Why you are a cathedral

Before you say anything: yes, of course I know that psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience. (Sometimes I think science is a pseudoscience, but let's not go there today.) So no, you won't catch me believing in anything, other than people, for which I do make an exception. However, as I already pointed out with regard to Christianity, you don't need to believe in stuff to find it interesting. And what I found interesting about the psychoanalytic method is that there seems to be something alive inside it. I mean, if you take the box and shake it, you hear a faint, plaintive squeaking from inside. Which is more than most pseudosciences will give you, let's face it.

In my case it happened like this. A friend recommended Merce, who was reputedly good at fixing broken children. I wasn't a child - must have been getting on for forty by then - but whoever recommended her to me must have thought I was, or that I acted like one, or something. Anyway, I had never been to a shrink before, and thought it was an experience everyone should have even if they decide not to take it any further, for the sake of a well-rounded CV - like, say, being falling-down drunk. At that time, I didn't know or didn't care that she was a Freudian psychoanalyst, and that the difference between going to one of those and going to, say, a cognitive therapist, was like the difference between trying to get drunk on meths and trying to get drunk on cheese. But when I was finally ushered into her gabinete, the caricature of Sigmund on her wall felt like a good omen. That Sigmund was there at all felt reassuring (we had points of reference in common vis-à-vis the human mind, e.g., the basic understanding that it wasn't necessarily very nice, and that childhood actually mattered), and that it was a caricature rather than an Approved Portrait suggested independence of judgment rather than slavish devotion to The Doctrine. (Having said that, Freud himself was always a caricature of Freud, just as Victor Hugo was just a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.)

Anyway, I discovered very quickly that her method of being a psychoanalyst consisted of sitting at the other side of the room with head cocked to one side, attentive-looking and motionless, looking exactly like a blackbird on your lawn listening for worms. That's all she ever did, in all the sessions I went to, and I went to quite a few. She never actually said anything, which was a disappointment, and something of a surprise. Well, that's not entirely true. At the beginning she suggested I talk about any dreams I'd had, and if I faltered, she would gently guide the conversation back onto dreams. Once or twice she would ask for greater detail, or ask me what such-and-such an element in my dream reminded me of. But there were times when I wondered if it wouldn't be cheaper to arrange a regular weekly session of talking to a tilted floor lamp, since a tilted floor lamp would perform exactly the same service of, well, having a tilted head and not moving for an hour, that she did. But I suspect the tilted floor-lamp wouldn't work. What I think I was paying for was the Beard.

OK, in the interests of ruthless honesty and narrative fidelity I have to admit that Merce did not actually have a Beard, not even a false one, though it would have been rather charming if she had. What she did have was the female equivalent, which is somewhat sharp features, shiny black hair in a utilitarian, somewhat gender-fluid coiffure, a penetrating gaze, and a sort of birdlike, vaguely insectivorous look about her. The sort of look that says "I can pinpoint a fat cockroach scurrying through the grass from a distance of fifty yards, and have it in my beak five seconds later". I suspect, though visual memory is silent on this, that she used eyeliner judiciously to accentuate the penetrating gaze. Not that she actually gazed at you while you were talking. Her attention seemed to be taken by a space a few yards in front of and to the side of her chair, in which everything you were saying rearranged itself into the swirling holographic representation of a tormented mind, in real time.

What I meant to say is that you really do need a Beard, or nearest locally available equivalent, to set up shop as a psychoanalyst. This is one of the few, very few, advantages of being male, the fact that all you have to do is stop shaving for a few days and before long you can do a passable imitation of someone who Knows Things, and is Wise and Inscrutable and a Tribal Elder... as long as you remember to keep your gob shut. To get the same effect as a woman is probably slightly harder, and will demand quite a lot of attention to detail. I couldn't fault Merce in that respect, though. There was nothing either in her personal appearance or in the surrounding décor that said: this is as far as my intelligence extends, and no further. These are my prejudices, oh, and here's my bourgeois dinnerpartyishness, and complete set of wine glasses. Here are the outermost boundaries of my limited capacity to understand someone as troubled and troubling and as seedy as thou.

You have already noticed, if you read the previous posts, that I am in the Goddess market. Always have been as far as I can recall. This, in orthodox psychoanalytic terms, meant that I was, when I walked into that gabinete, in the market for Transference. In this respect, going to a shrink is a bit like having a blog, or at least this sort of a blog. You're hoping that, at long last, someone will actually get you. Whether that someone is a blackbird, or a floor lamp, or a reader in the Ukraine (why are nearly all blog readers from the Ukraine? Is that all Ukranians do these days, stand around in the waist-deep mud and read blogs, and dubitatively stroke their wedge-shaped beards over them?). You want to be understood. Or perhaps, in the Joycean sense, overstood. There is a bit of that, too. (Vide infra.)

I never quite Transferred - though years later, in an email, Merce suggested that the fact I had written to her suggested that what Transference there had been seemed to have been "positive". That obscene word, of course, and the continents of prejudice it somehow encapsulates, is part of why it didn't quite happen. There's also the fact that I once attended a seminar she gave. I can't say I disagreed with anything she said (it was about the gender-differentiated role of parents in the child's psychical evolution) but I felt she took a lot too much for granted, and didn't give the naysayers (not that I could detect the presence of any in that rather small audience) enough of a run for their money. I could have disagreed with the lot, out of routine scepticism, had I been inclined to, and not felt in any way challenged. In other words, she didn't actually present any cogent arguments. (I know, I know: pseudosciences don't.) That reduced her slightly below Goddess status, though not catastrophically. I had already conceived the strong suspicion she was more green ink than blue. Women in that field tend to be.

Still, I would kill (or at least I would execute a small six-legged creature with wings and a proboscis) to have a rekky at her case notes on me. I assume she kept some, since her lips were never very far from a pencil. I would love to see, therein, what happens when you take a mind like mine and strain it through a mind like hers. Or anyone's, really. Which brings me at least a little closer to the stated topic of this post.

What I meant about the squeaking from inside the box is this. Since I didn't "get better" in any discernible way, the only part of the whole experience which suggests that Freudian psychoanalysis is more than just a placebo is the fact that, as soon as I started going to those sessions, I started (a) remembering my dreams, and (b) having more interesting, thematically and symbolically rich dreams than I have ever remembered having before or since. Obviously the two effects are intertwined, i.e. (a) accounts more than adequately for (b), on a strictly logical plane. Still, there's something a bit mysterious about that. It's as if the mere knowledge that there was someone waiting twice-weekly to hear about my dreams (I was going to write "interested", but Merce was so scrupulously professional that at no time could I have accused her of looking interested) threw a switch in my mind that resulted in my being able to remember them. It is far from obvious to me how, or why, that works.

Now, the burglar who stole my laptop six years ago not only eliminated from the universe a large amount of not-quite-ready writing I had done over the years, including a couple of novels and some poetry, but also the detailed accounts I wrote down, at the time, of some of those dreams. Which means that now, all I have to go on is memory, and (see previous post) there isn't all that much of that left. But I wanted to mention one of those dreams specifically, to which all this has been merely leading up, and I wanted to mention it simply because it insinuated itself into my train of thought yesterday morning before class, and the bloggish thing to do is probably to go wherever your train of thought takes you.

The dream, or rather the little I now remember, goes like this:

I was walking around inside the Cathedral of Segovia. If you've been there, you'll know it's quite something, as cathedrals go. It sits at the edge of the Plaza Mayor looking exactly like an enormous UFO, sprawled between the surrounding buildings on its flying buttresses. The odd stork perches hieratically on various of its innumerable spires, and the air around it is thick with a faintly yellowish temporal vagueness, pierced by the criss-cross beams of various suns. When you go inside, the predominant feeling is of space, space not quite properly or euclidianly circumscribed - the shifting space inside a quietly breathing stone lung. OK. Well, in this dream I was inside the cathedral, and a guide of some sort was pointing over towards a place not quite in the center, where there was a smaller cathedral, of somewhat different design. The guide said: 'This was the first cathedral. It built the other one around it, over years, to protect it from the rain." I was speechless with a sense of italic significance when s/he said this. Finally (this part is extremely vague, but wasn't vague in the original) I was led over to a wall on which various altorilievos stood out, in a sequence rather along the lines of those Stations of the Cross that were regularly inflicted on me as a child. I noticed immediately that the altorilievos depicted various more or less perverse sexual acts, including one or two which held great significance for me. At this point, the guide said something that made me feel that my particular sexual interest was known about. And that's all I can remember.

What matters, very schematically:

(a) So the big cathedral, the extended you, the great metropolis, the breathing universe of the known, isn't the original.
(b) The original is smaller, and more vulnerable. It felt rained on, and wanted to protect itself. You can't see inside it. Not much, anyway.
(c) The original is innocent of those sexual obsessions, which were added later, for reasons unclear and probably anecdotal. Although hidden on the inside of a wall, they belong to the outer structure, the added-on one.
(d) The original isn't a shed, or a latrine, or a rickety cottage. The original is a cathedral, too. A smaller one, but still a cathedral.

Of these listed perceptions, different ones have mattered to me at different times. It took meeting Carmen, somewhat later, for me to understand and accept (c), for example. But what struck me yesterday, in the ten minutes before class, was (d). You, yes you, as well as me, are a cathedral. This seems to me to be something worth ruminating.

You see, the only people I have a problem with are the reductionists of this world, and the thing that generally goads me into writing is the spectacle of everyone around me busily and orgiastically reducing things - reducing every last bloody thing they can get their grubby hands on, often to rubble. Yes, of course I understand that this is a function of the intelligent mind. Generally known as abstraction, i.e. taking stuff away, it is something we need to do, at a basic level, in order to read a watch, or drive a car, or, in fact, say anything coherent. I get that. But my concern is with the people who take stuff away, and then pretend that they haven't, that what is left in their hand is all there ever was. That is what really pisses me off.

Just as a frinstance: God. My religious scepticism (atheism, if you like) is not about trying to take away people's beliefs: as far as I'm concerned the more stuff you can find to enthusiastically and joyously believe in, the better. And temperamentally, I'm not the sort of person who cares all that much whether beliefs are, y'know, in correspondence with reality - at least, not always. To be honest, I've never been on all that good terms with reality, or it with me: if you get me drunk enough, I will probably confide in you, between belches, that reality, for me, has always kind of sucked. So that's not it either. What it is, is simply the discovery that in my own case, not believing in God frees me to believe in a lot of other stuff that seems to me to be immeasurably more fulfilling, and enlightening, and challenging, and beautiful, and (as an added bonus) scientifically literate. Take women, for example. It is well known that God cordially dislikes them, every last one of 'em, except for the ones who are able to have babies without sex, which is a good trick if you can do it, but by no means given to all. Whereas I have always liked women, generically at least (exceptions abound), and wanted to understand them better, always assuming (which I don't always assume) that there is something there that's less than obvious to understand. So, yeah. If I were to choose a late night drinking companion, Yahweh definitely wouldn't be it. But if he's your main man, no problem as far as I'm concerned. Just try and keep his temper under control, and keep him away from the poitin. There are other people drinking in here, and you know what it does to him.

To dissect the metaphor, then (having reduced it from a symbol, and yes, I saw myself doing that): you are a cathedral if, and only if, you have a high degree of complexity, were added to at different times, are large inside, can be divided into different parts with different functions, were not designed and planned from inception in every detail yet evidence some degree of overarching purpose, contain mysteries and crypts, have at least one Organ, withhold the plenitude of your secrets from any one visitor, no matter how many return visits she makes, yet reward curiosity and devotion.

Plus: than you, nothing is grander or more important or more beautiful. You are at the centre of your world.

This seems to me to be worth pondering; and the only belief I am aware that I hold that might deserve the contemptuously dismissive label "faith" is my belief that it applies to every human on the planet.

As to why I hold this faith, well, inductive logic aside (and I do think that "people are cathedrals" is variously falsifiable, if you look at the definition above), I'm English by birth, as well as a teacher. and hence, not to believe this at least by default strikes me as being, as well as unprofessional, rather bad-mannered and uncouth.

Uncivilised - that's the word.

More on this later.