Patterns of Intimacy

Pilar Jennings writes of the patterns found in creating intimacy:

As skillful therapists from all schools of thought know, our ability to find and sustain healthy interpersonal experience does not depend on a history of perfect attunement. There is no such thing as two people—whether baby and mother, two lovers, or teacher and student—being perfectly in sync with each other’s needs and wishes. Real intimacy arises from an ongoing process of connection that at some point is disrupted and then, ideally, repaired. I think of this as an interpersonal crochet stitch: connection, disruption, repair, over and over again, until a fabric is created with enough strength and flexibility to endure the wear of any two people attempting to know one another.

Rather lovely I think.  Possible?

What do we know?

On Sunday, I took my son to see two movies at a French film festival that was in town. The local train was out. We walked over to Amsterdam to flag down a cab. The cab rolled right past us and picked up two young-ish white women. It's sort of amazing how often that happens. It's sort of amazing how often you think you are going to be permitted to act as Americans do and instead receive the reminder—"Oh that's right, we are just some niggers. I almost forgot." 

This is how Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog post begins this morning.  It’s an angry but thoughtful take on being black and male in America in 2014.

I was inspired to look up this song with Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins after seeing Million Dollar Quartet last Friday night.  The most poignant line in the play was when the owner of Sun Records said something like this:  I just wish those boys could have been happier.

Andrew Solomon writes a heart-breaking and compassionate account of an interview with Peter Lanza, father of the Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza.  One of the frustrating pieces of this story is there appears to be no one to blame.  Even in hind-sight, there are almost no signs that Adam would commit such violence.  It is a story that requires us to live with no answers.  Solomon describes Peter Lanza’s dilemma:

Interview subjects usually have a story they want to tell, but Peter Lanza came to these conversations as much to ask questions as to answer them. It’s strange to live in a state of sustained incomprehension about what has become the most important fact about you. 

Solomon seems to say, sometimes things just go bad. I hate that, but there is something reassuring about Solomon and Lanza's search the the facts.

Beyond Default

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent,real -- you get the idea…. People who can adjust their natural default-setting…are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

The above is from s speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College.  The whole speech used to be found online.  Since then, it has been published as a short book called This Is Water, and now only pieces of it are online.  More exerts are here plus some audio.  This site calls Wallace's speech "one of the most timeless graduation speeches of all time." I think it's a very good speech, and I thought of it this week as I noticed myself falling needlessly into default mode.

I’ve been spending the week in Florida walking along some beaches that have touched my heart.  Then this morning there was a lovely poem by e. e. cummings on Andrew Sullivan’s blog that intensified the feelings of beauty.  The conclusion of the poem is below, and the whole poem is here.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.

Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?” 

― D.T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture