In which Narcissism Collides with Selflessness

My blogging career is off to a bit of a slow start. You see, after my great declaration of narcissism, I found myself suddenly needing to be very selfless: my wife gave birth to a daughter. She has nothing to offer. She has two states, sleep and discontent. And she sort of has the flat, wrinkled face and squinted eyes of an old Asian man.

And, of course, she has ripped my heart to pieces, and rebuilds it every time she peeks out at me with her grumpy blue eyes.

In commemoration, I’m going to share a poem—not one about this moment, but about the moment that my wife gave birth to our first child, Hudson. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with poetry; not unlike my relationship with blogging. I’m a bit of a skeptic (this is a nice way to say cynic) when it comes to life, which creates a weird tension because I'm also a bit of an optimist. Figure that one out, and I’ll owe you some sort of counseling fee. The thing about loving and hating something is that they’re not all that separate really; these are measures of intensity, not necessarily pure motive. Although I think I have a fairly liberal definition of the word love. Most of our feelings actually land somewhere on the continuum of the concept of Love, and where they get so conflicted is that each feeling is bent through this series of lenses: how we love ourselves, how we love those we intimately know, how we love those we don’t know, and how all of these sum together in how we love God (with an extra dose of how we love our parents, our authorities, and, well, the list goes on). So in that love and hate are one in the same, because if Love is the pinnacle of emotion, then we can only hate that which does some damage to one that we love—and often that "one" is our self. Or, we can hate ourselves in proportion to how we (perceive we) hurt those we love, even if that generic “those” is all of them encompassed in our understanding of God.

All that to say, I have this love/hate relationship with a lot of things in my life, because when I feel strongly about something that tends to be the result. I plan on exploring that tension in this space over the next however-long. Poetry, art, the Church and its churches, colleges, social media, faith, apologetics, responsibility, structure, the oxford comma, and so forth. But that’s not what I promised in this post, I promised a poem, and I also promise a future post that explores a bit my relationship with poetry, which is both the most beautiful art there is and the largest cauldron of bullshit you can dip your spoon into. 

The Weight of Blood 

It’s a hard thing to hold blood.

I’ve given blood and preached blood and

     eaten blood and spilt blood and

     shared blood and feared blood and shed

     blood.

Then I watched my wife

fair-haired and straining

muscles corded a

Viking shieldmaiden yelling

curses at Odin

because today is not a day for death but for life.

And she split herself in two to make way for a son.

He flailed out, purple and gray and red,

a gollum golllum cry for air for warmth for regret

and I wasn’t going to cut the cord until

and I never knew how to hold a baby until

and I can see the blood on the floor

and count the cost in stitches

because I am a father now.

And he cried until laid on his mother

and sweat and exhaustion

and tears and pain and blood

lift as my wife increases

as she weighs the cost of love and becomes it.

The Essential Narcissism

I wonder if you ran an analysis of every blog—let’s go way back, xanga and wordpress and blogspot and all the others. Every angsty teenager or established professional. I’d bet the most common blog post out there is, “I’m starting my blog up. Again. But for real this time.” Followed by one or two posts, no greater blogosphere interaction, and a lull of 6-18 months. So in the great spirit of the social conscious, I, too, am starting my blog again.

I’ve sort of had this love-hate relationship with bloggers. Particularly with amateur bloggers. It has always seemed particularly narcissistic to think that, of all the nodes of information commerce on the internet, someone would actually care to land on and engage with mine. So I’ve dabbled but never committed, because of the scathing internal critique I had for myself in my declaration as a “blogger.”

But that changed. Actually, that hasn’t necessarily changed, but my perspective on it has shifted a bit. I’m reading this book by Tad DeLay (God is Unconscious) which is (brace yourself, this gets weird) a theological treatment of Lacanian psychoanalysis. The mass appeal is pretty obvious. But one of the fundamental ideas that I’m reading is the differentiation between the Imaginary (which is our ego, our conscious) the Symbolic (our unconscious) and the Real, which is a sort of indefinable concept of that which breaks into our Imaginary and Symbolic worlds and holds us to some sort of account—which then changes/shapes our new Imaginary and Symbolic approaches to thought and or unthought. Subthought? (I’m not a psychiatrist. My language may not be technically correct. I’m simply a nerd who likes reading hard stuff.)

So if this is true, that we all live in the Imaginary, then our experience with the world is, unavoidably, narcissistic. We can only identify the real as a function of our combined conscious and unconscious thought; everything is subjective, everything is filtered through experience, and everyone is without fail narcissistic. To deny narcissism would be to deny the sum of our experience, culture, family, upbringing, belief sets, etc. Essentially to deny narcissism would be to deny existence itself.

So here I am. Just another narcissistic asshole with a blog. I’m not sure what kind of market there is out there for a guy who like, among other things, fringe theological thought, psychoanalysis, sports, books, writing cathartic (which usually means bad) poetry, and now, apparently, blogging. But I’m writing again. And Seth Godin tells me that art without an audience isn’t art, just a journal. And odds are this will remain simply a journal, but in that odd chance that it connects with someone—as DeLay says, indirectly, which is the only way to connect truly—then good. If it doesn’t…well, I’m a narcissist. And an optimist. With that combination, I'm sure it will be heartfelt and meaningful and transform lives. Right?