That "Blaming Your Parents" Bullshit

There is something singularly gutless about rejecting therapy as a tool to improve one’s life and something singularly contemptible about sneering at those with the courage to undertake it.

A common and particularly idiotic libel is that therapy is all about blaming one’s parents.

To begin with, with regard to many issues that merit therapy, upbringing doesn’t enter into it. If you have problems with procrastination, productivity, organization or even free-floating anxiety, a cognitive behavioral approach is almost certainly the best, and it has the advantage of being empirically based. Which is to say these approaches were developed after experimentation, the results of which are replicable and reasonably robust. A good introduction to this subject is Kelly McGonigal’s The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It (2012). McGonigal is a professor of psychology at Stanford who created a wildly popular Continuing Education course entitled “The Science of Willpower.” It routinely maxed out in terms of enrollment—we’re talking a course that had to be moved to bigger classrooms four times until McGonigal had to teach it in one of Stanford’s largest lecture halls.

McGonigal has gone to town on this, writing a number of other books, including The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It (2016). More recently she has gotten into the psychology of movement; for an introduction to this, see The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage (2019).

However, many problems are relationally-based, and then it does become necessary to look at one’s upbringing. Not to blame one’s parents—that is self-defeating—but to understand the ways in which their parenting mistakes generated distorted thinking, mistaken beliefs, low self-esteem, and any number of other problems that play out primarily in relationships: with friends, family members, co-workers and, usually most prominently, intimate relationships (or at least relationships that ought to be intimate). The dominant means by which these issues are addressed is classic “talk therapy,” which essentially tracks back to psychologist Carl Rogers’ conviction that people have an innate bias in favor of healing, and that if given a supportive space in which to heal, that is what they will do.

It is futile to blame one’s parents, but common sense to hold one’s parents responsible for the basic ways in which one was taught to see the world and oneself. I myself am a parent, and I ask you: between myself and my daughter, which of us holds nearly all the power and who exerts an out-sized influence upon the other? The answer is obvious: I do. I hold the power; I therefore bear the responsibility. And there is no doubt in my mind that as hard as I work at being a father, I am making mistakes. I don’t know what mistakes I’m making—if I did I would take corrective action—but I’m making them nonetheless. And I can tell you where these mistakes basically occur: in the realm between the messages I think I am conveying to my daughter and the messages she actually receives.

I do have an advantage over certain other parents—my own, for example—in that I’m self-aware about my limitations, willing to question my parenting choices, and above all, willing to ask for advice from people who know what they’re talking about. (I have an additional advantage in that my daughter has a terrific mom and I have a terrific co-parent.)

I will talk another time about the problematic aspects of the way in which I was raised. For now I want to move on to the second necessary step: to be able to see one’s parents as fallible human beings with their own struggles and their own imperfect childhoods. In the case of my mother and father, both survived personal tragedies that would have destroyed most people. And if they made some serious mistakes as parents, they did remarkably well in others. I will instance only the importance they placed on learning and the way they modeled it in their own behavior. My siblings and I lived in a house filled with books. All three of us learned to love to read, and all three of us have turned out to be pretty bright people. And as far as this project is concerned: were it not for the example of my father’s commitment to realism, my mother’s extraordinary compassion for others, and the courage that both of them displayed, I would simply be unequal to the challenge of writing this book.

Then there’s a third step, which is ultimately the most important. Insight will only get me so far. The crucial question is: Now that I know what I know, what am I going to do about it? The way I generally phrase this to myself is, Where am I in all of this?

There is not a rigid sequencing from assessing the lessons one imbibed in childhood; to viewing one’s parents realistically and with empathy; to making new choices about how to live in this world. After a while there is a kind of working back and forth among these three steps. But there is no doubt in my mind that I am far more emotionally healthy than I was when I first embarked on therapy, not because I have transcended my core issues—that just ain’t gonna happen—but because I have learned to face them squarely. Consequently I have the ability to manage them. They no longer own me.

In May 1977, however, they came within a few minutes of killing me.

Love's Lonely Offices

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

By Robert Hayden (1913 - 1980)

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

How Do We Forgive Our Fathers?

A few weeks before her birth I began keeping a journal for my daughter Chloe, intended for her to read when she turns 18. This is a portion of the entry for October 15, 2012, the day after she had her first birthday party:

When I met your mother, the film that until recently had meant the most to her was “Smoke Signals,” about two young Native Americans who go in search of the father of one of them, an alcoholic with a terrible secret that had caused him to abandon his family years before. At the end of the film one of the character speaks, voiceover, a poem by Dick Lourie:

How do we forgive our Fathers?
Maybe in a dream
Do we forgive our Fathers for leaving us too often or forever
when we were little?
Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous
because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.
Do we forgive our Fathers for marrying or not marrying our Mothers?
For Divorcing or not divorcing our Mothers?
And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning
for shutting doors
for speaking through walls
or never speaking
or never being silent?
Do we forgive our Fathers in our age or in theirs
or in their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it?
If we forgive our Fathers what is left?

I am sobbing as I write this because the poem is heart-breaking. I think of the troubled relationship I had with my own father but mostly I think of you. What will you need to forgive me for? Whatever it is, please know that I am sorry. I love you so much. I wish I could be perfect for you, and I know that, as hard as I try, I can’t.

Bullied - Part 2

I went to my Dad about it—sort of. I was ashamed to tell him the full extent of the hazing Stephen gave me—it would have been an impossible confession of weakness—but I do remember asking him if anyone had ever teased him and how he’d handled it. He mentioned that in the Navy some guy had hassled him until Dad had learned the guy’s embarrassing middle name and began calling the guy by that, which shut the guy up. Stephen’s middle name was Lynn, so I tried calling him that. He failed to see the point. He just kept razzing me.

I went to a school counselor one day, practically in tears, going there on some pretext or other simply to avoid math class, when Stephen sat next to me and the teasing was at its worst. The counselor vaguely supposed that my upset stemmed from being in a middle school rather than an elementary school. I couldn’t volunteer the real reason and waited for her to drag it out of me through some adroit series of questions which, of course, she never did.

My grades got steadily worse. By this time other kids had begun jumping on the bandwagon and I became fair game for anyone who wanted to acquire some inexpensive status. I couldn’t concentrate in class and when I got home I wouldn’t even glance at my schoolbooks—they reminded me too oppressively of school. Nobody did anything but scold me: students, teachers, parents. Nobody made a move to help. I felt completely alone, completely useless, completely worthless.

By the time Stephen’s incessant teasing had slackened, or at least so it seems in memory, and my chief problem shifted to grades. It’s hard to relate to this episode on either count—I’ve long since grown indifferent to teasing and grades alike—but it was far from being so back then. Plummeting grades were horrible by definition. In memory every day seems gray clad, gusty, bleak, and my stomach feels like lead. Happiness is a myth; my life is one huge gob of humiliation and bile.

Eventually this reign of misery subsided, primarily because it finally dawned on Mom and Dad that my lousy grades demanded something more than a scolding. One day Mom went to my teachers for a private conference and returned, vaguely scandalized. It had surprised her when they told her that I would probably flunk the next grading period and it had appalled her that she had the sense they relished the prospect. She told me what they said and both she and Dad began helping me with special projects—it became a sort of family conspiracy to show those teachers up.

Bullied - Part 1

“The sense of being unwanted has always been for me acutely painful. The sensation is reverberative and seems to attach itself to the last link in a chain made up of all similar experiences. The voices in the cast were loud and scornful, and there I was, buck naked, somewhere in the middle of the city and unwanted, remembering missed football tackles, lost fights, the contempt of strangers, the sound of laughter from behind shut doors.”

-- John Cheever, “The Fourth Alarm”

[Upon discharge from the hospital after my manic episode in September 1986, I was directed to go to Concord Counseling Services in Westerville, Ohio. I had no money or insurance but Concord operated on a sliding fee scale, which was, in my case, three dollars per session. I was assigned a psychiatrist and a therapist. Among the first things they noticed about me was that, when asked to give my family and personal history, I described the most horrible episodes in a flat, matter of fact tone bereft of emotional content. The therapist, an LISW named Linda (who was just two years older than me), spent most of our sessions trying to get me to open up emotionally—or more precisely, to access my emotions in the first place. She gave me an assignment….]

My job in this essay is to describe pain, personal pain: what it felt like, when it happened, why it happened, how I reflect on it after the passage of time; in effect, to relive those moments (or, in most cases, epochs) of pain: an intrinsically unpleasant task. I suppose that almost all the pain I’ve felt in my lifetime has occurred within the context of relationships. I can’t help but think that this marks me out as fortunate. I’ve known almost nothing of the pain that comes from bad health, a lost job, or the failure to achieve some desperately desired goal. When I think of some of the suffering I’ve witnessed secondhand—of Laverne J., for instance, a 62-year old woman slipping toward dementia, living alone in one room of a decrepit frame house with a coffee warmer to cook one, no bath or shower, and only cardboard boxes for furniture; or of a five-day old baby I saw in Zaire, shaking like a poisoned mouse, dying of umbilical tetanus because his mother had swaddled him in a cloth contaminated with goat dung; or the beggars in Kenya who showed me mangled limbs and endlessly repeated, “Saidia” [Help]—well, the suffering of a 26-year old writer who thinks himself unlovable seems rather thin tea.

On the other hand, pain is pain, and although it comes in many patterns and degrees of intensity it is surely fruitless to argue that one man’s pain is legitimate while another’s is self-indulgent or trivial. The labels are irrelevant. Trying to be objective about pain is like trying to see a planet from all sides at once: you can only view it from your personal angle of vision. The task is inherently subjective.

[NB. Notice the reflexive effort to intellectualize the issue rather than grapple with the emotions that attach to pain, which is the point of the assignment.]

Broken Arrow!

I will not hold you in suspense. Room 101 is a therapist’s office.

It is the last place many people will go. Sometimes they misunderstand what to expect—they think it’s just a place where you learn to blame your parents. Sometimes they think of therapists as touchy-feely creeps. If faith-based, they may assume that all therapists are secular and anti-religious (they aren’t). These objections extend to the persons who enter therapy, who are often regarded with contempt by those who reject therapy.

But I sometimes think it’s because the objectors intuitively know what’s in Room 101. The worst thing in the world is in Room 101. And the worst thing in the world is indeed in Room 101—in the therapist’s office.

But there is also the therapist, who serves as guide and protector as their client gradually confronts the problems they have shoved out of conscious awareness and which therefore own them.

Sometimes people—this is especially true of men—think that entering therapy would be a confession of weakness.

Just the opposite.

In their 1990 book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine,” Robert L. Moore, a professor of psychology and religion; and Douglas Gillette, a mythologist, draw upon Carl Jung’s concept of mythical archetypes to create an introduction to the psychological foundations of a mature, authentic, and revitalized masculinity. I teach Moore/Gillette in my “History of War” course.

I first introduce students to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who pioneered many basic psychological concepts relevant to the warrior ethos. The first key concept: we possess all human potentialities, but we choose—or usually our families and society choose for us—which potentialities to embrace and which to reject or hide. The parts we consciously accept are what Jung termed the Persona. Those we reject he called the Shadow. Jung argued that we repress—push outside our conscious awareness—what we regard as being the darker sides of ourselves.

Jungian psychologists have a simple but powerful way to identify a person’s Shadow: ask them what kind of person they most dislike. In my case, it’s bullies. To my chagrin, I have come to see that I myself can behave in a bullying fashion, and never more so than when I fail to see that I have that potentiality. A self-aware person can manage if not master their Shadow. If they cannot, their Shadow owns them.

A second fundamental Jungian concept is the collective unconscious. One of Jung’s students, Joseph Campbell, explored this idea throughout his life, and discovered that all societies basically possess the same mythic stories. The characters and stories are different, but the structure and significance of these stories are strikingly similar. Campbell’s most influential book was “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” (1948), which examined the myths concerning heroes from all around the world. He found that these myths had a common structure and common archetypal characters within them.

The basic structure of the Hero’s adventure is the journey from one place to another, an adventure involving a kind of death and resurrection into a new form of being. Every one of us took such a journey at the beginning of our lives: from a fetus, living in a water world that was enclosed and protected; to emergence into a wholly different world as a newborn.

The Best They Had On the Ranch

You keep telling me I've got everything
You say I've got everything I want
You keep telling me you're gonna help me
You're gonna help me, but you don't

-- “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight,” written by Michael Rutherford, Phil Collins, and Tony Banks, performed by “Genesis” on the album “Invisible Touch” (1986)

["Senator" is me: I have found it helpful to distinguish myself at 17 from myself at 60. The names used in the essay are not the real names of the persons involved.]

After the fact they will say it was because a girl broke up with him. Failing that, they will say that, because the half-finished composition paper on the table dealt with the Kent State shootings, that he was morbidly obsessed with the shootings. Failing that: well, they will find something.

They certainly will not find it in the 80 percent of the one-page suicide note that emphasizes being worn out and washed up, because that suggests that possibly he didn’t get the emotional support he needed, and fuck that.

They will never know that it isn’t the girl friend or Kent State that pushes him over the edge. It is the fact that he realizes he will not be able to finish the paper by the time it is due in the morning.

And they will never ask the obvious question: Why was Senator unable to navigate the stresses and challenges common to a teenager his age?

Time rolls back not quite a year. It is 3 p.m. on Monday, May 31, 1976, and Senator cracks open Notebook Eight. At the top of the first blank page—page 226, he numbers it—Senator notes the day and time and writes, “Christ am I ever depressed. Last night I cried alone hysterically for about ten minutes, till I could get ahold of myself; but after that I felt so mortified & ashamed that I was worse off than when I started. . . . I hope this passes soon. I find myself continually looking around the house for ways to ‘do away with myself.’ Of course I’ve no real intention of suiciding myself, but it’s a reflection of my general attitude. Man I must be crazy.”

After All

On Monday one of my spiritual advisers sent me a link to this song. It was a real blessing, because at the time I was feeling totally blown out on the trail: this book is extraordinarily hard on me psychodynamically. I absolutely loved the song and listened to the studio version and two live performances; I have supplied a link to one of them.

The song is simply stunning. You owe it to yourself to invest the 5 minutes, 10 seconds it takes to listen to Williams' performance.

"After All," by Dar Williams

You go ahead, push your luck
Find out how much love the world can hold
Once upon a time I had control
And reigned my soul in tight
Well the whole truth, it's like the story of a wave unfurled
But I held the evil of the world, so I stopped the tide, froze it up from inside
And it felt like a winter machine that you go through and then
You catch your breath and winter starts again
And everyone else is spring bound

Then when I chose to live, there was no joy it's just a line I crossed
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost, so I was not lost or found
And if I was to sleep, I knew my family had more truth to tell
And so I traveled down a whispering well to know myself through them
I'm growing up, my mom had a room full of books and hid away in there
Her father raging down a spiral stair, till he found someone
Most days his son and sometimes I think my father too was a refugee
I know they tried to keep their pain form me
They could not see what it was for
But now I'm sleeping fine
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance
I am the daughter of a great romance
And they are the children of the war

Well the sun rose, with so many colors it nearly broke my heart
It worked me over like a work of art and I was a part off all that
So go ahead, push your luck, say what it is you gotta say to me
We will push on into that mystery
And it'll push right back and there are worse things than that
'Cause for every price, and every penance that I could think of
It's better to have fallen in love than never to have fallen at all|
'Cause when you live in a world, well it gets into who you thought you'd be
And now I laugh at how the world changed me, I think life chose me after all

[Dorothy Snowden "Dar" Williams (1967 - ) is a singer-songwriter who performs primarily in coffeehouses. She has nonetheless acquired a national reputation and has opened for Joan Baez, who performed a duet with her in a song entitled, “You’re Aging Well.” In an adoring review of one of her concerts, Hendrick Hertzberg of the “New Yorker” called Williams “one of America’s very best singer-songwriters.”]

Battle Rhythm

“In war, the best strategy is always to be very strong, first in general and then at the decisive point.” – Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz.

I need to develop a “battle rhythm” or this project will overwhelm me. I learned the term at the U.S. Army War College during my two years there as a visiting professor. Essentially it means a sustainable routine.

The first priority is self-care. I need spiritual support and friends to whom I can reach out. Re the former, two are in place, one of whom was a close friend of mine in high school, the other a senior-level chaplain in the U.S. Army. Friends include three classmates from my 1977 high school graduation class.

I need to make time to read the Bible each day, do a devotional, and pray. I also need to be sure to take a walk or do some other kind of exercise on a daily basis. I need to eat right.

The second priority is to be consistent in my work on this project but to limit the time spent on it to two hours 5-6 days per week—both to give me time to attend to other projects and also to protect myself from psychological harm. This work is extraordinarily hard on me emotionally.

The third priority is to put regular entries online—each day if possible, but at least several times a week. Most of these entries will be short essays of 500-1,000 words, and most of them will work as a way to generate the book manuscript in a modular way, so that as I construct the final draft I can move them around as best suits the manuscript’s organization.

Insofar as possible I want to use a “show, don’t tell” narrative approach informed by the works of Civil War popular historians Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton. I have already written magazine columns on Foote and Catton. There are two biographies of Foote, two volumes of literary criticism, and a book containing his correspondence with novelist Walker Percy, much of it consisting of commentary on the creation of “The Civil War: A Narrative” (3 vols., 1954-1975).

There is no biography of Catton but there are several article-length appreciations; a few essays that Catton wrote on the craft of narrative history; and a memoir, “Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood” (1972). Most importantly, I studied the works of Catton closely during my teenage years learning the writer’s craft, so I know his style very closely; and more recently I have studied the way he structures his books—it’s no accident that he is a superb story-teller (as well as highly insightful about the war).

The fourth priority is to get the project organized in terms of building an archive, I suppose you’d call it, of all the relevant material, of which there is one hell of a lot: four journals (at least) and three notebooks focusing on poetry, stories, copied poems, etc., from the relevant period; also about 200 pages of typed, single-spaced reflective essays and journal entries (mostly from 1986 and 1997). I can only expend so much time on it, but I need to build it into something reasonably complete and to a standard similar to that of, say, the Library of Congress. Either you do this thing properly or you don’t.

The final priority is actual research and writing, which of course will eventually replace the fourth priority. I’ll start with two general works on suicide: A. Alvarez, “The Savage God: A Study of Suicide” (1971), a classic in the field; and “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide,” by Kay Redfield Jamison (1999). Alvarez (1929-2019) was a literary figure—a poet, mostly. Jamison (1946- ) is a clinical psychologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She co-wrote the standard textbook on bipolar disorder (which I own), and has bipolar disorder herself. I have read her memoir, “An Unquiet Mind” (1995). She’s quite a strong writer. Once I have learned my way around the field of suicidology I’ll begin to contact real experts on the subject.

War Child: My Battles Against Suicide

Well, man proposes and God disposes.

Over time the emphasis in my Commentary posts has shifted from the rise of conservative media to our toxic political culture to the beginnings of a consideration on manic episodes; and most recently to my suicide attempt in May 1977.

I am a faith-based person, and for me it is difficult not to see the hand of God in this.

So I’ve decided to shift fire and do a book on suicide, possibly suicide in general or possibly limited to teenagers and young adults. I won’t know until I’ve done more research in that area.

But the basic idea is to write a book about what might be called the interior experience of suicide: what it is like to feel suicidal, and, in the one case, to attempt suicide and then recover from it.

I decided it had to be a book after reviewing the abundance of material I have bearing on the subject. From April 24, 1975 (the spring of my sophomore year) through June 5, 1977 (the date of my high school graduation, I kept a detailed journal totaling exactly 900 pages of single-spaced, handwritten entries on college-ruled notebook paper. The journal continues through July 1987 and covers other key developments. I also have several 3-section notebooks consisting of poetry, stories, etc., some of which foreshadow the suicide attempt pretty clearly. In addition, I have five three-ring binders, most of them 2-inch D-ring binders that contain a lot of retrospective observations on the earlier periods. Plus a lot of other documents that will have to be filed, or already have been.

So basically I’m loaded for bear.

I’ve already announced this effort to the Facebook group for my high school graduation class (Westerville South High School Class of 1977) and my fellow alumni have been very supportive and have supplied me with additional information, much of it concerning a classmate who shot himself to death about two months before graduation.

This is something I feel called to do, and I think it can scarcely help but make an important contribution. There are memoirs by persons who have attempted suicide; but what I have in mind is a history that utilizes documents rather than memory. It is, in some ways, a bit odd to be writing a history of oneself; but my senior year was 43 years ago and when I read my journal entries for that period I experience them as having been written by someone else. They contain * a lot * of information that I no longer remembered, including some stuff that was very important.

It has been a very stressful project so far and, in the nature of the case, it will continue to be. So from time to time I’ll have to take a break and work on something else for a few days.

Before confirming my decision to do this as a book, I spoke by phone to several people, including a fellow alumna of the Class of ‘77; an Army chaplain I got to know well at the U.S. Army War College; my sister; and three friends. All of them approved of the project and were confident that I knew what I was doing. My therapist is already aware that I was writing publicly about the suicide attempt, but I have not yet had occasion to tell her of this new development.

Th Price of Inciviliy - Part 1

In general, I plan to let Senator tell his story chronologically, which is the narrative strategy Senator swore by. Already a close student of story-telling, he avoided flashbacks except when a character was in a pensive or contemplative mood, and he did not believe in flash forwards at all. But I think his ghost would—does?—approve of this departure, for reasons that will quickly be obvious.

A complex autumn and difficult winter have passed, dominated by an increasingly intricate relationship with Lorena, a fellow literary aspirant—primarily a poet. Lorena and Senator share a passionate relationship, but a uniquely passionate relationship, best characterized as that of two pen pals who would be all over each other in a New York minute if only they didn’t live four miles apart. I scarcely need to say who wants this arrangement and who puts up with it.

[Lorena and I have recently reconnected—in the here and now, I mean; and she has long since tweaked the modus operandi I have described. I know this because she has been married for many years; and the fact they have several children is fairly convincing evidence theirs is not merely a passionate pen pal relationship of many years. But Lorena, we’ll always have the USPS.

Email does not have quite the same sizzle, particularly given the husband and the kids and the fact that she is an ordained minister. On the other hand, the fact that she is cheering me on in this literary high wire act, is pretty hot, in its own way. Note to Lorena: I wouldn’t have the guts to do this without your support and that of a few others. You’re still magic. Also, I’m halfway through the sheaf of poems you sent me. Good stuff. (I will send you a critique more sophisticated than “Good stuff” once the Semester from Hell is over.)]

But to resume: Lorena has not been the least distressed—make that barely aware—of Senator’s new love interest, a fetching junior named Ellen who conveniently lives barely two blocks away. In early March he and Ellen discover a strong mutual chemistry and a sort of effortless rapport and—and we’ll leave it there for now.

It is Tuesday, April 21. Senator has filled the pages of Notebook Eleven and has reached page 37 of Notebook Seventeen—which despite Senator’s eccentric numbering system is actually the fourth volume of his journal.

Some excerpts from that journal:

Two Revisions

One thing I will say for Senator, from a distance of more than 40 years, is that he was scary smart.

“We con ourselves as a matter of course; I suspect because to see our true selves would be equivalent to seeing the head of Medusa.”

He had pegged it correctly right out of the gate; Ms Curry would have been impressed.

She would have had a couple of criticisms, though. The first would have been modest.

“‘We *con* ourselves as a matter of course? Isn’t that a bit harsh? How about changing it to ‘We *kid* ourselves as a matter of course?’”

Technically that is speculation on my part, but not really. I knew Inez—that was her first name—for years after I graduated from high school, and for a little while even attended church with her. She helped me to craft my first published articles and—to quote the Acknowledgements section of my first book, which explained why she was one of three teachers to whom the book was dedicated, “for years thereafter read a number of my other manuscripts with a practiced, discerning eye.” So I’d bet real money she would have leveled that criticism and made that suggestion.

I would also lay odds that she would have gone after Senator about “the head of Medusa” as well. It was a lazy choice of phrase, bordering on a cliché. But in that instance she would not have suggested a replacement. She would have told Senator to go away and come up with one himself.

It’s interesting to contemplate whether Senator would have arrived at my own choice for a replacement. It’s possible: Senator had read George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-four” a couple of years before. But I doubt it….

Winston lay silent. His breast rose and fell a little faster. He still had not answered the question that had come into his mind the first. He had got to ask it, and yet it was as though his tongue would not utter it. There was a trace of amusement in O’Brien’s face. Even his spectacles seemed to wear an ironical gleam. He knows, thought Winston suddenly, he knows what I am going to ask! At the thought the words burst out of him:

“What is in Room 101?"

The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He answered drily:

“You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.”

***

“You asked me once,” said O’Brien, “what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

In the aftermath of the suicide attempt there would be brief speculation concerning what motivated it, but the speculation quickly subsided because everyone, Senator included, not only wanted to drop the matter but, insofar as possible, to re-conceptualize it so that it was not, when one considered things carefully, a suicide attempt at all.

But of course it was a suicide attempt. And as to the reason, it was really quite simple.

Senator knew what was in Room 101, and to avoid it he merely had to go to sleep.

At the Edge of the Stream

So stately strong the currents run
that down to death will bear us all
beyond the fire of the sun
beyond the musty marble hall
where light is banned and darkness reigns
the flickering glow of ego wanes
the hoarded store of spirit drains
where we slip into oblivion

-- Mark Grimsley, Autumn 1976

Once I was young and had so much more orientation and could talk with nervous intelligence about everything and with clarity and without as much literary preambling as this; in other words this is the story of an unself-confident man, at the same time of an egomaniac, naturally, facetious won’t do—just start at the beginning and let the truth seep out, that’s what I’ll do--.

-- Jack Kerouac, “The Subterraneans” (1958)

This is the story of a seven-month journey. It begins on an ordinary afternoon in the classroom of a Creative Writing course, early in my senior year at Westerville South High School--Monday, October 18, 1976, to be precise; to a moment, shortly after midnight on a balmy May evening in 1977, when I swallowed seven capsules of Tuinal, a powerful barbiturate, and succeeded in getting within a few minutes of my intended destination.

In telling the tale, I will follow Kerouac’s strategy: start at the beginning and let the truth seep out.

To be sure, I can’t recall the *exact* beginning, because I can’t recall a moment in my life when suicide was not a thinkable thought, sometimes more thinkable than others but always present; and although I had no particular method in mind, I couldn’t shake off the conviction that, sooner or later, I would die by suicide.

But in terms of a place to start, the session that day in the Creative Writing class is as good as any.

And for the most part I’ll let my 17-year old self, a youth who was a little too skinny and a little too serious—he always seemed to have some bitterness of mind to chew upon—tell the story.

The youth is long gone. Yet sometimes his ghost hovers close, the reason for his spectral presence never clear to me, but simply there.

Calling my 17-year old self “the youth” for several dozen entries will come off as stilted and mannered and a rip-off of “The Red Badge of Courage” (whose protagonist is known only as “the youth”); and above all, stupid. So henceforth he will be Senator, his nickname at the Ponderosa Steak House—“Pondo” to the largely teenage crew that worked there. And yes, this itself is a direct steal from Norman Mailer’s “Of a Fire on the Moon,” in which he calls himself “Aquarius.”

To be precise, the nickname will be bestowed, not on the day this tale commences, but a month hence, on Saturday, November 20. Senator records his christening on page 149 of Notebook 11, the third of the personal journals he has kept since Thursday, April 24, 1975.

“Worked 4-7:45,” he reports. “Mostly P&R [the baked potatoes and dinner rolls station]. Found I have a new nickname: ‘Senator.’ As in Mr. C [the head manager] saying, ‘Senator Grimsley, I need two bowls of French fries up front;’ or ‘Need a mop on the line, Senator,’ etc. Or, best of all, ‘Good job tonight, Senator.'"

This new nickname, however, is not necessarily all that big a deal to Senator, who spends the next two pages recording the play-by-play of a hot date, after he clocks out, with Annabelle [not her real name; very few real names will be used in this story]. Annabelle will be among the major figures in this story’s cast of characters.

But the story itself begins a month earlier. Senator describes its commencement in a 3-section theme book he has purchased that day. He inscribes the cover, “Notebook 14, 18 October 1976,” then gets on with its maiden entry.

Facing Facts

What follows is an after dinner talk I gave ten years ago to a group of academics at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. I'd been asked to offer some reflections on an exhibition in Capital's Schumacher Gallery concerning the lives of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.

On my c.v. it appears as "Robert E. Lee and U. S. Grant in Public and Private Memory," but I had already posted it on a blog I once maintained entitled “Facing the Demon: A Personal Account of Managing Bipolar Disorder.” I had entitled the blog post “Facing Facts,” and I use that title here.

I dislike giving presentations that don't build toward projects underway, and since the next speaking engagements on the horizon would have to do with mental health advocacy, I decided this would be a good opportunity to experiment with one. The talk was something of a high wire act, interweaving personal observations of Grant and Lee with those concerning bipolar disorder. But judging by the response I received, it worked.

***

It’s a pleasure to talk with you this evening about Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, particularly in light of the exhibition at the Schumacher Gallery. I’ve heard it said that an exhibition, even when installed, is not really an exhibition. It becomes one only people come to experience it. They see in it, and take from it, meanings that the designers of the exhibition did not necessarily intend to impart. This is so because people bring to it their own experiences of life, their own concerns, and above all their own imaginations. Were this not the case, I doubt if exhibits would be at all worth the investment of time, money, and energy required to create them.

During the Civil War a pair of Union officers climbed atop a mountain to survey through telescopes the Confederate encampment beneath them. They saw soldiers brewing coffee, writing letters, reading newspapers, and washing clothes. To one of the officers this was a revelation. “My God, Adjutant,” he said to the other. “They’re human beings, just like us!” The Grant-Lee exhibition invites us to reconsider these two icons of the American military tradition, these central characters in the American Iliad. Their lives had the same common place experiences and the same complexities as our own. They were human beings, just like us.

I grew up with Grant and Lee. I got to know them through children’s books, and particularly got to know Lee through a biography entitled Robert E. Lee and the Road of Honor, written for young people by the Southern progressive journalist Hodding Carter, which I read at the age of eight. But the really critical experience occurred when I was twelve and first read A Stillness at Appomattox, Bruce Catton’s brilliant evocation of the epic struggle between these two commanders in the Civil War’s final year. When I say that I grew up with Grant and Lee I mean this, of course, in an imaginative sense, and yet the imaginations of the young can be so vivid and intense that I still sometimes feel as if I grew up with them in a literal sense. And in terms of their impact on my life, that is quite likely true in the deepest sense of truth.

Recently I turned fifty years old. That makes me just seven years younger than was Lee in 1864 and actually eight years older than Grant when he led the Army of the Potomac across the Rapidan River and into battle against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. My life has gone in directions very different from theirs and has taken a very different shape. But in dealing with the challenges of my life, I have often looked back on these two men, both what I thought I knew of them as a youth and what I think I know of them now.

The biggest challenge that has faced me in life began to confront me in 1986, when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder — what used to be called manic depression. For reasons I’ll explain in a bit, it has become important to me to talk about what it is like to live with the disorder, but at the time it was something that I simultaneously acknowledged and ignored, with an odd kind of doublethink that, I have discovered, is not uncommon with people confronting facts that are unavoidable and yet still something one wishes to avoid. For the first few months I saw a psychiatrist and took medications, but then I simply stepped away from that and for eleven years thought and lived as if bipolar disorder were something I had in theory, not in fact.

A hypomanic episode I had at age 38 finally brought me to reality. With hypomania a person can be charismatic, unusually creative, and brilliantly high functioning. But those who know them well recognize that something Is wrong. And if the person is wise, so does he. So early one morning, refreshed and wide awake after only two hours of sleep — notwithstanding the fact that given the pace I’d been keeping and the sleeping pill I’d taken I should have been out cold — I came to realize, and I mean really realize, that I had bipolar disorder and always would have it and was lucky during the preceding decade not to have met with disaster. I sat down at my computer and composed a sort of memorandum to myself. I’m going to read some of it here. At first it will seem to have no relevance to Grant or Lee, but then it will take a turn that should surprise you. It certainly did me.

How I Spent My Semester from Hell - Pt 1

About a week ago, one of my hardy little band of readers inquired about the long drought of entries. The explanation, as one might suppose, was the COVID-19 emergency.

My doctor actually had me tested for the virus last Friday, and the result came back negative. This was the result I expected, because at no point had I experienced the tell tale symptoms of fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath.

But I sure as hell had been experiencing *something*-- indeed, a seemingly endless stream of different *somethings* -- which finally prompted my physician to investigate the off chance that the coronavirus was using me as a human guinea pig to try out several inventive new ways by which to afflict a human being.

And yet my semester, which for me commenced on Wednesday, January 8, had begun auspiciously. I was teaching two mid-level undergraduate courses, each of which quickly developed that welcome rapport with students that makes coming to class a pleasure for one and all.

Then things began to suck. Bigly.

On Tuesday, March 3, I emailed my department chair: “My daughter had a fever last week and I had to cancel class in order to care for her. I’ve come down with something myself and just now sent word to my students and TA that I will need to cancel class today. I thought I would let you know so that you would not get any misimpressions via the rumor mill.” (The misimpressions being that probably I was canceling class because I was clinically depressed.)

Within minutes a sympathetic response landed in my in-box.

The following day I sent him an update: “I’m still sick and have had to cancel class again. This is very frustrating. I will compensate for the missing lectures by placing materials online. Just wanted to keep you informed.”

Another sympathetic response, with additional information that a lot of faculty were in the same boat.

A few minutes later it occurred to me that I was sick enough that I would likely have to cancel class yet again and therefore: “Looking ahead, given that next week is Spring Break, I think it may be best to proactively cancel my two remaining classes for the week and re-group. I dislike not having direct interaction with my students, but I can use Carmen to offset the loss of class time.”

Sounds good, the chair replied.

As it turned out, I had to use Carmen for a hell of a lot more than to offset the loss of class time. Because on Monday, March 9, the first three cases of COVID-19 in Ohio were confirmed and late that evening the university announced that face-to-face classes would be suspended, at least until March 30, and when classes resumed next Monday, after the conclusion of Spring Break, they would resume in online format.