Review of Faith, Hope, and Poetry, Part I: Imagination, Old English Poetry, and Malcolm Guite

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C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Dream of the Rood, Evangelical, Faith, Hope, Imagination, Malcolm Guite, Old English literature, Poetry, Seamus Heaney, Theology

In prior posts, I have raised the issue of what I termed “the scandal of the Evangelical imagination,” and have drawn attention to one of the figures who is helping to redress this, poet/priest/singer/songwriter/scholar etc Malcolm Guite. For Christmas, I received a copy of Guite’s book, Faith, Hope, and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination, and had all kinds of good intentions of finishing the book and then reviewing it on this blog. My current problem is that I am only a third or so through the book, and already have probably enough inspiration to fill a number of blog posts, so I have decided to post my review of the book in a few parts. Here begins part I:

There is a point where one just can’t take it anymore. By “it” I mean the vague, fuzzy, warm sentimental idealism that one often encounters in my profession, the study of English literature – although to be fair it is more often the rhetors rather than the scholars who play it up. Poetry is inspirational!!!; isn’t creativity wonderful?; imagination is the key to [insert goal here]! And when one encounters this one too many times, one finally snaps.  Isn’t imagination wonderful? No, but I’ll say yes if it makes people like you  go away. Isn’t freedom to be creative great? No, because what you mean by freedom has I think very little to do with being creative. Doesn’t poetry just open your eyes to the wonder of the world?  Yes, yes it does, and also the tragedy, horror and misery of it too. Before one knows it, one feels deep kinship with Swift, seeks solace in Ecclesiastes, and knows what Flannery O’Conner meant when, upon being asked if universities don’t stifle aspiring writers, replied that they rather don’t stifle enough of them.

I include this as prefatory material because it will help give some measure of what exactly I mean when I say that Malcolm Guite’s book is helping to revive in me some understanding of wonder – of terms such as creativity, imagination – that were long ago shattered by encounters with vapours disguised as these things. The main title of the book covers three topics – faith, hope, and poetry – and while I’m good with faith, and good with poetry, hope, as some of you will know, is for me one of the hardest sayings of the gospel. Of course, the hardness of a thing should never keep us from enacting it in faith, but I will say that Guite’s remarkable book is opening my eyes a little to the thing I am trying to faithfully enact. It takes something special to be hopeful without allowing hope to become the kind of optimism that papers over things, and it also takes daring because being hope means imagining a vision beyond the alleged data – a vision that the reality police often do not like. In any case, Guite models both, and if I am a poor student, I am at least a willing student.

So, what is so special about this book? First off, I must say that not everyone picking it up should expect the same experience I have had. It will, for instance, be particularly annoying to those who do not believe in an ongoing conversation of great ideas from the beginning of writing till now. It will be annoying to those who believe that scholars shouldn’t make overarching claims about literary history, and should stick to their own little fields and let others stick to theirs – scholars such as I am in my worse moments. In fact, in approaching the poems he considers from both an academic and creative writing perspective, Guite takes the risk of being charged by one side of sacrificing scholarly nicety for creativity, and on the other side of dredging up old boring poetry that has nothing to say to the modern creative writer.

What such critics might find most annoying, though, is what I find most attractive. In the hands of Guite, old poetry is revivified such that it can speak into the milieux of contemporary poetry, theology, theory, and politics. However, this is not an only alleged dialogue where old works simply become puppetry to say what modern people want them to say – Guite lets the alterity of the poetry push back. The results of this are messy; the book is neither a neat scholarly work in the traditional sense, nor simply a modern “how-to” book for creative writers. Rather, what I sense most behind the book is ongoing dialogue – Guite wrestling with the poems he encounters in an arena where the strictest rules apply and the judge is Christ – no easy outs or deceptive maneuvers here. In certain ways it reminds me of what might have happened had Boethius encountered not Philosophy but the best of the muses rather than the harlots he dismisses at the beginning of the Consolatio.

I will be saying more, but for the current post I will focus on one particular section that impressed me: Guite’s treatment of Old English poetry. As an Anglo-Saxonist, I will admit that one of the most attractive features of this book even before I bought it was its inclusion of a chapter on “The Dream of the Rood.” Very often even Christians talking about faith and imagination are under the impression that nothing much happened before the Romantic period of literature, which has as much as anything else to do with the fact that such Christians who want to engage imagination are often Evangelicals, and Evangelicalism is birthed from the same historical moment as Romanticism – how can they remember what happened before they were born? In any case, as a scholar of medieval and early modern literature, I am often frustrated by those who ignore these literatures when they look to define what creativity and imagination are, and part of the attraction of Guite’s book was the front and centre inclusion of “The Dream of the Rood” – an inclusion no doubt inspired in part by his friend, Seamus Heaney.

Beyond its inclusion, however, the real test for me was whether he in fact “got” the poem – not that I am of course the ultimate judge of this, but as an Old English scholar I am qualified to gauge this chapter in a way that I am probably not for any of the other chapters, with perhaps the exception of the one on John Donne, which I have not yet read. In any case, I was well aware that it would be very easy for a theologian to get his hands on a translation and use the poem as a superficial prop for a more broad theological claim. But this is not what Guite does. To his credit, he includes passages from the original Old English, and discusses minute nuances and shades of words. Of course, not every Old English scholar will agree with his interpretation (if they did, it would have to be a bland interpretation indeed), but I was personally intrigued by what he does with the poem, particularly with relation to the much vexed issue of Christianity and paganism in Old English literature. Though the best critics are careful to hedge their claims and carefully navigate the polyphony of the Old English texts, critics have in the past often found themselves divided into two camps: the exegetically oriented critics situating the literature with regard to the Christianity that informed the context in which the manuscripts were preserved; and oral-formulaic critics more interested in the poetry’s alleged sedimentary paganism preserved from the pre-Christian times when the poetry was passed down orally.

In any case, Guite reads the poem against the backdrop of C. S. Lewis’s idea that pagan myths, rather than mere falsehoods to be utterly destroyed, could gesture, powerfully yet also imperfectly, toward the truth of Christianity. Guite’s articulation of this set something off in my head, and I realized that this is the way I (likewise influenced by this idea in Lewis) tend implicitly to read Old English poetry – though an exegetically inclined critic, I knew, thanks to Lewis, that the inclusion of a pagan idea in a poem must not always be damnable syncretism or subversive revolt, but could in fact be the baptism of that idea, wherein that idea found its perfection in Christianity. Of course, in reality, this is neither Lewis’s nor Guite’s idea but a very longstanding one in Christian tradition. Guite’s relation of Lewis’s conversion, though, via the circuitous but probably also necessary avenue of Norse myth, is helpful in communicating the “The Dream of the Rood” to modern Christians, who can see that the “tree” of the cross is not only a simultaneous appeal to and displacement of Yggdrasil in Old Norse myth, but is also an appeal to and displacement of the enduring value conveyed in the myth and appreciated by (comparatively) modern people such as Lewis.

Of course, what Guite is saying here – that there is something in Old English alliterative verse that modern poets can learn from and use – is not an altogether new idea, given poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Seamus Heaney, and Earle Birney, as well as the poetry of J. R. R. Tolkien’s deeply Anglo-Saxon imagination. Moreover, there are, I imagine and hope, more than a few lovers or scholars of Old English verse who have tried their hand at it and found the results not entirely unpleasing and anachronistic. Where Guite’s genius lies, though, is in explicitly articulating beyond modern aesthetics why not only poets, but in fact theologians, Christians, and other moderns lamenting the modern/postmodern crisis in fact need to be revivified by engagement with poems like “The Dream of the Rood.”

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Theological Education and the Public Pastor

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academia, Academics, African American theology, Barack Obama, civil religion, civil rights, congregationalism, ecclesiology, ecumenism, Eugene Cho, Evangelical, feminist theology, gender, homosexuality, James Cone, Louie Giglio, Mark Driscoll, martyrdom, queer theology, Reinhold Niebuhr, seminary, St. Stephen, Theology

On January 22, 2013, Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated for a second term as President of the United States of America.  The inauguration itself had been the subject of some evangelical controversy.  On January 9, Think Progress posted a sermon by Pastor Louie Giglio that he had preached in the mid-1990s. The sermon’s title said it all: “In Search of a Standard – Christian Response to Homosexuality.”

Giglio, the founder of the Passion Conferences and pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, promptly bowed out of the inauguration on January 10.  He was then ridiculed by the secular media, defended by evangelicals, and finally given The Last Word‘s “Rewrite” by progressive Catholic and MSNBC news host, Lawrence O’Donnell.

The evangelical drama wasn’t over yet.  After the Giglio débacle unfolded, Obama announced that he would put his hand on two Bibles as he took the presidential oath: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Bible and Abraham Lincoln’s Bible.  That went pretty smoothly.

But then, there was this tweet from within the heart of the evangelical world from Pastor Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church:

Praying for our president, who today will place his hand on a Bible he does not believe to take an oath to a God he likely does not know.

— Mark Driscoll (@PastorMark) January 21, 2013

Of course, Driscoll might contest that he could be characterized as being “the heart of the evangelical world” because he is from Seattle, but suffice it to say that it seemed like the Giglio drama was reignited. Driscoll perplexed the secular news media, was defended by fans on his social media pages (while called expletive names by others), was deconstructed by the Naked Pastor, and provoked not-a-few facepalms from Christians who deemed themselves thoughtful.  Here’s Eugene Cho, just across the bridge from Driscoll, for example:

On MLK Day, you want me to honor his legacy by responding to a privileged white dude pastor who rarely-if ever-engages civil rights? No thx.

— Eugene Cho (@EugeneCho) January 21, 2013

What was fascinating was that, in a piece completely unconnected with these incidents, the same Mark Driscoll posted a response to a young man seeking to know whether he should major in ministry during his undergraduate education.  Driscoll’s answer, using the typical Driscoll-isms of masculine appeal to “men are like trucks; they drive straighter with a load,” turned into an all-out exposé of the contemporary seminary as a debt-inflating institution with which young men exploring a ministry option should be very cautious to engage.

True as Driscoll’s advice may have been, however, I found myself wondering about Driscoll’s musings on theological education in the context of the public pastoral débacles of the last two weeks. I mean, it seems these days that it might be better to read a few books than spend money on seminary curriculum built around Scriptural exegesis, church history, systematic theology, and a few practical ministry courses, plus an internship in which you pay the seminary to work for a church. I mean, if you can teach yourself these things, why waste your money and four years of your life? But I wonder if Driscoll’s advice, as responsible as it sounds, might be short-selling his readers.

Indeed, had Driscoll himself received broader exposure and critical pedagogical guidance to a wider set of theological traditions, his critique of Obama might have been more acute. Of course, I am assuming that one receives a broad exposure to a wide array of theologies in seminary, which, from my experience as a dropout from two theological institutions, is probably not a safe assumption to make about many schools. However, there may be a case here that it is precisely pedagogical guidance to the breadth in historical and contemporary theological conversations that should be the added-value of a seminary education over reading a book and that seminaries should be making sure that they are providing this service if they aren’t doing it already.

Take, for example, a hypothetical situation in which Driscoll, instead of being only narrowly exposed to a narrow system in evangelical theology during his theological training, might have critically engaged critiques of Obama and his theological guru, Reinhold Niebuhr, launched by James Cone and Cornel West, both faculty specialists in African American theology at Union Theological Seminary. (Sure, Driscoll has occasionally confessed to reading feminist theologians and not enjoying them, but one wonders if more pedagogical guidance here would have been necessary.) West’s critique of Obama sounds eerily similar to Driscoll’s, but with a bit more teeth:

I mean, that sounds so similar to Driscoll: West is saying that if Obama does not carry out policies of justice for the least of these in poverty-stricken America, he doesn’t have a right to put his hand on a Bible that is filled with verses of justice that speaking of a God of justice in which King believed.  If West critiques Obama directly, Cone takes on Obama’s major theological influence, Reinhold Niebuhr, in his recent book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, where he suggests that being influenced by Niebuhr does not equate being rooted in the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.:

There was, however, an important difference between Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King Jr. that partly accounts for why King became a martyr in the civil rights movement while Niebuhr remained safely confined in his office at Union Seminary teaching Christian social ethics, never risking his life in the fight for justice.  Unlike King, Niebuhr viewed agape love, as revealed in Jesus’ cross, as an unrealizable goal in history–a state of perfection which no individual or group in society could ever fully hope to achieve.  For Niebuhr, Jesus’ cross was an absolute transcendent standard that stands in judgment over any human achievement.  The most we can realize is “proximate justice,” which Niebuhr defined as a balance of power between powerful collectives.  But what about groups without power?  Niebuhr did not have much to say to African Americans, a 10-percent minority, except to recommend nonviolence, which he believed might advance the cause of civil rights, while never winning full justice.  Niebuhr’s moderate view was not one to empower a powerless group to risk their lives for freedom.  That might have been why he did not talk to militant black groups or black nationalists in Harlem.  He had very little to say to them.  (James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011, p. 71.)

Yes, that sounds like Obama-style pragmatism to me too.  No, I’m not saying that Driscoll needs to become African American; that makes about as much sense as when St. Paul tells circumcised Christians not to seek to be uncircumcised (one wonders: were they really thinking about it?).  I am saying, though, that in light of Eugene Cho’s response, Driscoll might have some theological reflection to do about the connection between his neo-Reformed evangelicalism and racial justice. As radical as this may sound for an evangelical, it is not impossible.  Witness, for example, Tim Keller’s attempt that was itself a response to John Piper’s attempt:

Recalling Michael Emerson and Christian Smith’s (2000) Divided by Faith, the Cone and West aficionados may wince a bit at these appeals to personal repentance and blunt critiques of ethnic churches that come out of an evangelical obsession with individual responsibility at the expense of structural forces. But come on; at least they’re trying, and maybe we should encourage them…especially by helping young clergy reflect on this in seminary.

In addition, getting back to Giglio, one wonders if a more intelligent exchange might have been had if only he had been exposed to feminist and LGBT theology during his theological training.  Indeed, the fact that Giglio felt that he had to bow out of the public stage meant that he didn’t know how to think anything else except for what the Gay Christian Network founder, Justin Lee, calls the “gay-vs.-Christian” dichotomy.

Again, in the same way that I juxtaposed Driscoll with Cone and West, I’m not saying that Giglio would have to become a feminist or LGBT theologian, or that he even needs to change his view on sexual ethics (he could remain what Justin Lee calls a “Side B” Christian).  I’m saying that if he might have had a few more tools in his theological toolbox than what he had already, that is, if he had been aware of the fabulous work out there, say, written by Patrick Cheng, James Allison, and Sister Margaret Farley (I mean, after the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did their thing, who in the theological world hasn’t heard of Margaret Farley), Giglio would at least know that he has to engage this stuff.  Or, on that note, what about thinking through what evangelical ethicist Lewis Smedes at Fuller has to say about homosexuality as an identity not actually being found anywhere in Scripture in the revised edition of Sex for Christians? I mean, the sermon is about “biblical standards,” which suggests that at the time, Giglio thought of homosexuality as a loose lifestyle funded by a wealthy lobby to make some kind of sexually hedonistic Epicureanism an acceptable alternate lifestyle with no real moral standards or constraints on pleasure-seeking, which in turn has to be confronted with the truth that there are moral standards and those are found in Scripture (although the moral standards bit was probably learned from Part I of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity).  I mean, whatever one’s theology of the body is, with the passage of two decades and a bit more reading, a bit more clergy development, and a bit more counseling, one should know that that portrayal was probably a tad too monolithic. Had he had a few more tools, his response to being called out by Think Progress might have at least been a little more interesting.

In other words, what I’m saying is that there is a very broad theological conversation that is happening, and that part of the point of theological education is to induct people entering ecclesial service into that dialogue. Sure, OK, some people may think I’m dreaming; after all, isn’t pastoral work about walking with the people, counseling them, providing pastoral care, being part of the major events of their lives (birth, baptism, confirmation, wedding, funeral,etc.), and equipping them to live Christian lives?  Yes, it is, and part of that happens to be precisely to equip them to be the church, and part of being the church is to be in communion with the church catholic that is having these conversations. And part of the way of training young ecclesial leaders on how to get in on the conversation is pretty standard pedagogical practice: give them a road map to the literature, make it required reading, and make your assignments about critical engagement! Of course, is this how theological education currently works? Likely not. I’m just saying that it’s an imperative.

But, of course, Driscoll’s post on theological education highlights three things that probably need to change before this is possible: 1) the cost of theological education, 2) the utility of theological pedagogy that would be of added value to personal theological reading, and 3) the support of churches for young clergy pursuing theological education.  In other words, can theological education actually be available to young clergy who will likely not be able to repay their debts?  Might churches be able to pool resources, even relying on the church catholic instead of struggling along as autonomous congregations, to train young clergy?  Will seminaries be able to demonstrate that they can provide theological training that cannot be obtained by simply reading a good book by themselves?

Come to think of it, these questions may well strike at the heart of our ecclesiology.  They inquire as to whether our belief in debt forgiveness as in the Lord’s Prayer, the parables of forgiveness, and the messianic announcement of the Jubilee actually matches our practice.  They probe our models of congregational autonomy when, say, Paul’s collection for the church in Jerusalem appealed to anything but congregational autonomy; those who disagree will find 2 Corinthians a very challenging read.  They challenge our understanding of education altogether, making us wonder when information accumulation replaced the discipleship and formation that seems to have been a long point of orthopraxy in the Christian tradition (thinking beyond Paul and Timothy, for example, one finds examples in Justin Martyr, Origen, Benedict, Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Francis de Sales, Basil Moreau, etc.).

That said, the Giglio and Driscoll débacles of the past two weeks highlight once again the real problem of evangelical leaders who are thought to be able to do theology until they are challenged on theological grounds.  This is a problem because for all that is said about the persecution of Christians by a secularizing public sphere, to be martyred for less-than-informed remarks isn’t exactly how martyrdom in Scripture works, at least not in the Acts of the Apostles.  Sure, OK, out-of-context soundbites were twisted in efforts to drag Stephen, Peter, John, and Paul before synagogue leaders and the Sanhedrin. Stephen, for example, was taken brutally out of context when the Freedmen’s Synagogue said that he was telling Jewish Christians to abandon Moses.  But Stephen did not resort to whimpering about being taken out of context because he was too busy being a deacon-waiter or saying that that was not the focus of his message in the first place.  No, he faced the Sanhedrin and retold the entire tradition through the hermeneutic of the people of God embodying stiff-necked opposition to the Law and the Prophets so that they ultimately lynched the culmination of the Scriptures.  Acts 7 is actually a fascinating theological read, and ultimately, it suggests that people like Stephen were martyred because they understood the breadth of the tradition so well that they told such convincing theological stories with such an acute, subversive, and creative Christian hermeneutic that they couldn’t be silenced except by brute force.  I’m not convinced that Giglio and Driscoll have done that.

Mental Illness and Silver Linings Playbook: One Sufferer’s Perspective

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Academy Award, Christian, film, Health, Mental disorder, Mental health, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, Pat, response, review, Silver Linings Playbook

Apologies, but since it has been on my mind, and since I think dealing with mental illness is one of the things Christians should think about, I am devoting yet another post  to it.  Please bear with me and use me gently – it is a matter close to my heart, and head.

I was provoked to thought by Silver Linings Playbook, a film that is currently up for some Academy Awards, and that features characters, some diagnosed and some not, suffering from a variety of mental illnesses. I was impressed, which is saying something, because it takes something special for a romantic comedy to impress me; usually my preferred literary topics – suffering, death, theology and wisdom – are not prominently featured in this genre, at least in its modern incarnation.

In any case, following the film, I was curious regarding public response. The debate I discovered can generally be broken down into two positions. Richard Brody of the New Yorker, for instance, criticizes the film on the grounds that the film depicts a bipolar person going off his meds, willing himself to get better, and working his way up to a happy ending – all of which, by the way, are not very realistic ways of dealing with mental illness. Others note that the OCD character goes untreated, and the full effects of his illness as well as those of others are gilded over for the feel-good purposes of romantic comedy. In a quote particularly apt for the broader subject of this blog, Brody charges that “without a word about religion in the script, “Silver Linings Playbook” advocates a faith-based view of mental illness and, overall, of emotional redemption.” Presumably by this faith-based view (a description he intends as critique and not praise), Brody means the very superficial way of dealing with mental illness (just get over it) that one is bound to encounter when one (like me) suffers from mental illness in and around Christian communities.

The film, of course, has its defenders. One of the more balanced reviews is Gwynne Watkins’s interview of Dr. Steven Schlozman, who is a better reader of the complexity of the film than, say, the tersely expressed concerns of Dr. Michael Blumenfield. Interestingly enough, one of the recurring themes in both the attacks and defences is the question of whether in fact Pat is taking his meds, and what message the film is conveying concerning mental illness.

Before going into my own analysis, though, I would like to clarify the dual battle that I fight. Many Christians I know, whether deliberately or subconsciously, approach medication and medical treatment with excessive suspicion, and to these people I find myself being an adamant defender of these things. Even those who hypothetically allow medication for hypothetical people who are hypothetically too ill to do otherwise need to realize that it may not just be hypothetical people who need medication – it may indeed be someone very close to them or in fact themselves.

But then there are the people who want medication to fix everything. Some Christians, pushing back against the suspicion of medication, go too far the other way and act as if depressed people can simply go to the doctor, get medication that fixes them, and then go back to normal. Unfortunately, in fact, a lot of the rhetoric that encourages mental health awareness comes across in a similar way – as soon as you start “officially dealing with it” things will become so much better. The reality is far more complex. I have seen medication work near miracles in people. I have also seen people migrate from medication to medication, partially helped but never wholly. And, yes, I have seen cases where medication has negatively affected people instead of helping them, and cases where those who represent the “official” public line on mental health have failed and done damage.

My policy, then, has come to be that “just” is a four letter word. If someone tells you that you “just’ need to pray more, or “just” need to talk to a doctor, or “just” need to go on medication, or “just” need to be a better Christian, or “just” need to open up and talk to someone, run in the other direction.

And it seems to me that this is the problem critics are having with Silver Linings Playbook. Some think it says, “Just will yourself to be well.”  Others think it says, “Just fall in love and you will get better.” Still others defend it on the grounds that it is not saying these things, but is in fact appropriately saying “Just take your meds.” And this annoys me. Normal people get complicated movies with complicated characters and complicated plots. But mentally ill people aren’t allowed this. No, the films we get concerning our people must be critically reduced to their message and approved by the board of censors before they can be praised.

Let me put it this way. The assumption is that this film should be perfectly mimetic of real people with real mental illness. But not all regular movies profess to be perfectly mimetic. I have not encountered a hobbit recently. And, in fact, most romantic comedies end with the “happily ever after theme,” which taken properly is not mimetic, but is a gesture or allusion to something we wish for, but only ever catch glimpses of this side of heaven – only moderns could be so crass as to take this fairy tale ending literally and then critique it for not fitting the genre of realism, which it was never intended to do. All this to say that what critics are really critiquing is the genre (it has an unrealistic happy ending), but somehow it is considered more of a problem if the film is about mental illness. One of the concerns, of course, is that allowing people with mental illness to indulge in fantastic or imaginative stories might be harmful because they sometimes can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy – it is the same impulse that tries to save the poor innocent minds of children by not reading them fairy tales. To be sure, I do think we should be sensitive to what might or might not be helpful for or trigger those we know with mental illness, or ourselves. But I sometimes worry that people stop treating us as human altogether; it is easier to treat the person as the illness, infantilize him or her, and then place him or her in a sanitized environment where people do not get real stories but rather appropriate and pre-approved messages.

To come if circuitously to my point, I would suggest that the reason I liked Silver Linings Playbook is that it was ambiguous and was not simply propaganda. Though I do not have bipolar (and I would want to talk to a few people who have it before trying to gauge how “accurate” the depiction is), I can certainly sympathize with Pat’s heroic but completely unrealistic attempt to “fix” himself so as to be acceptable to those he cares most about. One has visions and dreams of a self that is completely healthy, and vows to become that self, whereas the more realistic route recognizes that life may be more about management of illness and reinterpreting our relationships and meaning in terms of the selves that we cannot help being. I also liked that Pat’s episodes were not clearly marked, since figuring out what is oneself and what is one’s illness is part of the struggle. I liked the offhand reference to the difficulty of what it means to think of being a parent when one can barely take care of oneself. I liked the dinner table conversation when Pat and Tiffany, who have no interest in “ordinary” topics, suddenly light up when they exchange medication stories inappropriately at the dinner table. I like that the film recognizes, in the relationship with Pat and his friend, that suffering from a mental illness makes people much more willing to open up to you about their own problems, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can solve them. And I like the laughter and the happy ending that is not (as some accuse it of being) contrived by the sheer willpower of Pat, but rather happens counter to his initially doomed-from-the-start plans to re-enchant his wife, who has clearly left him.

That last statement about liking happy endings is not something you will hear me say often. But I do like this one because it is precisely what a lot of people do not want to hear about mental illness. They want it to be fixed, made better, off the screen. They don’t want to be told that, for some, the only meaning they can find might be moments of laughter and joy intermixed with their illness. They don’t want to imagine the life of a person who is mentally ill and simultaneously has meaning and hope in his/her life. For such people, a meaningful life and mental illness are mutually exclusive.

You see, I think at the end of the day what bothers people most about the film is that it is, like life and mental illness, too ambiguous. We can’t always tell when the crazy person is talking and when the “real” person is talking. And for some of us,  laughter in the midst of situations that others might consider hell is the only laughter we will get. So no, the film does not convey a clear and properly sanitized message or image of mental illness – but then again, neither do we who actually suffer from it.

Ecclesiastes, OCD, and the Horror of Infinite Possibility

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dissertation, Ecclesiastes, editing, Education, mental illness, Obsessive–compulsive disorder, OCD

“Imagine infinite possibility.” The phrase reads like an advertising slogan. But as with many such phrases, people should be careful what they wish for. As someone with OCD I can and do imagine infinite possibility – and it is terrifying. A normally functioning brain sorts for us which possibilities we should pay attention to and which to ignore. The OCD brain doesn’t. For instance, when one locks a door, the normally functioning brain assumes it will stay locked. But the brain with OCD has an uncensored imagination. What if I accidentally bumped it and it came unlocked? Maybe I forgot to check to make sure it was locked for real? I heard a sound and maybe it was the cat brushing against the door which would have jiggled the door loose. And why does it matter? Because if the door is unlocked and someone breaks into the house you are responsible for what happened, and so if you don’t check – again and again and again – you are irresponsible and don’t care about the people around you. Infinite possibility is a little like the island of dreams in Lewis’s Dawn Treader. It seems like a good idea until you remember that you have nightmares. And when the nightmares, even the most implausible of them, feel as possible as the far fetched rituals that one imagines to deal with them, then any situation becomes a potential source of terror – it is disconcerting to, for instance, be slicing an onion and suddenly be afraid of poking someone’s eyes out. Imagine the infinite possibilities of things you can do with a knife. And if you imagine feeling like you are as liable to do one as the other, you will know what OCD feels like. Removing the trigger (in this case, a knife) is no good. Were we bound in a nutshell, that nutshell would simply become fodder for our bad dreams. Where there is consciousness, there is always room for the malignant creativity of OCD.

But all this is preamble to what I really wanted to talk about today. In part I want to talk about it because it has come to my attention that some of the things I have said here about ocd have been helpful to others. Also, there is the more selfish part of me that hopes writing it out will somehow break its spell over me. What I want to write about is the process of writing and editing a dissertation.

Because, you see, in every sentence and every paragraph there is infinite possibility. To put something one way is to not put it any number of other ways, and what if one if those other ways is a more perfect way to put it? And then there are sources. Titles and databases take one a certain distance. But what about those misleadingly titled papers that seemingly have nothing to do with one’s paper, but by happenstance contain a golden paragraph that you could not find except by following up the vaguest of possible references? One’s bibliography gets filled up with these and becomes useless because one can’t distinguish the wheat from the chaff. The ever looming possibility that one might find something of use in the most unlikely places places on one the infinite burden of being aware of everything, so that one throws up one’s hands in despair and wishes to be aware of nothing. This to be sure is not something I feel with all writing; unofficial writing (like this blog) or drafts are fine. But the closer I come to finality (in this case, my finished dissertation) the more terror I feel at the prospect of choosing final words that I commit to stand by.

The psychologically proper thing to do, of course, is to identify experiences of OCD and do what a hypothetically “reasonable man” would do, but it remains hard to question my work enough to edit properly without overdoing it and questioning everything entirely. And I wish I could better grasp the point of Ecclesiastes.

The latter statement might sound odd, but I often like to imagine that the Ecclesiast had something like OCD. What is lacking cannot be numbered. The frustration of eternity – infinite possibility – is set in our hearts so that we are boggled even by the smallest of things. The mundane becomes terrifying: men start at the sound of a bird. There is no end of toil. The books to read are endless and much study is a weariness of the flesh. And the Ecclesiast can’t even come up with something final to say – there are positions to be clarified and caveats to be made. In fact, someone else must step in and finish the book for him, for his thoughts are cyclical and as endless as the rivers that flow into the sea. This of course may be a highly implausible and fantastic interpretation, but I keep wondering if there might not be something to it. It would after all be a great relief to find that all was vanity – in the sense discovered by Anne Bradstreet – and that one could treat a final draft with as cavelier an attitude as this blog post. It might, in fact, even look a little like grace.