A friend, colleague, and Vermonter once observed and offered about another friend and colleague something like this, “Watch him when he preaches. He enters the pulpit, gritting his teeth and works his way through, by the end of the sermon, to serenity. He always seems to be at war with his own past but building peace in each present.”
Some of us will be conscious, perhaps, more of what that feels like than others. And, especially, may we recognize the process when we think of the human relationships which give us greatest difficulty when we wonder, “How in the world can I get along with that person I can’t stand?”
D. H. Lawrence once poetized:
Give and it shall be given unto you is still the truth about life. But giving life is not so easy. It doesn’t mean handing it out to some mean fool, or letting the living dead eat you up, It means kindling the life-quality where it was not.
That is difficult, too, (kindling the life-quality where it was not) in those important human relationships that never went quite right or have gone quite wrong. Nevertheless, I should think most people have some real evidence, if they look for it, that the life-quality can be kindled even in the barest, coldest, hardest, most heavily armored of souls. Love can break through destructiveness, reconciliation through quiet and forgiveness can dissolve the bitter disgrace of the years.
Most mature people are not truly evil, though some are. But most can suffer trouble (that would appear to be rooted in evil) out of mere stupidity, stubbornness, false pride, and righteous intransigence.
That is what John Gardner’s novel, October Light, is about and I use it today as the beginning basis of my theme. It is a novel about evil and guilt and a war between two forces of self-righteousness—in this case, a brother and sister, Vermonters, living together and growing older; James Page, 72, and his 80-year-old sister, Sally.
James, a fierce conservative and cross between barbarian and Yankee philosopher, had inherited the old family place after his sister, Sally, married a dentist and moved away. But Horace, the dentist, had died too young and Sally had run out of money and in her advancing years and had come back “home” to live with James, who was by now also widowed.
One would think they needed each other, but, in truth, they couldn’t stand each other. James’ conservatism and Sally’s fierce liberalism, she believed in amnesty and New York City, for example, did not stir together too well. It started with the television set Sally had brought along. James’ limit was TV. He felt, “God made the world to be looked at head on…let a bear live in the woodshed, he’d soon have your bed. Same with TV. It was a matter of right and wrong.” “The world had gone to hell,” thought James, “and TV brought the hell right into your living room.” “Did God give the world his Holy Word in television pictures?” he’d asked Sally. “No,” he answered himself leering, “used print.” “Next thing,” she said, “you’ll tell me we should only read words if they’re carved on rocks.”
And Sally even preached James a sermon right off television in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment and that he absolutely would not take. Sooner or later, you guessed it, the savage James picked up his shotgun and bumped off Sally’s TV, blew it to pieces in front of her incredulous eyes. Had to happen, you can even believe it as you read; he chases Sally upstairs with a piece of stove wood and locks her in her bedroom.
In retaliation, she, just as venomous as he, barricades herself inside, takes to eating apples stored in the attic above her room and refuses day after day after day to come out to lift a finger in their new arrangement—unconditional non-capitulation. She comes to see herself as the whole Third World up against James as brutish capitalism.
But a good liberal could not sing a paean to the virtues of Sally either. She is as gritty and inflexible as her brother. We discover that her liberalism is not pure, (whose is?). She is among other things without knowing it, a closet racist parading in color blindness. She leans over so far backward pretending super equality that one can see her hover over the slough of arrogance to totter toward the pit of shame. Like most of us, these two are complicated complex people.
The fury of brother and sister, symbols of brotherhood-sisterhood, of humanity itself gone wrong, builds apace.
James, furious and drunk, carrying the guilt he believes to be his in connection with his son’s death years before, carrying a dead wife in his heart, carrying a profane fury at fate, finally, crazily, runs his farm truck off the road, no insurance, truck gone, loses his teeth, future in peril. Out of his head. People rush to help the clergy. He hates them, “living,” he raged, “off their wholly fictitious God.”
Fury toward anyone who comes after him or wants to help, his anger toward his sister is not white-hot. He has decided he will shoot her next. But the story is actually a tragicomedy.
I was reminded of a gruesome, strangely funny, (in a macabre sort of way) and more gruesome in detail than my retelling of it, old Serbian tale about a man who had uncorked a genie that was ready to grant him anything he wished but the genie answered, “Anything you wish for, your enemy across the river will get twice as much of it.” “All right,” said the man, “cut out one of my eyes!”
James and Sally were just about at that point. How do you go about loving somebody you can’t stand?! Someone you hate?! Well, murder is not recommended and when James sobers up he has given up that idea.
By now, however, Sally has indirectly landed James’ daughter, Ginny, in the hospital. She had come to the house to find out what was going on. Sally had laboriously rigged up a heavy crate of apples over her door so that if James came in her room, the crate would fall on him. But Ginny came in instead and the crate struck her on her head, putting her in the hospital. After all this, James, without his teeth, calls through the door to his sister, “You mean to thay you ain’t comin out even now?” “Nothing’s changed,” she said. “Nothinth changed!” he yelled, “By God, Thally, you’re the meaneth, thtubborneth, bitchieth, mule-headedeth, vengefalleth, cold-blooked therpent in the thtate of Vermont!”
And in another exchange, when Sally realized the money is gone, the truck for the farm is gone, there is no insurance, she calls through the door, “And what about your teeth? How are you going to pay for new teeth?” “Maybe jith ath well,” he said crossly, “I don’t git no teeth, I can’t bite nobody.” “Thath right,” she mimicked, “You can drown em to death in thpit!”
Still and slowly in this strong, and before it is all over, this said lovely book, respect begins to emerge.
Understanding seeps slowly to the surface of probed and troubled souls and we begin to see ourselves, our fathers or mothers, a brother or sister, a lover, spouse, relative, co-worker, friend or even an old enemy who did not wish to fight anymore as we did not wish to fight anymore. It had gone on too long.
James and Sally were both benighted. Both were in a darkness that had imprisoned them. Both were ignorant of family truths that surfaces at the end of the story in a way I shall not tell here for you may wish to read the book. Suffice it to say there were family secrets, buried, hidden from those who were deeply injured by not knowing them, the way people in any place and time can be injured, indeed badly hurt, by what they don’t know.
October Light is a tale of guilt and evil, of fate, and of love emerging from the near ruin of crushed relationships. In its case, good and evil are rooted in the distant past haphazardly but most of the present trouble arises from ignorance and from error, from the miserable pride and stupidity of the main characters. It can be so with any of us in a world that is, if we look at it honestly, both monstrous and beautiful.
But coming closer to where we live more of the time, most of us are not going to fire shotguns in the house at the television sets or barricade ourselves in a room for days on end. Possibly some of us smile to recall how close we have come and we may recognize ourselves in such characters that we ourselves, under certain circumstances, might be capable of cupidity, blind rage, even cruelty.
No one likes to admit such things about himself or herself. None of us likes to look at our own lives head on without benefit of illusion—to look not only at all of the beauty we would like the world to think is a picture of our whole self, but also at the dark and festered side of our character.
Nevertheless, a human being cannot become whole until he does look—until one becomes courage enough to look in privacy of the mirror where only the self we really are looks back for the one we see there is not the mask or the persona we bring to a daily stage.
The one we see there is all of it oneself—the impoverished and enriched soul, pockmarked and smiling, all in one visage. What a mix, the human.
To have grown up is to have been hurt and to have experienced guilt and people, each of us in his own way, will pull out a mask to cover and protect ourselves from guilt and hurt.
So we see them, covering most everybody, some of the masks…the cool one, nothing rattles that one armor, we think, but he knows better…the fuzzy-minded one, “Who, me? I’m only sitting here trying to find out what happened. I didn’t do anything!” Over there, sweet face…now who in the world could suspect such a sweet face of anything untoward? Wanted to cut out somebody’s gizzard? Just look sweet. Who would think a sweet face to be a secret gizzard cutter?”
Or consider the comic, “The Devil made me do it! I promise I won’t do it again. They did it really. Those people, the ones with frowns on their faces. The bad guys! Anybody, Not me Baby!”
These and a thousand other masks and most folks have several. John Coleman of Haverford, when he was here, suggested we might have a box at the door to drop our masks in when we come to church. Fact is, we do to a degree if we get serious about ourselves and the big questions like who am I really and where do I fit?
Having a mask isn’t bad! It’s human! Unavoidable to a degree. But personal growth is sharing the degree. Coming on out from under there! Getting real authorization, letting the gnarls and knots as well as the fall leaves show like old trees with real integrity. Suppose someone criticizes you and you are outraged by that.
Well, psychology tells us that the more we are outraged by something (we take as personal criticism) the more likely someone has hit the nail on the head, even if, at the time, we cannot consciously determine the truth in the criticism. Not that we should give up our entire defense. Remember Sam Keen saying, “I’ll keep my defense, thank you.”
But we stop defending against self-knowledge by asking the old, old question, “What is it about me that makes me feel the way I do about him or her?”
It is just plain natural hard to look at the shadowy side of ourselves. We deserve that courage because it is worth it and it is the way to begin to relate with more compassion and respect toward and for others. Very often, as you know, people will project their own shadow on to others—that is, we may tend at times to say another person is guilty of or is like that which we do not like in ourselves. Thus, we pour out hostility on others, or can do so, that belongs to us, not to them.
But another thing human beings do is to project their own undeveloped potential into the shadow and let it fall on others, too, refusing to own it themselves. Let Jim or Jane do it. That’s their thing. They’re good at it. It’s not for me! I can’t do that. This can be a way of avoiding responsibility for our own development.
One trouble with this is that before long the one we can’t stand and cannot love is ourself for not having done what we could have done, that which was potential in our larger self. And we knew it or suspected it while being afraid of it.
One can become furious with and unforgiving of himself for not living up to and not developing his own potential for excellence, the fulfillment of talent, achievement, service or anything else one was capable of but afraid to face though it was much needed.
Let us try this sometime. If we find ourselves feeling an exaggerated adulation or animus and anger toward someone else let’s ask ourselves if we have in fact been projecting the shadow of our own hopeful or negative potential onto that person.
Somewhere, perhaps best from the ministry, we are capable of offering each to the other; we need the spiritual power to meet our own shadows serenely no matter what we have done or left undone! Have faith that we can get that power by giving it in trust. We have to get our own houses in order. Have faith that it can be. We have to get our own lives together before we can truly do much good for other people, or love those we can’t stand.
And yes, we do have to love those we can’t stand, not like them or not like them yet for a while, probably. After all, we can’t stand them so how in diddle could we like them? But we do have to come to love them, says religion, says psychology, says humanity.
Life is too short for extended alternatives. But how?
Into my head, as I was thinking about this, popped the memory of a letter a woman wrote to psychoanalyst Carl Jung which my records tell me I last read to the congregation on September 27, 1964, 13 years ago.
“Out of evil,” she wrote, “much good has come to me. By keeping quiet, repressing nothing, remaining attentive, and hand-in-hand with that, by accepting reality, taking things as they are and not as I wanted them to be, by doing all this, rare knowledge has come to me, and rare powers as well, such as I could never have imagined before. I always thought that when we accept things, they overpower us in one way or another. Now this is not true at all, and it is only by accepting them that one can define an attitude toward them. So now I intend playing the game of life, being receptive to whatever comes to me, good and bad, sun and shadow, that are forever shifting, and in this way, also accepting my own nature with its positive and negative sides. Thus everything becomes more alive to me. What a fool I was! How I tried to force everything to go according to my idea!”
End of letter, a lesson there.
Also, it would help if we could learn not to get more upset just because we are upset! We should not become too discouraged if there are those we think we cannot stand or we know can’t stand us. So what’s new about that?
It is because we have real values and deep desires and things we truly do care about that we have trouble with other people, mostly people we love and respect (or long to love and respect) or we wouldn’t care at all. They could not get to us, we would be indifferent.
So if you are aroused to a high pitch sometime don’t despair of your despair. It beats the dullness out of indifference. You care! You differ! But you are not indifferent! Other people can get to us and we to them if something important is going on.
Other people stir up stuff within us, they heat up our emotions and we theirs, in the Biblical sense, we get our “bowels in an uproar,” the bowels, in the Bible, having been thought of as the seat of pity and kindness.
It’s okay. Has to happen, sometimes, with the one you love or a work partner or the one who is trying to dump responsibility for his life upon you or the one who makes you boil or the one you are sure is building a volcano under you, the one you can’t stand, because it takes such emotion to bring about some change, some transformation, some growth.
You have a right to be an absolute loner—to protect yourself in that fortress—but it is not good for you!
I have been concentrating not so much on the one we can’t stand, and his or her culpability through this, because that is far less important than what we do about ourselves. One’s duty is to straighten oneself out!
The one who irks us may be bitter of tongue, an arrogant snob, a slovenly sniveler, whatever, but he or she cannot irk us so much really if we do not let him or her. If things are to get better, we work on ourselves, because we’re the ones we can change, not him or her.
Besides, suppose we truly understood the other one, then we’d not get so angry. Carl Jung once said he used to become very angry with other people, and often when he was young, until he went into business of understanding them.
If we knew how they felt and why, really knew, then we would not mind so much the way they act outside. “Why don’t we try turning ourselves inside out?”
Loving people we can’t stand?
Stick with it long enough and try to understand. You may just come to like the old buzzard, the old battleaxe. “Enemies in war, friends in peace,” a truism from the novelist.
Buried somewhere in the middle of John Gardner’s October Light out of the mouth of a character already dead, as the events of the novel transpire, we read what is to me the point of the whole novel. In the novel much destruction comes first. Crazy attack. Then the revelation of secrets for the alleviation of guilt. And finally a softening, a mutuality, a loving. Certainly, Horace’s words are the point of this sermon—these words, “We humans are such poor miserable things. However, we may hope we know perfectly well all we have is each other. Pity how we struggle and fight against our own best interests.”
© Robert Mabry Doss