The Web address of this
two-page article is http://sfhelp.org/01/ventura.htm
Ventura, a new stepfather, gives us a rich description of his
inner "tribe,"
and those of his wife Jan, and stepson Brendan.
Shadow
Dancing is out of print, but you can probably find used
copies.
-
Peter Gerlach, MSW; Founder, Break the Cycle! project
+ + +
"Marriage is the most dangerous form of love. Count the casualties and you
know. It turns many people to stone. We all have seen that. Our society is
cracking under the weight of many stone- lives. We all know that. But will
we, or will we not, discover all that a man and woman can be? Marriage is
not the answer, but it is the most demanding way to live the question.
Don’t ask questions. Live them.
That is the unrelenting demand of an active inner life. If we shirk that
demand we begin to turn to stone.
So here are the speculations on a flux, a life, a dare that I sometimes
refer to as "my marriage." They are the notes of a man who, only a
bit more than two years ago, joined in "wed-lock" (the phrase is
not without its sinister echo) with a woman and her young son. The notes of
a man who, at the time, only dimly realized that in marrying with these two
others he was marrying no less than -- everything.
"Everything," in Greek, is the word pan, and pan is what they
called the wildest, most elemental of the gods, the god least subject to
placation - the god that was never housebroken. No wonder they sang and
danced at that wedding!
Our life leads separate lives.
I am "married," as they say in this world, to Jan, who is
"married" to me - "two old fuckers," as she puts it.
She, forty. Me, thirty-nine. And Brendan, eleven now (her child but, as I
find myself putting it in conversation, "our boy"). It is now, as
I’ve said, two years since I married these two people and they married me - three separate acts. Three very different inner ceremonies
- Jan’s,
Brendan’s, and mine - taking place within the one ceremony that joined
us. Or that symbolized our joining. For in marriage symbols often come
first: first the instinct to join, then the symbolic joining, then the
relentless reality of trying to join.
So far the above would be described by most systems of thought - psychological,
sociological, whatever - with the phrase: "The two of them (or the
three of them) are married."
A pathetically useless phrase for the description of any reality I know. We’d
best leave it behind right now. For one thing, it implies that there are
only three people living in our apartment.
But living in this small apartment, there are, to begin with, three entirely
different sets of twos: Michael and Jan, Jan and Brendan, Brendan and
Michael. Each set, by itself, is very different from the other, and each is
different from Jan-Brendan-Michael together. But go further:
Brendan-Jan-Michael having just gotten up ‘for breakfast is a very
different body politic, with different varying tensions, depending on
whether it’s a school day or not, from Brendan-Jan-Michael driving home
from seeing, say, El Norte, which is different still from driving home from
Ghostbusters, and all of them are different from Brendan-Jan-Michael going
to examine a possible school for Brendan. The Brendan who gets up at
midnight needing to talk to Michael is quite different from the Brendan who,
on another night, needs suddenly to talk to Jan, and both are vastly
different from the Brendan who often keeps his own counsel. The Michael
writing at three in the afternoon or three in the morning, isolated in a
room with three desks and two typewriters, is very different from the
Michael, exasperated, figuring the bills with Jan, choosing whom not to pay;
and he in turn is very different from the half-crazed, shy drunk wondering
just who is this "raw-boned Okie girl" moving to Sam Taylor’s
fast blues one sweltering night in the Venice of L.A. at the old Taurus
Tavern. The Jan making the decision to face her own need to write, so
determined and so tentative at once, is very different from the
strength-in-tenderness of the Jan who is sensual, or the sure-footed abandon
of Jan dancing, or the screeching of the Jan who’s had it up to here.
I can only be reasonably sure of several of these people – the several
isolate Michaels, eight or fifteen of them, whom "I" pass from,
day to day, night to night, dawn to almost dawn, and who at any moment in
this much-too-small apartment might encounter a Jan or a Brendan whom I’ve
never seen before, or whom I’ve conjectured about and can sometimes
describe but am hard-pressed to know.
So in this apartment where some might see three people living a
comparatively quiet life, I see a huge encampment on a firelit hillside, a
tribal encampment of selves who must always be unknowable, a mystery to any
brief Michael, Jan, or Brendan who happens to be trying to figure it out at
any particular moment.
And who, on this hillside, subject to its many winds and weathers, who among
these loyal but often nomadic manifestations of Jan, Michael, and Brendan,
who among these people is "married"?
Some are. Some are gladly and enthusiastically married, with, as the
wonderful old phrase goes, "abiding faith." Some are married but
frightened, nervously married, hesitant as to their capacities, their
endurance. Some are hostile to the marriage. Some are too crazy to be
married. Some just go about their business; it doesn’t affect them, The
hostile and the crazy and the unconcerned may be in the minority (though
there are days when it doesn’t feel that way), yet they exist, they speak
with our mouths sometimes, they break a dish now and then, they make a bad
joke - they even have bad dreams, just as the parts that are gladly
married have their good and bad dreams.
I think of a Henry Miller line in Tropic of Capricorn: "The labyrinth
is my happy hunting ground." I am beginning to see what he means. In
this labyrinth, I have found that on days when I feel far-off from Jan and
she feels rejected, it is not Jan whom I’m rejecting at all. I am
rejecting the parts of me that feel closest to her. That is a very different
bowl of gumbo. It indicates a very different sense of, and object of,
responsibility.
And I can only guess, yet, at how many Jans there are whom I haven’t yet
seen naked. They are the "other women" I’ve been interested in
since I met her. As there are Michaels I haven’t encountered yet, and who
come to life, surprising me, only in "her" presence, in the
presence of some Jan or other.
I feel a leader to all my selves whom I call "I". It was his idea,
this marriage! Most of the others cheered him on, a few tried to shout him
down. But always this whole motley crew is in my consciousness, in all its
motliness, when "I" say, "I am married."
There have been times during our marriage when have heard all our inner
people laugh at once. That is marvelous. And nights when they have all
rested within the same sleep. (That is more rare by far.) An days when this
entire hillside of selves seems to follow "the three of us" down
the street as though a great festival were taking place, and only we know of
it, yet its psychic exuberance "adds its light to the sum of
light." (in the words of one Billy Kwan). This luminous, virtually
religious sense of one’s inner life radiating into and nourishing the
outer, wider world - I have felt it before, but never so strongly as in
the context of this thing we rather lamely name "marriage." And
the converse: the sense of dread when I feel us failing, not only the dread
of the private failure, but the sense that we are failing more than
ourselves, that we are failing world that needs us not to fail. Failing not
the crumbling world that is, but a world that some of us feel is struggling
to be.
I think of the Sioux medicine man Lame Deer when, as an old man, he cried on
a hilltop to his gods for a sign that he had not entirely failed them. That
sense is not dead in all of us, though we may be shy to speak of it in
ourselves and suspicious of others who do. It applies to marriage in the
sense that, marriage doesn’t only join two people, it links their inner
quests - the quest of each to share in, and build on, the sense of
becoming in the world, the feeling that this era is struggling to transform
itself into another, more fulfilling era. If only one of a married, pair can
succeed in taking part in this transformation, both will feel a hollowness.
There are many who are not interested in contributing to the world’s
transformation, but there are also many for whom such concern is an
enormous, if often unadmitted, pressure, and we live in a society that
hardly names this feeling, much less honors it. But even if one person in a
marriage feels this dimension, the marriage takes on the burden of the
concern, whether named or not.
This is one of the many ways that a "relationship" can feel so
much more free. A relationship is defined as it goes along, with a lot of
subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations as to what is and what isn’t the
other’s business. Inner quests may, or may not, he part of that
negotiation, whichever choice or compulsion dictates. The special thrill of
a "relationship" is to select one or two (rarely more) of one’s
many selves, and play them out with someone who is doing the same. Sometimes
the self being lived out in the relationship is shallow, or wonderful but
severely limited, and the relationship ends quickly; sometimes it goes
deeper, so that as time goes on more of one’s inner selves participate,
coming into the presence of both relating "I"s. A serious
relationship usually ends when there are more secret selves participating
than your mutual intentions can bear to accommodate.
A marriage puts you in a very different existential position. A man and a
woman, in a marriage, are not offering each other only their favorite, or
most convenient, or most needy selves. You marry everything, like it or not.
If you’re living together and not married, it is still not quite the same;
though there is a great deal invested, the door is still metaphorically
open. Whereas marriage puts a lot more pressure on the psyche, because
whether or not people say "till death do us part," thousands of
years of heritage have made the vow implicit. This is what marriage means in
our collective consciousness, if not in our modern ceremonies, even now. So
if we get married yet are still trying to follow the ways of a relationship,
we feel undermined by the massive cultural vow we have ingested without
wanting to. We fed closed in. Sooner or later, we feel dread.
Jan and I let the vow stand, said it out loud with our joined voices, as
though to let our inner tribes of selves know what they were in for:
"till death do us part." We instinctively felt what we began both
instantly and painfully to share: that, willingly or unwillingly, we had
each married all of the other, including parts yet unguessed at.
Marriage is this inclusive act, like it or not. You will not make it
something else by saying that you want it to be something else. You will not
make it something else by believing it should be something else. Life is not
so simple. The psyche, collectively whole yet enormously varied within you,
is not so easily contained. The very fact of being married will act as the
catalyst to make your psyches both the subject and the object of the
marriage. You can face this, and feel as though you’re leading a
dangerous, even adventurous life; or you can avoid it, and gradually feel
more and more unanswered by the presence of your mate.
When two people "get involved," each usually has a clear (if
usually nonverbal) idea of what he or she needs for the next stage of his or
her growth. Virtually every serious relationship or marriage is a partially
conscious means by which this ‘next stage" Is achieved, is grown.
Crisis time comes when one or both of them have pretty much exhausted this
more-or-less intended stage of growth in the other and are trying to figure
out if they can accompany each other I through yet another significant
stage. We are living in a society in which there are few things more rare
than two people accompanying each other through more than one significant
run of growth.
The idea of marriage flies in the face of this. It is, depending on your
viewpoint, a gallantly or foolishly unrealistic challenge to one’s own
future. Looked at this way, it’s a damned silly way to treat yourself.
Fortunately or unfortunately, there is a phenomenon we’ve not yet alluded
to which short-circuits these considerations. It is referred to somewhat
vaguely as love.
We love before we know. Love comes first, and in order to answer its
questions we have to love further. The fling turns into an
the
affair turns into a relationship, the relationship turns into a marriage.
For many people today the process of relationship has been the first stage
of growth. Then a sad thing often happens: instead of really trying to stake
out a further unknown territory, many try to adapt how they’ve grown
already (the first stage) to what they feel are the conventions of marriage.
This is usually an unmitigated disaster.
As it happened, Jan and I went straight from fling into marriage. We decided
to marry within ten days of meeting each other. This saved us the
relationship stint of getting to not-know each other, which usually and
sadly consists of people trying out their various selves .on one another,
compulsively and/or intentionally, testing for commitment. That’s
necessary for one stage of life, but like many people our age we had each
done that many times. We decided: this time, no tests. Dance to the music.
Marry it.
Were we marrying each other or marrying the impulse? Good question. A
question that can he answered only after it’s too late. Fine. For love is
nothing, if it’s not faith. Nothing.
When Brendan was born, almost nine years before Jan and I met, Jan had sent
out announcements with that old blues refrain:
Baby I learned to love
you
Honey ‘fore l called
Baby ‘fore I called your name
Love often occurs "in this wise," as the old phrase as though love
were for "calling the name." And certainly "to be loved is to
feel one’s name called with an inflection that one has never heard before.
So we found ourselves sending our wedding invitations that went:
Come on over
We ain’t fakin’
Whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on
Odd, now, to think how small a sense of foreboding we had at that Jerry Lee
Lewis verse - though we’ve only "come to blows" (revealing old
phrase, isn’t it, with its odd sense of formality?) once, and she struck
first, broke my glasses, and I hit her then, one time, and she slumped
against the wall, both of us feeling so soiled and ugly and wrong. How many
bitter, gone grandmothers and grandfathers stood in the room just then,
cackling their satisfaction at our shame? Hers, Irish; mine, Sicilian. Both
of them traditions that did not teach us to forgive. To learn to forgive is
to break with an unforgiving past.
Pause at the word: "forgive." "For-to-give." Forgiveness
is such a gift that "give" lives in the word. Christianist*
tradition has tried to make it a meek and passive word; turn the other
cheek. But the word contains the active word "give," which reveals
its truth: it involves the act of taking something of yours and handing it
to another, so that from now on it is theirs. Nothing passive about it. It
is an exchange. An exchange of faith: the faith that what has been done can
be undone or can be transcended. When two people need to make this exchange
with each other, it can be one of the most intimate acts of their lives.
Forgiveness is, for one thing, a promise to work at the undoing, at the
transcending. Marriage soon enough gives all concerned the opportunity to
forgive. There have been enough broken chairs, broken plates, and one broken
typewriter - my beloved old Olympia portable manual, that I’d had since
high school and smashed myself - to testify to how desperate the joined
desperations of all the Michaels, Jans, and Brendans can be. Whole lotta
shakin’ goin’ on, and on and on, and sometimes when you are trying to
break through the hardened crusts inside you and inside each other, some
dishes and typewriters arid furniture might go in the process.
The most odious aspect of goody-goody, I’m-OK-you’re-OK dialogues is
their failure to recognize that sometimes you have to scream, slam doors,
’break furniture, run red lights, and ride the wind even to begin to have
the words to describe what is eating you. Sometimes meditation and dialogue
just can’t cut it. Sometimes "it" just plain needs
"cutting" - or at least a whole lotta shakin’. Anyone afraid
of breaking, within and without, is in the wrong marriage. Let it all go.
Let the winds blow. Let’s see what’s left in the morning.
And that is "the solace of marriage" - a phrase I’ve heard in
several contexts, but am otherwise unable to comprehend. The discovery, of
what is unbreakable among all that’s been broken. The discovery that union
can he as irreducible as solitude. The discovery that people must share not
only what they don’t know about each other, but what they don’t know
about themselves.
Sharing what we know is a puny exercise by comparison.
Concluded
on page 2
+ + +
* Following
the lead of James Hillman ‘s work, I use “Christianism” in place of
“Christianity” and “Christianist’’ in place of
‘‘Christian’’ wherever possible, in an attempt to get around the
enormous bias for the religion built into our very language"
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