On The Role of the Body in Speaking Interpersonal Truth and the Possibility of Collective Skill Loss

Speaking truthfully is a physically demanding process. 

 

Ending romantic relationships has often made me gag and vomit. Giving two weeks notice can be an anxiety inducing experience.

 

Anyone who is alive, human, and living, should know what I'm talking about: difficult topics can have arresting affects on our physical body. We shake, sweat, sigh, and suffer under the felt weight of our  situations.

 

This means that speaking truthfully is a process in which our bodies play a significant role.  

 

This claim requires 'truth' to be understood in a specific way. I am not talking about the form of truth appropriate to the physical world. I'm sure its true that Mt. Everest is 29,032 feet tall. But this is not a physically (bodily) demanding truth to learn (except for those that undertook the actual climbing and measuring. My Googling of it was quite easy and didn't generate much of a physical response from me). There are, I confess, truths to learn about ourselves and the world that will not make us shake or sweat or pant or pray. I don't know what my blood type is, and I don't imagine that learning this would mean very much to me. 

It is meaningful truths that strike us in the body, that prompt strange and overwhelming physical responses. Archimedes ran through the streets, allegedly naked, screaming "Eureka!" when he made his discovery about displacement. This was apparently a meaningful truth for him: it prompted him to run naked through the streets exclaiming that he found something!

There are countless videos online of families celebrating acceptances to a college or university. A child tentatively opens a letter, people wait. The news is delivered. And the bodies in the room will become animated in the appropriate ways. Shouting, exclaiming, and dancing and embracing will occur if the news is welcomed. Bodies will deflate, sigh, and soothe one another if the news is bad.

 

This video of a man crying has been memed into oblivion. But it is a powerful example of what I'm talking about. Something clearly powerful is spoken in the context of an intervention or confrontation. In response to hearing this confession, "I still love you...", this man can only wail and cry. Those around him immediately touch him, squeezing his shoulder and rubbing his back.

I think something beautiful and profound is happening in this clip, and I am sad that it has been trivialized by internet culture. Its so real. The way he touches his chin is so real.

I will simply state it as an empirical fact: the truths that arise in human experience are physically arresting and affecting. For some reason different types of truths compel our bodies to adopt certain shapes. Joyful truths curl our lips upward; painful or discouraging truths curl our lips downward. 

Telling the truth is something that we can become more and less capable of, more and less skilled at. It can be difficult to tolerate the bodily sensations that accompany the speaking of a difficult truth. So much of my youth was dominated by the sensation of a tight, burning throat. 

 

To end a relationship or leave a job might make us sick to our stomachs. And it is possible to persist in a job or relationship far longer than we should. If we can't tolerate the shaking, the sweating, the crying, the disorientation, we may never speak difficult truths.

At times I've had to simply sit, shake, and breathe for several minutes before I was able to say the things I knew I had to say. 

 

I am thinking of a practice called Focusing I am very involved in. While practicing Focusing one attends to their body in a present, meditative way, noticing present experience in all of its complexity. 

It is from this place of deep, present, embodied experience that I have been able to speak the greatest truths about myself and my life. But these truths often make me shake before I am able to say them. I feel them in my body, they come to me in sensations and images long before they come to me in words. Again, I suspect that you, my reader, can feel your problems in your body long before you can say them in words. 

But one has to be able to tolerate the jarring appearance of the spirit of the problem if one wants to be able to find the words that will adequately express or honor that spirit. 

The spirit of the truth can be terrifying and overwhelming before we find the words. The words tend to tame.

I know from my own life and therefore can simply assert: There are truths that can be spoken only after one allows oneself the sit, shake, heave, and pant for a while.

What are the kinds of things that can only be said after shaking?

Again, this is a type of truth that I'm pointing to. The solving of a math problem could do this for someone (Eureka!), but often it doesn't. I memorized so many things during my time in public schools, and I didn't feel a thing at all about it all.

In America, it seems to me, we are more inclined to think of 'truth' as something objective, unfeeling, measurable, quantifiable, 'outside of us'. The age of the universe, the height of Mt. Everest, the chemicals in my brain, are these not the 'truest' things because they do not implicate the 'subjectivity' of human beings? 

Put differently, we tend to think of 'truth' as third-personal, as pertaining to the order and arrangement of things without the presence of human beings. This is a type of truth. But I am more interested in first-personal truths, meaningful truths, things that pertain to concrete lives as they occur in concrete relationships and situations.

 

These are the types of truths that arrest the lived body: love, hate, fear, disrespect, shame, hatred, lust, honor.

 

These are the types of words needed to illuminate the types of truths I am talking about.

As a psychotherapist, I specialize in the speaking of first-personal truths. Third-personal truths, no doubt, have their role in psychotherapy. It can be comforting to know, for example, that someone's behavior is well explained by neuroscience or trauma research. And these third-personal insights are true in their own way: someone's nervous system activation is a very important part of explaining their volatility, and this is something all human beings are capable of. It is a generic truth, and there are generic truths.

But there will always be a personal or first-personal dimension missed by these sorts of explanations. "Yes, your nervous system did get overwhelmed and you went into a protective rage response." Yet the question remains: Why was that particular situation so activating to you, what in your unique history conditioned you to respond that way?

Third-personal, abstract forms of truth, unfortunately, can often distract people from those more particular questions. This is something I have experienced often in relation to both of my parents. My mother doesn't want or need to explore her particular depression; she is content with a generic medical explanation about her bad brain. My father doesn't feel the need to look carefully at his own experience; instead he can say "I'm just an anxious person..." 

These generic explanations, derived from psychiatry, have done little to soothe my parents or solve their problems.

 

But they have certainly allowed them to bypass their experience. 

The truths that would cause their bodies to shake have appeared threatening and therefore been deemed irrelevant or illusory.

 

They never developed the skills needed to welcome the types of truths that rack the body. Because, again, this is something that must be learned. We must learn to  pass through the disorienting waves of feeling that precede and accompany the speaking of difficult truths.

And this brings me to the second point I want to explore, that of collective skill loss. I will pose it as a question: If one must learn to tolerate the bodily process of speaking truth, is it possible that a society or culture can be better or worse at this type of education? And wouldn't it be possible for these skills to be gained or lost, to be more and less known at different times in human history?

Or, to render it as a statement: I suspect that European and American cultures have undergone a collective skill loss in which we are less capable of sitting with painful truths, more inclined to seek refuge in empty third-personal truths, frightened and averse to the arresting quality of deep personal,  interpersonal, and spiritual revelations.

Collective skill loss is a documented phenomenon. Sometimes it is called "Brain Drain," by which people mean "the emigration of highly trained or intelligent people from a particular country" (dictionary). I talked to a man who emigrated from China and he explained to me that most of the Chinese people you meet in America have worked incredibly hard to pursue education and opportunities abroad. It is a small and self-selected segment of the population: many of the most intelligent and educated people leave and seek opportunity elsewhere. 

Sometimes Brain Drain isn't about emigration, but about death. I have heard that during WWII large amounts of the Polish educated classes were murdered by the Nazis: doctors, lawyers, politicians, academics, intellectuals, writers, all these people were systematically murdered because they posed a more substantial threat to the Nazi hope of dominating Poland.

Whether its emigration, murder, or other forms of strife, it is possible for skills to be lost, and for a society as a whole to come to lack certain skills, resources, or abilities.

There is much evidence, from many sources, that colonialism abroad, and industrial exploitation domestically, led to the disruption of communities and their local practices and knowledges. 

Collective skill loss seems like something that must have occurred in the last several hundred years, especially in the places my ancestors were: England, Scotland, and the rest of Western Europe. I have recently been learning deeply from Karl Polayni's book The Great Transformation. He documented with great clarity, in then 1940s, the way that the citizens of England were manipulated and coerced into their new existence as a standing body of laborers, subject to the whims of wages, rent, and the whole capitalist apparatus. 

People's livelihood and subsistence was no longer tied to the land, but tied to the market. 

This disconnection from land seems to come along with a disconnection from the body. And, as I have been arguing, it is connectedness to our own bodily experiences that allows us to engage in discussion of difficult truths.

Relationships with land and ancestry were disrupted by industrial and capitalistic processes. The body began to acquire a new, mechanized meaning in this industrial-capitalistic context. How could this type of transformation not affect our capacity for discussion and truth telling? 

This morning, 9/13/24, I finished reading R.G. Collingwood's 1936 essay "Man Goes Mad." Collingwood was observing precisely the processes of collective skill loss I am trying to understand. He lived through, and carefully wrote about, the changes that occurred in the English countryside and the incumbent changes in human relationships and experiences. Collingwood gives special attention to the role of landscape, nature, and agriculture. 

He seems to think that the shift from agricultural to industrial modes of production has radically shifted the emotional patterns of English culture. We no longer feel competent to build in relation to nature, to think of our constructions as 'adornments' of the already beautiful natural world.

I am not yet sure how to develop this idea of 'collective skill loss', but I hope to have indicated some of its contours and some of my sources.

Regardless of how I delineate it, I still believe my immediately and extended family have been suffering under the conditions of this sort of collective skill loss.

 

My great-grandfather left Scotland and came to North America because the industrail revolution had shifted economic conditions so that he could no longer make his living there. Much of his family left, apparently. When he first arrived in America he ended up in Detroit, struggling in the Ford factories. The Ford factories, apparently, were brutal, intolerable. They left and went to Montreal where he worked in coal mines. This was a point of significant shame, it seems.

In his 60s, my grandfather began, but did not finish, a play about his childhood in Montreal. His mother is depicted as a ball of anxiety, grief, and shame. The emigration seems to have hurt her deeply. His father is depicted as initially sweet, then passive in the face of conflict, and then explosive and abusive after a period of frozenness. 

My great-grandfather, at least in my grandfather's description, was not graceful in his ability to speak difficult truths, was not able to sit, breathe, gather, and carefully express himself. He is depicted as overwhelmed. His wife, my great-grandmother Peg, is depicted as overwhelmed. Their bodies shake but they do not understand this as the rumbling of truth; they understand it as the sting of shame, pure and simple, something to be scorned and resisted.

Were my ancestors ever able to have a relationship with the types of truths I'm talking about? I really don't know... But I do have evidence that there has been rage, explosiveness, defensiveness, and fear... There is evidence that certain changes, and the truth of those changes, has been unspoken in the context of the family.

 

My family members were caught up in the tension between one form of truth telling and another... the truth of numbers, clocks, machines... these began to swallow up the truth of the body...

 

For the social changes I am pointing to are impossible without significant changes in the nature of truth. Even in antiquity there is the idea that truth is not about the individual speaking difficult truths (revelation), but rather the impersonal, the quantitative, the 'objective.' In the modern world, this image of truth as third-personal becomes dominant. It is, in fact, the basis of modern science and modern industry.

 

My ancestors were caught up in this avalanche of quantification and rational manipulation. Indeed, this is what made the Ford factories what they were (re: Taylorism, scientific management, and the project of mechanizing the human being). 

 

It must have been so hard to conform to the rhythms of the machine. How could one not forget the rhythms of the body? How could one not lose their sense of place and person?

The truest form of truth is the first-personal revelation of implicit experience. All third-personal forms of truth are derived from this other form of truth. The revelation of first-personal truth is profoundly bodily. We must shake and sweat and pant as a way of blessing and welcoming the words that will honor what wants so how itself in and through us. But this is a skill. And the events of the last several hundred years make it clear to me why this skill is so hard to learn, in such short supply.

Something happened to my ancestors, and I am only now learning to let my body shake as it finds the words to honor the wounds that dominated my family and my life within it.

A Formulation: What Tools and Bodies Say

 The tool says IS. 

The living body says Could/Will Be.

A tool functions within a defined situation of known criteria.

A tool functions properly or improperly, serves its function or not. 

A tool relies on a living body for these determinations (definitions, criteria, goals, functions). 

A living body is always in the process of being otherwise than it is, always changing.

A living body is the origin and basis of tools.

Many animals seem to generate something like tools.

The human body generates a dilemma regarding tools.

The tool says Is. The human body says Could Be. The tool, sometimes, says No.

This is a problem arising from the generational inheritance of tools.

The next generation is a collection of living bodies that says Could Be, Want to Be.

The previous generation of tools says No, how you want your body TO BE is no longer compatible with the tools that ARE. 

This becomes all the more troubling and intense when we recognize that symbols and tools are essentially identical.

A hammer is above all the idea of a hammer, a symbol pointing to one object that can break or drive another object.

The symbol possesses an ambiguity, however.

The symbol, as tool, says IS.

The symbol, as product and consequence of a living body, points towards that body's Could/Will Be.

Somehow this is the basis of tragedy.

Is There a Legitimate 'Arche' in A Patri/Matriarch? What is Power and/or Authority?: Thoughts on a Wedding and Its Spiritual Organization

I was recently in Grand Junction, Colorado, to officiate the wedding of some close friends (May 10th-13th, 2024). It is both a humor and a pain that multiple friends have asked me to officiate their weddings at this time in my life, which is unequivocally a period of loss and grief. I have never felt so disoriented, stuck, and wounded. And my friends are here to remind me that they trust me to, and want me to, speak at length about love and relationships in front of their loved ones. 

This is a helpful reminder, and I trust that my friends understand me more clearly than I understand myself. At this moment, I am hurt, disoriented, and lost. I am unsure of my strengths, capacities, and lovability. There is something about my friend's invitations to officiate, and the way that people responded to my speech and presence at the wedding, that reminds me of who I am. It helps me see the deeper layers of my nature that are currently obscured by the grief and pain I have been passing through.

And, I mean, come on... Its a little bit ridiculous, horrifying, and comical that the loneliest and most painful years of my life are also the ones in which friends asked me to speak publicly at their weddings. Its an absurd reminder of how lonely I've been, how much time I've spent single and alone, and how much my life has been vexed by my desire for romantic partnership. I have tried to bear the ambivalence gracefully, or take in the bittersweet quality of these experiences as much as possible, without forcing the experiences to mean one thing.

Additionally, 4 of my cousins are getting married this year between June and September. The universe is just kicking me in the face with other people having something that I want and have never really 'had' in a satisfying way. A common experience, I'm aware.

And in this moment I am unsure, even doubtful, that what I really want or need is a romantic partner. Such an ambiguous and ambivalent wanting...

The Colorado wedding was remarkable in part because I got to experience my friend Eric's extended family, who are spread out over the state. Eric's grandmother, Grandma Jill, was a particularly powerful presence. I learned, prior to arriving, that Grandma Jill was the real 'matriarch' of the family, setting the tone, being a powerful, organizing presence within the family. Eric indicated some of this energy in the final email before the wedding. There he had a section called "Things we'd like" which had 3 numbered points pertaining to wedding needs. The very first point was: "1. Please don't just go in Grandma's house without talking to Grandma. If you don't know who Grandma is, come find me (Eric) and I'll introduce you, and then you can ask permission." This is a striking sentence, delivered with an assumed familiarity that betrays strong family bonds. Eric did not say, "MY grandma..." but simply "Grandma..." There is no need for qualify her as MY grandma. Her existence, apparently, is too singular, established, and known. Its like walking into a new bar in a new town and someone says "Oh you don't want that mess to be on the floor when Janette gets here..." The name Janette, in this example, is spoken with gravity and depth, and implicit weight. "Oh, shit, Janette..." A stranger would be left with the feeling that a person of gravity and prowess was being referred to.

"Don't go into Grandma's house without talking to Grandma..." Eric's capitalization indicates the type of gravity that I'm talking about.

Part of me wondered: Should I be afraid of this woman? Is she volatile, aggressive, or worthy of caution? What is the power that this woman wields that is so clearly being indicated here?

Put differently, Eric's way of referring to her frames her as someone worth deferring to (or at least, ro be deferred to for some reason, worthy or not). 

 

Here I am raising the question of what we defer to and why we defer to it. Notice I say WHAT we defer to and not WHO we defer to. What is worth deferring to can never simply be a person (or an institution). Yet there are things worth deferring to.

Things worth deferring to, here, I will call 'arche'. The word 'arche' is an ancient Greek word meaning 'principle', 'originating source', or 'cause'. The word has more nuanced meanings in Aristotle, who I have read a lot of, but his nuances escape me.

It is the word arche that gives us our words patriarch or matriarch. A p/matriarch is a person that stands as a type of origin or source, a 'mother' or 'father' in the broad sense of 'point of origin' or organization.

Grandma Jill is a matriarch in a way that my mother or grandmother wasn't. What does this mean? I crave the presence of a genuine matriarch, or a genuine patriarch. Why would I crave this? Isn't patriarchy a gross, corrupt, and unjust notion? I certainly agree with much contemporary feminist or critical writing about patriarchy. bell hooks, for example, was on the right track with her string of adjectives describing our contemporary political regimes: "white-supremacist capitalist imperial patriarchy..." Of course...

 

So when I say that "I crave a m(p)atriarch," I do not mean that I endorse or support or crave patriarchy as it exists now. I'm too steeped in queer thought and experience for that to be. Its not me.

 

There must be other meanings, a real arche rather than this bogus arche we have now. I will call this legitimate arche versus corrupted arche.

 

The difference between a legitimate or a corrupted arche could be understood through two different meanings of the word power. Sometimes the word power means domination, force, or violence. This is what we mean when we critically say that "politics is all about power," or "they really abused their power": we are talking about people coercing one another, mistreating one another. Patriarchy, as the term is used nowadays, points to a network of institutions that enable some people to dominate other people. Wealthy people dominate the poor; the educated dominate the uneducated; whites dominate POC; so on, so on. I am not interested in this type of arche, for violence is never a true arche, never really at the root of things (however much Hobbes wants to insist on this, i.e. 'nasty, brutish, and short', or however much our society wants to found itself on Hobbesian notions, like Weber's claim that the state is simply an entity with a monopoly on legitimate organized violence). 

Violence is not a real arche. Real power is not violence. 

The word power means not only violence but also potential or capacity. I may call a book, a poem, or a movie 'powerful'. When I call it powerful I may mean moving, insightful, thought-provoking, or challenging. In these cases the word points not to domination but to things like growth, potential, learning, or change. Something powerful can also be something transformative.

A person can be powerful in both of these different ways. When a person misuses their power we call them a bully or say they 'throw their weight around'. When a person is in their power they don't need to announce their power, it is felt or known. As Nassim Taleb observes, as soon as someone says "I'm in charge here," you know that they absolutely are not in charge. Something like this is said only when power is slipping away, when someone feels themselves out of control.

 

Real power is always implicit, and to explicitly declare power is always (typically) a sign of weakness, vulnerability, or fear.

Grandma Jill at no point announced herself as a powerful person, made no claims to being in charge. She was unassuming in her presence and small in her stature.

 

But her personality, her presence, seemed to ground the space somehow...

 

Is this just what I want to feel? Did I see her that way because Eric primed me to and because I need to see that in the world?

 

I have been so horrified by the lack of elders (arche) in my life. I have a few aunts that I admire, respect, and look up to. They are elders of a kind. They certainly offer me love and nurturance. But there are limitations. They are not my parents and they do not participate or intervene in the affairs of my nuclear family. It is in my nuclear family that I have felt the lack of elders, the lack of a patriarch or matriarch. There are no leaders. 

Of course this is what I want and crave and do not have. I recently told a friend of mine about this question and they said "I've never seen someone act that way..." I was describing to them a type of presence that I craved. When I first began this essay I left myself a note that concisely captures what I'm talking about. And this note answers the question I raised above: WHAT is worth deferring to? (With the WHAT here being radically contrasted with WHO).

I wrote to myself: "What is a matriarch? What is a patriarch? When those words are used crudely they point to domination. When they are used more powerfully they point to someone attuned to the energy as it moves in human communities, someone who is grounded in themselves enough to take in the reality of others without their own reality feeling compromised. In being grounded enough to take in the reality of others an arche is able to make decisions beyond the ego, for the family, the tribe, the community, the group..."

I added: "It is this failure for an ARCHE to appear that has so hurt me in relation to my own family. My grief is mine and mine alone... No one understands or seems to want to understand..." 

It is those two notes that provided the impetus to this writing. I will briefly say more about what I mean in my description of an arche above.

Again, I defined a legitimate arche as: "someone attuned to the energy as it moves in human communities, someone who is grounded in themselves enough to take in the reality of others without their own reality feeling compromised. In being grounded enough to take in the reality of others an arche is able to make decisions beyond the ego, for the family, the tribe, the community, the group..."

 

This is actually a bizarre formulation as I look at it. What is "the energy" that I refer to in the first sentence? And what does it mean for a person to attuned to "the energy"? 

 

I'm pointing to psychological dynamics around something like egoism, or a preoccupation with oneself or one's image that interferes with or distorts our understanding of the world and others.  

I am talking about how it is possible to perceive reality more and less clearly. Being able to perceive reality more clearly, I seem to be saying, has something to do with being able to take in the reality of others, to understand that other people have experiences that are both alike and different from our own. 

For whatever reason, it seems easy to fall into something like egoism. Darwinism selfish gene blah blah blah, arguments about inherent selfishness are a dime a dozen.

But what about the experiential process of trying to become more attuned to others or less blinded by the immediacy of our own self-involved, bodily and psychological needs? 

Many wisdom traditions, especially Buddhism, are so concerned with egoism and the learning required to live in a less egoistic way. It takes work. We have to learn to work with awareness and attention, train ourselves to see less automatically, to take things in as if they were strange. We have to work on consciousness from within consciousness. This process is both deeply bodily and also completely non-physical/spatial. Being attuned to another person (listening), for example, is deeply bodily: I'm sitting, my ears are taking in sound waves, my brain is doing things. But then the experience is one of being aware of or sensing things that cannot be physically located.

 

And I don't just mean stories and concepts. I mean something that I can only call energy, the aura of a situation, how it feels to know that there are things behind me that I can sense without seeing or touching. What is this sensing? 

This sensing is the lived bodies intimate relationship with reality. Invisible threads everywhere, everything the world interacting with itself, everything a single clay differentiating itself into the many beings that share both identity and difference. 

Why do some people exert gravity on social situations? Why do some people exert magnetism or power more easily than others? 

I am ready to be done writing, but feel compelled to acknowledge the subtitle of this writing: "Thoughts on a Wedding and Its Spiritual Organization."

All this time I'm trying to talk about 'spiritual organization'. My speech was about the meaning of 'places' as distinct from 'spaces'. Here I'm talking about something very similar to what I said there. Places exist when people are united by some form of spiritual organization that is both larger than them and generated by them.

Because the world is in the process of unfolding itself and we are one of the many things it has unfolded from itself. The world's self-unfolding is invariably orderly. Nowhere do I see chaos (but of course I understand why we talk about violence or pain as chaotic). 

 

We have emerged from the orderliness of the world and seem to have brought new, distinct forms of orderliness with us in our emergence.  

We know not only the order of our bodies and the fruits and the earth and the sky; we also know the order of making. Human life is impossible without making (homo faber). We invariably use tools, as do many other animals. Yet we transform our worlds more fully, our amalgamated artifacts come to constitute a world for us. It is this network of tools and their implied purposes that human beings chiefly experience life and the world.

The order generated by making (the world of artifacts) can obscure the orderliness of nature, a more emergent, spiritual order.

A legitimate arche (m/patriarch) is one who is not so lost in the world of artifacts and human goals, has not forgotten the spiritual world, the emergent order that constitute the deep structures of experience. The ego thrives in the made world of human artifacts. "Go get a job, be a fancy person with lots of money, succeed within the system, and then you'll be happy." This is the most familiar problem in the world by now. But here I am saying it differently.

The ego is necessary. We must have our jobs and our rules and our roles. We must function within the human world in which the made order pre-dominates. But the made order is only possible on the basis of a deeper, spiritually felt order, the order of the world in its self-unfolding. 

Truly skillful human living, and thus the possibility of genuine leadership or nurturance, seems to depend upon gracefully navigating the tension between the made order where egoism thrives and the deeper spiritual order in which the boundaries separating persons begin to thin.

My Grandfather Understood "The Crisis": Thoughts on the 'Next Project'

In 1953, my then 29 year old grandfather, John Paterson, published a small article called "A Cosmic View of the Private Eye" in a magazine called The Saturday Review.

I read that article, in print, this morning, Sunday January 14th, 2024. I drank too much coffee while I read it and I was psychologically distressed over the malfunctioning heater in my apartment unit that has been making my space uncomfortably hot. It is a complaint I am unhappy to make, as these are the coldest days of the year, and I have been aware of people who do not have the luxury of heated spaces and have to persist outside at all times. And yet it is still a significant problem for me. The right side of my body is hot, as the broken heater is four feet to my right, constantly putting out hot air. 

The essence of my grandfather's article is a comparison of the detective story genre before and after 1914, that is, before and after The Great War (WWI, for us). I'll just say 'pre-war' and 'post-war' here, but I mean WWI, not WWII, as is commonly meant by those phrases.

The difference, in short, is between a world in which "beams don't just suddenly fall on you" and a world in which beams, well, just might. Indeed, he writes of a post-war detective story in which the main character is nearly crushed by a beam falling from a 10 story building. In the pre-war period one could walk down the street and not look up, not look over one's shoulder. There was confidence, at least for the wealthy and privileged groups, that society was safe and sound, and that laws did indeed maintain order. My grandfather points to the PI's changing relationship with official law enforcement. The pre-war PI has unproblematic relationships with the police, confident in their role in preserving and maintaining order. The post-war PI, however, has no such assurance. Rather, the post-war PI is "spiritually brutalized," feeling the "inability to find grounds for action," basically "not sure what his motives are."  

In concluding the essay, he says that the post-war PI is "par excellence the creature of crisis..." He closes with a confession: "I am an inveterate Sam Spade [post-war PI] myself."

This concluding reference to 'crisis' is striking because I have become preoccupied with a body of writings that I've come to call the 'crisis literature'. Indeed, in late 2023 I presented a paper at the Gendlin symposium precisely on this question of 'crises' in modernity. 

The crisis literature is diffuse, having no definite beginning or ending. It seems that all serious human writing is responding to something like a 'crisis'. Being human seems to be its own sort of crisis. 

But I want to use the term to designate a precise period of time and a specific set of problems. For my purposes now, I will say that the crisis literature begins with Hegel's response to the French revolution. Human beings had, for the first time, attempted to destroy their theocratic shackles and usher in a period of government both for and by human beings. This led to a crisis in the meaning of the divine, spiritual, or religious. 

Hegel was seemingly confident, or at least hopeful: The French Revolution instantiated the divinization of the human being; we no longer needed to tell stories about God or gods in the beyond. Spirit had come to earth, first in the form of the French Revolution, and second in the form of Hegel's systematic philosophy of spirit. Voegelin claims that Hegel and his ilk believed that the German philosophical revolution was a deepening and furthering of what had begun in the French Revolution.

By the time we get to Nietzsche, however, things look a little more grim. Indeed, I am reading The Gay Science, where Nietzsche discusses the 'death of god' for the first time. Nietzsche knew, like Hegel, that the de-divinization of the terrestrial realm was irreversibly underway. God or the gods were receding. But the sufficiently divine human being had not yet appeared. Where is our ubermensch or super-human? Not here, yet, apparently. Nietzsche's writings constitute a bizarre love letter to this person of the future. His level of sincerity feels impossible for me to evaluate.

 

The crises continue up to the present, and the crisis literature continues to iterate itself. In my lifetime, I have witnessed 9/11, the 2008 housing collapse, worsening weather events, the Trump years, the pandemic... The list goes on. All of these are related crises, concerning the intense intertwining of political, economic, theological, and philosophical dimensions of our lives and societies. 

 

How shocking for me, then, to see my grandfather working out his own version of the crisis literature, claiming that it can be found, of all places, in the crime novel. He published two monographs in his life: a study of 7 great English novelists called The Novel as Faith, and another book about the Edwardian period of English literature, The Edwardians.  

Clearly the crisis replicates itself all over. And clearly my grandfather had a pulse on this, somehow, to some extent. My aunt Mary often tells me that he used to say "Its the system, Mary!" He knew it was bigger than us. 

All of this points me to the next project I hope to undertake, that I have begun to do the reading for. I intend to go through the varied documents my ancestors have left behind in the hopes of producing a narrative that can generate some experiential continuity for me. My family life has been deeply fractured and fracturing. My parents always spoke of our closeness, our love for one another. But those stories have unraveled for me. The self-interpretation that my parents impose on the family has not resonated with the interpretation I have developed in my own personal, therapeutic, and scholarly work. 

The conflict of these two interpretations have been devastating, leading to an almost complete breakdown in my familial relationships. My body has ached with the ongoingness of the problems for years. Worse, I have been punished by every member of my immediate family for attempting to speak my own narrative aloud.

The documents I have on hand are: My great-grandfather's (Arthur Bromage) letters from WWII, when he was in England, France, and Germany participating in the reconstruction effort. He ultimately had a nervous breakdown and was sent home on medical leave of some kind. He was apparently changed by the experience in deep, painful ways. His wife, Mary Cogan Bromage, produced a memoir, dictated while she recovered from cataracts surgery on both eyes, intended as a gift for her grandchildren (my father and his sisters). She was also a respected historian of Ireland and an expert in writing in business contexts. I have her book Churchill and Ireland as well as a technical manual called Writing for Business. Additionally, my grandmother, their daughter, left a brief memoir, consisting mainly of short vignettes. Her husband, John Paterson, left his 2 books, a number of articles I will have to track down, and, most interestingly, an unfinished play depicting his childhood in Montreal, CA, after his parents left Scotland when he was 2.

I will be aided in my study of these documents by a theoretical apparatus I have produced for myself over the last several years. Between April of 2022 and March of 2023 I wrote a 391 page document in which I tried to explain to myself how I understand the politics of psychotherapy, and the role of therapy in our larger political-institutional context. Several of my friends have been reading the manuscript, and we will be discussing the last chapter on Saturday.

 

The book tries to outline the relationship between three factors that all contribute to the political meaning of psychotherapy. The three factors are 1. Experiential-lingustic factors; 2. Political-institutional factors; and 3. Scientific-philosophical factors. 

 

The three themes can be rendered as questions:

 

1. Why is talking in the right way to the right people such a big deal? When people come to therapy, they mainly talk. But this sort of talking can help people heal, become less sick. People have fewer panic attacks, gain energy, heal in peculiar and mysterious ways. How the hell is this happening? Why is speech so powerful and why do we have this specialized form of speech called psychotherapy? (therapy, of course, is about more than speaking. I'm a somatic therapist. But therapy could go nowhere without some speaking).

 

 2. What is the quality of our political-instituional situation that so many people are unable to speak in the ways they need to to feel well? Because that is the implication of psychotherapy: people have to go to a special place to speak in specific ways because they are, somehow, denied this opportunity in their daily lives in the institutions. 

3. What is up with our sciences, specifically psychology and the social sciences, that our political-institutional situation is such? 

All three themes culminate in a series of hypotheses: Psychotherapy exists as a space in which people can speak safely of things that are normally not safe to speak about. Whether or not we can speak of the most important things in safe ways is a serious matter to our health. Not speaking of the most important things in safe ways makes people sick. People are unable to speak of the most important things in safe ways because most of our institutional spaces are manipulative in character; they value people not for their personal uniqueness but their capacity to fill generic roles. The manipulative quality of our institutions, and the incumbent suppression of significant speech, is directly connected to the pseudo-scientific orientations of most contemporary psychology, which has bought into the bogus prestige of quantification and the impulse to control and mastery. 

I will be going through my family members documents with these themes in mind. How was their speaking in relation to their embodied experience? Were they saying the important things to one another? Or were they forced to hold too much, made sick by their secrets? What sort of institutional settings were they in and how did this affect their ability to speak of significant things? And lastly, what was their sense of the social sciences? Were they hopeful about or skeptical of positivism, behaviorism, etc?

I am certain that the encounter with the documents will generate themes that I cannot yet imagine.

But I find myself in 'possession' of a robust set of theoretical concepts that I have clarified for my own purposes. I now find myself ready to approach a significant and personal set of documents in light of those theoretical concepts.

I suspect the product will be rich, and I know that I will cry often as I read and write.

Two Quotations to Hold the Place of Future Thoughts

"Oftentimes Mary I have been reminded of the scene in one of the Irish plays at the Abbey theater. You remember it is Easter week and the people of the slums come out with baby carriages and gather up anything they can find. I remember how I laughed at that scene. But I don't laugh any more. I know that that scene meant social disorganization, a rift in the fabric. I have seen and felt in the turmoil of war how quickly people's instincts of self preservation and self aggrandizement come to the fore. One night in a Fr. commune I found myself acting like a regular policeman in my instincts. I felt just like going out on patrol[.] I must say for the French people that they have behaved admirably in the turmoil and stress. They have shown magnificent capacity to come back quickly, organize and administer. Every officer, at least this one, is always happy to see one gendarme in a village, for that man in blue symbolizes the establishment of order and law."

- Arthur Bromage, my great-grandfather, a political science professor at U Michigan

Letter to his Wife, Daughter, and Parents, September 11th, 1944 

Written somewhere in France while participating in the reconstruction of municipal governments in the wake of WWII.

 

"In war reality rends the words and images that dissimulate it, to obtrude in its nudity and in its harshness. Harsh reality (this sounds like a pleonasm!), harsh object-lesson, at the very moment of its fulguration when the drapings of illusion burn war is produced as the pure experience of being. The ontological event that takes form in this black light is a casting into movement of beings hitherto anchored in their identity, a mobilization of absolutes, by an objective order from which there is no escape. The trial by force is the test of the real. But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognizer themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same."

Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, (p. 21)

Choice, Change, and Attention

My life is barely comprehensible to me at the moment. I'm doing plenty, but I am in a situation that it is impossible to see clearly in; I am simply still too close to the matters. Time will give me distance and understanding will come with that distance. 

I have written down three words to guide my thinking: Choice, Change, and Attention.

I am so preoccupied with my life's difficulties that it feels difficult to pursue the thoughts implied by those words. I am just feeling so much, my body is aching with stress. I'm struggling.

I had hoped to write some reflections on two authors that I have been very impressed by: Iris Murdoch and Eric Voegelin. And it occurs to me now just what terribly different sorts of writers they are, what different worlds they come from. Murdoch was a peculiar figure, both an accomplished novelist and a gifted philosopher trained at Oxford and Cambridge in the analytic circles closely associated with Wittgenstein. Her writing that I have read (The Sovereignty of the Good and the first chapter or so of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals) belongs obviously to the climate of 20th century, English, analytical philosophy. 

 

Whereas Voegelin was an Austrian political refugee who lived in Louisiana for many years before eventually returning to Germany. He belongs to that incredible generation of German scholars who could deal with the whole of literature from antiquity to the present. This collection of scholars I think of the big names: Heidegger, Gadamer, Strauss, Arendt, Voegelin. Just such monumental learning. 

 

I am more familiar with Voegelin's overall project. I have read his Autobiographical Reflections as well as Anamnesis. I am halfway through The New Science of Politics. His magnum opus was a five volume work known as Order and History. I just order Volume V of Order and History today, called In Search of Order. I am interested in it because it is where Voegelin tries to directly address the theme of transcendence, or takes up the 'meditative movement' that is present in his work. 

And perhaps this is where Voegelin and Murdoch meet. Voegelin, after all, was working on a philosophy of consciousness (as a way of doing political philosophy, among other things). And what I have been drawn to in Murdoch, especially Sovereignty, is her emphasis on practices of refining consciousness. Her writings on goodness often concern the nature of action or choice. We want what is good, and we must make choices about what we think is good. Thus goodness and choice are naturally nearby concepts for us. 

 

Murdoch offers a very sophisticated image of choice. Her account is contrasted to the view prevalent in her intellectual community, what she calls the 'existentialist-behaviorist' view of the will or self. By this she means that moral thought of her world had an incoherent blending of these two philosophies. On the one hand, choice is seen as the sudden assertion of the will in a critical moment. This is the existentialist piece; as existentialism relies on the distinction between 'free will' as distinct from 'determined nature'. This is why things are but humans exist. On the other hand, English philosophy was also chiefly concerned with external descriptions of action, eschewing introspection or phenomenological description. Choice is discussed primarily in its behavioral dimensions. 

 

The existentialist-behavioral view of choice is thus in which we rely on the notion of 'the will' as a source of sudden assertion, but we bypass experiential reflection for behavioral descriptions of goals or goods. 

Murdoch claims this is not a viable description of choice and I agree (and of course this is a very brief gloss on something she describes more thoroughly. MacIntyre's After Virtue has a similar account). Choice is a much extended affair, Murdoch believes. It is not about a sudden fork in the road where we choose left instead of right. Sometimes it is like this. There are real moments of decision. Do I make this phone call or not? I made a phone call on November 17th that felt like that. I'm glad I made the call, no matter how horrified I am by the outcome. But what felt decisive in making that phone call? What allowed me to make that choice? 

 

Murdoch thinks that the single most important factor in choose is the quality of our seeing. She is adamant that we think seriously about the metaphors we use in these matters. The existential-behaviorist account often relies on metaphors of the hand, of grasping or asserting. Murdoch thinks that metaphors of vision and seeing are much more appropriate to questions of choice. I would agree in my own experience: I made the phone call I made because I have come to see the situation in a certain way.

 

I have been working for many years on my capacity to see the situation. It is not an easy situation to see, and there are many things that I am missing or excluding in my current ways of seeing it. But I have done much work on myself  and my seeing. Last year, when these troubles were just beginning, I wrote a blog post called 'When things are out of hand what good is it to see?'. I quite like the post, and the sentiment remains. The single most important thing is working on seeing clearly. Action will follow from clear seeing.

Murdoch therefore argues that choice is not about moments of assertion but about practices that we can undertake to 'purify' or 'clarify' or 'refine' consciousness. Purify is a fine term, but has rings of sin. Clarify is good, especially if I think about ghee, or clarified butter. Refine has a similar connotation, like refining oil. 

 

The main thing that needs to be purified, she claims, is selfishness or egocentrism. We are naturally self-centered, she openly stipulates. This is, in some sense, literally true in that I can only experience the world from my own body and gaze. But then there is the deeper sense of selfish meaning immorally egocentric, greedy, deceiving, et cetera. She points to beauty as an important antidote to this. She tells a story of sitting at her desk, fussing over a particular piece of writing, angry and in her head about it, and suddenly catching sight of a stork flying. For a moment all her petty problems are gone, its just the stork and her attending to the stork, seeing the stork. In moments of beauty we are able to see something as it is, something about reality stands out to us.

 

Murdoch claims that this was a function of prayer: a practice for attending to the larger context of god, a way to overcome our perhaps instinctual draw to self-centeredness.

I have been thinking about her as I go deeper into my practice as a psychotherapist (and as a client in therapy, and someone who participates in other therapeutic practices). It seems to me that psychotherapy is about learning how to see. A good therapist generally doesn't give advice, doesn't tell you what to do. They help you see things. And for a human being, seeing means naming. This is the strong sense of the word 'phenomenology' in which experience is structured so that naming something allows it to be seen even when you are no longer naming it. Once something has been named in a deep way it acquires experiential salience, it will appear in unreflective experience. 

Careful, loving attention and patient, tentative naming are the main engines whereby we begin to see differently. We need to be able to go slow, to feel uncomfortable things, and to try out different ways of talking about things. This can really change people. Gendlin's Focusing is a good way of understanding how this changes people. I can't explore it now, I'm getting tired. But his "Theory of Personality Change" article is good on this. I'm wanting to connect this to Gendlin's understanding of change as real growth and not just rearrangement. But that feels hard to do.

I also want to connect it back to Voegelin. Because I can say more clearly what the connections are now that I've gotten to the relationship between seeing and naming. Put briefly, Voegelin is concerned with how the relationship between symbols and experience shifts over time. In the ancient world, he claims, they had a 'compact mythological' way of symbolizing experience. There were then periods of spiritual eruption, like when Laozi, Confucious, and Heraclitus were all contemporaries. During this period of spiritual eruption there was a great wave of 'symbolic differentiation'. We live in the epoch made by those great moments of symbolic differentiation.

That means that seeing has to have a historical component. We need to name to see. We need to know history to use our symbols. Voegelin is the philosopher who tracks the convergence and divergence of the relationship between symbols and experience. When symbols and experience are nearby things are going well. When symbols and experience become separated from one another we enter something like stuckness, second reality, or a world of ideology. 

Again, psychotherapy is so centrally about finding the nearness of experience and symbols. When the right word comes up it can crumple someone's body, just tears and tears and tears. 

Murdoch and Voegelin both have much to offer me.

For the core of my project is to understand why self-knowledge and well-being is so challenging in the world I live in, in the family I grew up in. My own journey has been a journey out of familial mythology into more differentiated symbolic experience. I have learned to name and see things that were very hard to see within the family, that still seem impossible for some people to see. My particular situation has had to navigate a highly complex set of symbols that define our situation, symbols like: Mental health, depression, chemical imbalance, 'sensitive', anxiety et cetera. This set of symbols is profoundly ideological in that it obscures a good deal about experience. More specifically, it obscures the political dimensions of experience and thereby the political dimensions of suffering. This is not incidental. 

There's a lot that I'll need to figure out how to say about time, development, and symbolization. Once a moment of symbolic differentiation has occurred you cannot undo it. Once you look at something you've seen many times and you say abuse and it feels right, you can't unsee it. These moments of symbolic differentiation occur at historical scales and they occur at individual scales. There was a moment in which no one had ever spoken of psuche before. And there were moments in which these terms took on new meanings. The appearance of Christ is the appearance of a new set of symbols. 

Symbols always belong to situations. My life has taken me in a direction that there are certain situations I can no longer be in. Being in those situations requires a particular, strict, obfuscating use of symbols. Those situations are 'ideological' situations in a certain sense, in that the symbols are frozen, the narratives are set, the questions are answered. I belong to situations of questioning and hopefully of healing. 

Something monumental has occurred for me, a moment of differentiation unlike anything else before. What happens after here will bear its mark, and not like a bruise but like a halo. I am grateful for my wounds because I am grateful for my gifts. I wanted to share my gifts with some of my family and they told me I was wounding them. 

Everything I've said here could be thought of as the pursuit of reality. In wanting to see I want to see what is real. It can be hard to be confident in the pursuit of reality when there can be such strong, conflicting, and discordant 'realities' (experiences). 

But I find myself calm, if also in pain. I find myself able to stay present, if certainly in a more distracted tenor. And I find myself able to find the words I need. This writing is some evidence, even if the approach is oblique.

"Jenny, I don't know where to love from" - In Praise of Barrie's 'Jenny' - Thoughts on 'Inner Space' and Sources

Barrie is the musical project of Barrie Lindsay, a New York based musician and producer. I discovered her music after the release of her 2019 debut album, "Happy To Be Here." At the time I was completing my graduate school internship, working in a clinic with folks with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities. 

One client and I spent a lot of time listening to music. He loved traditional Chinese flute music. The flute music was our home base, our consistent thing we listened to, but I shared a lot of music with him, and he told me about other CDs he listened to. We listened to music together and explored his inner life as we did so. He had a remarkably rich inner life. He was also the quietest person at a clinic. You never know what someone is doing or thinking until you ask him. I asked him, and he had a lot to say. Most people at the clinic, clinicians included, apparently never asked him.

 

My favorite song from her first album is called "Hutch." I remember playing the song for this particular client. The piano on Hutch reminds me of Sufjan Steven's song "Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Part I: The World's Columbian Exposition Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream," especially the second half of the song when Sufjan slows it down, leans into the piano and horns. Both songs share ascending piano, layered vocals, and something vibe-like, something hard for me to name. Resonance that I cannot specify. I'm listening to Sufjan right now, the transition about 3 minutes in is so excellent, so interesting; this little bridge linking the two halves of the song. 

Part II of Sufjan's song is so beautiful. The lyrics are so significant for me, perhaps the vocal melody even more important:

"And I cried myself to sleep last night

For the Earth, and materials, they may sound just right to me

Even with the rest belated, everything is antiquated
Are you writing from the heart? Are you writing from the heart?
Even in his heart the Devil has to know the water level
Are you writing from the heart? Are you writing from the heart?"

 

Am I writing from the heart? Am I writing from the heart? I'm trying.

I always think about Sufjan's song when I hear Barrie's "Hutch." One thing I admire about Hutch is the playfulness of some lyrics: "What'd ya get? Who ya with? Where ya going?" all said in rapid, playful tones. It reminds me of child-like excitement that I feel sometimes in all relationships; wanting to be close to people; wanting to naively ask questions and be informed. I like to feel in the loop or inside the circle. 

 

 

"What'd ya get? Who ya with? Where ya going?"

Barrie released another album in late 2022 called "Barbara." Pitchfork reviewed it on March 31st, 2022. I didn't add it to my Syncd playlist until November 26th, 2022.

Truthfully there is only one song on the album that really leaps out at me: "Jenny." The rest of it sounds good but it fades into the background too easily for me.

Here are the lyrics:

"[Verse 1]
Jenny dropped under the water
Been waiting, pressed my head into her collar
Devotion, I don't know
Emotion, high to low
Yeah I don't know

[Chorus]
Jenny, I don't know where to love from
Never had to hold myself true to someone

[Verse 2]
Jenny, let me punch her shoulder
Jenny, I'm only the opener
Met her at the show, she goes too
Man, I hate guitar, except with you

[Chorus]
Jenny, I don't know where to love from
Nеver had to hold myself true to somеone
Jenny, did you love me in July?
Jenny, could you love me if you tried

[Chrous]
Jenny, I don't know where to love from
(Jenny, I don't know where to love from when my time comes)
Never had to hold myself true to someone
(Never had to hold myself true to someone when I'm said and done)
Jenny, did you love me in July?
(Do you love m? Do you love me?
Do you love me? do you love me now?)
Jenny, could you love me if you tried
(Do you love m? Do you love me?
Do you love me? do you love me now?)"

 

The song, for me, is defined by and driven by the chorus. The chorus, of course, repeats. But every time it repeats with an addition, a change, something new. 

Initially we get just the two lines: "Jenny, I don't know where to love from. Never had to hold myself true to someone."

An important admission, an important question. Where do we love from? The heart... whatever that is.

The second time we get two additional lyrics: "Jenny, did you love me in July? Jenny, could you love me if you tried?

Ah, a temporal marker. Summer love. "Jenny, did you love me in July?" A question of effort: ... if you tried? 

In one way love has nothing to do with effort. It strikes us. Trying to make love occur is a fool's errand. 

In another way love has everything to do with effort. The flame must be discovered, but effort must maintain it.

There is a small instrumental bridge between the second and third iteration of the chorus. The third iteration is far richer than it has been so far: layered vocals, background vocals singing (sorta like) in a round, renewed inflections of passion in Barrie's voice. 

 

As I have thought about this song I have been reminded of a very early memory, when a teacher showed us in Kindergarten how to sing in a round. We sang "row, row, row your boat" in a round. I remember it being totally mind blowing to my small body. 

I have also been reminded of the time I went to Compline at St. Mark's Cathedral in Seattle. Every Sunday night there is a singing event, a form of prayer, in which folks in monastic garb sing and chant in deeply harmonic and melodious ways. I remember feeling the power of the space, the echoing of voices in the cavernous church. I thought about what it must have been like when early humans first discovered harmony, first understood that voices could interact, first realized that a cave would change the quality of a voice. 

Above all I am struck by the frank admission of this song and the vulnerable question it poses. "I don't know where to love from... Never had to hold myself true to someone..."

In some ways it is an odd question, Where do we/I love from? From is a term that has both spatial and causal meanings. I am from Maryland. This is a spatial/geographical sense of "from." I have recently been writing about the relationship between prediction and judgment. I have been claiming that judgment is something that must be undertaken from a "1st-personal" place; prediction generally comes from a "3rd-personal" place. These are terms that I got "from" Eugene Gendlin and his involvement in the phenomenological tradition. This is not a spatial "from," but a psychological or mental "from."

Where do ideas "come from?" We ask, "where'd you get that idea?" Ideas never come from space the way that food comes from the ground or I come from Maryland.

When talking about "where we love from" we don't mean a physical place, but a metaphorical place: the inner space of experience. 

We talk about how things feel "crowded" inside of us, or how we feel "spacious." When I go to work I want to feel spacious, I strive to be aligned with Rilke's claim about solitude: that we should be able to walk inside ourselves for miles without encountering another. 

In the world of Focusing, an embodied form of psychotherapy I work with, we talk about "close process" as opposed to "distant process." Sometimes people know that something upset them: "When my dad said that to me last week I was livid..." But then when they come to talk to me they can't recall the feelings, nothing is there... The experience has gone away or become distant somehow. 

With the right kind of effort an experience or feeling can be invited; we can reconstitute, reexamine the feeling, bring it back to life. 

Where to love from? 

I love from the place in me that is neither too close nor too far. I love by being present. But what is presence? It is not spatial or physical presence. It is presence in inner space, closeness with the things that are at hand. 

The "from" question raises the "source" question. Things come from other things. Living bodies come out of other living bodies. Where do living bodies come from? No one knows how to answer this question. A book like Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature tries to answer this question, but in many ways reveals that we simply don't know.

Source in some absolute sense seems hard or impossible to know. Where did all the extant things come from? God is our name for the source, or the whole.

But there is an experience of being closer or further from the source. The source is not God in some absolute sense. But it is a sense of being close to the place that fresh words come from. 

Sometimes when we talk we just recycle old phrases, old ideas, we repeat familiar stories. And then  other times when we speak we find we are saying new things, we surprise ourselves, old friends and familiar people surprise us.

New things happen.

Why do new things happen and where do new things come from? This is an especially difficult question when we are asking it in the non-spatial sense, like Barrie asks of Jenny. 

"Jenny, I don't know where to love from" is a statement or question about the source of invisible things like love or fear or experiences generally. 

The experience of being close to the source is the experience of real embodiment. There are ways of interacting with and being present with/in our bodies that can lead to new things. Gendlin calls this being with the "murky edge." 

The "from" question could be crudely answered with the concept of the unconscious. But I prefer this notion of the murky edge. There are edges in awareness, "places" we can sense in which we sorta understand something, can say certain things about a problem or situation; but we can also sense that there are things we aren't saying, that don't fit. 

When we learn to attend to and stay with that murky edge we find that new things come up. Plato's Meno is an interesting demonstration of how learning arises from staying with these unclear but felt places.

Love is about knowing how to stay in those murky spaces in which we don't yet understand but want to understand. "The big middle," as my therapist once called it. Staying present in the big middle is the opposite of being overwhelmed by something or letting it go totally out of mind.

Love is about particularity, perhaps of a person, but also of a flower or mug or period of time. 

Love is revelatory. It shows us what we are and what other people are.

Love and presence seem in some ways to be identical.

I have the sense of a leap. A circularity. A bedrock.

Love is. We learn that it is by experiencing it. We experience it when someone can offer us presence, listening, patience, and real understanding. 

 

Reality is unspeakable and the most true and potentially meaningful statement is "It is what it is..."

The Midnight's song "Bend" comes to mind: "Everything will always be exactly how its gonna be. Though I seem to worry every single day. This prodigal turns home again and morning comes and in the end I see that new sun shining on your face."

The sun is.

Love is. 

New things come. They come "from" our ability to stay present at the murky edge of our understanding. But that "from" is quite strange. 

 

When we stay at the murky edge we stand in front of a door. We know things come out of that door.

But we cannot go through that door and see what is on the other side.

We just know that things come, and everything that comes comes from somewhere. 

Some thing comes, from some where, out of some place... Something like that... These are some of the most important phrases I am aware of.

So, I don't know the answer, but I admire Barrie's frankness, her willingness to pose a question through an admission: 

 

"Jenny, I don't know where to love from..."

I think I do know where to love from. Or, at least, I find myself capable of love.

But it is a practice: something that must be repeated and returned to. 

Love is a practice of returning, over and over, to that mysterious "door" I find inside myself where new things seem to "come from."