Belated Replies
By Michael Ventura, Fri., Nov. 27, 1998
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One gentleman suggested that I am a repressed incest-survivor who can only be happy through his or someone else's therapeutic services. The concept of "incest-survivor" annoys me. So do the words "molestation" and "abuse," and their inevitable link with "victim." Our words for these experiences are so lacking in nuance. Having written directly and indirectly over the past eight years, both of the incest I experienced and of being raped in a men's room when I was a boy -- well, to put it mildly, they are not experiences I would wish on anyone for any reason, they are shattering, they never go away, no "process" (as we say these days) can bring them to "closure." But their effect on the soul is far more complex than psychological theory usually grasps.
Closure? I find the very word obscene. It suggests that there is some cure for tragedy. The psychological theory it comes from is largely an Anglo-American phenomenon, a worldview that seeks to impose its notion of well-adjusted wholeness on every experience. This is an ethnic trait of Anglos. But the distinguishing ethnic feature of Anglo-Americans is that they don't know that they, too, are an ethnicity. They define "ethnic" as other-than-Anglo -- and have no idea how ridiculous, not to say pathetic, this evasion looks in the eyes of we who are other-than-Anglo. In reply to the Anglo-ethnic concepts of "closure" and "process," I turn to the Mexican writer Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude. Written in 1950, he used "North American" for what we now call Anglo. As follows:
"... The North American wants to use reality rather than know it. ... We get drunk in order to confess; they get drunk in order to forget. ... We are sorrowful and sarcastic and they are happy and full of jokes. North Americans want to understand and we want to contemplate. They are activists and we are quietists; we enjoy our wounds and they enjoy their inventions. They believe in hygiene, health, work and contentment, but perhaps they have never experienced true joy, which is an intoxication, a whirlwind. [It's not so much fun to be characterized from the other side, is it?] ... What is the origin of such contradictory attitudes? It seems to me that North Americans consider the world to be something that can be perfected, and that we consider it to be something that can be redeemed."
When Paz says "we enjoy our wounds," he isn't speaking of the Anglo-American concept of enjoyment, which always involves some aspect of pleasure. He is saying that for temperaments that have their roots in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, to enjoy is always in part to accept. To accept all the lights and darks of a thing -- and to do so with all the lights and darks within ourselves. As the Greek poet George Seferis put it, in what is my favorite line in any love poem: "I watched you with all the light and darkness I have." And speaking of the pain in Billie Holiday's music, Etta James said: "It's a love that won't go away. ... This is another way of getting that love all over you."
Getting that love all over you, light and dark, agony and joy. It's in that sense that "we enjoy our wounds." Closure, transcendence, "outgrowing" (that horrible American phrase) the past -- is not my objective. I want to get it all over me. "Incest," "abuse," "molestation" -- I can't help but put those words in quotes because they are so one-sided -- are awful and awe-full experiences that create, for worse and for better, an excruciating but constantly revelatory and always changing relationship between one's soul and one's body. The agony can shimmer with joy, the joy can tremble with agony, at any moment. Is it difficult and dangerous? Are you kidding? Yet I have no wish to be cured of this condition -- I certainly don't wish to sacrifice my relationship with my experience for the vanilla happiness that most New Age-ish psychotherapy imagines (but rarely seems to find -- perhaps because they don't really want it?). For me, closure pales before having an ongoing relationship with one's experience, however terrible that experience may be.
This letterist -- Did I just invent a word? I like it! -- dug all the way back to a 1990 article titled "Solutions to Everything" in which I wrote: "Indulge in secrets. Without one or two major secrets, your life will surely fade. A conundrum: Secrets aren't lies -- they're mysteries, havens, passageways. Lies wreck your life; secrets can save your life. But sometimes you have to lie to keep the secret. Uh-oh." (Today I would add: Anyway, probably and half-secretly you want the lie to wreck your life -- lookin' for the exits. Confucius really did say: "The way out is via the door. Why is it that more people don't use this method?")
Suggesting that people can only be free when they have no secrets, the letterist said, "Secrets can save your life? Name one." Ah, but if I named it, it wouldn't be a secret anymore.
To go from a crucial issue to,well, a different issue: the wails of protest at my review of Jack Jackson's Lost Cause ("The Lost Cause," Vol. 18, No.3). Several letters pointed out, with historical references, that the Henry repeating rifle had been invented by 1857. I said Jackson had goofed on this detail, while really it was me goofing. One letter-writer said I should apologize for this, but an honest mistake needs no apology; an admission is sufficient. My other judgments stand -- more strongly, if anything. It is interesting that no missive I read mentioned, much less defended, Lost Cause's distorted racist portrayal of black behavior during Reconstruction elections in Texas -- a depiction very like D.W. Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation. (So much for progress.) If my article prevents one parent or one teacher from handing that distortion to one child, it was a good night's work.
Finally, someone wrote a kind,even sweet, letter about the silent scream I heard coming through a closet from the core of the earth, after viewing Auschwitz footage as a child. This letterist said the scream was inside me still, and I should seek competent help in releasing it. Believe me, it is without sarcasm that I say: The scream came from the closet. The scream came from the core of the earth, from all of history -- it was not inside me, though I can hear it still. No amount of my own screaming, no matter who guides me, will change the history that haunts our culture and haunts me. Again, to use Paz's word: We can sometimes redeem history, by our behavior in the present; but we cannot heal history. Or transcend the screams that made us. We are the children of an explosion, after all -- the explosion of a star. As my brother Vinnie said: "We come from the inside of a star, how can we expect to be gentle?" The miracle is that we achieve gentleness sometimes; but the scream goes on. Right now, as we speak, The New York Times reports that 20% of the world's population is unemployed. A staggering, screaming figure; a terrible fate for all those people and their families. Going to therapy will change neither their fate nor what I feel about it.
This letterist also bade me: "Don't try this [coming to terms with the scream] at home alone. Do this with the help of someone good at helping people learn to re-own their trust." I'm grateful for the concern, truly; and, despite my serious reservations, I know that in many instances therapy can save lives. But are we saying here that only the affluent, only those who can afford such help, have a chance? If it can't be done "at home," by ourselves or with friends and family; if only professionals can save us -- then the world is lost. Doomed. Because only a sliver of a percentage have the resources for the help you prescribe. For that reason, and for that reason alone, I pray you're wrong. But you had the heart to care and took the time to say so, and for that you have my thanks.
