Although psychoanalysis presents itself in part as a way of thinking capable of addressing constitutive barriers in communication, I continue to remain vexed by the difficulty people have in communicating with each other. These difficulties create and haunt our dearest relationships. So many of us lie to those close to us and rely on the lies we are told. Honesty can be too much to share with someone who matters to us. Love means being willing not to tell the truth, being willing to bear the lie. This may be a commonplace in Lacanian theory, but it's still enormously challenging as lived experience.
I keep obsessively recalling the details of my recent camping trip, the challenges associated with the interactions with my father and my children and the differences between their capacities and expectations. Was my father not acknowledging the physical changes of being seventy? Was I trying to protect him from acknowledging them? Was he trying to protect me from them? Were we both trying to keep up some kind of delusion?
Having heard my version as well as my father's, my brother has reinterpreted the situation so that we're not bogged down in what seems to each of us to be rather profound failures of communication and understanding, failures linked in part to my goal-oriented, box checking (miles covered, ascents made) in contrast to something I find completely other, foreign, mysterious (sitting and being, poking a fire, whatever it is that one is supposed to be doing when one is camping--I can't even phrase it in a way that doesn't come out nonsensical). Anyway, my brother said our father is a shaman. All the aspects of his spiritual, religious, mystical speech that I bracket as an unfortunate remnant of his Southern Baptist upbringing (how is it that he is brain surgeon?), my brother says should be understood as essential to the person our father is. I won't go in to the other evidence my brother offered for this view, although it involved rituals, origin stories, practices of serving. At the very least, the shaman idea provides a way of rendering the caesura of our communication as something meaningful than simple failure or fault. It makes me wonder about the ways we get pushed into a limited array of intelligible positions. And how even a helpful image can name but not bridge a gap.
I keep obsessively recalling the details of my recent camping trip, the challenges associated with the interactions with my father and my children and the differences between their capacities and expectations. Was my father not acknowledging the physical changes of being seventy? Was I trying to protect him from acknowledging them? Was he trying to protect me from them? Were we both trying to keep up some kind of delusion?
Having heard my version as well as my father's, my brother has reinterpreted the situation so that we're not bogged down in what seems to each of us to be rather profound failures of communication and understanding, failures linked in part to my goal-oriented, box checking (miles covered, ascents made) in contrast to something I find completely other, foreign, mysterious (sitting and being, poking a fire, whatever it is that one is supposed to be doing when one is camping--I can't even phrase it in a way that doesn't come out nonsensical). Anyway, my brother said our father is a shaman. All the aspects of his spiritual, religious, mystical speech that I bracket as an unfortunate remnant of his Southern Baptist upbringing (how is it that he is brain surgeon?), my brother says should be understood as essential to the person our father is. I won't go in to the other evidence my brother offered for this view, although it involved rituals, origin stories, practices of serving. At the very least, the shaman idea provides a way of rendering the caesura of our communication as something meaningful than simple failure or fault. It makes me wonder about the ways we get pushed into a limited array of intelligible positions. And how even a helpful image can name but not bridge a gap.
... are rocks, holes, spares & crosses continuations of your chasm musings? ...
Posted by: raymon | July 30, 2008 at 03:54 AM
It felt that way as I put them up.
Posted by: Jodi | July 30, 2008 at 10:44 AM