On Violence (and the silly season)

Reading DoctorDi’s blog post today on the terror attacks in Mumbai, I was thinking about our general incomprehension in the face of such extreme violence. (Incidentally, congrats to Di on being long-listed by Veruna in Aus for her novel. I know she’s busy with the rewrites so doesn’t get to leave many comments around the blogosphere, but you should read her stuff.)

Perhaps it’s too early for analysis of the attacks and I’m reluctant to even go there. What’s my interest in this? Why should I sound off on other peoples’ tragedies? But I also think that there’s something to be learned here. Regular readers may know that I’ve been preoccupied for a while with empathy and violence. How violence results from a total lack of empathy. In simple form: Anger – Empathy = Violence.

With high levels of violence in South Africa, it’s not hard to find examples. One of the dominant stories in Cape Town in the past few months has been that of a senior policeman, Marius van der Westhuizen, who gunned down his three children as a way of punishing his wife. Yesterday I read how the forensic psychiatrist described his actions as possibly the most severe example of narcissistic rage that her team had seen in the past few months.

Violence feeds the ego, as Adam Phillips reminds us. And our commercial culture is only too ready to feed our egos with gratuitous violence in the form of violent movies, news images, computer games and hate speech. Di was asking what the perpetrators of the Mumbai violence might want from this horror. And as I read her incomprehension which matched my own yesterday, I started thinking about the need for publicity and self-importance of the perpetrators which links in with the needs of the commercial media to generate media consumption. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to reflect on the rise of the 24-hour news channels in the wake of the Gulf Wars. And then to remember how 9/11 had us glued to CNN and Sky and BBC (or whatever your channel was) for days on end in absolute horror.

So what do the perpetrators want? Reports suggest a surge of hatred and hostility between India and Pakistan for a start. The cooling of ill-feeling between the two countries is clearly not good for the terrorism business. I’m sure other analysts will reflect on a general hatred for Western values which links up with narcissistic injuries of wounded and excluded identities. But I’ll leave it there for today. I know this is rather depressing talk for a Friday. This is supposed to be the silly season after all. One of our wonderfully talented cartoon strips in SA is “Madam and Eve”. The best exchanges occur between Granny Anderson and the cute black girl (whose name escapes me). Granny Anderson, a diminutive gin-and-tonic-swilling expat from England, is usually goaded into locking the cute black girl (CBG) out of the house for disturbing her afternoon nap with funny and pertinent questions. “Now?” asks the CBG. “How about now?” “Now?” She’s wearing a false nose and glasses and is asking Granny Anderson if teh silly season has started yet. Well, it’s clearly not today. But my online Xmas shopping started yesterday. Books and CDs. *purr*

Living with the cracks

“… we all go to pieces with our patients at one time or another. We all go to pieces now and then even without a patient to help us along. Your grief makes you more fragile. You know I’ve always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We’re fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being.” – The Sorrows of an American, Siri Hustvedt

The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt is, as Jane Smiley points out in the Guardian, “beautifully thought through, deeply serious and enormously intelligent”. It is a complex novel narrated by a New York psychoanalyst, Erik Davidsen, who is coming to terms with his beloved father’s death as well as the failure of his own marriage. It is two years after the tragedy of 9/11 and his sister Inga, a philosopher / writer is also mourning the death of her husband Max, a famous novelist. Erik is also preoccupied with his tenant, a beautiful Jamaican woman, while Inga is trying to discover the contents and meaning of seven letters which Max wrote to a former lover.

Perhaps what I enjoyed most about Sorrows were the carefully described observations Erik makes in reference to his patients, himself and his family. Erik’s style of therapy sits easily with me and I admired his ability to reflect on his own feelings with such clarity and detail. Hustvedt has this aspect of the novel down to a fine art. But there was also something quite anti-climactic about this novel. I found it dragged in the middle and it left me rather unsatisfied. Perhaps Erik Davidsen seems rather tame as a main character. Hustvedt does a good job of portraying him as a ‘wounded healer’. As one of the characters points out, it is the cracks that let the light in, and Erik’s own crackedness, while not fully explored, is what makes him interesting and likeable as a character. When he’s doing therapy he’s controlled, rational and reasonable but in his own time he’s wrestling with personal and familial troubles.

Reviewing Sorrows in the New York Times, Sylvia Brownrigg puts it well:

While (frustratingly) reticent about his ex-wife and the reason for their split, he [Erik] speaks at length about his ambiguous attachment to Miranda, his new downstairs tenant, a Jamaican woman with a lively 5-year-old daughter and a manipulative, sinister boyfriend. Observing himself with the same care he brings to his patients, Erik remarks on his uncharacteristically obsessive behaviour in relation to Miranda: “My solitude had gradually begun to alter me, to turn me into a man I had not expected. … I’ve often thought that none of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.”

For me, this is what makes psychology and literature so important to one another. We all have ‘convenient fictions’ and it is in telling our stories that we make meaning of our lives. On another level, Smiley comments that for all the novel’s considerable strengths, she finds it most interesting for the way in which it fails. “There is a reason why Freud and Kafka belong to one culture, and Ibsen and Sigrid Undset belong to another,” she argues. “It’s a rare Scandinavian writer who expects any sorrows at all, even those of an American, to be healed by mere memory.” This is an interesting argument, connecting the stoicism of Scandanavian storytelling with the healing work of sorting through memory that psychoanalysis offers.

*****

On a personal note, it’s been a rough few days here at the Couch Trip. I’m going to be trying to take things easy for a week or two but I’ll still hopefully be reading and commenting. Incidentally, the photo at the top is from the military base where I work. I liked the way it gives a glimpse into another world.

Learning from Barack: Anger, Empathy, Community

Reading Parts 2 and 3 of Dreams From My Father, I was struck by the power of anger as a force for change, Obama’s capacity to learn and grow out of adversity and the intertwining of the personal and the political. Barack’s experiences as a community organiser in the South Side of Chicago in the mid-1980s provide a few hints of the powerful political figure to come but the lasting impression for me was how an accumulation of small changes can make a big difference.

I was impressed with Obama’s honesty, his determination, his willingness to learn from people and his ability to integrate the diverse strands of his experience (Hawaiian, Indonesian, white, black, African, American) into a meaningful whole. For a start, there’s the interconnectedness of education, health, crime, the economy, identity. One moving scene towards the end sees a solitary Barack sitting in a packed Chicago church listening to the charismatic African-American preacher Jeremiah Wright give a sermon on the “audacity of hope”. The boy next to him nudges his arm and hands him a tissue, at which point Barack realises that he has tears running down his cheeks. In the context of his Chicago community work it makes a lot of sense and seems to mark a moment of emotional homecoming and integration.

On a personal level, the young Barack reminded me a lot of my friend Kevin R. A young American volunteer from Washington DC, Kevin came out to South Africa in the mid-90s to volunteer for a year at a black school in Limpopo province. He was tall, good-looking, confident, had a way with languages (he was half-Italian) and full of ideas. Like Barack, he grew up with his mother who encouraged him and his sister to travel back to Italy once a year to keep his ties with his father’s family alive. Kevin was smooth like Barack and had a way with women which I envied.

Kevin and I finished up our work in Limpopo at the same time and he came to stay with me in Cape Town before boarding a yacht to sail across to South America. Like the young Barack, Kevin had a yearning for his dad, who now lived in Brazil, and this was a good way of making his way back to America. I lost contact with him but I’m sure he made good. Probably not quite as good as Barack but he was headed for a good grad school and then a job with the UN, the World Food Programme or the EU.

Like Kevin, the young Barack had drive, curiosity, empathy, a sharp intellect, and a dissatisfaction which drove him on. Obama also has a great way of telling stories — you’re right there with him in the South Side of Chicago, noticing the sweat on the necks of the old men playing cards, breathing in the polluted air and feeling the cold wind blow about your ears.

One phrase that stood out for me was “a capacity for outrage”. He describes community workers worn down by the system who’ve lost the capacity for harnessing the anger that you need to make things happen.

There are many lessons to be learned in this autobiography. For a start I’m wondering about anger as a positive force for change, and the delicate balance between anger, empathy and hope. A few quotes to finish off with:

On community: “… communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens”.
On anger: “… anger’s a requirement for the job” (his first boss giving him advice)
On community work: “… getting to the centre of people’s lives”.
On black identity: “… are you surprised black people still hate themselves?”

Obama’s mother

I’ve just started reading Barack Obama’s 1995 autobiography, “Dreams From My Father”, and already it’s taking me in unexpected directions. It details his “personal, interior journey — a boy’s search for his father, and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American”. The first surprise for me happens in the preface (updated in 2004) where BO writes a moving tribute to his mother, who died the year after the book was published:

“I think sometimes that had I known she would not survive her illness, I might have written a different book — less a meditation on an absent parent, more a celebration of the one who was the single constant in my life. In my daughters I see her every day, her joy, her capacity for wonder. … I know that she was the kindest, most generous spirit I have ever known, and that what is best in me I owe to her.”

Could any mother wish for a better tribute than that? But just stop for a minute and think what would have happened if BO had written a book about his mother instead of his father. Would he have been labelled a mommy’s boy? Would people have said that he was denying his black heritage and trying to ingratiate himself with whites (as he says himself):

… some people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some tell-tale sign.

I suspect that it is BO’s ability to bridge both black and white (and to combine the best of his parents’ respective heritages) that is an essential ingredient of his success. If he was white he wouldn’t be as interesting as he is, and if he was “black black” he would be too different from mainstream America. Of course the issue of race is not a straightforward one. But as slow reads points out, people see in BO what they want to see. They can identify with him, see themselves in him. My BO is not the same as your BO.

I think BO’s comment on his mother was such a powerful one for me because it was unexpected and yet it made so much sense. It has become a cliché to say that mothers are the unsung heroes of our lives but I see it every day in my work. We need to take mothers for granted because that enables us to make our ways in the world. If we are constantly looking over our shoulders to see that mother is OK, then we’re always held back. What I liked in BO’s short tribute was the recognition that the best in him comes from his mother’s love. For me it recalls Auden: “he was my North, my South, my East, my West” and also Shakespeare: “love is an ever-fixed mark … whose depth’s unknown though its height be taken”.

Friday fessing: Baby steps

I need a writing project. Something that drives me to write, to revise, something that keeps me up at night. At the moment most of the writing I do is in the form of morning pages, blogs and case notes (in that order). But today I feel anxious and becalmed. It probably doesn’t help that I just had a row with my mom over the curtains.

You’re not doing it correctly. Why did you take the whole thing down? Your father does it in 10 minutes….

Mom, you’re not helping. They’re down now so just help me or go back to your room. (And so on for a good few minutes while I struggle with the intricacies of re-hanging heavy curtains.)

Sit down at my computer and the mower starts up. There’s no way that I’m going to get away with letting my 69-year old mother mow the lawn all by herself. I reluctantly walk down to help her. Gussie didn’t come in for her Whiskas … Can you download the emails? … You will remember to walk the dogs, won’t you?

No wonder I can’t write a thing. I don’t need a writing project. I need my own house again – or at least a bit more privacy. But for the next few months I’m stuck here. I keep reminding myself that it’s one step at a time.

Actually I already have a writing project. It may not be a very sexy one but I should go ahead and finish it. I’m bound to get more enthusiastic along the way. The goal was this: write 20 articles around the themes of Empathy and Violence. I keep getting distracted with thoughts of writing a short story, a poem, an op-ed piece for the papers.

But these never really materialise and today the anxiety and laziness are winning. I’m not ready to give in yet but I’m clearly not making progress. To help myself, I’m breaking it down into baby steps. 1. Buy an exercise book to plan this project. 2. Make room for it on my writing stand. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Having things down on paper is so much more helpful than trying to keep everything on computer. I’m going to work my way through the 20 articles. They don’t need to be fantastic, publishable (at this stage) but they need to be thought-through.

I’m also going back to gym and, on a related topic, I’m finding some writing exercises to stretch my creativity as well. One that I thought of is also an exercise in empathy:

Imagine you’re gay. Describe your day from this perspective. What would be different? What would stay the same? (Maybe I should also reassure P that this is just an exercise!)

Update: This exercise makes me uncomfortable for a number of reasons, but I think the main one is that it treats the issue of identity (more specifically sexual identity) in a simplistic way. Just the instruction itself: “Imagine you’re gay” already sets up an ‘othering’ process where gayness is considered something separate and different, something that has to be imagined. Rather than edit it out, I thought it might be helpful to confess my discomfort here (but I’ll save the rest of this discussion for another post.)

First [expletive] Chapters: When Will There Be Good News?

Kate Atkinson is fast becoming one of my favourite authors. Reading the first few pages of her new novel When Will There Be Good News? over at the First Chapters page of the NYT book section, I’m chuckling and smiling and I want to share my reading pleasure on the blog. Look, an unhappy childhood that’s also a happy childhood, people being stupid and selfish and proud and stubborn and muddling through. If Kate were my friend I’d send her a message on Facebook saying “loving the dialogue” with a big smiley face.

An unexpected delight about First Chapters is that all swear words are edited out with the word [expletive] in place of the offending word.

“Your father’s country-[expletive]-idyll,” their mother said as the bus drove away in a blue haze of fumes and heat. “Don’t you swear,” she added automatically. “I’m the only person allowed to swear.”

 

And then a bit later:

 

When the spring finally came, instead of planting a vegetable garden, their father went back to London and lived with “his other woman” — which was a big surprise to Joanna and Jessica, although not, apparently, to their mother. Their father’s other woman was called Martina — the poet; their mother spat out the word as if it were a curse. Their mother called the other woman (the poet) names that were so bad that when they dared to whisper them ([expletive]- poet) to each other beneath the bedclothes, they were like poison in the air.

 

Tweet tweet. This is even better with the expletive edited out, because now the word seems so bad that we’re not allowed to see it. My imagination is left to try and fill the gap.

 

*****

 

A book that I’m actually reading (as opposed to flirting with online) is The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt. I’ll review it in due course but suffice to say that the main character is a slightly depressed New York psychoanalyst. Who could ask for more?

Music Monday: Hallelujah

The song for today’s Music Monday (thanks Emily) is Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah (as performed by Rufus Wainwright). It’s a beautiful, haunting, sad and joyful song. I don’t know when I first heard this song but I rediscovered it of all places in the Shrek soundtrack. I’ll have to watch Shrek again sometime just to see how they work it in. There are a number of versions available on YouTube and there’s a good article on the song on Wikipedia. (The YouTube link here is to the version used in the final episode of the first series of the OC).

Hallelujah (Leonard Cohen, performed by Rufus Wainwright)

 

Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord

But you don’t really care for music, do you?

It goes like this

The fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

 

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof

You saw her bathing on the roof

Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you

She tied you

To a kitchen chair

She broke your throne, and she cut your hair

And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

 

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Baby I have been here before

I know this room, I’ve walked this floor

I used to live alone before I knew you.

I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch

Love is not a victory march

It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

 

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

 

There was a time you let me know

What’s really going on below

But now you never show it to me, do you?

And remember when I moved in you

The holy dark was moving too

And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

 

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

 

Maybe there’s a God above

And all I ever learned from Love

Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you

And it’s not a cry you can hear at night

It’s not somebody who’s seen the light

It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.

 

Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah 

 

I love the way the first verse describes what happens in the music: “the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift”. The baffled composer is David but it’s also Cohen himself. Later on, two lines really stand out for me: “Love is not a victory march. It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.” My immediate association was with the Obama victory. I suppose all the excitement about Obama is starting to wane a little now and I see some anxiety creeping in. Will he disappoint like so many of our other heroes in the past? Dick Jones reminds us that we should be naturally suspicious of anyone who seeks power. One blogger that I saw even made a connection with Fascist leaders like Hitler and recalled how they were initially received with adulation. Obama seems so far removed from those leaders that I think the comparison is completely misplaced. (I would rather go with those who see a paradigm shift in politics.) But I think the point about being wary of those in authority is a good one.

And I think I’m being perverse in seeing the Obama victory slowly turning into a “cold and broken Hallelujah”. I mean, give the guy a chance! He’s not even in office yet.

I’d love to know other people’s reactions to this song. One powerful association, for Americans anyway, is with the 9/11 tribute documentaries. And which version do you prefer? I like Rufus Wainwright’s performance (although not the YouTube version) but I have to admit that KD Lang nails those Hallelujahs.

Drunk on Obama

I’m enjoying reading the post-election blog posts. The joy, the hope, the sense of history- in-the-making. We’ll all come down to earth soon enough. In the meantime, a few links from the world-wide Obama wave. BeeDrunken captures the euphoria of election-watching, Charlotte sums up our hopes about Obama’s leadership and makes a thought-provoking comparison with Mandela, Verbivore does a great take on the acceptance speech here and Ted revisits America’s promissory note in Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Enjoy.

Update: And in news just in … while president-elect Obama is choosing his team for the next four years, the public are more interested in the choice of the First Puppy. Those puppies are damn cute – and who knew that the choice of a dog was so controversial? And once you’ve chosen the puppy then comes the name part. Obama sources deny that the front-runner at this stage is George.

For Africa, this is huge!

“Who was the fat lady?” asked my mom, who had walked in near the end of my four-hour watch-snooze election marathon. I looked at her for a second and tried not to get anymore choked up than I already was.

“Well, he got Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then Virginia, but when the networks called California it was all over.” I was pleased that I managed all those words without the frog jumping out of my throat.

But really, the moment when it happened was almost unreal. One second Jeremy Thompson, the main anchor for Sky’s election coverage, was reporting on the latest results with Obama still well short of the magical 270 electoral college votes needed to win, and then he paused, listening to his earpiece.

“One of the US networks has called the election for Obama,” he announced. Then he listened some more. “And so are we” (or words to that effect). The screen exploded in a blaze of confetti-type graphics. “Barack Obama wins the Presidency!” went the caption. The polls had just closed in California (at 5am our time) and the race was already over. Obama wins!

America and the rest of the world are starting to make sense of what that means. For Africa, the symbolic value alone is huge. For a continent that has struggled under the burden of racism for centuries, it is incredibly inspiring. And for the voters who elect Africa’s leaders it means that they too can hope for leaders who embody the leadership qualities of Barack Obama. It’s a nice touch that the two women who had the most important influence in Obama’s formative years were white. In the picture below, doesn’t he remind you a bit of Mandela? I’m sure Madiba must be smiling one of his broad, hugely infectious grins today. The message to Africa should be: Yes we can!

 

All hail the Barack (and some summer reading)

Today’s the big day so I’ll be surprised if anyone’s reading blogs other than the political-watching ones. I wish the rest of the day would fly past so I can settle down in front of the TV at 2am and watch the results come in. Remember 8 years ago — when the election race was “too close to call” for what seemed like weeks!?

I’m going to enjoy seeing Obama and the Democrats winning some swing states like Ohio, Florida and maybe some red states such as Virginia. Maybe the race will be closer than we think but I just can’t see that. Obama’s so much better than McCain and, as corny as it sounds, there’s a sense of hope in the air. Maybe this time things will be different. Maybe America can be an inspirational superpower and increase peace and prosperity around the world.

On the reading front I have a number of books on the go (or waiting to have their turn):

The Innocent Libertine (Colette)

The Sibling Society (Robert Bly)

London Fields (Martin Amis)

Sexing the Cherry (Jeanette Winterson)

Tonight I’m borrowing Siri Hustvedt’s The Sorrows of an American, which seems oddly out of place today. I’ll report back in due course on the reading above. So far I’m enjoying the Colette but I have some questions. Will have to check what Litlove has to say about her.

The Robert Bly has flashes of brilliance but I find it a bit limited. There are some very interesting ideas in there and I like the way that he develops the fable of Jack and the Beanstalk, comparing the beanstalk to our brainstem and exploring the evolution of the brain. But I’m not totally taken by Bly and I think it has to do with his playing up the role of fathers as opposed to mothers. There’s a stubborn insistence on the role of fatherly guidance rather than an appreciation of motherly containment. As one of the leaders of the mytho-poetic men’s movement, Bly is a self-styled male guru. He’s a softer male if you like but he’s also at pains to criticise the softer male and declare himself in favour of the Wild Man and to argue for an important role for male aggression. I agree but also disagree. What about female aggression? Is the female in Bly’s worldview mainly about nurturance?

Returning to the election, I was looking for a poem that expresses the joy of today. This doesn’t quite get it, but there’s a feeling of careful optimism and gentle celebration maybe.

Spring is like a perhaps hand (ee cummings)

Spring is like a perhaps hand

(which comes carefully

out of Nowhere)arranging

a window,into which people look(while

people stare

arranging and changing placing

carefully there a strange

thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps

Hand in a window

(carefully to

and fro moving New and

Old things,while

people stare carefully

moving a perhaps

fraction of flower here placing

an inch of air there) and

without breaking anything.

Update: I also think Mary Cornish’s excellent poem “Numbers” could apply. Here’s how it starts:

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I think the “generosity of numbers” is a good way of describing that process in which the electoral college votes get divided up between the two candidates. As the votes come in the presenters touch the state concerned (Virginia for example) and then another 11 votes magically get added to the tally of Obama (hopefully). Which will be the decisive state which takes him over the tipping point?