The Web address of this article is
http://sfhelp.org/01/ventura2.htm
Continued from p. 1...
And did I say there were only myriads of Jans, Brendans, and Michaels
encamped in the firelit cavern that appears to be an inexpensive old
wood-frame duplex south of Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles? Life is
not so simple as even that. What about the raging mob we refer to, politely,
as "the past." Nothing abstract about "the past." What
has marked you is still marking you. There is a place in us where wounds
never heal, and where loves never end. Nobody knows much about this place
except that it exists, feeding our dreams and reinforcing and/or haunting
our days. In marriage, it can exist with a vengeance.
Bloody, half-flayed, partly dead, naked, tortured, my mother realty does
hang on a hook in my closet, because she hangs on a hook in me. Occasionally
I have to take her out and we do a rending dance, tearing each other bloody
as we go, and the stuff splashes happily all over - all over Jan, several
of the many Jans, and several of the many Brendans - and then run for the
hills, my dears, for I am in my horror.
One of my several, my insistent, horrors.
We are all, every one of us, full of horror. If you are getting married to
try to make yours go away, you will succeed only in marrying your horror to
someone else’s horror; your two horrors will have the marriage: you will
bleed and call that love.
My closet is full of hooks, full of horrors, and I also love them, my
horrors, and I know they love me, and they will always hang there for me,
because they are also good for me, they are also on my side, they gave so
much to be my horrors, they made me strong to survive. There is much in our
new "enlightened" lexicon to suggest that one may move into a
house that doesn’t have such a closet. You move into such house and think
everything is fine until after a while you start to hear a distant
screaming, and start to smell something funny, and realize slowly that the
closet is there, all right, but it’s been walled over, and just when you
need desperately to open it you find yourself faced with bricks instead of a
door.
In our cavern on this hillside in this apartment, there is quite a closet,
where my hooks hang next to Jan’s, and to Brendan’s - it’s amazing
how many you can accumulate at the mere age of eleven - which are also
there for their good and harrowing reasons.
This is one reason it’s so odd to "see the parents." Can’t
comment on marriage and fail to mention the in-laws. Odd to see them,
because you’ve seen them already hanging on hooks in your closet, and the
beings splayed on those hooks are so removed from these aging,
well-intentioned, confused souls who are the actual people. Actual, older
people who are powerless, really, because they cannot act in their own names
any longer. The past acts through them, no matter what they try. All they
can do is hope to change that past; that is, to transmute its effects. Which
is not impossible, but is so very rare.
So it Is, as I say, odd to see your mate’s parents because you know them
already, intimately, as archetypes in your mate’s sleeps. To assure this
archetype that, yes, you really do love her fried chicken, is to enter a
realm of comedy in which even the Marx Brothers might be frightened to
cavort.
And so the horrors and the joys of what we foolishly call "our
pasts" - we would more accurately call them "our sleeps"
- blend, and we live the strengths and lacks of what we were, and that
also is marriage. "Your people will become my people," goes the
old vow, and it is inescapable in the sense that I am speaking of.
For a marriage to be a marriage, these encounters do not happen compulsively
or accidentally, they happen by intention. I don’t mean that the
encounters with all the various selves and ghosts are planned (that’s not
possible, though they can sometimes he consciously evoked); I mean that this
level of activity is recognized as part of the quest, part of the
responsibility each person has for him/herself and for the other.
Which is the major difference between the expectations of a marriage and a
relationship. My experience of a relationship is two people more or less
compulsively playing musical chairs with each other’s selected inner
archetypes. My tough street kid is romancing your honky-tonk angel. I am
your homeless waif and you are my loving mother. I am your lost father and
you are my doting daughter. I am your worshiper and you are my goddess. I am
your god and you are my priestess. I am your client and you are my analyst.
I am your intensity and you are my ground. These are some of the more garish
of the patterns. Animus, anima, bopping on a see-saw.
These hold up well enough while the archetypal pairings behave. But what
happens when the little boy inside him is looking for the mommy inside her
and finds instead on this particular night a sharp-toothed analyst
dissecting his guts? When the little girl inside her is looking for the
daddy inside him, and finds instead a pagan worshiper who wants a goddess to
lay with, which induces her to become a little girl play-acting a goddess to
please the daddy who’s realty a lecherous worshiper and … little girls
can’t come? Or when a woman is attracted to a macho-man who is secretly’
looking to be mothered? When a man’s sexual self is in the service of an
interior little boy, it’s not surprising that he can’t get it up or
comes too quick. Or they’re really not there at all, they’re
masturbating, really: men in their little-boy psyches for whom the real
woman is just a stand-in; while the woman who happens to be in the same bed,
an extension of their masturbation, is wondering why even though the moves
are pretty good she doesn’t really feel slept with.
And why he turns away so quickly when it’s done.
On the other hand, teachers fuck pupils with excitement, analysts fuck
clients with abandon, and people seeing each other, in bed, as gods and
goddesses light up the sky - but the psyche is a multiple and a shifting
entity, an none of these compassionate pairings hold stable for long. The
archetypal mismatches soon begin, and then it’s a disaster of
confrontations that can take years not even to sort out (it would he worth
years to get it all sorted out) but simply to exhaust itself and fail. And
then the cycle starts all over again with someone else.
My experience of a marriage is that all these same modes are present, but
instinctively or consciously it becomes a case of two people running down
each other’s inner archetypes, tackling them, seducing them, cajoling
them, waiting them out, making them talk, ‘fessing up to them, running
from them, raping them, falling in love with some, hating others, getting to
know some, making friends with some, hanging some in the closet on each
other’s hooks - hooks on which hang fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers,
other loves, idols, fantasies, maybe even past lives, and true mythological
consciousness that sometimes come to life within one with such force that we
feel a thread that goes hack thousands of years, even to other realms of
being.
All of this is what we "marry" in the other, a process that goes
on while we manage to earn a living, go to the movies, watch television, go
to the doctor, walk on ‘the Palisades, drive to Texas, follow the
election, try to stop drinking, eat too much Haagen Dazs.
Obviously, if two people are completely oblivious to this level of life,
they cannot live consciously on this level of life. If one person is
oblivious, life can’t he lived at this pitch. (Though this is a level that
works its ways whether or not you are aware of it; it is, in Lawrence
Durrell’s phrase, "the life of your life," and most people
thrash around on its surface, the puppets of their needs, hardly guessing.)
If two people are in competition with each other, then this sort of
responsibility toward each other’s inners cannot occur. (This sense of
women and men in competition is a common notion now, and I don’t
necessarily mean career competition, nor do I mean that people pursuing the
same careers are necessarily in competition.) Nor can life be lived at this
pitch if one person is trying to tame the other. Nor can it occur if people
are trying to live up to an ideology, whether it is a Christianist ideology,
an "it’s-time-to-live-happily-ever-after" ideology, or a
"liberated man/liberated woman" ideology. Sooner or later your
wife is going to come prancing through the living room with the flayed
undead carcass of her ex-husband or her lost father, and you’re going to
be slipping on their psychic slime, and watch out, mama’s boy, that bitch
wants to dance, to dance with her horror, and you better he able to give her
something more present than a Marxist or new age or fundamentalist ideology.
With volatile people much of this is surprisingly out front, given the eyes
to see it, But the same stuff goes down with sedate, quiet couples. It just
happens more undercover, and is harder to spot. Worse than harder to spot,
it’s harder to feel, because it’s not so specific. But it is, after all,
the mannerly Anglo-Saxon peoples who started a new religion partly to
institute divorce and who fought hundreds of years of religious wars partly
to keep a Protestantism that allowed divorce. It is their descendants in
America who have largely made divorce a legal institution. Even so, roughly
a third of the murders that occur in America take place within families.
These forces can remain unknown, but they are never unfelt.
Statistically, there are many more violent crimes per capita within families
in the United States than there are in any other nation. When you consider
that this is the nation most responsible for the stability of the world’s
economy and that this nation - these families - elect leaders who have
the power to end all life on this planet, you may agree with me that this
issue of what might constitute a dynamically sane marriage is as crucial as
wars in the Third World, economic justice, and nuclear survival. These
situations are certainly and umbilically linked.
Which brings me to my main point:
there may be no more important project of
our time than displacing Christianist fiction of monopersonality. This
fiction is the notion that each person has a central and unified
"I" which determines his or her acts. "I" have been
writing this to say that I don't think people experience life that way. I do
think they experience language that way, and hence are doomed to speak about
life in structures contrary to their experience. This contributes to the
pervasive and impotent sense of bafflement that very quickly can turn to
violence.
Marriage, for instance. Our conventional concept of marriage came out of the
life of feudal Europe, a life so strictured that it likely evoked only two
or three of the
within one person on any given day. The higher
thinkers and artists of the time knew most of what we know about the psyche
- their cathedrals prove it. And the worshipers had a virtual chorus line
of saints they could react to with their various selves. But they worked six
days a week, they went to bed at dark, they were married and often had
families by the time they were fifteen, and their life span was often not
much more than forty years. Except for the church and the holidays, there
were next to no external stimuli outside of the daily grind. We are still
speaking their language. We are still structuring thoughts - envisioning
reality - with their grammar. But our lives are totally different.
Modern society can be defined as a barrage of stimuli haphazardly evoking
many conflicting selves daily in every individual. These selves - as our
art proves, from the Pyramids to Homer, from the Bible to Chartres and the
present - have always been alive and only restlessly asleep in our race;
now they’ve been awakened by a cacophony of concurrent and constant
calls. Yet most Western thought - most psychology, socio-economic theory
(both leftist and rightist), feminist theory, to name a few - labor under
a model of the human personality as outdated for contemporary life as
Newtonian physics was to relativity physics.
This meditation on marriage has been based on another model of the psyche
entirely: the notion that we have not a single center, but several centers;
that each of these centers may act independently of each other; and that
each center has in turn various active aspects, or shadings; and that alt
these centers are unified more by an
atmosphere, an overall mood and rhythm, than by anything as stolid as a
"central command post" called an "ego" or whatever.
There is a central awareness; but awareness us not control. Confusing
awareness with control is the mistake Western thought has been making for
centuries. It is tempting to call this awareness many things - one’s
ego, one’s character, one’s personality - but those words are just
screens onto which we can project what we most need and want to be,
projections that change depending on which inner self we are expressing and
acting out at the moment. A new model of the psyche must take this unifying
urge into account, and presume that its impulse is fundamental to us; but a
new model of the psyche must go beyond this impulse and envision the inner
multiplicity which this impulse strains to unify. It’s as though the
reason this impulse is so strong is that there’s so much within the
individual to unify. For too Long Western thought has mistaken the impulse
to unify for the entity itself (the psyche) that needs such an impulse
because of its very multiplicity. The central "I" is not a fact,
it s a longing - the longing of all the selves within the psyche that are
starving because they are not recognized.
This notion is certainly not original with me. You can find it, in various
forms, in the novels of Doris Lessing and Lawrence Durrell, in the teachings
of the Sufis and the Zens, in the art of Picasso and Bosch, in the poems of
Ovid and Lorca, in the writings of Gurdjieff and Laing and Jung and
Marie-Louise von Franz: and James Hillman. Here is a passage of Laing’s
Politics of Experience that get at it in terms similar to and possibly
clearer than mine:
"Consider the
rnetamorphoses that one man may go through in one day as he moves from one
mode of sociality to another - family man, speck of crowd dust,
functionary at an organization, friend. These are not simply different
roles: each is a whole past and present and future, offering different
options and constraints, different kinds of closeness and distance,
different sets of rights and obligations, different pledges and
promises."
I know of no theory of
the individual that fully recognizes this. There is every temptation to
start with a notion of some supposed basic personality, but halo, effects
are not reducible to one internal system. The tired family man at the
office and the tired businessman at home attest to the fact that people
carry over not just one set of internal objects, hut various internalized
social modes of being, from one context to another." (Laing’s
emphasis.)
My description, as compared to Laing’s, is, well, more Catholic than
Protestant, more the Tarot than the I Ching. No matter. The important thing
- as important, I believe, as relativity proved to be (indeed this may be
the only way we can cope with relativity) - is that many are at the
beginning of a theory of personality that will gradually overwhelm the
monopersonality model that still warps the West’s vision, for that is a
model as inadequate to a more accurate perception and experience of what we
are as Newton’s mechanical-universe model was for charting any but the
grossest, most obvious movements of the universe.
It is crucial to every form of human effort that we forge a model of the
psyche that is closer to our hour-to-hour experience, because, in the long
run, as a society, we can share only what we can express. Our institutions
don’t match our experience, and that is causing chaos on a world scale. It
is likely that these institutions won’t match our experience until we can
articulate our experience in more accurately contemporary terms. Marriage is
only one of those institutions.
Remember Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard walking away down the road at
the end of Modern Times? They’re broke. They’re vulnerable to any
circumstance. Their walk is almost a dance. They’re on their way. That’s
the image of marriage that keeps this married man going. For us, marriage is
a journey toward an unknown destination. The "solace" possible is
to be reasonably certain you’re not going backward, not uselessly covering
the same terrain again and again, not circling one another in one place.
Sometimes, of course, you find yourself walking backward, facing where you’ve
been, blind to where you’re going - interesting, disorienting, and
infuriating, but it happens. Sometimes you’re pushing each over impossibly
steep, sheer terrain. The metaphors, from this point on, could be as endless
as the road. The important thing seems to be not to kid ourselves about the
destination. We don’t know it. It is not "security," which is
impossible to achieve on planet Earth in the latter half of the twentieth
century. It is not "happiness," by which we generally mean nothing
but giddy forgetfulness about the dangers of all our lives together. It is
not "self realization," by which people usually mean a separate
peace. There is no separate peace. - "While there is a soul in prison,
I am not free," said Eugene Debs once upon a time, and that goes for
all sorts of prisons, psychic as well as walled, and it’s as true if you’re
married as if you’re not. Getting married won’t stop it from being true.
Until we accept the fact that technology has married us all, has made us one
people on one planet, and until we are more courageous about that larger
marriage, there will he no peace, and the destination of any of us, married
or not, will be unknown.
The mission of marriage in our age is to live out the question: how far can
men and women go together? Because they must go wherever it is they are
going together. There is no such thing as going alone. Given the doings and
the structure of the psyche, there is no such thing as being alone. If you
are the only one in the room, it is still a crowded room.
Marriage creates a field between two people in which these issues can he
lived out, lived through. This, of course, happens or tries to happen
wilIy-nilly in any serious connection between people; but it is the focus
and inner mission of marriage. That is the danger of marriage, and its very
danger is its hope and the measure of its importance.
In this sense, marriage is on the cutting edge of this culture now as it may
never have been before. What men and women may or may not become is being
tested in its crucible.
So … I get up to look for matches for my cigar before I re-read all this
and send it in, and Jan says, "I hope it’s not like the first
draft."
"What do you mean?"
"I hope they know we laugh sometimes."
In laughter my writing is weakest, and she knows this better than anyone.
"We laugh a lot," I say.
"Not in the first draft."
+ + +
