The 4:51 a.m. Tuesday post was the most emotionally difficult thing I have ever written. It affected me all day and still, not quite 24 hours later. I think I have written all of the things contained in that post previously, separately perhaps. It affected me more.
Americans have this need it seems, sometimes almost a compulsion, to memorialize their darkest thoughts in the spoken or printed word. We are a confessional society. Maybe it is the effect of our religiosity where confessing is the first step to redemption and salvation. In our civic life it has long been considered therapeutic to "get it all out." That is the appeal that cops make during interrogations.
When I first met my girlfriend Carmen I followed this American practice as I have with every previous love and told Carmen everything about myself, including the bad and the ugly, particularly the bad and the ugly. These are long conversations for me; as a friend puts it "Harris reads every girl her Miranda rights before dating." Carmen reciprocated, much more briefly, but told me there was one thing she was not going to tell me. And to my surprise, I was okay with that! I never pressed her then or later.
Carmen is an American citizen now but was born and raised in Cuba. Came here married with a son and divorced her husband. She was not inculcated with the American civic confessional practice and, more importantly, disagreed with the notion that confessions are therapeutic. I have always listened closely to whatever Carmen has said, no matter what the subject, and when she told me that she disagreed with the thinking behind America's culture of confession, it was a fresh perspective. There are some things that do more harm than good to the confessor and do not impart significant information to your significant other to justify the pain that is cost of confessing.
I immediately looked upon things differently. I realized that the American practice is not a universal. Of course, I had the Chinese in mind. Dr. Mo began writing his remembrances of the Cultural Revolution but then told me that he had to stop, that he had been writing when his wife was sleeping because she did not want him to do it; it was just too painful for her to think about and to know that he was writing about that dark, preternaturally dark, period. It was also taking a toll on Weimin. Of course, I immediately advised him to stop, to not put himself and his wife through it.
One time a couple of years ago I called Carmencita as I do several times a day. She answered the phone crying. Sobbing. She never does that. I was deeply alarmed but she said she didn't want to talk about it. I was spending that weekend with her anyway and when we were together she continued to be upset and I put my foot down. She said it had nothing to do with me and I replied with warmth that it damn well did have something to do with me, it was affecting our relationship that weekend and I fairly demanded she tell me. She did, not all at once but in segments. I was in the bedroom and she told me one thing and my reaction was "What? Chill. You didn't do anything wrong." She retreated back to the living room, I went back to reading and 15-30 minutes later she came back adding more. We were going further back in time with each segment of information. "You're right;" "Okay, now I think she was right;" "Now you're right." Repeat, reengage. It was a pattern of infinite regression that took us back twenty years or more. When finally we got to Ground Zero I concluded that Carmen had been wrong and told her so but the thing had become so attenuated that it didn't matter. It was strictly an interpersonal family matter and the exercise to get to the root cause had been pointless. It did not change how she felt, I did not make her feel better by concluding that she had been wrong 20 years earlier and I concluded that in a family matter that was so personal, l was uniquely unequipped to voice any opinion and regretted ever demanding her tell me. I now hoped that the whole subject would be dropped. Which it was.
Chinese don't have this compulsion to confess and we remonstrate them with platitudes of needing to "confront their past." I concluded that Carmen was right to let sleeping dogs lie sometimes and I came to think that the Chinese are not wrong for wanting to not talk about the CR. So I stopped viewing their reticence as the reaction of an immature civilization. I mentioned Carmen's thinking to my shrink and said I found merit in it. He jumped on it and said she was absolutely right, that American psychology has gone so far as to now prescribe memory-erasing drugs for particularly traumatic memories.
Those dreams and memories in that Stanley Kubrick film I saw recently: My reaction to Nicole Kidman telling Tom Cruise her dreams of consummating her lust with that sailor, my reaction to all of that was "Shut the fuck up!" There is merit to shutting the fuck up. I regret not shutting the fuck up at 4:51 a.m. Tuesday. Sometimes silence is golden.
"Man is the sum of the things he has done" were the wise words of songwriter Joe Henry. Wise but incomplete. You have to add "things done to us by others" to get the proper sum for no man is an island. And when we complete our arithmetic, no matter how paltry or grand the result we have to go back to living. We have to live in the present and for the future and move on from the arithmetic of our past. We must move on.
Americans have this need it seems, sometimes almost a compulsion, to memorialize their darkest thoughts in the spoken or printed word. We are a confessional society. Maybe it is the effect of our religiosity where confessing is the first step to redemption and salvation. In our civic life it has long been considered therapeutic to "get it all out." That is the appeal that cops make during interrogations.
When I first met my girlfriend Carmen I followed this American practice as I have with every previous love and told Carmen everything about myself, including the bad and the ugly, particularly the bad and the ugly. These are long conversations for me; as a friend puts it "Harris reads every girl her Miranda rights before dating." Carmen reciprocated, much more briefly, but told me there was one thing she was not going to tell me. And to my surprise, I was okay with that! I never pressed her then or later.
Carmen is an American citizen now but was born and raised in Cuba. Came here married with a son and divorced her husband. She was not inculcated with the American civic confessional practice and, more importantly, disagreed with the notion that confessions are therapeutic. I have always listened closely to whatever Carmen has said, no matter what the subject, and when she told me that she disagreed with the thinking behind America's culture of confession, it was a fresh perspective. There are some things that do more harm than good to the confessor and do not impart significant information to your significant other to justify the pain that is cost of confessing.
I immediately looked upon things differently. I realized that the American practice is not a universal. Of course, I had the Chinese in mind. Dr. Mo began writing his remembrances of the Cultural Revolution but then told me that he had to stop, that he had been writing when his wife was sleeping because she did not want him to do it; it was just too painful for her to think about and to know that he was writing about that dark, preternaturally dark, period. It was also taking a toll on Weimin. Of course, I immediately advised him to stop, to not put himself and his wife through it.
One time a couple of years ago I called Carmencita as I do several times a day. She answered the phone crying. Sobbing. She never does that. I was deeply alarmed but she said she didn't want to talk about it. I was spending that weekend with her anyway and when we were together she continued to be upset and I put my foot down. She said it had nothing to do with me and I replied with warmth that it damn well did have something to do with me, it was affecting our relationship that weekend and I fairly demanded she tell me. She did, not all at once but in segments. I was in the bedroom and she told me one thing and my reaction was "What? Chill. You didn't do anything wrong." She retreated back to the living room, I went back to reading and 15-30 minutes later she came back adding more. We were going further back in time with each segment of information. "You're right;" "Okay, now I think she was right;" "Now you're right." Repeat, reengage. It was a pattern of infinite regression that took us back twenty years or more. When finally we got to Ground Zero I concluded that Carmen had been wrong and told her so but the thing had become so attenuated that it didn't matter. It was strictly an interpersonal family matter and the exercise to get to the root cause had been pointless. It did not change how she felt, I did not make her feel better by concluding that she had been wrong 20 years earlier and I concluded that in a family matter that was so personal, l was uniquely unequipped to voice any opinion and regretted ever demanding her tell me. I now hoped that the whole subject would be dropped. Which it was.
Chinese don't have this compulsion to confess and we remonstrate them with platitudes of needing to "confront their past." I concluded that Carmen was right to let sleeping dogs lie sometimes and I came to think that the Chinese are not wrong for wanting to not talk about the CR. So I stopped viewing their reticence as the reaction of an immature civilization. I mentioned Carmen's thinking to my shrink and said I found merit in it. He jumped on it and said she was absolutely right, that American psychology has gone so far as to now prescribe memory-erasing drugs for particularly traumatic memories.
Those dreams and memories in that Stanley Kubrick film I saw recently: My reaction to Nicole Kidman telling Tom Cruise her dreams of consummating her lust with that sailor, my reaction to all of that was "Shut the fuck up!" There is merit to shutting the fuck up. I regret not shutting the fuck up at 4:51 a.m. Tuesday. Sometimes silence is golden.
"Man is the sum of the things he has done" were the wise words of songwriter Joe Henry. Wise but incomplete. You have to add "things done to us by others" to get the proper sum for no man is an island. And when we complete our arithmetic, no matter how paltry or grand the result we have to go back to living. We have to live in the present and for the future and move on from the arithmetic of our past. We must move on.
