On Jacob and Esau and Psychopathy

I’ve been toying with the story of Jacob and Esau, really most of my life. I keep reading this story and every time I see something else. Sometimes I read it heroically—things make sense, align, God is provident. Sometimes I read it and it seems like every damn person is a villain. Jacob for stealing the inheritance, his mom for helping him, his dad for trying to give it to Esau against God’s will, Esau for trying to take what he traded to Jacob (even if Jacob was a real opportunistic jerk about it) ,and God himself for setting the whole situation up in the first place. 

I keep reading this story because it’s my namesake. It’s my middle name, Jacob, that I get from my mom and I get from the Bible. He’s the deceiver. He’s weirdly chosen and gifted, but deals in deception most of his life. It’s hard to figure out how this guy stays in God’s favor. Everything he does is a con, and he’s got the greatest ally you could ask for. 

And fair warning, I might be reading personal experience into theology. There’s a hell of a lot of projection that goes on in the theological world, particularly with bad theology (but even in good), and perhaps I’m trying to rationalize some belief set that makes sense of my family and my flaws. Or maybe the best we can do is read and interpret, to meditate on these stories over and over and dig into the core of who God is as best we can know him, given the cumulative sum of our own experiences. That seems to be how Paul approached scriptures, at least as far as I can tell.  

Regardless, this is what I have: my brain, my lens, my dysfunction applied to God. Sorry God. I’m doing my best. 

On to the matter at hand: there’s this really powerful theme in the story of favor and abandonment playing side by side. Particularly in the relationship between Jacob and his mom, Rebekah. Warning: hot button, completely biased zone for Patrick here. Buckle up. Jacob’s mother effectively destroyed Jacob’s relationship with his father and his twin, and really everything he knew. When she dressed him in goatskins and deception, Rebekah severed any paternal loyalty or brotherly affection that existed among Isaac, Jacob, and Esau. Those relationships became dead—and in doing so, Rebekah killed her own relationship with her favorite son. She would remain with Isaac, and send Jacob off (with God, but nothing else) into the desert. For the favor of a son, she removed everything that he had ever know, she destroyed stability, and she split a family. Guys, we teach this story to kids. There’s some awful, divisive, destructive stuff going on.  There’s no, “And Esau went to counseling for the rest of his life, because his mom really screwed him over on this one.” 

How do you even carry that weight as Jacob? It’s heavy. And honestly, if we want to take it a bit more extreme (why not, right?) let’s blame God, shall we? He’s the one who decreed that Jacob would have the inheritance. He’s the one who set the events in motion. He’s the one who broke up the family, so that his blessing could go on to the second son instead of the first. Jacob was complicit, yes. But he was a pawn in a plot of his mother to fulfill a prophecy by his god to give him everything—and to burn everything to the ground. Scorched earth theology. He lost the whole world, but I guess won his soul? 

So Jacob ends up fighting with God. They wrestle all night. And I’m not sure if it matters if it was really God or if it was Jesus or an angel, or if the whole thing is metaphor. Whether in act or in mind, Jacob was pissed, and Jacob was scared, and Jacob was swinging for the universe. He’s wrestling, I think, with his parents and—perhaps—himself. 

You see, what Jacob is about to face across the river is his brother Esau. But more than that, it’s his own complicit deception. And I wonder if what Jacob finds most offensive or daunting is the fact that he has to face his brother, whom he duped and abandoned, without saying that he’s sorry. Because I don’t think he is. Everything he has, if we believe the narrative, his flocks and his wives and his family, his great riches that drove him from his father-in-law’s lands, is because of that deception. What Jacob is wrestling, what Jacob is afraid of, is not just the confrontation. It is not just the presence of a God who seemed to bless deception, and at such cost. It is not his brother, waiting for him. What Jacob is wrestling is his own psychopathy. He’s not sorry. He wouldn’t take it back. He lied and he cheated and he took the greatest blessing he could find and at some point he has to acknowledge that he’s not a victim, but a willing accomplice. And he would do it all over again. 

So what do we do with that? According to the Bible, we fight. We get pissed and we wrestle and we refuse to be lost even though we feel irredeemable. And we take what blessings we've been given, even in the midst of chaos, and we hold to them until it breaks our hip.

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.