with climbable rocks. Take him to the shore. Let him peer up into the faces of cliffs. From great heights let him gaze out over vast expanses. Hold him tight.

You cannot know and needn’t bother about the thousands of place impressions that he will treasure and store when he is alone: the swirl of the wall paper by the bed, the geometry of the dormered window, the pattern of tiles on the bathroom floor, the snow curled over the eaves, the creak of the stairs, the beckoning dark behind the furnace.

In pictures and in your travels, stand him in front of handsome structures: the classical court house, the cathedral, the castle, the imposing fortress. Let him behold the skyline of a great city .Tell him stories of great cities, great kingdoms. He already holds an intimation of such places and will store the images and stories in his deep knowing. He will go to animals, take their measure. Let him. Watch him watch them, squirrels, yard birds, rabbits, cats. Have a dog. Have two dogs.

Understand that he can lash out suddenly, that he can hit. Understand that he will throw things, drop things, break things on purpose. He can push. He can knock down. He can snatch what he knows is not his, hide and hoard it. He will press every boundary, and he will long to trespass. Understand these things. Feel them as he is feeling them. Remember feeling them. Then correct him. Then stop him. In time he may feel a helpless longing to set fires, to shoot, to stab, to pierce, to blow things up. You must acknowledge these urges, too, perhaps remember them. Then instruct and correct. When you must, stay his hand, tell him no.

As soon as he can, he will turn his imagination and longing to remote times. He is equally charmed by the deep past and the deep future. He seems always to have known that there was a time of dinosaurs. Dark forests and remote jungles are equally familiar. Just as readily he will extend himself into the future, outer space, worlds beyond worlds.

He will be drawn to the trappings and the clothes of prior eras: the knight’s armor, Robin Hood’s tunic and tights, the pirate’s buckled shoes, the tricorn hat, the cape, the sword, the bow and arrow, the chaps, the spurs, the six guns. These dreams will flow seamlessly into dreams of sport, of colossal work. He will be enchanted first by the uniforms and equipment, tools and vehicles. He will treasure, then scatter and forget hats, helmets, balls, mitts, clubs, bats, rods, reels, skis, goggles, fins. He will mount and ride anything that moves. He will quickly learn to steer but not to slow or stop. He does not love the big machines but wonders how to reduce them to his size.

He is responsive to music, even when he seems oblivious. He can feel music carrying him. He will mouth the words without regard to their sense but feeling their attitude. In music he will sense crisis, sweetness, danger, love’s longing and its loss. He will rise at once to making music, to the instruments, their burnished wood and gleaming brass, the thrilling complexity of stops and valves and felts and hammers. He moves at once to percussion.

He will enter stories earlier than you think, even as he fidgets, looks, away, squirms off your lap. You must understand he enters the story long before he follows its sense.
He enters the characters and the creatures. He enters the colors and the shapes. He is able to make them pulse with his own feeling. Show him, read him, tell him stories. When he has sufficient language to follow a story’s sense, some stories will hold him fast, confirm him. Grimm tales of abandoned or imperiled children who make their way will do this almost certainly. Stories of the destined, miraculous birth will do this, stories of Moses in the bull rushes, Romulus and Remus, Jesus in the manger. Do not interpret or explain his stories. Do not tell him the moral of stories. He has already gone deeper than that. He has lived in those stories, and there is every chance that he will go on telling the story because it is now the story of himself.

He enters stories before he reads. Reading does not unlock stories or open them up. Reading is only the medium for accessing stories in texts. Reading, even facile reading, can deaden stories, even as the reader is carried along in the act. The effort and awareness of reading will begin to form a barrier, distancing the boy from the world in the story, so that in time he will be able to say and begin even to believe that it is only a story.

A boy’s experience of other people, of his parents, siblings, adults and other children compose his first stories. Before he enters texts, he enters them. He does not come to know them as he learns their names and qualities. He enters into them, absorbs them before he names and categorizes them. In this he is utterly indiscriminate. If he is safe and loved, he will enter, know, and love others eagerly. He will observe, he will wait before touching, before imposing. He will play along side, listening, watching. Then he will risk offering a gesture, an exchange. He will follow or he will lead. He will do what the others are doing. He will play. He plays long before he is “taught” to play; he is not taught to play.

Boys who are loved and safe, boys who are witnessed rather than guided and shaped, are neither fearful nor fearsome. Such boys enter an open world, a story with all the elements, including loss, danger, evil, and death. In an era when boys, at least some boys, were loved and safer, there was no harm in martial play, in stories of boy orphans, boys kidnapped, boys taken up into a band of child thieves. In that era there was no harm in fantasies and cartoons of edgy cats alternately pursuing and fleeing mischievous mice or canaries. There was a zest, a lilt to the breakneck pursuit of predator and prey, heads flattened with frying pans, falls from cliffs, spectacular electrocutions. In that world the hapless and foolish sufferers always recovered and resumed the chase.

By contrast, in a culture in which children are really neither safe nor loved, where they are shaped and guided and lavishly provided for but insufficiently witnessed, danger lies everywhere. It lies in the coloring of apples. It lies in peanuts and in bees. It lies in fiber glass and household cleansers. It lies in competitive sports, in hurtful toddler games like musical chairs, in sadistic playground games like dodge ball. It lies in animal fat, in milk, in new strains of bacteria, in viruses, in the medicines devised to treat the viruses. If children ride their bikes down the street on an errand, they may be abducted and disappear. Pedophilic predators arise in profusion, insinuating themselves into children’s chat rooms, their vans idling just outside the school yard. Teachers and coaches and counselors are pedophiles. Scout leaders are pedophiles. Priests and rabbis and congressmen are pedophiles. There is no end to the succession of new child pathologies and syndromes and disabilities. Desperate efforts to shield children from threats on so many fronts give rise to monstrous parental excesses, resulting in new pathologies and syndromes. The ambient mood in such a world is terror. It is an age of terror.

One cannot—and should not!—say with certainty how the world will look, how conditions will improve, what fears will be dispelled and what errors will be corrected once we regain an understanding and appreciation of children. To do so would be to set up as if one had figured it out, drawn closure, adjusted the engine, patched up the infrastructure. That is the last thing children need.

Whether born of arrogance or desperation, the assumption of certain knowledge about children and what is good for them is the heart of the problem. There is no such certainty, no such knowledge. Every boy, if he is safe and loved, is a work in progress. If he is lovingly and appreciatively witnessed, he is very likely to emerge a surprise, possibly a pleasant surprise, perhaps the last thing you expected. Hedged in by knowing expectations of what he is like, of how and what and how fast he should learn, of how he should behave, whom he should love, and what kind of work he should do, he will refuse in the now familiar ways: he will draw inward, act out crazily, rebel, get sick.

Because we cannot nurture viable children with certainties does not mean we cannot nurture them. It is disposition, not certainty that is required. The basic dispositions have already been named: the disposition to love, to appreciate, to witness. When these dispositions are central and uncompromised, they are more than capable of resisting seemingly enormous cultural pressures to nurture and school children otherwise. Rightly disposed parents, joining will to instinct, have always done this, but because this disposition is by its nature unformulaic and fluid, there has been no movement or theory or school to carry it forth.

The first condition sought by the loving parental disposition is safety, and this cannot be overemphasized. Abraham Maslow rightly put a child’s safety at the foundation of any possible future realization. This is real safety, the soul’s apprehension of safety. It cannot be materially produced. It cannot be abstracted to suburban or rural refuges. It certainly cannot be gated. No privilege can buy it. A child can be safe and loved in a tenement or in a trailer park. Children who live in unworldly opulence, with every toy and diversion, can and do live in hellish anxiety and fear. For many western children unworldly opulence has become normative, generating its own stream of anxiety, the anxiety of not getting it, of not having it yet, of losing it. It is harder than almost any idealist imagines to shake compulsive acquisitiveness in a culture predominantly dedicated to material acquisition. In that culture, so fundamentally lacking in real safety, acquisition holds out the desperate promise, a promise never fulfilled. Children who sense their parents’ desperation in this regard become doubly so.

If a loving disposition can rise to resist crippling, dead-end acquisitiveness, it can also stand guard against and resolutely refuse to practice what the angry Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing called psychic robbery. Psychic robbery is the practice of substituting one’s own desires for what a child is thinking and feeling. Psychic robbery occurs in seemingly benign ways, as when a child declares, “I hate broccoli,” and a parent responds, “You don’t hate broccoli.” It also occurs—normatively—when children express their darkest and most intense feelings: “I hate baby,” “I want to kill you.” When parents and other nurturers answer “no you don’t,” “you don’t feel that way,” the child is not reassured; he is made anxious and hurried into despair, because the truth has not been acknowledged.

Psychic robbery is exponentially worse than disagreement. A child’s dark or challenging declaration can be met with sheer witness, with questions, with consolation, or with objection, but if it is met with a knowing, manipulative, or perhaps angry insistence that his feeling is not felt, that what was actually felt is an alien mental state, that is the beginning of a child’s profoundest anxiety and despair. The child is easily cowed into verbal denials and recantations, but the underlying and now inaccessible interior condition is deepening anxiety and despair. To deny and replace any true mental state felt or declared by a child is in effect to negate him, to cut him off from connectedness to others, to undermine his safety. Children detached in this way do not forsake the dark or unwanted sentiment. To the contrary, because the sentiment has been unwitnessed and unmet, it will become a fixation. Only in a detached, unreachable condition can a child live on in a world of psychic robbers. He will not relate to or find himself in seemingly well-intentioned but actually frightened classrooms and school curricula where the dark thought is unutterable on pain of expulsion, where it cannot be found in the assigned texts or even in the libraries, where organized exercises to identify and express “feelings” are highly manipulative, transparent attempts to lighten and sweeten the real thing, not to open it up, but to seal it off. There is ultimately no denying the darkness. Psychic robbery is both a selfish and futile practice. It is generated by a fearful disposition, not a loving one. The culture in which psychic robbery is normative will find itself overwhelmed by the very terror it refuses to witness in children.

I hope by now it is understood that all of this is offered out of a particular disposition, not out of certainty. This is not to say that disposition is weak or somehow inferior to certainty. Love and appreciation of children can infuse disposition with great strength and clarity—but again, not certainty. Beware of certainty, of the need for certainty. Certainty can only close off and cut short the continuous process of our understanding. Forsaking certainty does not mean you cannot know things. Knowing is not confined by certainty. It is possible to know, for instance, that the pursuit of certainty is futile, that the assumption of certainty does not satisfy.

All of so-called “self-help” is driven by the illusion of certainty: that some sage or therapist knows for certain why what’s wrong is wrong and how to make it right. Like addicts on the prowl for a fix their enfeebled forebrains know full well will not permanently satisfy, like unlucky gamblers emptying their wallets to place yet another bet, like school girls prowling the malls for yet another tank top or lip gloss, strangely aware that these items will not transform or satisfy them any more than any of their prior purchases, the self-helpless continue to kneel at the alters of certainty.

It is by no means certain but perhaps very promising that in addition to a loving disposition to children, certain pathways ahead beckon brightly—in fact, have always beckoned brightly. Again, my experience limits me here to the experience of boys.

I believe boys can thrive. In the past some have thrived. We have their stories. Loved and safe as they begin, boys have and perhaps can again make their way vigorously through experiences both enlivening and self-affirmingly great. In this condition their lives unfold as in a story. The first is the story of boyhood itself, the limitless exuberance and danger and wonder of the puer-spirit, the puer-spirit played out in every way, in every place, with whatever kind of gear, and with whatever companions happen to be at hand.

The boyhood story is busy and charged with movement, but there is no forward motion. Forward motion begins in another story, the story of a passionate quest. This is a love story. The boy is taken up, consumed in, enchanted by someone beloved, someone perfectly good, perfectly beautiful. The nearer he gets to the beloved, the deeper the communion, the more vaulting the love. There is no end to this, but even as the lover feels and seems to have it, it is at risk, it is elusive, it is gone. There must be a quest to regain this. Its allure is at the same time utterly chaste, deeply sexual and holy. The quest is for something like the legendary grail or a magic ring. It is for somebody like Dante’s Beatrice or Romeo’s Juliet. There is no certain end to this quest. There is every peril and obstacle. The quest could fail, could end in disappointment or even death. The very sadness of that prospect intensifies the beauty of the condition. The great boy does not care. He wants only to try. He wants to be consumed in the trying.

There is another boy’s story, perhaps the final story. This is the story of saving the city. The very best of cities has enemies within, enemies without. The great boy realizes early on and will continue to realize through the course of his life that the city, like his loving parents, has been his playground, his school, his home and his safe return. He has always loved his city, and even as he quested far from home, he realizes that without the city he could not have been. His happiness and all of his beloved could not have been.

His love helps him to see that the city is in peril and he musk risk everything, face every danger to save it. Saving the city is now the quest. It will require every thing he has mastered and understood. He will not, or not for long, attempt political reforms. He will not fall back on reasons and arguments. He is driven by no vision of clean streets, prosperous commerce, or civic conduct. He will of course create or preserve order, but he wants to save to soul of the city, its vitality, its loving disposition. We cannot of course know exactly how this new order will be constituted. It will be the kind of order a spirited boy who wants to save the city would create. It would be an order good for spirited boys. It might be the salvation of all of us, although nobody can say for certain.

The breaking of boys and men: part six

2009-05-19T06:51:00.000-07:00

BOYS WITHOUT A STORY:
Broken Boys in the World

Boys reveal their broken condition in two ways. They tell us how they feel in written and spoken utterances, and they act out their inner state in increasingly dramatic and violent ways. If the broken boy’s connection to what sustains him has been severed so completely that he can no longer even recognize it or long for it, he fills the void of what has been lost with visions of negation. He alternately wants to destroy himself, to destroy others, and to destroy the world in which his life grows increasingly desolate.
Boys entering junior high school and on the brink of biological puberty are profoundly aware that the days of their true boyhood, such as they might have been, are numbered. They know just as surely as Peter Pan what the story of their future promises to be: an increasingly consequential progression of school requirements and then work. They feel the looming weight of the unstated expectation that a boy will one day assume domestic responsibilities as a husband and a father as well as civic responsibilities as a citizen, perhaps a community leader, and, if needed, a soldier. These prospects carry no allure or romance. Boys are more or less aware of them, but, except for certain fantasies of soldiering and combat, they do not long for them. Boys with nothing to long for attempt to fill the void with intense, reality-obliterating stimulation. They seek it with whatever materials are at hand: street drugs, liquor or pharmaceuticals filched from their parents, toxic inhalants, violent fantasies, and, once they are able to amass a suitable arsenal, violence itself.
Perhaps the least remarked aspect of the grim progression of American schoolyard shootings in recent years is that many of the young perpetrators had hoped that, in addition to drama, catastrophe, and annihilation of the people and things, their outing might provide some “fun.” Andrew Golden and Mitchell Johnson were 11 and 13 when they bundled a collection of rifles and handguns pilfered from Andrew’s grandfather into one of the Johnson’s vans and drove off to shoot their classmates and teachers at Westside Middle School in Jonesboro Arkansas, March 24, 1998.
Neither boy was an innocent. Andrew, his schoolmates claimed, had previously tortured and killed a friend’s cat and had shot another child in the face with a pellet gun. Mitchell boasted that he had formerly been a member of a violent gang, talked about getting high and “having a lot of killing to do.” At the time of the shootings, he was awaiting trial for having molested a little girl while he was visiting his estranged father.
The morning of the shooting the boys, dressed in army-fatigue outfits, drove to school and parked the van nearby. While Andrew ran inside and set off a fire alarm, Mitchell hauled the guns into the woods directly across from the school entrance. As the children streamed outside, the boys opened fire, killing four girls, a teacher, and wounding nine others before fleeing back to the van, where they were overcome by police.
In their school photographs the boys look, if anything, younger than their years, but each had already developed a canny sense of what he needed to do to appear to meet adult expectations. After their arrest, when their parents and other adults were present, they wept, expressed remorse, and asked for bibles and a chance to see their minister. With the other young inmates and out of their elders’ view, the boys talked excitedly and boastfully about what they had done, especially shooting a teacher Andrew particularly disliked.
Because of Arkansas’s relatively lenient sentencing laws for juvenile felons (since revised), Andrew and Mitchell were detained in juvenile detention facilities until their twenty-first birthdays. Mitchell was released in 2005 without a public record as a felon, legally able, if he should so choose, to purchase firearms. One New Years Day, 2007, he was arrested, along with another young murderer who had been convicted and released, for possession of marijuana and illegal possession of a loaded handgun. Andrew was released from detention on his birthday in May, 2007.
Six weeks after the Jonesboro school shootings, Kip Kinkel, 15, shot and killed his mother and father at home after they found out he had been expelled from school for having a stolen handgun in his locker. The following day, he packed up an assortment of his pistols and rifles and opened fire on his classmates at Thurston High School in Springfield, Oregon., killing two of them and injuring 25 before being subdued by police.
Kip’s mother and father were high school Spanish teachers. The Kinkels lived in a commodious suburban house where Kip was virtually an only child, his older sister by six years having departed for college. The extensive media coverage of the massacre stressed how unlikely it seemed to those who knew him that Kip would be capable of such brutal murders. Teachers and schoolmates described him as “boyish and likable.” His parents were reported to be attentive and loving. Commentators searching for possible psychological factors in the outburst pointed out that in a family of achievers, Kip was dyslexic and had to struggle scholastically, also that he was physically awkward in a family that prized athletic prowess.
In a journal he kept and in some of his assigned school writing, Kip tried to express what he was feeling about himself and his place in the world. These documents make clear he was suffering miserably, even as he presented a “boyish and likable” face to the world. He is boyish and likable in the note of confession he left after shooting his mother and father: “I have just killed my mother and father! I don’t know what is happening. I love my mom and dad so much. I just got two felonies on my record. My parents can’t take that…I’m so sorry. I am a horrible son. I wish I had been aborted…I don’t deserve them. They were such wonderful people.”
He is boyish and likable in his statement of contrition to the survivors of those he killed at school. “I have thought about what I could say to make people feel just a little bit better. But I have come to the realization that it really doesn’t matter what I say. Because there is nothing I can do to take away the pain and destruction I have caused. I absolutely loved my parents and had no reason to kill them. I had no reason to dislike, kill or try to kill anyone at Thurston. I am truly sorry this happened…”
It is almost unbearable to look at the photographs of Kip Kinkel’s face that appeared in the press at the time of the incident. Dark bangs fall over the forehead of a troubled, wistful boy’s face. It is a face one cannot help liking. It is a boy one somehow wants to embrace. His dark and desperate journal entries indicate no viable path forward in his school life or beyond. At one point he remarks that he would be unthinkable as anyone’s father. He reveals a powerful infatuation for a certain girl whom he is sure will never really know him and penetrate his isolation. He cannot imagine easy, satisfying friendships. He cannot imagine succeeding on the school’s terms or his parents’ terms. There was never for him a secret garden or Neverland or any kind of boy-realm where he felt invigorated, inspired and secure just as he was. The only way ahead he acknowledges is the world’s way, and toward that world he feels no tug or welcome, only alternating waves of murderous anger and self-loathing. And while he cannot see a place for himself within it, he does not fault the world of his family or the world of school. “They were wonderful people. It’s not their fault…My head just doesn’t work right…I wish I made my mother proud. I tried so hard to find happiness. But you know me, I hate everything.”
Kip Kinkel was by no means an eloquent or practiced writer, but in the personal journal found in his room, he may have come very close to realizing what was at the heart of his dreadful impulse to hate and to harm. “I don’t want to see, hear, speak or feel evil, but I can’t help it. I want to kill and give pain without a cost. And there is no such thing. We kill him—we killed him a long time ago.” The transition from expressing his desire to kill and give pain to the statement, “We kill him—we killed him a long time ago,” is surprising, seemingly irrational. That transition is revelatory, however, if one assumes, as Kip Kinkel quite possibly did, that the “him” referred to is boyhood itself.

On April 20, 1999, a little less than a year after Kip Kinkel opened fire on his classmates at Thurston High, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, both seniors at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, Colorado, entered the school in late morning heavily armed and dragging duffel bags filled with home-made explosives. Over the next 55 minutes, they wandered about the cafeteria, library and corridors of the school, tossing bombs and firing rifles and handguns at students and faculty. At times the shooters seemed to be firing randomly at display cases or banks of windows. At other times they would focus murderously on students they knew, taunt them and ridicule them before shooting them at point blank range. A little after noon, the school had grown quiet. Twelve students and a teacher lay dead. Twenty-four others were wounded. What students and staff remained were either silently hiding or dead. Police S.W.A.T. teams were massing outside, preparing to storm the building. A school surveillance video captured the final moments of the assailants’ lives as they paced agitatedly about the library before sitting down and shooting themselves fatally in the head.
Of all the school massacres of the past decade, none has been more troubling or gruesome than the Columbine shootings. The killers were older, farther along in their personal development, more effective, better planners. Both boys were facile with computer technology and shared a passion for firearms and explosives. Neither came from abusive or especially troubled households. Neither expressed hostility to his family. In documents discovered after the shootings, both boys stated explicitly their families were in no way at fault. On a calendar kept by Harris and found after his death, he wrote “good wombs have born bad sons” in the Mother’s Day square. Of the two friends, Harris was the more volatile and angry. Earlier in high school he had posted on his computer what appeared to be death threats to a former friend but local police did not see grounds for a formal response. At the time of the shootings Harris was taking a prescription drug, Luvox, to treat depression.
Klebold, best friend to Harris throughout high school, was quieter, harder to read. Some of his classmates thought him merely shy, but others, including some of his teachers, were aware of an angry, rebellious streak. He was inclined to inappropriate language in class, and one of his senior year creative writing assignments was felt by his teacher to be violent and mean-spirited enough to warrant a concerned conference. Klebold served for a time as a technology aide in Columbine’s computer facility, but he had to be disciplined for stealing one of the school’s lap tops and taking it home. In January of their junior year, Harris and Klebold were arrested for breaking into a car to steal computer equipment, for which both were required to undergo psychological counseling and to perform community service. Both boys complied and expressed contrition in the course of their mandated rehabilitation but secretly vowed to wreak a terrible “judgment” on those who had caught and disciplined them for what they cryptically called “the incident.”
The massacre appears to have been planned for over a year. Not old enough to purchase firearms legally, they found intermediaries through whom they could buy shot guns, pistols and semi-automatic weapons. On the internet they learned how to make pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, and other explosives, more than a hundred of which they brought to school on the day of the attack. They kept meticulous track of their growing arsenal, including a video inventory. They logged time at a nearby firing range to practice shooting, also documenting these outings with video recordings. The boys periodically exchanged coded messages about the apocalyptic event they had conceived. The attack they were planning was sometimes linked to the film Natural Born Killers, in which a deranged young couple goes on a cross-country shooting spree.
There is a decided grandiosity in the way the boys referred to the impending event. The date of the shooting, April 20, seems to have been a last-minute postponement; the boys had hoped to launch their attack on April 19, commemorating the Branch Davidian shootout in Waco, Texas, the Oklahoma City bombing, and Hitler’s birthday. A year before the massacre, Klebold referred to it as the “holy April morning.” The day prior to the event he filled up pages of his school notebook with excited musings: “About 26.5 hours from now the judgement will begin. Difficult but not impossible, necessary, nervewracking & fun.”
When Klebold was confronted by his parents about the violent fantasy he had handed in to his Creative Writing teacher, he protested, “It’s just a story.” There is a clear sense in the documents they left behind that both boys were hungry for a story; more specifically, that their own lives might rise to story quality. But besides Natural Born Killers, the only stories in which they could locate themselves were those structured into their favorite video games, Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. In both games, one set on Mars, the other in a kind of Nazi prison, the challenge is for an armed and embattled individual to prevail against a teeming onslaught of attackers. In both games the embattled individual is decidedly righteous, and the attackers—sinister humans, extra-terrestrials, demons—are evil. In both games the world in which the combat is carried out is utterly spoiled. Combatants battle on ramparts suspended over putrid seas of toxic waste. No better world, no prior world awaits the lone victor. He exists to prevail in an endless and escalating succession of violent encounters in which one can either kill or be killed. Crucial for survival in each game is the acquisition of ever more lethal weapons.
Klebold and Harris seemed to be arming themselves for such a contest. A few generations earlier or in the cultural context of another hemisphere, their fantasizing might have been played out on the open range, with a lone cavalry officer on horse back confronting an Apache war party ascending the ridge before him, or perhaps with a masterfully skilled martial artist leaping, kicking and chopping his way through a never ending swarm of deadly attackers. But for Klebold and Harris, the story they were attempting to compose was an angry, ugly blend of Doom and Wolfenstein and Waco and Oklahoma City and Jonesboro. In their story they would be the lone, pitiless, against-the-world combatants, and their enemies would be all who had ever slighted them, ignored them, shamed them, or irritated them, even if the provocation was no more than living, looking, behaving and believing as they did.
The ruined world was school, Columbine High School. In it, as Klebold inscribed in Harris’s yearbook, “my wrath will be godlike.” Harris confided in his journal, “Before I leave this worthless place, I will kill whoever I deem unfit.”
Since the inception of the plan to attack their school, both boys were aware that one way or another they would lose their lives. Harris pledges he will “leave this worthless place” without regret. Three years before 9/11 he mused about hijacking a plane in Denver and crashing it into a building in New York City. The day before the shootings, Klebold wrote in his notebook, “It’s interesting, when I’m in my human form, knowing I’m going to die.” Elsewhere in the same notebook he hopes that the rampage might be at least “fun.” “What fun is life,” he wrote, “without a little death?”
In the event, the Columbine school massacre was, even by the perpetrator’s standards, a terrible story. Sensational as the breaking news of the shootings was, the attack did not go as planned. The initial event was to have been the detonation of two substantial propane bombs in the cafeteria. The bombs they assembled were to have been powerful enough to blow up the entire cafeteria and cause the library above to collapse over the wreckage. The attack plan called for the boys to plant the bombs, withdraw to their cars to observe the devastation and then to open fire on students and faculty as they fled from the building. When the bombs failed to detonate and Harris and Klebold reentered the building, students were slow to realize their gun-toting classmates posed a danger.
As the two armed shooters ranged through the building, they shot some students at close range. They spared others. They fired idly in the direction of distant students, missing most of them. They shot out banks of windows, prominent display cases. Every few minutes they would toss an explosive—pipe bomb, Molotov cocktail—over a railing or under a desk where students were cowering, but most of the bombs failed to explode. A boy who knew Klebold asked him what he was doing. Klebold answered, “Oh, just killing people.” To a girl he encountered praying out loud that she would not be killed, Klebold pointed his gun at her and asked, “Do you believe in God?” He taunted her for a while and then apparently lost interest.
There were brutal, cold-blooded moments. Discovering a tangle of students hiding under a table, Harris said “peek-a-boo,” then shot and killed them at point blank range. At one point in the library, the shooters demanded that “all the jocks” stand up so they could shoot them. None did. Witnesses report another girl was asked if she believed in God and was shot when she answered affirmatively.
In less than an hour the school was quiet. The gunshots and a few of the explosives had damaged the facility, but it was not the smoldering ruin the boys had envisaged. Twelve students and a teacher lay dead in or around the building. Twenty-four others had been hurt. As police SWAT teams positioned themselves outside, Harris and Klebold paced distractedly about the library. Harris was bloodied and suffering from a broken nose caused by the recoiling stock of his rifle. Sensing there was nothing more to do, the boys sat down and shot themselves. No one can know their final thoughts, but they would have been aware that the attack had not gone very well, that they had failed to cause the kind of devastation they had imagined. There is no indication that either boy experienced any kind of revelation, however dark. Klebold was not seen to have had any “fun,” sadistic or otherwise. The events combined to no coherent story.
At seventeen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were as tall and rangy as men. Unlike Kip Kinkel, they could not have been—and in fact were not—called “boyish and likable” by anyone. And in fact they were not at all like boys; they represent, rather, something vacant and devastating that boys might become.

The breaking of boys and men: part five

2009-05-19T06:50:00.000-07:00

BOYS BROKEN

When, on the brink of suicide, young Werther makes his final, desperate case to his beloved—that his boy-spirit, his very vitality depends on her undivided love and attention—Lotte, now married, responds with the last thing he wants to hear. “Be a man. Put an end to this dismal attachment to a creature who can do nothing but pity you.” (115)
Lotte’s mature and practical perspective is worthy of Freud in its psychological acuity, but the insight is no help to Werther, as the pitch of his feeling—inflamed, impossible, or otherwise—is the very condition that sustains him. He has experienced the ecstasy of living at that pitch, a psychic frequency to which uncompromised boys become easily attuned. When Lotte implores him to “be a man,” to get over the condition he has experienced as life itself, he witheringly responds that her words “could be printed and commended to the use of teachers.”
Werther had been schooled enough to sense that the purpose of culturally mandated education is not to enlarge or exercise a child’s spirit but to tame and subordinate it to culturally approved purposes, a process which from the spirited child’s standpoint is an unbearable violation.
By the time Barrie composed Peter Pan, the protocols of compulsory schooling were so firmly established in western minds as to be virtually unquestioned. There has long been and continues to be a proliferation of schemes for educational reform, but any serious reconsideration of compulsory schooling itself has been all but non-existent—except in stories.
For Barrie, who remembered being happy in school but not at university, submission to schooling was fundamentally opposed to the free expression of boy-spirit. In Peter Pan the embodiment of schooling is Hook, who loathes the very idea of Peter Pan, who confesses to being unable to look at him while he is sleeping, because there is something so untroubled about his posture.
Hook’s character, Barrie discloses to his readers, was fashioned in the crucible of school, and it is school’s central aim to capture and eliminate the likes of Peter Pan.
“Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in ablaze; but as those who have read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments…and he still adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he retained his passion for good form.” (229) The imposition of good form is the ultimate accomplishment of schooling, but it requires the gradual mastery and then the elimination of boy-spirit. Peter knows this instinctively. When Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother, asks Peter if she may adopt him, the first thing he asks her is “Would you send me to school?” Mrs. Darling tells him that she would, and then to an office, and then he would be a man. Peter tells her without reflection that he doesn’t want to go to school and learn “solemn things.” More direct than young Werther, he tells her, “I don’t want to be a man.”
The adopted lost boys ultimately bear out Peter’s reservation. “Before they had attended school a week they saw what goats they had been not to remain on the island; but it was too late now, and soon they settled down to being as ordinary as you or me or Jenkins minor. It is sad to have to say the power to fly gradually left them.” (231)

Later in the twentieth century, after the world wars, a new kind of boy’s story began making an insistent appearance. In these stories there is no rapturous flight, literally or figuratively; there is only falling, loss, and utter wreckage. A boy like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (1951) may have an intimation of a prior, golden world, but he will fail to locate it in the course of his sad, lonely truancy in Manhattan. Holden has just bolted from a prep school from which he was about to be dismissed for unsatisfactory effort. At the brink of nervous collapse, he imagines stepping off curbsides into an abyss. In this state he pictures himself in a field of rye at the top of a steep cliff where he is patrolling in order to catch wandering children before they can fall.
In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (l959) Gene, a self-aware young man who has successfully mastered the good form necessary to make his way at his prep school, realizes that his best friend, Phineas, has a quality he longs for but cannot master: an untamable exuberance. Phineas’s playful spontaneity is counter-scholastic, if not downright anti-scholastic, and while it is infectious among his companions, it arouses a poisonous envy in Gene whose determined scholastic attainments have barred all access to such openheartedness. One evening on a study break Gene and Phineas climb up a tree to a limb overhanging a riverbank. To make one’s way far enough out on the limb to clear the bank when he jumps requires exceptional daring, and this prospect is thrilling to Phineas. As Phineas moves out along the limb, Gene, without reflection, jounces it with his foot, causing his friend to fall sickeningly to earth. The resulting injury ultimately kills him.
As the Cold War baby-boom years progressed, stories of fallen, broken boys proliferated. The phenomenally popular Catcher in the Rye was for a time viewed warily by schools and, due to Holden’s frank and sometimes vulgar utterances, banned in some, but within a decade the book, along with Separate Peace and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), became required school reading. But even as the story of the fallen boy became standard school fare, successive tellings grew darker and grittier. By the early nineteen sixties, there is a clear sense in the strongest boys’ stories that the descent is past mattering; the only thing left to report is the hellish quality of the fallen condition.
Even before his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver was widely recognized as a modern master of the short story. One of his earliest published stories, “Nobody Said Anything” (1963), recounts a single truant day in the life of an unnamed middle school-aged boy. He awakes to an overheard quarrel between his parents and immediately goads his younger brother, with whom he shares a bed, into a foul-mouthed exchange of complaints, in which the brother is alternately referred to a “chicken-shit,” an “asshole,” and a “royal asshole.” Unable to face the day and school, the boy feigns stomach trouble, and in the course of an unsupervised morning and afternoon while his parents are away at their jobs, he proceeds, as soon as his mother leaves the house, to smoke some of her cigarettes, watch morning television, masturbate, and rummage through the drawers in his parents’ bedroom in search of condoms and lubricants before deciding to go outdoors and fish.
Like the world inside, the world outdoors is ruined. The boy’s father has periodically taken him fishing, and in those outings, close to the elements, the boy vaguely senses a spark of vitality. As he proceeds through the mean streets of the working class town where he lives, a woman stops her car and asks if he needs a ride. The boy observes her warily: “She was thin and had pimples around her mouth. Her hair was up in curlers. But she was sharp enough. She had a brown sweater with nice boobs inside.” (7) They exchange a few awkward words before she drops him off near the creek where he intends to fish. The brief encounter with the woman arouses him sexually, and he fantasizes about being alone with her under the covers of his bed. He hurries over the embankment down to the creek and masturbates into it.
The creek bed lies adjacent to an airport runway. It is a fouled, forlorn watercourse, fed by drainage pipes. Crawling under a fence bearing a No Trespassing sign, the boy makes his way along the brackish water and begins fantasizing again about the woman, encountering her in her house as she is sitting on the toilet. He is about to masturbate again when there is a strike on his line. He reels in the fish with little effort. He recognizes that it is a trout, but there is something wrong with it. “It was the color of moss, that color green. It was as if he had been wrapped up in moss a long time, and the color had come off all over him.” The boy is troubled that the fish had not put up a fight. “I wondered if he was all right. I looked at him for a time longer, then I put him out of his pain.” (11)
Moving down the stream, the boy comes upon another boy, who excitedly tells him he has spotted the biggest fish he has ever seen. The boy, like the woman in the car, bears a haggard, ruined look: “He looked like a rat or something. I mean, he had buckteeth and skinny arms and this ragged long-sleeved shirt that was too small for him.” (12)
Together the boys pursue the fish and after some failed tries manage to catch it and bring it to land where the narrator breaks its spine and kills it. He sees that there is something wrong with this fish, too. “He was at least two feet long, queerly skinny, but bigger than anything I had ever caught.” (16) The boys immediately begin to argue about who will keep the fish, the smaller boy claiming he had spotted it, the narrator pointing out that he was the one who landed it. They decide to cut the fish in two but argue again about which half each will take home, the head being clearly preferable to the tail. The narrator knows he is bigger and stronger than his companion but decides not to have his way forcefully. He offers the tail end of the fish plus the sickly green trout, and the smaller boy agrees to take it.
When the boy arrives home, he hears his parents arguing in the kitchen. He knows he is late and possibly in trouble, but he hopes to enter the house triumphantly and to show off his trophy. He bursts into the kitchen exclaiming, “”You won’t believe what I caught at Birch Creek. Just look. Look here. Look at this. Look what I caught.” (20) He holds his creel open for his mother to see, and she is horrified. She asks if it is a snake and demands he take it out of the house. The boy excitedly tries to explain what a big fish he has caught and how difficult it was to land it, but his angry father yells at him to “take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage.”
Outside, doing as he is told, the boy looks inside his creel at his catch, now a gelatinous, unrecognizable mass. “I lifted him out,” the boy recounts as the story closes, “I held him. I held that half of him.”

Stephen King’s novel, The Body, is set in1960 in a working class town in Maine, a milieu remarkably similar to that depicted in “Nobody Said Anything.” The Body is the story of four twelve year-olds who embark on a kind of quest, but, as in Carver’s story, the quest has no redeeming objective, and it is carried out by damaged children in a ruined world. The narrative is set in motion as the four young friends learn that a boy their age, Ray Brower, is missing from home and is rumored to be lying dead at the base of a stretch of train tracks a few miles out of town. It is summer and the boys are free of school. One of the boys’ parents is criminally abusive, and the parents of the other three are inattentive enough that the boys are able to devise a ruse in which they will pretend to be sleeping overnight together in a tent while they go off in search of the missing boy’s body.
The boys’ stated mission is to find and possibly report the location of the body to the authorities, thereby gaining a kind of bragging rights, but the deeper motive seems to be the morbid fascination of beholding an actual corpse. Along the way, the friends face many obstacles and dangers, but any bracing sense of adventure in the outing is overwhelmed by the unrelieved ugliness of the world and people they encounter—and the ugliness the boys have already begun to incorporate in the conduct of their own lives. They have managed to create a world unto themselves, but it is no secret garden or Neverland. Their improvised clubhouse is, in Gordie’s words “a good place to smoke cigarettes and look at girly books.” Like Carver’s boy narrator, King’s twelve-year-olds are tough-minded and foul-mouthed; one of them, the brutally abused Teddy, is psychologically damaged beyond repair. In their banter they address one another as “you four-eyed pile of shit,” invite one another to “fuck your hand, man.” (297-98) They encounter no humane or accomplished adult. As they attempt to buy provisions for their journey, the grocer tries to cheat them at the counter. The narrator, untroubled by any sense of incivility or disrespect, shouts “Fuck you!” as he runs out of the store. Having trespassed over the fence of a junkyard in order to drink from a water pump, one of the boys finds himself on the forbidden side as the proprietor and his allegedly vicious dog approach. When the boy successfully regains the safe side of the fence, he lingers to taunt the proprietor’s dog—“Kiss my ass, Choppie! Kiss my ass! Bite shit!”—and then the proprietor, calling him “fat ass,” “lard-bucket.” When the proprietor cruelly answers the boy’s taunts, the ugliness of the boy’s invective intensifies: “YOUR MOTHER BLOWS DEAD RATS! I’LL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!” (348)
Gordie narrates The Body from the perspective of his thirties, looking back. He is, like the novel’s author, Stephen King, a writer; moreover he is a writer who has written some of King’s published stories and books. It is by no means clear whether the narrator/author is celebrating the near-feral antics of his principals or whether he is holding them up for concern. The boys go on to face many dangers. Following the rail tracks over a bridge, they are surprised by the rapid approach of a train and must run for their lives. Camping that night by a fire, Gordie entertains the others by telling a yarn about a fat and cruelly teased boy named David Hogan, whom his townsmen call Lard Ass. He enters a pie eating contest, to the mockery and delight of those who come to watch. As he is about to win the contest, he vomits copiously over the other contestants who in turn become ill, resulting in a vomitous chain reaction and, presumably, a kind of justice. The next day the boys go swimming to get some relief from the intense heat and find themselves covered with leeches. To his horror Gordie finds a leech has attached itself to his scrotum. He asks for help from the other boys, but they are too squeamish. Fearful and shaking with tears, he manages to detach the leech which bursts bloodily into his hands.
At length the spent boys spot the body of Ray Brower lying partly submerged in water at the base of the tracks. Gordie notes in exhaustive detail the position and condition of the body. He speculates with precision how the collision must have propelled the body to the spot where it came to rest, how the impact had lifted the boy out of his shoes. Where some kind of catharsis or revelation might be expected, there is nothing—beyond the realization that the boy was indeed dead. “That finally rammed it all the way home for me,” Gordie muses. “The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping. The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore…The kid was dead; stone dead.” (408).
The dreary quest of the boy who went fishing in Carver’s story resulted in an unviewably grotesque prize: not a fish, but a mangled wreck of a fish. The quest of the four twelve-year-olds in The Body results in nothing at all. Four living boys seek and find a dead one. In their speech and in their actions the boys already bear the mark of the debased culture in which they are suspended, and on that very account the narrator/author seems to want to exonerate them, even commend them to our affection. This intention is made even more stridently in the action that follows the discovery of Ray Brower’s corpse. Soon after the boys arrive on the scene, they are confronted by a menacing band of teenagers who had hoped to discover the body themselves. The older boys, including one of the twelve-year-olds’ older brother, threaten the younger ones menacingly. In the ensuing showdown, Gordie defiantly stands his ground. He tells the boy threatening him to “suck my fat one, you cheap dime store hood.” One of the other younger boys has smuggled his father’s pistol out of the house and threatens to shoot the older boys if they advance. The teenagers back off, although later they will exact vicious physical revenge.
When Stephen King first published The Body, he included a subtitle: The Loss of Innocence. Yet there is no loss of innocence narrated in the tale. The boys have already lost innocence when they enter the story. Their debased language, the unacknowledged cruelty and insensitivity revealed in their “victorious” encounters with the older boys and adults, even the stories they tell for delight reveal how far they have come from the redemptive spirit of the puer aeternus. The boys talk the talk and think the thoughts of failed and bitter men.
Nothing like the lilt and exuberance of Peter Pan can possibly “break through” into the dispirited, gritty world of Carver’s story and King’s novel. Those stories along with the profusion of kindred stories that have followed represent a kind of epitaph to boy-spirit. Barrie began Peter Pan with the assertion that every boy, except one, grows up. As long as there is one, and he is known, boy-spirit might live on to invigorate all that it touches. At the conclusion of The Body, Gordie, now grown to manhood, reveals that the three fellow travelers of his boyhood have all died young. No boy has grown up, except one. That one is the writer, the one left to tell the tale, and the tale is that if a boy sets off to find himself in the world as it is, he will find a dead boy.

BOYS BROKEN

When, on the brink of suicide, young Werther makes his final, desperate case to his beloved—that his boy-spirit, his very vitality depends on her undivided love and attention—Lotte, now married, responds with the last thing he wants to hear. “Be a man. Put an end to this dismal attachment to a creature who can do nothing but pity you.” (115)
Lotte’s mature and practical perspective is worthy of Freud in its psychological acuity, but the insight is no help to Werther, as the pitch of his feeling—inflamed, impossible, or otherwise—is the very condition that sustains him. He has experienced the ecstasy of living at that pitch, a psychic frequency to which uncompromised boys become easily attuned. When Lotte implores him to “be a man,” to get over the condition he has experienced as life itself, he witheringly responds that her words “could be printed and commended to the use of teachers.”
Werther had been schooled enough to sense that the purpose of culturally mandated education is not to enlarge or exercise a child’s spirit but to tame and subordinate it to culturally approved purposes, a process which from the spirited child’s standpoint is an unbearable violation.
By the time Barrie composed Peter Pan, the protocols of compulsory schooling were so firmly established in western minds as to be virtually unquestioned. There has long been and continues to be a proliferation of schemes for educational reform, but any serious reconsideration of compulsory schooling itself has been all but non-existent—except in stories.
For Barrie, who remembered being happy in school but not at university, submission to schooling was fundamentally opposed to the free expression of boy-spirit. In Peter Pan the embodiment of schooling is Hook, who loathes the very idea of Peter Pan, who confesses to being unable to look at him while he is sleeping, because there is something so untroubled about his posture.
Hook’s character, Barrie discloses to his readers, was fashioned in the crucible of school, and it is school’s central aim to capture and eliminate the likes of Peter Pan.
“Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in ablaze; but as those who have read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments…and he still adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he retained his passion for good form.” (229) The imposition of good form is the ultimate accomplishment of schooling, but it requires the gradual mastery and then the elimination of boy-spirit. Peter knows this instinctively. When Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother, asks Peter if she may adopt him, the first thing he asks her is “Would you send me to school?” Mrs. Darling tells him that she would, and then to an office, and then he would be a man. Peter tells her without reflection that he doesn’t want to go to school and learn “solemn things.” More direct than young Werther, he tells her, “I don’t want to be a man.”
The adopted lost boys ultimately bear out Peter’s reservation. “Before they had attended school a week they saw what goats they had been not to remain on the island; but it was too late now, and soon they settled down to being as ordinary as you or me or Jenkins minor. It is sad to have to say the power to fly gradually left them.” (231)

Later in the twentieth century, after the world wars, a new kind of boy’s story began making an insistent appearance. In these stories there is no rapturous flight, literally or figuratively; there is only falling, loss, and utter wreckage. A boy like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (1951) may have an intimation of a prior, golden world, but he will fail to locate it in the course of his sad, lonely truancy in Manhattan. Holden has just bolted from a prep school from which he was about to be dismissed for unsatisfactory effort. At the brink of nervous collapse, he imagines stepping off curbsides into an abyss. In this state he pictures himself in a field of rye at the top of a steep cliff where he is patrolling in order to catch wandering children before they can fall.
In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (l959) Gene, a self-aware young man who has successfully mastered the good form necessary to make his way at his prep school, realizes that his best friend, Phineas, has a quality he longs for but cannot master: an untamable exuberance. Phineas’s playful spontaneity is counter-scholastic, if not downright anti-scholastic, and while it is infectious among his companions, it arouses a poisonous envy in Gene whose determined scholastic attainments have barred all access to such openheartedness. One evening on a study break Gene and Phineas climb up a tree to a limb overhanging a riverbank. To make one’s way far enough out on the limb to clear the bank when he jumps requires exceptional daring, and this prospect is thrilling to Phineas. As Phineas moves out along the limb, Gene, without reflection, jounces it with his foot, causing his friend to fall sickeningly to earth. The resulting injury ultimately kills him.
As the Cold War baby-boom years progressed, stories of fallen, broken boys proliferated. The phenomenally popular Catcher in the Rye was for a time viewed warily by schools and, due to Holden’s frank and sometimes vulgar utterances, banned in some, but within a decade the book, along with Separate Peace and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), became required school reading. But even as the story of the fallen boy became standard school fare, successive tellings grew darker and grittier. By the early nineteen sixties, there is a clear sense in the strongest boys’ stories that the descent is past mattering; the only thing left to report is the hellish quality of the fallen condition.
Even before his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver was widely recognized as a modern master of the short story. One of his earliest published stories, “Nobody Said Anything” (1963), recounts a single truant day in the life of an unnamed middle school-aged boy. He awakes to an overheard quarrel between his parents and immediately goads his younger brother, with whom he shares a bed, into a foul-mouthed exchange of complaints, in which the brother is alternately referred to a “chicken-shit,” an “asshole,” and a “royal asshole.” Unable to face the day and school, the boy feigns stomach trouble, and in the course of an unsupervised morning and afternoon while his parents are away at their jobs, he proceeds, as soon as his mother leaves the house, to smoke some of her cigarettes, watch morning television, masturbate, and rummage through the drawers in his parents’ bedroom in search of condoms and lubricants before deciding to go outdoors and fish.
Like the world inside, the world outdoors is ruined. The boy’s father has periodically taken him fishing, and in those outings, close to the elements, the boy vaguely senses a spark of vitality. As he proceeds through the mean streets of the working class town where he lives, a woman stops her car and asks if he needs a ride. The boy observes her warily: “She was thin and had pimples around her mouth. Her hair was up in curlers. But she was sharp enough. She had a brown sweater with nice boobs inside.” (7) They exchange a few awkward words before she drops him off near the creek where he intends to fish. The brief encounter with the woman arouses him sexually, and he fantasizes about being alone with her under the covers of his bed. He hurries over the embankment down to the creek and masturbates into it.
The creek bed lies adjacent to an airport runway. It is a fouled, forlorn watercourse, fed by drainage pipes. Crawling under a fence bearing a No Trespassing sign, the boy makes his way along the brackish water and begins fantasizing again about the woman, encountering her in her house as she is sitting on the toilet. He is about to masturbate again when there is a strike on his line. He reels in the fish with little effort. He recognizes that it is a trout, but there is something wrong with it. “It was the color of moss, that color green. It was as if he had been wrapped up in moss a long time, and the color had come off all over him.” The boy is troubled that the fish had not put up a fight. “I wondered if he was all right. I looked at him for a time longer, then I put him out of his pain.” (11)
Moving down the stream, the boy comes upon another boy, who excitedly tells him he has spotted the biggest fish he has ever seen. The boy, like the woman in the car, bears a haggard, ruined look: “He looked like a rat or something. I mean, he had buckteeth and skinny arms and this ragged long-sleeved shirt that was too small for him.” (12)
Together the boys pursue the fish and after some failed tries manage to catch it and bring it to land where the narrator breaks its spine and kills it. He sees that there is something wrong with this fish, too. “He was at least two feet long, queerly skinny, but bigger than anything I had ever caught.” (16) The boys immediately begin to argue about who will keep the fish, the smaller boy claiming he had spotted it, the narrator pointing out that he was the one who landed it. They decide to cut the fish in two but argue again about which half each will take home, the head being clearly preferable to the tail. The narrator knows he is bigger and stronger than his companion but decides not to have his way forcefully. He offers the tail end of the fish plus the sickly green trout, and the smaller boy agrees to take it.
When the boy arrives home, he hears his parents arguing in the kitchen. He knows he is late and possibly in trouble, but he hopes to enter the house triumphantly and to show off his trophy. He bursts into the kitchen exclaiming, “”You won’t believe what I caught at Birch Creek. Just look. Look here. Look at this. Look what I caught.” (20) He holds his creel open for his mother to see, and she is horrified. She asks if it is a snake and demands he take it out of the house. The boy excitedly tries to explain what a big fish he has caught and how difficult it was to land it, but his angry father yells at him to “take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage.”
Outside, doing as he is told, the boy looks inside his creel at his catch, now a gelatinous, unrecognizable mass. “I lifted him out,” the boy recounts as the story closes, “I held him. I held that half of him.”

Stephen King’s novel, The Body, is set in1960 in a working class town in Maine, a milieu remarkably similar to that depicted in “Nobody Said Anything.” The Body is the story of four twelve year-olds who embark on a kind of quest, but, as in Carver’s story, the quest has no redeeming objective, and it is carried out by damaged children in a ruined world. The narrative is set in motion as the four young friends learn that a boy their age, Ray Brower, is missing from home and is rumored to be lying dead at the base of a stretch of train tracks a few miles out of town. It is summer and the boys are free of school. One of the boys’ parents is criminally abusive, and the parents of the other three are inattentive enough that the boys are able to devise a ruse in which they will pretend to be sleeping overnight together in a tent while they go off in search of the missing boy’s body.
The boys’ stated mission is to find and possibly report the location of the body to the authorities, thereby gaining a kind of bragging rights, but the deeper motive seems to be the morbid fascination of beholding an actual corpse. Along the way, the friends face many obstacles and dangers, but any bracing sense of adventure in the outing is overwhelmed by the unrelieved ugliness of the world and people they encounter—and the ugliness the boys have already begun to incorporate in the conduct of their own lives. They have managed to create a world unto themselves, but it is no secret garden or Neverland. Their improvised clubhouse is, in Gordie’s words “a good place to smoke cigarettes and look at girly books.” Like Carver’s boy narrator, King’s twelve-year-olds are tough-minded and foul-mouthed; one of them, the brutally abused Teddy, is psychologically damaged beyond repair. In their banter they address one another as “you four-eyed pile of shit,” invite one another to “fuck your hand, man.” (297-98) They encounter no humane or accomplished adult. As they attempt to buy provisions for their journey, the grocer tries to cheat them at the counter. The narrator, untroubled by any sense of incivility or disrespect, shouts “Fuck you!” as he runs out of the store. Having trespassed over the fence of a junkyard in order to drink from a water pump, one of the boys finds himself on the forbidden side as the proprietor and his allegedly vicious dog approach. When the boy successfully regains the safe side of the fence, he lingers to taunt the proprietor’s dog—“Kiss my ass, Choppie! Kiss my ass! Bite shit!”—and then the proprietor, calling him “fat ass,” “lard-bucket.” When the proprietor cruelly answers the boy’s taunts, the ugliness of the boy’s invective intensifies: “YOUR MOTHER BLOWS DEAD RATS! I’LL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!” (348)
Gordie narrates The Body from the perspective of his thirties, looking back. He is, like the novel’s author, Stephen King, a writer; moreover he is a writer who has written some of King’s published stories and books. It is by no means clear whether the narrator/author is celebrating the near-feral antics of his principals or whether he is holding them up for concern. The boys go on to face many dangers. Following the rail tracks over a bridge, they are surprised by the rapid approach of a train and must run for their lives. Camping that night by a fire, Gordie entertains the others by telling a yarn about a fat and cruelly teased boy named David Hogan, whom his townsmen call Lard Ass. He enters a pie eating contest, to the mockery and delight of those who come to watch. As he is about to win the contest, he vomits copiously over the other contestants who in turn become ill, resulting in a vomitous chain reaction and, presumably, a kind of justice. The next day the boys go swimming to get some relief from the intense heat and find themselves covered with leeches. To his horror Gordie finds a leech has attached itself to his scrotum. He asks for help from the other boys, but they are too squeamish. Fearful and shaking with tears, he manages to detach the leech which bursts bloodily into his hands.
At length the spent boys spot the body of Ray Brower lying partly submerged in water at the base of the tracks. Gordie notes in exhaustive detail the position and condition of the body. He speculates with precision how the collision must have propelled the body to the spot where it came to rest, how the impact had lifted the boy out of his shoes. Where some kind of catharsis or revelation might be expected, there is nothing—beyond the realization that the boy was indeed dead. “That finally rammed it all the way home for me,” Gordie muses. “The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping. The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore…The kid was dead; stone dead.” (408).
The dreary quest of the boy who went fishing in Carver’s story resulted in an unviewably grotesque prize: not a fish, but a mangled wreck of a fish. The quest of the four twelve-year-olds in The Body results in nothing at all. Four living boys seek and find a dead one. In their speech and in their actions the boys already bear the mark of the debased culture in which they are suspended, and on that very account the narrator/author seems to want to exonerate them, even commend them to our affection. This intention is made even more stridently in the action that follows the discovery of Ray Brower’s corpse. Soon after the boys arrive on the scene, they are confronted by a menacing band of teenagers who had hoped to discover the body themselves. The older boys, including one of the twelve-year-olds’ older brother, threaten the younger ones menacingly. In the ensuing showdown, Gordie defiantly stands his ground. He tells the boy threatening him to “suck my fat one, you cheap dime store hood.” One of the other younger boys has smuggled his father’s pistol out of the house and threatens to shoot the older boys if they advance. The teenagers back off, although later they will exact vicious physical revenge.
When Stephen King first published The Body, he included a subtitle: The Loss of Innocence. Yet there is no loss of innocence narrated in the tale. The boys have already lost innocence when they enter the story. Their debased language, the unacknowledged cruelty and insensitivity revealed in their “victorious” encounters with the older boys and adults, even the stories they tell for delight reveal how far they have come from the redemptive spirit of the puer aeternus. The boys talk the talk and think the thoughts of failed and bitter men.
Nothing like the lilt and exuberance of Peter Pan can possibly “break through” into the dispirited, gritty world of Carver’s story and King’s novel. Those stories along with the profusion of kindred stories that have followed represent a kind of epitaph to boy-spirit. Barrie began Peter Pan with the assertion that every boy, except one, grows up. As long as there is one, and he is known, boy-spirit might live on to invigorate all that it touches. At the conclusion of The Body, Gordie, now grown to manhood, reveals that the three fellow travelers of his boyhood have all died young. No boy has grown up, except one. That one is the writer, the one left to tell the tale, and the tale is that if a boy sets off to find himself in the world as it is, he will find a dead boy.

The breaking of boys and men: part four

2009-05-19T06:28:00.000-07:00

J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan

As the ninetheenth century merged into the twentieth, The Sorrows of Young Werther lost favor. The young man held powerfully in thrall of his child-spirit was no longer an appealing, or even recognizable, figure in the larger culture. Spirited boys continued to be rendered, and rendered well, in literature by great masters like Dickens and Twain, but Pip and Oliver, Tom and Huck, bore no relation to the tortured and tremulous figure of Werther. The preferred trajectory of boys on the brink of manhood was up and out into the actual fray of worldly affairs, not a dreamy return to the wonders and sweetness of prior light. Boys on the brink of manhood, many of them unschooled naturals, were spirited enough, but they were determined to make their way, succeed or fail, live or die, in the world in which they found themselves. The favored stories thrust vulnerable boys into challenging and even life threatening situations through which they negotiated with tragic or heroic consequences. Some, like Tom and Huck and Kipling’s Stalky, were inspired rascals, but even in their aversion to established propriety, they were geniuses of practical accommodation; they knew how to get around.

In the decades spanning Queen Victoria’s coronation and the outbreak of the First World War, British stories of boys coming of age were set in distinctive schools, schools in which the remote expectations of the teaching masters bore less on a boy’s daily life than did the infrastructure of an exacting, often lawless boy-code. In tales ranging from Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays through Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That boys endured painful beatings, harsh privations, and injustices—all of it far removed from maternal nurturance and domestic comfort of any kind—as a crucible of effective manhood. The boyhood passage was a test, and while tough and spirited boys like Tom Brown ultimately pass the test, it was quite possible to fail, as the handsome and promising Eric Williams failed in Frederic W. Farrar’s cautionary classic, Eric, or Little by Little. These stories held the promise, as did Horatio Alger’s American stories of determined orphan boys rising through their own determination to great wealth, that boy-energy rightly channeled led to worldly success—along with the unexamined assumption that in such success lay all the satisfaction a boy could hope for.

But against the backdrop of this procession of stories in which plucky or lucky boys made their way in a rough-and-tumble world, there was first a stirring and then a full flowering of an altogether different kind of story. These were stories told both for and about children, stories that wanted nothing to do with the waking, working world. Humphrey Carpenter, in surveying the profusion of children’s literature composed between Victoria’s reign and the Great War, calls the entire enterprise “a secret garden,” after Frances Hodgson Burnett’s l911 book by that name. The landmark books that appeared in this vein were indeed about enchanted arcadian places discovered by solitary and especially dreamy children. These secret places included the underwater world entered by the presumably drowned chimney sweep in Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, the Kingdom of Oz in Frank Baum’s Oz books, Alice’s Wonderland, the lovely riverbank and wood of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, the three-acre wood of A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin and Pooh, and of course J.M. Barrie’s Neverland.

The boys in these stories do not seek to grow up into productive young men. They are not strengthened and improved by hardship; they are sustained by wonder and delight. James Matthew Barrie (1860-1937) was arguably a boy in spirit his entire life, but he was in his thirties when he conceived of the character Peter Pan and in his forties when he wrote Peter into the script of his famous play (1904). The inspiration for Peter and the other children in the play were derived directly from children Barrie knew and loved. The prototype may have been Barrie’s older brother, David, who died tragically in a skating accident when he was thirteen and James six. David’s death sank their mother into a grief from which she never fully recovered. Barrie recalled as a boy dressing in his late brother’s clothes to try, without success, to lift his mother’s spirits. David Barrie would represent vividly for his six-year-old-brother the boy who never grew up.

In a number of striking ways J.M. Barrie never grew up himself. Born into a large family of Scots weavers, he became as a young man a phenomenally successful novelist (Sentimental Tommy, The Little Minister) and playwright (The Admirable Crichton, Quality Street, Peter Pan). A good friend to the most admired writers of his day, including George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, he was unassuming and unsmiling in his personal manner, but given to sudden whimsical utterances. In the course of an early conversation with the great Wells, he is reported to have remarked, “It is all very well to write books, but can you waggle your ears?” At full maturity Barrie stood at five feet.
Barrie’s sexless, childless marriage to the actress Mary Ansell ended in divorce. His most intimate, apparently chaste, relationships were with the married Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies and her five boys whom Barrie met and befriended in the course of walking his dog in Kensington Gardens. After a few years of their acquaintance, Arthur Llewelyn-Davies, the boys’ father died, and when, just three years later, Sylvia died as well, Barrie served as personal and financial guardian for all five boys through their maturity. Barrie claimed to derive the character of Peter Pan from the Llewelyn-Davies boys and once told them, “I made Peter by violently rubbing the five of you together, as savages with two sticks produce a flame. That is all he is, the spark I got from you.” (Yeoman,71) There is no indication of any kind that Barrie’s interest in the boys was in any way sexual or pathological. With one of the sons, Michael, Barrie corresponded daily, until Michael’s death, probably a suicide drowning in Oxford when Michael was twenty. Long after Barrie’s death, in 1979, the youngest Llewelyn-Davies son, Nicholas, wrote to a biographer, “I never heard one word or saw one glimmer of anything approaching homosexuality or paedolphilia: had he had either of these leanings in however slight a symptom I would have been aware. He was an innocent—which is why he could write Peter Pan.” (Yeoman 147)
Mainly what Barrie liked to do with the Llewelyn-Davies boys was play. He liked to scuffle about on the grass and, when they boys were younger, dress up with them in American Indian outfits and play out imagined adventures. He liked to preside over standard outdoor games, improvise hikes and fishing trips. Later in life, the middle Llewelyn-Davies son Peter would recall that Barrie’s emphasis with him and his brothers was “on the lighter side of life,” not “culture.”
Despite his extraordinary literary success, Barrie was never a notably happy man. He periodically fell into debilitating bouts of headache and depression. While he never succeeded in restoring his mother to good spirits after his brother David’s death, he remained devoted to her. He fell in love with a series of beautiful actresses, in addition to his wife, and perhaps loved Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies most deeply of all, but the affection he felt was kept largely to himself. He once wrote a jocular account of being forever out of young women’s romantic consideration because of his diminutive height and stature; a man like himself, he concluded, could never be considered sufficiently “dangerous.” He had a gift for male friendship and for imaginative play, but he spent a great deal of time alone. He was throughout his life a self-deprecating man, a cipher. The man who once said famously, “Nothing that happens after we are twelve matters very much,” did not outwardly rebel against the cultural requirements of growing up. He managed his financial and other adult responsibilities overall conservatively and responsibly. But the slight, dark little man who would go on to be knighted and a much beloved figure in British national life was always something of a boy in man’s clothing. He was perhaps resigned that boys—nearly all boys—grow up, but the possibility of an exception infused him with an unusual vitality.
The novel Peter Pan begins with the declaration, “All children, except one, grow up.” The exception here is everything, and he is Peter Pan. Peter tells Wendy that he ran away from his mother and father the day he was born because he overheard them talking about what he would become when he became a man. For a time he hid away and played with the fairies in Kensington Gardens but then, because he was able to fly, made his way beyond the stars to Neverland, a verdant and teeming place peopled with pirates and red Indians and mermaids and fairies. In time Peter is joined in Neverland by a band of lost boys, infants who had fallen out of their prams and were lost by their nannies. There are no lost girls in the band because, as Peter later explains to Wendy, girls are too clever to fall out of their prams.
Neverland is almost but not quite sufficient as a superior reality for Peter; it lacks only a mother. This mother-need is not, for Barrie, a flaw in Peter as an embodiment of puer aeternus. Some kind of mother-need is, rather, an essential part of Peter’s nature, because he is a true boy, not a man-in-progress; boys have and need mothers. In the opening chapter of the story, “Peter Breaks Through,” Peter permeates the barrier between the magical confines of Neverland and real England in order to fill the mother-need in the figure of Wendy Darling, an upper middle class girl in the pre-adult flowering of her girlhood.
Neverland, like Oz and other enchanted alternative worlds evoked during this period, bears some resemblance to its characters’ real world, in this case late Victorian England. Peter’s arch enemy, the gaff-handed pirate, Captain James Hook, has, for instance, attended a good boarding school and, although otherwise bent on menacing deeds, is preoccupied with matters of “good form.” But unlike Frank Baum, whose Oz books offered substantial social commentary on American life in the Progressive Era, Neverland is not a corrected England; it is the right and only world for Peter, for a real boy. In this world a mother may be periodically desirable, but she must be a Neverland mother, a girl-mother, someone who shimmers with maternal femininity and nurturance, but who does not actually restrict or in any way shape a boy’s spirited behavior. In Wendy Peter sought and found what the much older Werther sought but only partially found in Lotte. Wendy is a kind of comfort and delight for Peter, but she is not quite essential to him or to Neverland. When after many adventures Peter guides Wendy and her brothers and the lost boys back to the Darlings’ house in London, he alone among his band refuses adoption and returns to Neverland. He pledges to return for Wendy annually, which will mean a spell of renewed child-life for her and a touch of motherly domesticity—“spring cleaning”— for him, but Peter has a boy’s porous memory and for years on end forgets to come. In the interim Wendy grows up and becomes a mother and then a grandmother, but Peter is forever boy, as he alone has the child’s gift, as Barrie put it in the book’s final sentence, of being “gay and innocent and heartless.”
Peter is heartless in that he is holds his inalienable boy-spirit above even the sweetest particular attachments. He is forever drawn to Wendy, but not to the temporal, mutable Wendy who will grow up. Peter, except when he forgets, will return for Wendy in the form of her daughter and then her granddaughter and on into an infinity of thrilling new adventures and play. In this sense the enchantment carried by the figure of Peter Pan does not lie in the familiar story reenacted on stages and screens and inscribed in books. The enchantment lies, rather, in Peter’s invigorating capacity for imaginative renewal, his constancy in inconstancy. He is “heartless” in that he is bound by no sentimental or moral obligation. On the initial flight from London to Neverland, Wendy’s brother Michael drops off to sleep and nearly plummets fatally into shark-infested seas. Wendy cries for Peter to save him. Teasingly, Peter is slow to intervene: “…it was lovely the way he did it; but he always waited till the last moment, and you felt it was his cleverness that interested him and not the saving of human life.” (PP,57)
Years later when Wendy has been restored to her family in London and Peter’s formerly lost boys have been adopted by the Darlings and are now proceeding through school, Peter returns to the Darling nursery. Wendy excitedly asks him about the old things. She tries to reminisce about their nearly fatal encounter with Captain Hook, an adventure that concluded with Peter’s turning the tables and sending Hook to his death in the jaws of the crocodile who had earlier taken his hand. Peter is bewildered. He has forgotten Hook. “I forget them after I’ve killed them,” he tells her.
Peter charms and enchants because he is indomitable and resilient, not because he is naïve or cute or good. It is tempting to say that he is not altogether lovable, but he is profoundly lovable. Peter is hated only by Hook, and the chief reason is Peter’s irrepressible “cockiness.” He won’t defer, to grownups or to anyone else. Wendy loves him, as does her wistful mother and, later, Wendy’s offspring. Perhaps the deepest yet most seldom articulated response to the figure of Peter Pan on the part of audiences and readers is that one loves and longs for him. Peter is lovable, but he cannot be possessed.
Because of his utterly uncompromised embodiment of boy-spirit and Barrie’s remarkable skill in evoking that spirit, Peter Pan continues to invigorate and trouble those who encounter him more than a century after the play’s debut. Steven Spielberg and John Schumacher have revisited the condition of lost boys with great artistic seriousness in two very different films, Hook (1991) and Lost Boys (1987). Even more recently, Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland (2004) explores the relationships between Barrie and Sylvia Llewelyn-Davies and her sons in order to indentifiy the psychological source of the characters in Peter Pan. The deepening relationship between Barrie and the Llewelyn-Davies mother and sons is touchingly enacted in the film, but the film succeeds even more surely in suggesting the transformative power of fantasy and play in real boys’ lives.
Again, Barrie served faithfully as guardian to the Llewelyn-Davies boys after their parents died. Along the way he watched them grow up and begin to make their adult accommodations. There is no indication that he unduly tried to shape their futures or influence their practical or vocational choices. He was devastated when the oldest boy, George, was killed at the front in the First World War and again when the fourth boy, Michael, drowned at Oxford. Barrie knew the boys would grow up, and he continued to care for them personally as they did so. One cannot know with certainty, but one suspects the quality he most hoped to see alive in his adopted charges was the sheer belief in the liberating capacity of imagination and play.
There is a reliably emotional moment in every performance of Peter Pan in which Peter’s sidekick fairy Tinkerbell hovers between life and death. At this point Peter enjoins the audience directly to affirm their belief in fairies by clapping their hands. Invariably the children—and others—mount a crescendo of applause, and Tinkerbell lives. In a preface to an edition of his plays, Barrie recounted an episode while fishing with Michael when the boy was twelve, on the cusp between uninhibited childhood and guarded adolescence. Barrie asks Michael who, at that very moment, Michael would most like to see.

‘ “Of course,” said Michael, “I would most like to see Johnny Mackay.”
“Well then, wish for him.”
“Oh rot.”
“It can’t do any harm to wish.”
‘Contemptuously he wished, and as the ropes were thrown on the pier he saw Johnny waiting for him, loaded with angling paraphernalia. I know no one less like a fairy than Johnny Mackay, but for two minutes Michael was quivering in another world than ours. When he came to, he gave me a smile which meant we understood each other, and thereafter neglected me for a month, being always with Johnny…’(Yeoman 148)

It was Barrie’s singular gift to be able to make people quiver in another world than ours—even while standing squarely in the latter. Barrie had known that kind of elevation, that transcendence himself. He had known it when he was a boy, and he could sense it in the boys he came to know and befriend when he was a man. Boys may grow up, and the world may work on, but as long as there is just one who does not, then the membrane between the golden world and the working world is still permeable—a boy like Peter, or Michael for that matter, could still “break through.”

The breaking of boys and men: part three.

2009-05-18T08:09:00.000-07:00

The Sorrows of Young Werther

At certain historical moments even a story can challenge the prevailing civic order. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe was twenty-four when he published his tragic novella, The Sorrows of Young Werther. Today it is largely forgotten and unread, but when it appeared in Germany in 1774 it created a sensation that would resonate powerfully for more than a century. Within a few years of its publication Werther was translated into every European language. It made an especially strong impact in England and France, where it inspired operas, plays, songs and a profusion of poems. The book was read by all literate classes, including royalty. Bowers and benches and rustic expanses in which the story was set became commercial shrines. The book generated profitable trade in Werther-related paintings, porcelain, jewelry, and scent. Werther’s suicide at the story’s conclusion was widely believed either to have caused or contributed to the suicides of countless lovesick and otherwise troubled European youth, some of whom were found with copies of the book in hand or close by as they perished. There is some scholarly debate as to the actual extent of Werther-inspired suicides, or Liebestod, in the decades following the publication of the novel, but no such disagreement about the depth of the story’s impact. The Sorrows of Young Werther has been called the first modern tragic novel, and it created the kind of fervor J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye would evoke in the Cold War era.

Werther is the tale of an educated and rarefied young man who, in the course of a rustic idyll as he is about to embark on a career in statecraft, meets and falls deeply in love with a young woman, Charlotte (Lotte), with whom he shares a carriage ride to a ball. Lotte is both girl and finished woman, daughter and mother. When Werther meets her, her own mother has recently died, and she has risen resolutely to assume the care of her eight younger siblings. Lotte’s girlish beauty and grace combined with her warm nurturance enchant Werther and preoccupy him for the rest of his foreshortened life.

Immediately on making her acquaintance, Werther is informed that she is “as good as engaged” to an upstanding young man. Her intended, Albert, is indeed a man of parts and, more than a little strangely, Werther feels no resentment of his privileged and secure place in Lotte’s life. To the contrary he is admiring and fond of Albert, and he is equally fond of Lotte’s younger siblings, with whom he enjoys playing and telling stories. At first Werther’s love seems, except in its intensity, unlike the star-crossed passion of Tristan or Romeo, in that he recognizes no ominous obstacle. He seems too ethereal and genteel—and possibly too immature—to desire Lotte sexually. It takes him weeks to realize that Lotte’s and Albert’s impending marriage will mean the end of his almost limitless access to her company and of the emotional release he feels when he is with her. When it does dawn on him that he cannot continue to be her constant and adoring companion, he becomes agitated and volatile, to the point that he makes Lotte uncomfortable.

Abruptly Werther departs the village where Lotte lives, leaving only a letter explaining his tortured reasons for going. As he tentatively enters the social and diplomatic circles necessary to advance his adult career, Werther is unable to free himself from his obsessive attachment to Lotte. Unhappy in his work and reacting intensely to a class-based personal snub, he takes leave of his duties and drifts back to the beloved places of his happy childhood, only to find them painfully altered, “developed” in the name of a progress he reflexively disdains. Helplessly, he returns to lodgings near Albert and Lotte, now married, and resumes the acquaintance. More obsessed and despairing than ever, he presses his declarations of love, his tears, and, finally, even his kisses upon his distressed beloved until she forcibly absents herself from him, telling him that they must never meet again.

Having entertained mounting thoughts of suicide for some months, Werther borrows a brace of Albert’s pistols on a pretense, shuts himself up in his bedroom on a rainy night, composes a final note to Lotte, and then, just past midnight, fires the pistol into his forehead above his right eye. Werther does not die instantly, but lingers incoherently until noon the next day, during which time a number of people keep vigil and pay him last respects, including Lotte’s younger brothers, one of whom repeatedly kisses Werther on the mouth as he expires. He is carried off and buried that very night. “No priest attended him,” Goethe wrote in a chilling final sentence.

The world into which Goethe grew up and in which Werther is faithfully set is an altogether different world from that of the heroic lovers of the medieval era. Chivalric training and estate management are no longer the highest callings for men. There has been a renaissance of classical sensibilities throughout Europe. There has been an Enlightenment, a culturally endorsed celebration of scientific and rational understanding, understanding unaided by religious faith or any kind of submission to irrational or trans-rational forces. Wars continue to be waged, but in more calculated ways, in ways that might advance the interest of emerging nations, as opposed to the divinely sanctioned prerogatives of kings. In the enlightened eighteenth century a fortunate man’s highest aspiration might be to become a statesman, a scientist, an artist. In the eighteenth century the way had been cleared for generations of landless peasants and artisans to enter and then rise up into the now burgeoning complex of manufacture and trade. The new wealth produced by the emerging commercial class had created for increasing numbers of people the leisure with which to consider abstract and purely esthetic dimensions of experience.

Such was Goethe’s world and that of his sorrowful young Werther. The story of Werther is divided into two roughly equal parts. The first recounts his life in a lovely rural village, his meeting with and subsequent infatuation with Lotte, and the mounting unhappiness he feels in being unable to have her for his own. The second part is an account of his suffering and suicidal despair after he departs Lotte and her fiancé. Goethe based the first half of Werther’s story very closely on events in his own life, the second half somewhat on the life of a young acquaintance, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem who, like Goethe, was well off, well educated, entering public service, and miserably unhappy in love. Goethe incorporated the precise details of Jerusalem’s actual suicide in his account of Werther’s. In overlaying Jerusalem’s grim end onto his own passage through early love and love lost, Goethe is able to convey the heroic passion of romantic love—Tristan’s love, Romeo’s love—to its inevitable psychological conclusion without perishing himself.

Goethe made no effort to disguise the similarity of his personal feelings and circumstances to those of young Werther. The actual young woman who captured Goethe’s heart was Charlotte Buff, whom he would come to address familiarly as Lotte. She met and became fond of Goethe in the course of a ball they attended together. Lotte was oldest sister and virtual mother of eight younger siblings who delighted and often played with Goethe in the course of many visits and outings. Lotte’s fiancé, Christian Kestner, became an admired and beloved confidante to Goethe, as the fictional Lotte’s Albert became to Werther. Thus the “autobiographical” half of the novel proceeds very much as Goethe lived the summer of his twenty-third year.

As Werther begins his story, he is ecstatically happy. His formal schooling and legal studies have been successfully completed. He is free, at least for a time, to lose himself in his favorite books, especially Homer and Pindar and the astonishing Ossian. It is May, and he has arrived in a new, handsomely settled place. Everything is in bloom, and Werther has time on his hands to explore the countryside and observe the locals in all walks of life. “A wonderful serenity has taken possession of my entire soul,” he writes to his closest friend. (Hulse, 26) But it is not a static serenity; Werther confesses that the amplitude and beauty of his meadow walks, the falling of dusk, the complexity and elegance and hum of so many natural unfurlings threaten to overwhelm him. He longs to be able to render his experiences of Nature in drawing or some kind of art, but the force and beauty of everything before him seem almost to paralyze him. Transported in the grip of so much feeling, he reports, not yet with any regret, that “it will be the end of me” (27).

Werther has read deeply in the literature and lore of the west. He senses where he has spiritually found himself, and it is in the heart of Pan’s arcady.

…You go down a little slope and come to a vault of some twenty
steps to where the clearest of water pours forth from the marble rock.
The low wall about the spring above, the tall trees that shade the place,
The coolness of the spot, all of this has something both attractive and
awesome. Not a day goes by but I spend an hour sitting there. And the
girls come out from the town to fetch water…and I sense the
benevolent spirits that watch over springs and wells…(27)

Werther reports a sublime self-sufficiency in this state of being. It is a return, a return to something rich and satisfying from his childhood. He claims to want nothing more. He writes his friend that he is beyond the lure of books—“for God’s sake, keep the things from me!” (28) He knows that to fall back willingly into childhood happiness is to lose his civic place, but Werther surrenders: “I am treating my heart like an ailing child; every whim is granted. Tell no one of this; there are people who would take it amiss.” (28) Werther’s opening up to the childhood condition includes a renewed affinity for actual children: “the common people of the town already know and love me, the children in particular.” (28)

As soon as young Werther becomes aware of the superior, irresistible claims of the child-state, he is overcome with revulsion for the post-child impostures and mindless busy-ness of his fellow men.

That the life of Man is but a dream has been sensed by many a one,
and I too am never free of the feeling. When I consider the restrictions
that are placed on the active, inquiring energies of Man; when I see that
all our efforts have no other result than to satisfy needs which in turn
serve no purpose but to prolong our wretched existence…all of this
leaves me silent. (28,29)

.Werther discourses on the adult order’s smug condescension in attributing to children mere impulsivity in the face of life’s practical business, and he further faults adults for failing to recognize their own impulsivity and blindness in following safe and culturally sanctioned protocols. Of the two conditions—that of the spirited child and that of the prudent adult—Werther chooses the child.

I gladly confess that…they are the happiest who, like children,
live for the present moment, drag their dolls around and dress them
and undress them and watchfully steal by the drawer where Mama has
locked away the cake and when at last, when they get their hands on what
they want, devour it and with their cheeks crammed full, cry, “More!”
(30)

While celebrating the child—including childish excess—Werther is not impervious to the adult virtues of prudence and self-denial. He acknowledges that discerning, prudent adults will never do poor work, and that law-abiding citizens will never be bad neighbors. He feels certain, however, that such adults will never do the most inspired kind of work, and that they will never be people it would be really satisfying and exhilarating to know.
The child’s condition, if considered honestly, is preferable, because it is natural, uncorrected, and because it is susceptible to inspiration. Even compromised adults, Werther claims, are inwardly aware of this. Some of them are able to wall off private spheres within their compromised lives in which they can attempt to “make an Eden” of their own allotted gardens. Even those unable to do this, those who might not be fortunate enough to have a private garden to cultivate, can maintain the child’s link to vitality by holding fast to the “sweet sensation of freedom,” however fleeting, along with the knowledge that they can “quit this prison” whenever they wish. (31)

Held powerfully in his own sweet sensation of freedom, Werther, seemingly by chance, meets his beloved. It is now mid-June, and Werther, a passenger in a carriage on the way to a summer dance, is informed that they must stop to pick up another guest along the way, Charlotte: Lotte. Like Romeo first beholding Juliet at the Capulet ball, Werther is transformed forever. It falls to him to enter the house and escort Charlotte down to the carriage. His first and indelible impression is of a mother-girl.

I…beheld the most charming scene I have ever laid eyes on. In the hallway,
six children aged between eleven and two were milling about a girl with
a wonderful figure and of medium height, wearing a simple white dress
with pink ribbons at the sleeves and breast. She was holding a loaf of
rye bread and cutting a piece for each of the little ones about her, according
to their age and appetite. (37)

Werther is entranced, not merely with Lotte’s figure and presence, but with the children, the littlest of whom he kisses warmly before heading down to the carriage. Even as they proceed to the ball, Werther is made aware that Lotte is promised to another man, and he is undaunted. He learns in their first, rapt conversation that she too is “beyond” the lure of books, due to her domestic responsibilities and her joyful immersion in life as it unfolds moment to moment. But while unstintingly maternal, she is also sheer girl and confesses to Werther that “Even if it is wrong to have a passion for it, there is nothing I like better than dancing.” (39) No admission could be more pleasing to Werther, more consonant with his own views about the relative merits of acceptable attitudes and joyful behavior. “Never in my life,” Werther reports, “have I danced so well. I was no longer a mere mortal.” (41)

In this spirit Werther enters the most fulfilling, and last, summer of his life. The teeming meadows and mountain prospects continue to stir him, but the communion with Lotte in this Arcadian setting completes the picture. Like Juliet after she has met and exchanged loving vows with Romeo, Werther finds himself ecstatically “longing for the thing I have.” At no time is Werther happier in Lotte’s company than when her younger siblings are present and underfoot. Werther gets down on the floor and plays with them: “some of them climbing on top of me, some of them poking me, and me tickling them, and all of us yelling our heads off.”(45) This maturational reprieve, this opportunity to lose himself in uninhibited play elevates Werther. His pleasure is not in tending to or nurturing the children, but in joining them in their abandon and thus, like them, being Lotte’s in this privileged way. “Nothing on earth,” he writes to his friend, “is closer to my heart than children.” (45)

No sooner is Werther able to give voice to his happiness than he becomes aware, in a way familiar to desperate lovers, of the agonizing prospect of losing it. It occurs to him in the course of an afternoon outing with Lotte and the children and other friends that he has fallen into a terrible dependency on Lotte’s adoring attention. “What a child one is!” he realizes when he is briefly unable to catch Lotte’s eye. “How can one be so hungry for a look!” (51) But in Werther’s state the hunger can only mount. He craves Lotte’s undivided attention and approval, but her care-giving responsibilities make that impossible, as does the periodic presence of Albert, Lotte’s intended. And so to Werther’s—but perhaps nobody else’s—surprise, Albert becomes a “rival.” Moreover, maddeningly, he is a worthy and thoroughly appropriate rival. Werther retains enough social sense to know that he, not Albert, is the oddity in the picture, but this awareness is no consolation. He feels himself nearing combustion, growing increasingly ridiculous:

I cannot bear it any more, I behave like a complete fool, and
clown about and talk gibberish.—“For God’s sake,” Lotte said to me
today, “please spare us scenes like last night’s! When you’re
so merry you are terrifying.” (57)

Just as Lotte senses the desperation in Werther’s now inappropriate merriment, Werther is grimly aware that he has passed into perilous mental territory. News of a suicide preoccupies him, and he finds himself defending such gestures during a philosophical argument with Albert, in the course of which Albert makes good ethical sense. But Werther has passed beyond good ethical sense: “for no argument so throws me as when someone trots out a meaningless platitude when I am speaking straight from the heart.” (61)

Unable to temper, defer or, for that matter, consummate his desire for total, uninterrupted communion with Lotte, Werther declines helplessly into obsessive longing. He knows he is making a fool of himself, that the pitch of his desperation makes Lotte uncomfortable. Yet there is no consolation, feeling what he feels, knowing what he has known. “I can no longer pray,” he writes to his friend, “except to her; my imagination holds no figure but hers; and I see the things of the world about me only in relation to her.” As the summer wanes, Werther’s obsession turns to despair. He resolves to leave at once, depart the unlivable scene, although he can imagine no livable scene or breathable air apart from Lotte. Werther cannot sleep the night before his departure.

Here I sit, gasping for air, waiting for daybreak…Ah, she will
be sleeping peacefully, without a suspicion that she will never see me
again…” (69)

The evening before his departure Werther called on Lotte and Albert and engaged them in a long, tearful talk. They discuss the possibility of an afterlife and whether they are likely to recognize one another in that condition. Talk of departed souls gives rise to Lotte’s fond memories of her mother. The presence before him of his beloved girl-mother expressing vaulting appreciation and love for her own mother is too much for Werther. That mothers can be lost at all is too much for Werther.

“Lotte,” I exclaimed, falling at her feet, seizing her hand and
shedding a thousand tears on it—“Lotte! God’s blessing and
the spirit of your mother are upon you!” (71)

Werther takes leave of Lotte until, he believes, they will meet again in eternity. In the time intervening Werther must determine if there is an endurable course ahead for one who has known the sweetness of childhood regained.

Apart from Lotte and immersed in the business of adult pursuits, Werther realizes with clear-headed detachment that the culturally approved way ahead for him is hopeless, that the “model” of the finished man-of-the-world is an empty social construction.

We often feel that we lack something, and seem to see that very
quality in someone else, promptly attributing all our own
qualities to him too, and a kind of ideal contentment as well.
And so the happy mortal is a model of complete perfection—
which we ourselves have created. (73)

Realizing that so-called maturity is an empty fabrication, Werther, anticipating the kind of existential despair articulated by later writers, is repulsed by the adult order in which he is now held. “And this glittering misery, the tedium of these awful people cooped up together here! And their greed for rank, and the way they are forever watchful and alert for gain and precedence: the most wretched and abominable of passions, quite nakedly displayed.” (75)

Unable to bear it any longer, Werther resigns his position at court and embarks on a pilgrimage to the treasured places of his childhood in the hope that he can recover some sense of wholeness. “…And since the place of my birth is only six miles out of my way, I plan to visit it again and recall those long-gone days of happy dreams.” (85) He succeeds only in revisiting scenes that remind him that he was once full of hope, believing, like Odysseus, that frontiers were limitless and the seas “measureless.” He asks of what use is the knowledge, pressed upon every schoolboy, that the earth is round and its extent known? He longs for the prior condition, of a life more limited and yet more happy, a life infused with “the poetry and quality of childishness.” (86) Like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, adrift in Manhattan as he tries to reconnect to the saving sweetness of his childhood, Werther revisits his old school. When Holden entered a classroom in his former elementary school, he noted that someone had inscribed “fuck you” on a desk. Werther finds his old school has become a shop.

Werther wanders on, feeling rootless and out of sustaining relationship with everyone he has loved, especially, excruciatingly, Lotte. He struggles to find solace in a broader perspective but succeeds only in realizing his overall insignificance in the vast scheme of creation and that the only thing that had elevated him out of the relentless, transient march of empty lives was his unapologetic surrender to his untempered passions. “Do not children reach out for everything that attracts them?--Then why should not I?” (98)

Werther struggles with an equation he cannot solve. He understands that he came into the world with a robust capacity for joy and loving others. Moreover, he was able to experience that joy to its ultimate extent in his communion with Lotte. But when that kind of love is tempered or unrequited, however reasonable the causes, the lover’s sense of purpose, his very vitality is negated. Werther is sufficiently educated and socialized and reasonable to see why he may not have Lotte exclusively to himself, but the knowledge does nothing to mediate his predicament. For him, unrestrained loving is the completion of his nature; unrequited love is the negation of his nature. Increasingly this sense of negation leads Werther to suicidal thoughts, which he casts as a kind of martyrdom, at times likening himself to Christ in Gethsemane pondering his imminent death. In any event, like Romeo when he is banished from Verona and Juliet, Werther can find no consolation in philosophy, nor in theology. “Dear God in Heaven, was this the Fate Thou hast ordained for Man: that he should only be happy before he has yet attained his reason, or after he has lost it again?” (103)

Werther’s progression to suicide is grimly credible and familiar. He protests that he can no longer bear the practical business of living in the world, and he concludes, with some reason, that the world has no need of him and would perhaps be better off without him. Resolved finally to die, he goes to visit Lotte for the last time. In the course of a long, trying afternoon together, during which Werther attempts to disclose his inward state to Lotte by reading long, morbid excerpts from Ossian fantasy, Lotte correctly senses Werther’s dire intentions and tries to dissuade him. She insists that Werther can continue to see her—and Albert—but on appropriate terms, the world’s terms. Then, stunningly, she tells Werther that she cannot abide his “intense spirit” and “uncontrollable passion.” “Be a man!” she implores him. “Put an end to this dismal attachment to a creature who can do nothing but pity you!” Because Werther is not a man, because he is spiritually and temperamentally a boy, Lotte’s declaration completes his negation. Her pronouncement is devastating precisely because, on the world’s terms, it is profoundly true: “I very much fear,” she adds, “that what makes the desire to possess me so attractive is its very impossibility.” From his wild and tormented boy’s perspective, Werther makes an equally acute rejoinder: “That speech,” he remarked with a cold laugh, “could be printed and commended to the use of teachers.” (115)

Confined now within the terms of his own negation, Werther composes his final letter to Lotte. He is both frank and, at points, coolly lucid, disclosing that he has “harbored furious thoughts of—killing your husband—or you—or myself” but has settled on the latter course. (117) Late in the letter he revisits the prospect of their reunion in the after life. In this vision Werther is affirmative and hopeful, but what is affirmed is something, if not altogether other than Lotte, greater than Lotte:

I am not dreaming or raving! As I approach the grave I see
things more clearly. There will be a life for us! And we will
see each other again! We shall see your mother! I shall see
her, I shall find her, and ah, I shall pour out my heart to her!
Your mother, the image of you. (128)

In their fervid response to The Sorrows of Young Werther European readers spoke and wrote of the novel as a tragic romance, a love story—but is it really? Does Werther really stand in the procession of heroic lovers that began with Tristan, Romeo, and their like? Is it conceivable that Romeo, beholding Juliet for the last time, would evoke in farewell an image of Lady Capulet? Tristan and Romeo and Heathcliffe consummated their love. Upon reaching the threshold of manhood they transferred their puer-spirit into the only outlet in which it seemed possible for it to breathe. The heroic love ideal in the west is as uncompromising and wild as the puer spirit itself, and male lovers in that mode have all been spirited boys. Werther does not consummate his passion for Lotte. He reports dreaming of kisses, but nothing more When, finally and in despair, he actually does impose some desperate kisses on Lotte, both he and Lotte become upset and part in tears. He had long acknowledged that his deepest feelings for Lotte were not carnal: “Have I ever harbored reprehensible desires in my soul?” (112)

What Werther passionately and repeatedly expresses and what readers so powerfully responded to was less the impossibility of requiting his love for Lotte than his inability to live as a spirited child. In his autobiographical writing Goethe revealed that he himself had enjoyed a remarkable happy childhood. His personal troubles would begin with attempts to school him and, like Werther, when he sought to enter the world on adults’ terms. Like the heroic lovers who preceded him, he was able to express his untamed puer-spirit in romantic communion, but in Werther’s case his relationship with Lotte merely satisfied the formal requirements of a romantic pairing. She was not in fact available to him from the outset and told him so clearly. Unlike Romeo who rushed to marry Juliet within hours of making her acquaintance, Werther’s fondest hope was to feel the radiance of Lotte’s girl-mother presence while he gave uninhibited utterance to his dreamiest fancies and tumbled about with the other children. In the end, it was not Lotte but a younger brother--a mere boy—who kissed Werther’s lips as his life slipped away. What so struck Europeans for more than a century in The Sorrows of Young Werther was not the tragic death of a young lover, but the death of a puer aeternus, of the invigorating promise spirited children invite the larger society to recall.

The breaking of boys and men: part two.

2009-05-17T20:20:00.000-07:00

The Legacy of Romantic Love

The crisis of broken boys is a contemporary problem, but it is an old story. The archetypal story can be found in classical antiquity, in Ovid’s accounts of mythical figures like Icarus and Phaethon, boys who either wouldn’t or couldn’t manage the work of their fathers and perished in the attempt. The account of boys losing heart and ultimately their lives is developed more extensively and naturalistically in the medieval legend of Perceval/Parsifal and in the tale of Tristan and Isolde—and in the parade of romances that have followed.
Perceval, whose name means “little fool,” is the son of a warrior knight who, along with his elder sons, has been killed in combat. Perceval’s mother, Heart’s Sorrow, dedicates her life thereafter to seeing that her remaining son is spared that fate. She raises him in rustic isolation far from arms and warfare, gives him loving nurture and careful religious instruction. By chance, however, the youthful Perceval encounters a band of mounted, armored knights in the forest and is enchanted by them. Since his only knowledge of the larger world is his mother’s instruction, he concludes that they are angels, and from that time forward longs to become an angel himself. He fashions crude weapons from sticks of wood and attempts to tack the family nag as a knight’s steed. Realizing that she cannot deter him, Heart’s Sorrow allows Perceval to go out into the world to find his way. Perceval proceeds through many adventures, and while he is foolish and naïve and misjudges many situations, he is also charmed and seemingly divinely guided as he makes his way to Arthur’s court, where he improbably, in the manner of David slaying Goliath, kills a fearsome enemy of the court, after which Perceval assumes the slain knight’s armor and mount and continues his knightly quest.

Along the way he receives wise tuition from an older mentor and comes to the aid of a damsel in distress before making his way into a strange region where he is given hospitality by a Fisher King. At a banquet in the king’s castle, Perceval witnesses a procession of brilliant objects, including the Holy Grail. But because he is confused about what he is seeing, he fails to ask what it means. The next morning he finds himself alone in the castle, and when he departs, the kingdom of the Fisher King literally disappears. Perceval’s adventures continue, but he is no longer charmed. He learns of the death of his beloved mother, Heart’s Sorrow. He realizes that he has not kept his promises to her that he would be faithful in his Christian practice. No longer does he always succeed, always prevail. He encounters terrifying ugliness in the figure of a loathsome hag. One day, noticing drops of goose blood in the fresh snow before him, he stops to ponder and descends into gloom. He is self-conscious, no longer sure of himself—and sad. Here, in the earliest texts, the story ends, rather like the frayed ends of a rope. Later writers, so-called “continuators,” would pick up Perceval’s story, recount subsequent adventures in quest of the grail, many of them in the company of other Arthurian knights. In some accounts, Perceval is given another chance to behold the grail; in others he dies unfulfilled or is simply lost, his story dissolving into other Arthurian business.

The progress of Perceval’s life is troubling but instructive. The story of his boyhood has the exuberance and charm of a fairy tale. His trajectory after he is expelled from the Fisher King’s court carries an altogether different weight. Stalled on his mount and brooding over the bloodstained snow, Perceval has lost his resolve and spontaneity. He is self-conscious now, as, later, Hamlet would be self-conscious. No longer is he a “little fool,” and no longer is he a boy. As a boy he was held in the thrall of a bright, if mysterious, beckoning. As a man he is lost and troubled, and in this regard his story points to modernity.

The Jungian writer Robert Johnson proposes that certain stories have the capacity to transcend the historical era in which they are composed and in effect to announce the arrival of themes and questions that will engage mankind for centuries to come (We, 1983). He made this assertion in introducing his interpretation of Tristan and Isolde, a harrowing twelfth century love story that, Johnson suggests, gave form to an evolutionary new development in western consciousness, one that continues to enchant and bedevil contemporary men and women.

Johnson suggests that modern male consciousness began to surface in the twelfth century, and that Tristan is the prototype. Tristan’s trajectory out into the world is similar to Perceval’s. Tristan’s father was Rivalen, the warrior-king of Lyonesse in France. In the course of a successful campaign in England in support Cornwall’s King Mark, he is given Mark’s sister, Blanchefleur, in marriage. Shortly after his return to France, Rivalen is killed in combat. Blanchefleur, pregnant with Tristan and about to give birth, descends into despair. She lives only long enough to bear her son, and then she dies, but not before naming him Tristan, which means “child of sadness.” Tristan grows up into the culture of arms and combat. He will not know the identity of his real father until he is an adolescent. Like Perceval, he is charmed by chivalry, and becomes impressively adept. In the course of many adventures, he makes his way back to England, reunites with King Mark, his uncle, and swears knightly allegiance to him. Later in the course of adventures in Ireland, an enemy state to Cornwall, it falls to Tristan to deliver back to King Mark a new bride, the Irish Princess Isolde.

In the course of this mission Tristan and Isolde fall in love with an intensity neither will be able to put behind them, despite great and principled effort. In the medieval telling of the story, the irresistible mutual attraction of the lovers is attributed to their drinking a potion of wine and herbs that would bond the couple who drank it in consuming love. The potion was intended to be given to Isolde and King Mark on their wedding night, but by an accident it was provided by a servant girl to slake Tristan and Isolde’s thirst on a particularly warm day. Realizing the mistake, Isolde’s maid is horrified and, seeing the attraction already at work in the eyes of the lovers, warns them that death lay that way, to which Tristan responds, “Well then, come Death.” Tristan at that moment could be speaking for Romeo, young Werther, Heathcliffe and the whole procession of doomed, passionate lovers who have continued to engage the minds and hearts of western peoples.

Modern depth psychology offers strong explanations of the self-obliterating passion of young lovers. In the Freudian, and more mechanical, view, the repressed passion of infant boys for their mothers is reawakened in the course of biological puberty and becomes redirected to a new, age-appropriate, in-this-world female. This heady release of repressed feeling is so overwhelming it confuses the boy’s conscious ego as to its own identity and boundaries. The young lover does not know where he ends and his beloved begins. Objective reality loses definition and is replaced by pulsing inner subjectivity. The beloved becomes all, and the lover has no existence outside the love bond. No amount of wise, sound counsel can restore the young lover to a practical perspective. In Romeo and Juliet, when Friar Laurence attempts to draw Romeo out of his suicidal hysteria by reminding him of the consolations of philosophy, Romeo cries out, “Hang up philosophy! If it cannot produce a Juliet…”

In a somewhat similar way, Jungian analysis sees a boy’s consuming romantic passion as a projection of his unconscious feminine ideal, or anima, onto an in-this-world object. The intensity of this projection typically overwhelms the lover, the beloved, or both. The unbearable pitch of feeling cannot be sustained over time, nor can the beloved stand up for long under the force of the projection, which by its nature idealizes, falsifies and otherwise distorts her actual being. If and when a lover can adjust perceptions to the actual and can deflate the intensity of the initial infatuation, then perhaps a viable relationship can be established. But in the vaulting, beautiful and tragic stories of doomed young lovers, these adjustments are not made. The lover continues to find ecstatic, transporting communion in the presence of the beloved—or even her recalled image.

Because Tristan never knows his mother, it might reasonably be assumed that a “mother deficit” is the cause of such ardent love on the boy’s part, yet nothing in his language or behavior suggests anything like a need for mothering or nurturance. Other canonical lovers, such as Heathcliffe, are motherless, while others are not. Lady Montagu, Romeo’s mother, was a concerned presence in his life, and Romeo was already preoccupied and more than a little sex-starved for another girl, Rosaline, before he was overwhelmed by Juliet. Later fictional lovers, such as Goethe’s young Werther, are unmistakably in search of a mother figure, and the permanently lost boy, Peter Pan, seeks a girl-mother for his band of companions in Neverland, but Peter seeks no romantic attachment to Wendy. The persistence of the impulse to romantic love despite the particular tugs and ties of the mother-son relationship suggest that there is something essential, something more than a psychic compensation at work.

Tristan’s story is “modern” in that it explores in credible depth the tension between a young man’s necessary commitments-- to justice, community standards, to honoring beloved and revered elders—and the true longing of his heart. Tristan is nothing but loyal and honorable before he becomes entranced by Isolde. His love for her is infused with what had previously been his best energy, his charmed hero’s-- boy’s—sense of his place in the world. That quality of energy and feeling is then invested in the bond of love for Isolde. Everything that drove him before—commitment, service, enduring ordeals and tests, measuring up—becomes a secondary consideration to the thrall of being in love. Because he is strong and heroic, he doesn’t discard his former governing values altogether; they continue to bear on him in a tortured awareness of their antagonism to his new condition, but such values no longer inspire him and drive him through his days. When King Mark proceeds to make Isolde his queen, Tristan becomes a virtual and then an actual adulterer. It is his destiny to love Isolde with his body, heart, and mind, but it is his civic obligation to honor his vows of allegiance to the king, which could never allow his being the adulterous lover of the queen. But that is what he has been fated to become, and he will go on to live for three years in an aggravated state of ambivalence.

When Isolde’s maid first realizes that Tristan and Isolde have drunk the potion and are now irrevocably in love, she tells them, “Never will you know joy without pain again.” This is the sentence delivered to Adam and Eve as they are banished from Eden for having eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve’s sentence of drudgery and pain is the termination of their childhood innocence, which is to say their childhood. Tristan and Isolde’s sentence marks the end of their adolescence and imposes impossible barriers to happiness and fulfillment as adults. In the end, the maid’s initial prophecy—that consuming love leads to death—proves true in Tristan’s case, and he dies a divided, dispirited, and still lovesick young man.

So what exactly is the “modern” legacy of Tristan’s sad story? Tristan knows in his heart he cannot truly live outside a loving communion with Isolde. He also knows in his mind that he cannot truly live as a disloyal, adulterous cheat. There is no earthly resolution to the dilemma. The lovers meet secretly, but their trysts are as bitter as they are sweet. The ecstatic pitch of their initial communion is undiminished, but there is no room for it to breathe in the world of men. It is as if in Tristan’s case—or Romeo’s case, for that matter—the golden spark of boyhood is granted an extension in romantic love, but in the practical, waking world that kind of love is no more welcome or sustainable than the foolish exuberance of a boy. Yet—and here is the modern problem—boyish exuberance and deep romantic love are the truest and best conditions a male will know. Discernment, intelligence, practical adjustments, material gain, and consolidation of power never satisfy; they are always, when examined closely, compensations for what has been lost.

From the medieval era through modernity, the charmed spirit of puer aeternus, the eternal boy, continues to press its claims, as does the spirit of the heroic lover. Both the historical record and the literary record are replete with those claims, and while successive Icaruses continue to fly too high and star-crossed Romeos continue to love and lose, the larger culture proceeds apace, however violently and impoverished of spirit. The larger culture sanctifies the story, safely relegated to art, but continues to suppress the saving vitality of what the story tells.

In the medieval tales the boy hero thrusts himself without reflection into the larger world. He is virtually motherless. The world of his father and of men generally is a world of arms and combat and estate management. The young hero does not and cannot embrace the concerns of men, but he may seem to, in that he embraces the romance that seems to shimmer in manly pursuits. Young Perceval was sequestered away from bloodshed and killing and terror by his mother who had had enough of such wastage. When Perceval does happen to behold a band of knights, it is not their deadly potential that captures his heart, but the beauty of the sun glinting off their armor. He believes they are angels and sets out to be an angel himself. While he is held in the romance, he is charmed, vividly alive, connected to the unexamined force that sustains him. He is not really a boy-in-training-to-be-a-man; he is a boy held in a highly satisfying dream state. In this condition, he is unassailable and ecstatic. He is the biblical boy David, certain that he can slay the Philistine giant without aid of the man’s armor he is offered by Solomon. He is the boy tailor in the Grimms’ fairy tale who parlays the prideful achievement of “killing seven (flies) with one blow” into the heroic slaying of a malevolent giant. The heroic quest satisfies and energizes the boy as long as it holds its charm, its romance. But when that spell is broken, so is the motivation to go on. As long as there is the very ideal of effort, of perfect devotion, perfect love, a holy grail—an “impossible dream”—the boy spirit lives. When to his surprise Perceval beholds the actual grail, the enchantment is shattered, and he loses his way. Similarly, when Tristan’s romantic trajectory collides with the practical business of state, there is no more hope and no future worth having; there is only deception, enmity, endless fighting and death.

Deception, enmity, endless fighting and killing were indeed qualities that defined masculine medieval life, out of which these enduring stories were distilled as the era waned. All-consuming romantic love, it has been suggested, was an extension, a reprieve. The boy spirit enters easily and fully into romance, which serves both to stir the heart and to lift the boy hero out of the grim inevitabilities of arms and combat. The patriarchal civil order—the order of males who have outlived their boyhood—is utterly opposed to everything to do with the thrall of romantic love, of making love not war. In Edmund Spenser’s sixteenth-century allegory of the Faerie Queen, the seductress who lures the youthful warrior into her bower of bliss is a vitality-sapping witch who reduces her young victim to listless impotence, his shed armor rusting under the elements. This seductress can be found everywhere in the literary record of the west. She is Circe hoping to enchant Odysseus. She is Keats’ Belle Dame Sans Merci, who saps the strength and vitality of her young knight to the point that his life is reduced to “palely loitering.”

The witchy seductress lurking behind a cunningly lovely visage is a durable figure, one that continues to caution modern males against impetuous surrender to romantic love. Gestures, leanings in that direction are alternately risky business and fatal attractions which result in the wreckage of lives. But there is the counter-story: the love that is for real, beauty that is not deceptive but rather the outward sign of inward grace. There is Abelard’s Heloise, Tristan’s Isolde, Dante’s Beatrice, Romeo’s Juliet, Heathcliff’s Cathy For the heroic boy, unbowed and uncompromised, communion with his beloved trumps family, clan, state, and church. Romeo is a boy of his era and of his city, a boy of whom his worst enemy can say, “Verona brags of him to be a virtuous and well-governed youth.” He is a young knight trained in arms and had he not been diverted by the thrall of romantic love, would have joined if not led his clan in its brutal clashes with the Capulets. But love changes him and in effect extracts him from and elevates him above his martial peers and elders. Newly and secretly married to Juliet, he greets his wife’s Capulet cousin Tybalt as a brother and professes love for him, not enmity. Tybalt, who has not been so transformed, believes Romeo is putting him on and in consequence loses his temper and kills Romeo’s dear friend Mercutio in a duel. Mercutio is killed in part because Romeo attempts to break up the fight, enabling an unseen thrust of Tybalt’s sword to penetrate and kill him. Shocked and mortified by what has happened, Romeo momentarily shakes free of his amorous condition, and in a rage turns on Tybalt-- “O Juliet,” he cries, “thy beauty hath made me effeminate”—and kills him.

Again, the ecstasy of romantic love, while a welcome continuation of males’ puer spirit, is no more assimilable into the established masculine order than boyish exuberance. The unbroken succession of stories of such love into modernity is testimony to the psychological importance of opposing love to a deadening and deadly civil order. In the medieval telling of these stories there is the heroic suggestion that the spirited boy will choose love over any earthly alternative; moreover, without such love, there is no earthly alternative, only death—which banishes boy spirit from the world as surely as the civil order would have it.

2009-05-17T09:13:00.000-07:00

The historic alienation and breaking of boys and men: a serial.

Introduction: Generativity and Sons

Theoretically, if the adolescents of any era fail to take up the work and ways of their elders, the civilization in which they are held could collapse in a single generation. Moreover, if all children were uniformly separated from all parents by the same span of, say, twenty years, that very devastation would quite likely have occurred in this writer’s lifetime. But the so-called “generations” are not so tidily distanced, and the civilizations they compose therefore take quite a bit longer to collapse, and when they do, the staggering complexity of the process is likely to confound any given Gibbons or think tank.

The historical fact of the matter is that civilization is hard to kill. The trajectory of so-called “western,” or Graeco-Roman, civilization from classical antiquity through the present reveals as much continuity as it does discontinuity. Stepping back to take the long view, something very much like a Hegelian process is at work: dominant and longstanding modes of production and organized creeds and widely shared tastes and practices tend to generate their negations. These negations begin as marginal, outlaw challenges to the prevailing culture, then strengthen to uneasy legitimacy before melding into cultural dominance themselves. This dialectical process can be seen both in centuries-long transitions as well as in the transition from each generation to the next.

When Plato, in his Republic, wanted to show the transition of his logically constructed ideal society into the flawed and conflict-ridden societies historically familiar to us, he illustrated the passage with the generational dynamics of fathers and sons. The result was a clear and historically descriptive account of patriarchal aristocracy becoming supplanted by commercially driven oligarchy, the class tensions of which are resolved stormily by the formation of egalitarian democracy, the excesses of which lead to demagoguery and ultimately despotic repression.

In depth psychology too, whether Freud’s Oedipal dynamics or its related “attachment” theories or the Jungian theory of “individuation,” the progression of culture is understood through the generational tensions between parents and children, with special emphasis on father and sons. Developmental Freudians like Erik Erikson propose that certain historically situated son-father adjustments become emblematic of the suppressed longings of the larger society, and thus a dramatic cultural transformation is launched. Erikson illustrated this hypothesis by recounting the coming-of-age of a number of transformative sons, including Martin Luther, Gandhi, and Hitler.

There are two compelling reasons for better understanding generational transitions. The first is the light such understanding sheds on cultural problems like crime, poverty, intolerance or any number of other conflict-provoking, unsustainable practices. The second reason is more personal and particular: to help children come of age in a manner in which their full humanity can be realized. These two concerns of course can be seen as one. A world good for and fit for children may indeed be the world most worth having generally. Contemporary children, however, even those who dwell in the most technologically advanced and economically prosperous societies, cannot be said to be thriving. It has long been normative, first among psychologists and now generally, to consider coming of age a “crisis.” More recently there are suggestions that the crisis has devolved into a widespread and mounting failure to educate and socialize children effectively. The concern is no longer merely that they succeed in school and make transitions to adult productivity. The more immediate concern is that children will thrive at all, that they will endure a school day, with or without the intervention of powerful psychoactive medicines. There is concern that they will lapse into debilitating depression or incapacitating anxiety, that they will become addicted to drugs or alcohol or be drawn into the thralldom of gang rituals and violence, that they will starve themselves past recovery, that they will take their lives or the lives of others.

Children’s failure to thrive is increasingly normative. Titles of best-selling books about children suggest that to raise a daughter requires “reviving Ophelia,” while rearing a son is “raising Cain.” Ophelia is a suicide, Cain a fratricide. The older child or emerging adolescent in contemporary fiction and films is no longer seen as facing a challenging or even perilous world, but a world spoiled beyond redemption. The young hero is an anti-hero. It is a world in which a rebel could not conceivably locate a cause. It is a world in which a child might age but not mature. The world that created me deserves me, pledge the young terrorists of Columbine, the defiant misogynists of gangsta rap. The youthful anti-hero is no longer J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, melancholy and adrift in midtown Manhattan. Holden is a lost boy, but he is lost longingly among ghosts of golden times and golden comrades from his earlier childhood. Today’s lost boys long for nothing; indeed they have known nothing one would long for.

The contemporary boy, the contemporary son, is not so much lost as broken. A reading of the historical and cultural record will reveal, perhaps surprisingly, that he has been lost for a long time. The broken boy, by contrast, is a genuine novelty. Where did he come from? How does he come to be? Is there repair, a way forward, a return?

bad faith: a reflection on terror

2006-10-30T07:10:00.000-08:00

BAD FAITH

How Mental Regression Becomes “Religion”
And How Adherents to such Religion Mire Themselves
And All Others in Terror and Misery

We wake to find ourselves in a worldwide Age of Terror.

Terror has surpassed national interest, emergent technology and global economic schemes as the defining feature of contemporary life. Highly organized, deliberate terrorism is so recently evolved that it still feels like a novelty, yet all the world’s peoples have become aware of its looming possibility, and increasing millions carry out their daily lives in its grip.

Certain intellectuals have been quick to explain terror: as an inevitable response on the part of the oppressed against their oppressors, as the most efficient means a purposeful minority can employ to mobilize majorities to its will. Seen from the standpoint of basic political theory, terrorism is extremely potent; relatively few, highly dedicated terrorists have succeeded in influencing massively consequential decisions on behalf of the wealthiest and most militarily powerful nations in the world.

One of those decisions has been for the United States and its allies to wage a global war on terrorism. Declared in the volatile climate created by the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on the infamous 9/11, the War on Terror is a historical novelty: a war on a concept, a war against seemingly unfindable perpetrators, a war which cannot be confined to national or even regional boundaries. Moreover, half a decade after its declaration, it is a war not only un-won, but one which seems, despite staggering and mounting costs, to be barely begun.

Informed non-partisan opinion is now reaching a consensus that targeting Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq as a crucible for world terror was ill-informed. It also appears that there was good reason to know otherwise, even before the second invasion of Iraq commenced. One grim consequence of the anti-terrorist incursion into Iraq has been to convert the occupied country into an actual hub of global terrorist operations on the part of Al Qaeda and other jihadists who have now entered Iraq to further exploit the now rampant anti-American and anti-west feeling on the part of growing numbers of Iraqis and other Muslims of the Middle East. It is probably neither an exaggeration nor an over-simplification to say that the effect to date of the American-led invasion of Iraq has been to create precisely the kind of terrorist activity it intended to eliminate. By any measure there is more, not less, terrorism at work in the world than there was before the declaration of war against it.

Anybody paying attention already knows this. What we don’t seem to know is what to do about it, what to do about people who employ terrorist measures to achieve political aims, how to help people who are terrorized, and, perhaps most crucially, how to free ourselves from the grip of terror, including the impulse to defend ourselves by out-terrorizing the terrorists.

I. CAUSES AND CREEDS

Almost nobody wants to terrorize others, and absolutely nobody wants to be terrorized, so how has The Age of Terror come to be? Becoming a terrorist requires achieving and sustaining a highly particular state of mind. Two profound human aversions have to be transcended. The first is the aversion to one’s own physical danger, pain, and death. The second is the aversion to hurting and killing others. The strength of the first aversion—to one’s own pain, fear, suffering, and death—is probably universal. The strength of the second—to the suffering of others—varies with nurturance and other cultural factors that bear on character development, most specifically those that foster compassion, empathy, tolerance, and love.

In the aftermath of the past century’s devastating world wars and also that era’s concerted attempts to better understand social phenomena like genocide and racial bigotry, some useful knowledge has accrued to help illuminate how people overcome the aversion to hurting and killing others. Social scientists studying the behaviors of soldiers at war have documented a direct relationship between the readiness to kill and the perception of the enemy as an abstraction: that is, as being less than or other than human, whether due to some innately lacking or alien feature or to some irredeemable violation. Reducing another person or whole populations to an abstraction, assigning them to an objective category such as “inferior race,” “infidel” or even “terrorist,” serves both to objectify and distance those to be hurt and killed from those willing to hurt and kill them. Thus a soldier who in his civilian life could not bear to slap another person across the face can, when uniformed, trained, and indoctrinated to the dangers posed by an abstract enemy, open fire on a shadowy figure scurrying across a distant roof top or press a button to launch deadly missiles that will devastate untold numbers of unseen persons. The more distant and abstract the enemy, the easier, speaking psychologically, it is to kill them.

Another essential factor in the psychology of harming others was brought to light in the nineteen sixties by the controversial Milgram experiments, in which ordinary people agreed to deliver what were clearly painful and life-threatening electric shocks to human subjects in what was made to appear a scientifically supervised laboratory study. One of the conclusions of the psychologists who conducted the experiments was that the procedure’s uniformed technicians, scientific language and protocols constituted a kind of authority which served to override the volunteers’ empathic feelings for the subjects they were visibly electrocuting. Dr. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale, conceived of the experiment in the immediate aftermath of the trial of Adolph Eichmann for his role in orchestrating human torture and mass extermination during the holocaust. Milgram was interested in the conditions under which people could suppress or override their aversion to harming others, especially conditions in which the harm was sanctioned by what was felt to be a higher authority.

Milgram’s work was itself vehemently taken to task on the grounds that the experiment manipulated and deceived volunteers into committing acts of cruelty about which they felt remorseful and troubled afterward. But whatever the ethics of the experiment, which has since been widely replicated with consistent results, it documents the capacity of ordinary people to transcend their aversion to harming others if they believe they are acting in the service of a legitimate authority. Whether the atrocity under review is the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam or the torture of prisoners held in Abu Graihb in Iraq, the tendency of otherwise non-monstrous people to commit monstrous acts is undeniably strengthened when those acts are believed to be sanctioned by higher authority.

At this point it is possible to compose a serviceable formula for hurting and killing on the part of a person who would not ordinarily be willing to do so. The first element in the formula is the abstraction of a targeted enemy. Enemies are most easily abstracted and made objects if they are distanced from the agent harming them; the distance can be geographic, but it can also be socio-economic or cultural. Once enemies are sufficiently abstracted and distanced, their assault awaits only direction from a compelling authority.

There are various kinds of compelling authorities. Despotic regimes and rigid military hierarchies come easily to mind, but highly personal ideals such as honor and patriotism can compel with authority, as can exceptional personal charisma and the blind momentum of mobs. But considered historically—or any other way—the most compelling authority is ultimate authority: divine will.

Nothing compels action, including violent, aggressive action, more surely than perceived divine direction. Historically the most protracted and devastating wars and repressions have been carried out in the name of divine imperatives—or, as in the case Nazism or Stalinist and Maoist Marxism, in the name of imperatives so grounded in transcendent “world historical” forces as to be indistinguishable from those assigned to divinity. The European crusades into the Islamic states of the Mediterranean were proclaimed by the eleventh century papacy as God’s will—“Deus volt!”—and the continuing Islamic resurgence in response to such incursions has been identically justified.

Painting the picture in such broad strokes is often a persuasive technique used to beg the question of whether adherence to divinity (and to prior absolutes by any other name) is really the problem. Part of the allure of thinking this way—that adherence to divinity is what inflames and motivates people to assault and destroy those who believe otherwise—is that the solution to the problem seems so easy. But in practice such thinking serves only to exacerbate the problem. Enlightened secularists who believe there will be a more pacific, better world once it is purged of divinities and their adherents are really no different from radical jihadists who believe there will be a more pacific, better world once it is purged of infidels.

The mistake of course is to see repellent behavior—aggression, terror, killing—as endemic to religion in general or in particular. The mistake is in equating “religious” with whatever people do in the name of their religions. Religiously affiliated people sometimes do repellent things as well as contradictory things. Some European Christians collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War; other European Christians gave up their lives resisting Nazis. Some young Americans felt it was their Christian duty to take up arms against Hitler; others felt it was their Christian duty to object conscientiously to serving in that war. John Brown said and most certainly believed he was doing God’s will when he murdered a group of what he assumed were pro-slavery settlers in Lawrence, Kansas. David Koresh said and most certainly believed he was doing God’s will when he set up his armed Branch Davidian fortress in Waco, Texas. Mohammed Atta said and most certainly believed he was doing God’s will when he directed a hijacked jetliner into the World Trade Center tower. But are these men and their deeds instances of Christianity or Islam? When mathematicians behave badly or in a contradictory manner, has mathematics been diminished or contradicted?

The problematic fact is that religion cannot be reduced to whatever is done by religiously affiliated people in religion’s name. The distinction must not be forgotten or muddied if we are to keep peace and our heads. Careful discernment is not inimical to committed faith, nor does contending with the full range of human error and folly necessarily diminish faith. It is hard to imagine two more unshockable or worldly wise men than the great renaissance humanists Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More, yet both were passionate and unshakable in their Catholic faith. Their Italian contemporary, Niccolo Machiavelli, was also a practicing Catholic who, on his death bed, made his confession to a priest and received last rites.

Machiavelli, arguably one of the most problematic Catholics who ever lived, laid out a historically precocious analysis of the relationship between religion and politics. The writer of the celebrated guide to effective leadership, The Prince (if not the man receiving last rites on his death bed), observed that religious regimes tended to be easier to manage than secular ones. Being seen as religious, Machiavelli maintained, can be a great political asset. This is especially true if the constituents share a single faith and the head of state is visibly clerical. Heads of such states, Machiavelli wrote, should make a great show of religion, just as heads of all states should make a great show of virtue. The trick, or the art, as Machiavelli saw it, is for the prince—whatever his ecclesiastical office—not to let religious ideas or virtue interfere with clear political thinking and effective action, however brutal and ruthless. Again, the appearance of religiosity was for Machiavelli a political advantage generally and a positive necessity in states whose constituents are narrowly and passionately religious. If he were writing for a contemporary readership, Machiavelli would point out, for example, that an Ayatollah will have an easier time directing the political course of Iran than will an elected legislature of non-clerics. Princes must take care, however, never to let religion get in the way of their primary mission, which is to consolidate power and to fortify it against all enemies.

Those in political power and those seeking it need to compel, whether legitimately or not, others to act forcefully on their behalf. Whether as soldiers, police or other conscripts, certain subjects must be willing to subdue, injure and kill others at the risk of being injured or killed themselves. Such risk and sacrifice are most easily compelled when the agents of force share the motives and objectives of their leaders. The more commanding the leader, the more compelling is the call to risk and sacrifice. Leaders calling others to violent action may draw on a number of political “resources,” including monetary incentives, persuasive appeals to cherished ideals, the legitimacy of institutionalized conscription, or the credible threat of punishment or death for failing to serve. But none of these resources is more reliable in compelling sacrifice than an individual’s conviction that he or she is an agent of irresistible, transpersonal forces, including divine will.

What kind of people feel this way, and how do they arrive at this condition?

II. STRESS, ANXIETY, AND REGRESSION:
Terrorism and Adolescence

Under certain, extreme conditions nearly anybody can be made to feel compelled by irresistible, transpersonal forces. People who suffer from delusional mental illnesses report being commanded to acts of violence and retribution by beings and voices unseen and unheard by others. Mentally sound people who undergo extreme stress or sustained sleep deprivation may temporarily experience similar visitations. For many others the pathway to an unexamined compliance with a perceived “higher power” is less dramatic and less delusional. A succession of trying personal disappointments—insufficient nurture, unmeetable parental and societal demands, unemployment, divorce, death of loved ones, public disgrace-- or any sustained period of anxiety about one’s safety and viability can occasion a kind of psychic surrender, including submission or conversion to creeds which may entail highly regulated new behavior. Such surrenders and conversions are especially likely as a person approaches the abyss of debilitating depression or breakdown.

If despair can hasten individuals and whole peoples to submit to directives from a specific or non-specific “higher” power, then all the world’s adolescents might be said to be at special risk. The transition from the economic and emotional dependency of adolescence into the autonomy of early adulthood is dramatic for everyone and traumatic for many. The late adolescent standing at the brink of adult possibility has many reasons to feel dubious and fearful. Even lovingly nurtured and economically comfortable adolescents are susceptible to debilitating anxiety about their personal attractiveness, their economic and professional prospects, their ability to find life partners and satisfying intimacy. With adolescence arrives the capacity for abstract and theoretical thinking, and in consequence the adolescent experiences the additional burden of seeing what once may have been a highly particular problem, such as an act of perceived injustice, as a universal condition: Injustice in the world. Moreover, adolescents necessarily lack the accrued experience and perspective to mediate such enormities. So acutely aware of so many ominous general conditions—profanation of the scared, injustice, war, epidemic disease, environmental catastrophe-- an adolescent is likely to feel passionately concerned about present circumstances while at the same time utterly powerless to correct them.

Some of the responses to the crisis posed by adolescence—including those on the part of individuals well into their adult years but still arrested in their adolescent predicament—are pathological and destructive. These responses are regressive in that psychological equilibrium is achieved by retreating from anxiety-producing complexities into prior, more concrete, more childlike mental structures. One of these regressions favored by young or developmentally arrested males is identification with terrifying aggressors. At a primitive level of mental functioning, far below conscious deliberation, the terrified subject psychologically identifies with—and thus “becomes”—the agent of terror instead of its victim. An adopted identity as one who is fearsome instead of fearful relieves the anxiety of being unendurably afraid, helpless, and weak, but the costs of this psychic fabrication are devastating to the subject and dangerous to his society. The initial fearful vulnerability to injury and death is transformed in a process psychoanalysis has called “reaction-formation” into an obsessive urge to harm and to kill. Those held in such counter-phobic obsessions begin to fantasize about creating spectacular havoc, obliterating all enemies and rivals. If those enemies and rivals can be claimed to have bullied, exploited or demeaned the aggressor-identified subject, then he and his fellows may be further fortified by acting in the name of a righteous Cause. Energized further by collaboration with others similarly obsessed and by films and computer games and internet sites dedicated to destruction and mayhem, fantasies may progress to actual plans. Arms and explosives are amassed and stored. And then perhaps the apocalyptic march to the schoolyard or the post office or the wedding celebration.

Unendurable stress and fear serve terrorist activity in another familiar way. Some individuals cannot bear to bring to mind the image of a violent aggressor, much less identify with one. Instead their unendurable dread drives them to “overcome” the most unthinkable outcome—violent injury and sudden death—by embracing it. Such individuals are eagerly sought by terrorist organizations. Unlike the aggressor-identified terrorists themselves, these recruits are not aggressive. Apart from their deadly ultimate assignments, they are likely to be passive and benignly obedient. They are usually unequipped or unwilling to mediate their distress through analytic thinking, which so often results in bewildering complexity and doubt. Anxious and unsettled, they are looking for absolute, ringing certainty, and through a counter- phobic reaction-formation, become willing agents of what they now believe is their divinely sanctioned demise—and the demise of targeted others.

While historical religious martyrdom has most often been the result of persecuting strongly principled people not at all eager to die, the assumption of “religious” martyrdom on the part of suicide bombers and other terrorists works powerfully to strengthen the resolve of death-welcoming counter-phobes by providing a veil of special dedication and piety. While suicidal jihadists and abortion clinic bombers may come to their respective callings in highly distinctive trajectories, they share essential characteristics. At one point they feel unbearably lost and powerless. At whatever age or stage of life, they stand, like the adolescent, before an external reality that threatens to overwhelm them with all of its uncertainties and complexities. To venture out into that reality feels not only perilous, but also a betrayal of what were earlier instilled and catechized as sacred principles and beliefs. The adolescent cannot through ordinary cognition embrace the sacred principles of his childhood any more than the empirically aware child can embrace his former belief in Santa Claus. Yet the incipient recruit to terror, like the child and like the adolescent, longs for that prior certainty, with all of its beckoning majesty and remembered force. When the inner anxiety is sufficiently intense and the external circumstances are sufficiently unbearable, the reaction is formed. In psychological terms, fear is repressed into unconscious reaches; calm and certainty rise to consciousness, but conditional on the subject’s accepting a narrow creed and a prescribed mission.

III. TERROR’S THRILL

But for the inescapable fact that they ultimately deliver only misery, fear, pain, and death to both perpetrators and victims, acts of terror are a thrill.

To be more precise, the anticipation of an act of terror can be a thrill for those who conceive it. There is as yet no evidence of the actual commission of a terrorist act being thrilling for anyone on the scene, nor, barring extreme pathology, is there ever likely to be. The thrill of terror is typically experienced at a safe, abstracted distance from the act. It is reported that Osama Bin Ladin and his entourage erupted in cheers when they saw the televised 9/11 footage of the high jacked jetliners burrowing into the World Trade Center Towers. They were no doubt thrilled, but they were watching television, far from the scene. One doubts that anything remotely like that response would have been registered if Bin Ladin’s company had themselves been aboard the planes.

What thrilled and gladdened Bin Ladin was watching a remote and myth-y spectacle: the proud towers of a hated enemy power erupting in flames. At the onset of the first Gulf War, it troubled me that the network news crews appeared to be flushed with enthusiasm about the effectiveness of “smart missiles” so cunningly engineered that they could fly down streets, turn corners, and enter the ventilation duct of a targeted building. The marvels of smart missiles and other state-of-the-art military technology were touted seemingly for their own sake. I was teaching in a high school at the time, and it was unsettling for me to talk about the war and its coverage with the boys in my school. The elaborate computer graphics demonstrating the capabilities of smart missiles were, my students pointed out, just like their video and computer games. The spectacular spikes of illumination shuddering against the night sky over Baghdad as the city was bombed were likened by my students to certain special effects in their favorite action movies. In their excitement my students were not, I believe, especially insensitive or martially inclined. Baghdad was very far away. The enemy was thought to be not very formidable. Things were fine at home. My students were, like Bin Ladin and company, just watching television.

The actual agents of terror are stimulated in an altogether different way. As suggested already, terrorist resolve is a reactive compensation to feeling anxious and powerless. This regression to a more concrete, childlike mental state is experienced as a clarifying, exhilarating relief. Lost and alienated souls feel born again, included, anointed. The voluntary surrender of personal autonomy is for mature and healthy people the very negation of life’s purpose, but for those who do so, it is a thrill. The thrill is amplified and ennobled if the person surrenders to the will of a divinely guided elect, a chosen few. It is thrilling to be an underdog in any contest or struggle. The thrill is greater if the underdog has been wronged and greater still if the wronged underdog can claim absolute righteousness. For those marching under the banner of absolute righteousness, conventional victory is preordained, conventional defeat a glorious martyrdom. Under the banner of absolute righteousness, there is no defeat.

The vast majority of the world’s people are not psychologically susceptible to terrorism’s allure, but for that very reason they have profound difficulty understanding those who are. Unable to identify with terrorist motivation but nevertheless desperate to understand it, non-terrorists have proposed all manner of mistaken explanations. That they are mistaken or insufficient is due to no lack of intelligence or generosity. The difficulty a non-terrorist faces in understanding terrorist mentality is precisely parallel to the difficulty non-addicts have in understanding those addicted to alcohol and drugs. The non-terrorist/non-addict sees plainly—but only—the devastating consequences of the problematic behavior, not the psychic payoff, the transcendence, the thrill. For this reason recovering addicts are often the most effective initial interveners in the rehabilitation of others. It is not unthinkable that recovering terrorists might one day play a similarly healing role, but the immediate concern worldwide is with impenitent, practicing terrorists who see themselves as exemplary, healthy and, many of them, commissioned by divine will.

The most common misunderstanding of the nature of terrorism has come from liberally educated westerners trying to explain jihadist terror. Such explanations often combine a generosity of spirit with a thoroughgoing consideration of Islamic culture and Middle Eastern geopolitical realities. Nevertheless, at the heart of these explanations is the projective assumption that at some deep, common level jihadist terrorists share the rational hedonism and egalitarian friendliness of the secular west. Put another way the western analysts mistakenly assume their condition is universal, diversions from that condition attributable to injury or error The logic of such inquiry thus becomes: what has motivated people like me to behave in an inconceivably extreme way? The logical answer within that projective framework becomes: people so severely hurt and oppressed that they have become unlike me. This answer alone does not solve the westerner’s unease about terrorism, so there is further explanation: western nations, due to cultural insensitivity and economic designs on Middle Eastern oil, have imposed unwanted and unbearable conditions on Islamic peoples, and the only recourse, given western might, is terrorism. From this standpoint follow any number of corrective recommendations, such as a deeper understanding of the abrasive impact of western commercial culture on Islamic peoples and the cessation of military interventions for the sole purpose of consolidating western interests. In sum, this point of view proposes that the west has given offense, and once those offenses cease, so will terrorism.

This kind of analysis is neither implausible nor entirely invalid. But it is fundamentally mistaken in its assumption that terrorism is a mere extension—a tactic—of conventional power politics, from which it gratifyingly follows that once the objectives of presumptively wronged parties are met, terrorism will cease. But as current jihadist manifestoes make clear, the long term plan is to generate autonomous, decentralized terrorist cells all over the world, cells answerable to no party, state, or earthly authority. The jihadist objective is not a better behaved west, it is the disintegration of the west—the downfall and disappearance of the infidels.

Seeing terrorist acts as understandable or even justifiable gestures of retribution casts little light on, say, the eruption of schoolyard terror on the part of school children—although voices have risen to claim that the youthful perpetrators of school violence must have been driven to deadly terrorism by having been bullied, teased, or otherwise marginalized. Still other analysts have wanted to fault the perpetrators’ parents or the administration of their schools. But this is reaching. The perpetrator-as-cultural-victim approach fails appallingly to cover cases. Of what, finally, was Timothy McVeigh a victim? What oppressions and privations compelled him in the heart of placid middle America to blow up a civic building, injuring 800 people and killing 168, including 19 preschool children?

IV. THE FAILURE OF TERROR

While devastating acts of terror may continue to cause all manner of reactive measures on the part of the individuals, sects, and nations affected, terror will necessarily fail to achieve either the political or personal outcomes terrorists seek. Politically the response has been, and can only be, ever more determined counter-terrorism, which in its own way heightens anxiety as it diverts human and material resources away from more humane business. Personally terrorism is inherently incapable of delivering satisfaction because it is based on a psychological regression to a mental state that distorts the terrorist’s perception of present reality while at the same time suppressing the fears and feelings of helplessness motivating the regression.

Psychologically speaking, the suppression of feeling is costly. The mental energy required to barricade fact and feeling into the recesses of the unconscious depletes the conscious resources available to meet the exigencies of daily life with flexibility and creativity. When confronted with information—including true information-- that challenges the regressive program, the terrorist, like all neurotics, grows rigidly defensive. To question anything would be to question everything. To question at all violates the original submission. In order to maintain mental defenses and to screen out dissonant data, the terrorist must turn radically inward, dissociating from substantial, intimate contact with others. He may reinforce his submission with doctrine or scripture, but not with news of the world. Rigid, dissociated and alone even in company, the terrorist is only partially conscious, only partially in the world.

By any reckoning, terrorism represents a failure of human realization. It is a failure on the part of those who conceive and plan it, and it is a failure for those who carry it out. Terrorism succeeds for a time in creating fear, misery, and death, but it never achieves its stated political objectives. Terror does not finally daunt or annihilate enemies; it swells their ranks and heightens their resolve.

V. TERROR’S PLACE

Which is not to say terror does not have its existential place. Stepping back to gain an ontological perspective, it is clear that deep consideration has been given to the place of negation and destruction in the scheme of being. Hindu theology conceives a dynamic cosmic equilibrium shaped by three immanent forces: creativity (Brahma), preservation (Vishnu), and destruction (Shiva). Judeo-Christian theology locates the willfully destructive urge in the realm of evil. In Freudian psychoanalysis all existence, including human existence, is held in a polar tension between generative forces (Eros) and destructive ones (Thanatos). In that scheme, civilization requires individuals to sublimate or otherwise displace their destructive urges in ways that enable both society and individuals to thrive. Informed in part by Freudian thinking, Jung and his followers in archetypal psychology have placed humankind’s darkest and most destructive tendencies in the realm of unconscious Shadow, which might be summarized as the combined forces individuals or collectives cannot bear to acknowledge consciously. Jung saw, for example, the buildup of underground arsenals of nuclear missiles ominously facing each other across geopolitical battle lines as a Shadow symptom of the deadly irrationality of those plotting the course of the Cold War.

There is considerable explanatory force in the notion that history is the interplay of conscious deliberations and unconscious responses. Societies and sects that have attempted to banish erotic expression in public discourse and private behavior find that their prohibitions are continually being undermined. Despite heightened and even brutal measures to punish and subdue offenders (or even members of the offender’s families), sex or the suspicion of sex seems, like terrorism, to beckon darkly just beyond the reaches of surveillance.

There is also considerable explanatory force in the notion that every creative affirmation in time will generate its own negation. A serviceable example might be the flowering in our era of a world wide web of electronic communication, now the daily foundation of global commerce, institutional learning, and interpersonal relationships. Wondrous, useful, and still an emerging novelty, the information technology boom is already beset by tireless hackers, acting individually and in clandestine cells, to implant “viruses,” “worms,” and other system-flummoxing obstructions. The goal to date for most hackers, despite the havoc some of them temporarily cause, has not been to undermine computer technology itself. Like parasites, they need their cybernetic host. The goal of their intrusions and obstructions seems so far to be mastery and status within their peculiar fellowship, but the danger posed by hackers in service of political terror is already a mounting national security concern.

In an Age of Terror national security concerns can only mount. Nor will those concerns be limited to specific developments, such as nuclear weapons or deadly toxins in terrorist hands. In an Age of Terror, every cultural or technological development carries with it new possibilities for negation and destruction. Terror does not reside in the destructive capabilities of weapons; it resides in people who can be shaped into agents of negation and destruction.

VI. TERROR AND MATURATION:
A Better Story

The aggravating dialectic of terrorist provocation and anti-terrorist response will not resolve itself without a transformative culture change on the part of at least some of the peoples participating in that dialectic. However difficult to achieve in practice, the direction of that culture change is clear. The cessation of terrorism requires growing up and past the basic dreads that cause the psychological regression into the terrorist state of mind.

Growing up in this way requires a deeply considered commitment to nurturing and educating children and emerging adults to their full human potential, which is to be conscious, discerning agents in a complex, shared world. A fully realized person in that complex, shared world feels safe and strong enough to contend with ambivalence. A fully realized person is not afraid to hold up for consideration seemingly irreconcilable points of view. A fully realized person is stimulated, challenged, and even charmed by complexity and difference. Fully realized persons want to know the world as it is and others as they are more than they need to reduce them to safe and familiar orthodoxy.

To contend with complexity and ambivalence is by no means to be adrift in those conditions. Strong convictions and passionate faith are not incompatible with full human realization. All the established faiths of the world see divinity at work in creation and therefore acknowledge in various ways the sacredness of the created world and created beings in it. Carried forward into practical living, this kind of divine inspiration can contribute powerfully to empathic, inclusive feelings for others, including those very differences in cultural practices that give rise to ambivalence and concern. Fully realized persons, whether religiously affiliated or not, do not see difference as enmity.

The capacity to contend with difference, ambivalence, and complexity does not mean one is a relativist without fixed standards. Experience cannot fail to teach any child that some conditions are better than others, that safety and comfort are better than deprivation and fear, that freedom of movement and thought are better than confinement and restriction. Contending with difference and complexity does not mean there are no overarching, transpersonal truths and values—or that they must be suspended when dealing with people who appear to believe otherwise.

Anthropology suggests that many early peoples practiced child sacrifice in some form. Moreover, most of them grew out of those practices, but not at the same time or in the same ways. The way past child sacrifice has been to know better, which means to experience the durable pleasure and satisfaction of living otherwise. The demonstrable satisfaction of living humanely is powerfully transformative.

Compelling desired behavior and belief through force and terror has not been transformative. Western peoples generally find the genital mutilation of Islamic girls to be a repellent practice. Moreover, concerned westerners would like to see that process curtailed: for Islamic girls to experience their full, given range of sexual feeling and expression. Moreover, if asked to reflect, those seeking this transformation would almost certainly claim that the condition they would like Islamic girls to experience is not a “western” condition or a particular cultural condition of any kind, but a universal human condition, to which all people are entitled. This western concern about genital mutilation may well be grounded in universal, transpersonal principle. But if so, how is the desired transformation most likely to take place? It will almost certainly not come about through the violent overthrow of the regimes under which the practice occurs, nor by debunking the faith of its practitioners. Nor is it probable that some kind of western-style feminist momentum will unite and empower Islamic women to eliminate the contested practice on their own.

Transformation occurs when the superior example is lived and demonstrated. With respect to any practice westerners would like to see operating in the larger world, the transformative approach would be to demonstrate its worth and durability in the conduct of their own lives. Western people collectively committed to the full realization of every growing girl would not have to stray far from home to find important work to do. If not genital mutilation, certain other impositions and privations stand in the way of many western girls’ (not to mention boys’) full realization. To achieve the full realization of its children or even to make significant progress toward that goal would be dramatically more transformative in the larger world than any theory, policy, or export the western world might otherwise devise.

The problem of terror is not an East-West problem. It is certainly not an Islamic problem, nor really a religious or ideological problem of any kind. Terror, whether in American schoolyards or the vestibules of abortion clinics or at a pedestrian crossing in Baghdad, is the result of individuals regressing to a pre-adolescent mental state as a result of being unable to manage the tension of their circumstances.

One of the obstacles to growing past terror is the often unwitting journalistic tendency—along with the unapologetic attempts of the games and movie industries-- to romanticize terrorists, to pander meekly and reverently to the dramas they create. We are badly in need of a different kind of drama and romance. Perhaps we have had enough alienated, existentially wounded young anti-heroes, alone in a ruined world, pitted against looming legions of malignant forces. Perhaps we have had enough of The Matrix.

The way out of the Age of Terror is growing up. This does not mean merely that incipient terrorists and our ideological enemies must grow up. It means that we as individuals must grow up, so that our political representation in the world, our government, can be grown up. As proposed already, growing up entails a robust capacity to contend with complexity, ambivalence, and difference. There must be not just the head but the heart for such contending. Growing up means resolutely refusing to turn back to the narcissistic and childish impulse to reduce alien and adversary to safe and predictable versions of oneself. We must not think that way and we must take care that children are not indoctrinated or frightened into thinking that way.

Gandhi, surveying the massive and seemingly hopeless conflict among the peoples of post-war India, told his bewildered countrymen that in order to transform the troubled nation for the good, each of them should clean his own house. To grow up is to clean one’s own house. A house in order is the most elementary credential for offering housekeeping services to others.

Once again, fully realized people are able to contend with the world as they find it, as it is. They may be challenged mightily by dissonance, danger and complexity in that world, but they know the difference between living freely and creatively and living by compulsion of force and fear. They have no need to force or frighten others to their point of view or to their way of life. They attempt to live well, in ways and for reasons they offer up freely to the consideration of others. They have cleaned their own houses, and the result is there for the entire world to see.

We need that story, that romance.

RAH 10/28/06