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?

Some Thoughts on Life and Writing

I think I've fallen off pace of my 50 books for the year goal. I'm going to try to add it up soon--it's been so long since I stopped keeping track, it's going to be a task to go back and add them up--but I'm sure I'm not in the high-20's range that I need to be.

I did supplement my reading few delightful (and, in terms of my goals, delightfully short) books of poetry, and have focused the bulk of my personal writing on poetry. Poetry--or rather, good poetry--is so new to me, that it feels like learning to walk. Yes, I have been exposed to plenty of poetry throughout my life, and there are even some highly acclaimed poets that I've enjoyed reading, but I have learned so much in the last six months that it really all feels new.

So I'll start posting some poetry here, poems that I am proud of, and seeking to publish in the "real media" at some point.

Learning anew: the playfulness of Updike.

I recently (well, a couple of weeks ago) Updike’s book of poetry Verse. It is two books of poetry combined into one, most of which was written and published before he began his string of commercially successful novels.

One of the facets of Updike’s writing that I’ve always admired is his unflinching adherence to ugliness, and his belief that within ugliness, we can find beauty. These themes run through his Rabbit series, color his short stories, and add to his most common main character: an egotistical, sexually-driven man. Death, divorce, drug use, and despair; these are not pretty items but they are true items.

Yet in his poetry, Updike portrays a vastly different personality. These poems are, in a word, fun. Spanning from an alphabet of poems—one poem per letter, each for one item starting with said letter—to a touching poem written to his daughter, who, like him, was born in March. And yet the biting wit, the sly cleverness of Updike remains. It shows concisely and cleverly in the following poem:

Xyster

“An instrument for scraping bones”
Defines the knife.
The word is rarely used—but why?
What else is life?

Beyond playful—or cynical—witticisms, though, Updike shows a patience for the act of crafting poetry. In the poem, “Yardstick” he writes five lines, each split into three sections—and each section containing exactly twelve characters. Equate the characters to inches, of course, and the poem is five yardsticks stacked on one another.

Updike pulls from headlines, from funny turns of phrase he hears, and from antiquated sayings that appear comically poetic to a contemporary ear. It reads more like Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstine than Updike, but even at his most lighthearted, Updike shows the same mastery of the English language that enabled him to pen some of the best American novels I have ever read.

50 Books in 2010: Book Two, Atonement by McEwan

I recently finished reading Atonement by Ian McEwan, a gift from a professor (many thanks, Dr. Allison), given with the promise that (is it ever not true?) the book was much better than the movie. I haven’t seen the movie, and having read its better origin, I am none too enticed to see it.

I enjoyed the book—I read it rapaciously, in two days time (and without staying up until the quietest hours to do so), but I have to admit that the first book—it is split into three books—was by far my favorite, and the latter two thirds were a bit disappointing.

Before going any further, it should be said that McEwan is a terrifically talented writer. He turned phrases that made me want to vomit, they were so beautiful. (Is that professional jealous? Perhaps. Intimidation? Most certainly.) His phrasing, his manner of painting a setting, and his characterization were all immensely enjoyable.

That being said, the book weighed uneven to me. The first third, in my reading of it, focused on a few simple tasks: introducing the characters, the setting, and developing the characters as a means to slowly move the plot. The language sprawled from chapter to chapter, and worked to add its depth within the context of the everyday. It was, simply, life. The latter portion focused more on events, it seemed, then characters, whose characterization seemed fairly static once Book II started. It focuses on World War II, a soldier’s experience and a nurse’s experience, and tries to encapsulate the horror of war, the tension of the times, the shame of retreat—and all within the framework it set in Book I. Certainly a daunting task, and one that is so major that the everyday realism of the characters was lost in the scope of major events. It was like the book started to be about people and life, and ended about events.

Perhaps it is just personal bias, but I have long felt that the most important parts of literature are the language and the characters. If the language paints a clear picture and the characters are real, and elicit emotion (positive or negative, or most likely positive and negative) I think the plot will come.

Maybe I’m wrong. I’m certainly no expert, and this blog is the closest I have come so far to publication, but that’s the part that I enjoyed the most, and the part I enjoy creating the most. We’ll see where it takes me.

Probably worth saying, too, as a disclaimer: For those who haven’t read it or seen the movie, Atonement is not a book for kids. Maybe not high schoolers either.

Book one complete: Family and the Santuzzus

I finished Ardizzone’s Satutzzu a few days ago, and while I’ve already reflected on most of what it meant to me—to be honest, for much if it I was too distracted with the how of the reading that the distilled what of the story was a bit lost. What I gathered, though, is it is a celebration of family.

Family isn’t an easy concept or an easy entity in our society. It’s hard to get my fingers around what a family is, or even what a family is supposed to be. Like so many of my generation, I am the product of divorcees, who are themselves products of divorcees. In fact, I know of one couple in all of my extended family who has had an enduring marriage.

Which is okay, because that doesn’t make us any less family. The Santuzzu family had their problems—separated by thousands of miles, separated emotionally and physically for a big section of their lives, in the end what mattered was family and one another. And my family, too, is separated by hurt, by psychological reactions to what’s happened in our lives, and I think maybe most of all by our respective searches for identity and self. And just like, whether in grief or in jubilation, the Santuzzus were still bound by mutual love and belongingness, so are the Eckhardts, so am I. And wherever I go searching for who I am and what I am meant to be, I am still bound by what my family is—I am an Eckhardt, complete with our traditions, our mythologies, and the string of love that ties them together.

Falling in Step with Literature

I have about 70 pages left in the book I’m reading—In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu by Tony Ardizzone. It’s been an odd reading experience; I sailed through the first 90 pages, then trudged through the next 100 or so, and now am sailing again. Of course, it’s fair to disclaim my reading with the fact that I was turning in graduate school applications in that middle section of it.

That small caveat being what it is, I’ve never let responsibilities (work, sleep, eating, etc) distract me from a book that I’m heavily invested in. In fact, right now, my eyes and fingers are itching to get back at their work. But I think last night’s epiphany is worth documenting before I move forward. It is the progression of a reader contrasted with the progression of a book, and an important look at the delicate dance that both the book and the reader have to give themselves to.

When I first began the book, I enjoyed what I was digging into. It is well written, with poetic language and a real “storytelling” vibe. I also was stuck for a few hours doing nothing in the emergency room, so that helped motivate my reading. Then I stalled—the novel wasn’t exactly what I expected. I like experimental writing, I generally enjoy a book that jumps perspectives (if nothing else, I admire how one writer can capture multiple voices within one work), but something about this bogged me down. It was hard to read the book—which melds a realistic story of an immigrant family with a familial mythology, each chapter “told” by a different family member—because the interjection of mythology made it hard to cleanly follow the characters and their unraveling “real” stories. Realistic fiction is what I particularly enjoy, so while mythology is fun, I found it distracting.

Last night, though, I was able to shift my perspective, and it is amazing how easily a book can shift from tiresome to engrossing. Because I realized what this book is, and how to read it: it isn’t a novel, despite the stamp on the cover. It is a series of short stories, anecdotes, engaging tales told over a dinner of fresh sweet bread, minestrone soup, and a pasta whose name I likely can’t pronounce. While the ribbon of continuity is there, I was spending so much mental energy attempting to follow it rather than enjoy the individuality of each story. And the truth is, as I’ve relaxed my hold on the story as a whole, each anecdote has been easier to follow and insert into the weave of the “novel” in its entirety.

And so the book has changed. It is no longer a frustrating task I am trying to firmly hold, chart, and analyze, but it is a dinner amongst friends, whose stories elicit rolling laughter or heartbroken, sometimes bitter, tears. I knew from the beginning that the book was well written, and I have long held that any story, if it is well-written enough, should be enjoyable. So the stymieing effect this novel had on me was particularly unsettling; it assaulted my most basic philosophies of good literature. Instead, though, it just took work to shift my perspectives, and hammered home how much of the relationship of reader to novel really forms what the novel is. It is a dance, and I had to learn to follow the books’ steps before I could appreciate the tone, rhythm, and beat of the music.