To Err Is Human, To Kvetch Divine

 

Driving my daughter Samara around the neighborhood for her mid-day nap earlier this week I encountered the following bumper sticker:  “The more you complain the longer God makes you live.”  On the surface the meaning and humor of this bumper sticker is fairly straight forward.  It depends on an image of God as One who is as annoyed by constant complaining as the next guy, perhaps even more so since the offending individual is complaining about the universe that God Himself created.  As punishment for the crime of complaint, God sentences the complainer to more of what makes her miserable in the first place, life itself.  In handing down the sentence of long life, this God is clearly telling the complainer “Shut up, already.”

 

This is a God with whom we are very familiar, a God who makes us quite comfortable in the claim that we were made in His image. With this God, The Holy Spirit is encountered in that rush of righteous indignation you feel when your neighbor complains about the quality of the snow during his recent Colorado ski vacation.  To get on with this God, the annoying complainer must enact a change in attitude, a change that would not only please God but would also make the complainer less offensive to those mortals who have had to put up with all of the bellyaching.  To please this God, the complainer must learn to let go of the complaints by growing in awareness of the infinite blessings in her life; blessings that, of course, flow freely from God’s never ending grace.   Most specifically, this is the God who would abolish all of our worries by pointing out how well tended are those lilies in the field.   Implicit in this instruction to the complainer is the deeper message of how delightful these silent lilies are to all of the passersby, which is exactly why all of those annoyed by the complainer worship this God. 

 

There is just one catch.  If we follow the mandate of the bumper sticker, ceasing our complaints and replacing them with humble gratitude for the bounty of our blessings, if we become the kind of person who, when asked what kind of day he is having, automatically replies “I’m blessed”, then by the logic of the bumper sticker we are to be rewarded with… a shorter life.  

 

As the logic of the bumper sticker collapses in on itself, this God, the God we are all so comfortable worshipping precisely to the degree that we are convinced that He will not so much vanquish our enemies as He will punish those who get on our nerves, dies. In encountering the God of this bumper sticker, Nietzsche, with his proclamation of God’s demise, has never seemed more prescient. 

 

But God is, like Steven Seagal in his seminal 1990 action flick, hard to kill. In place of the late, overly familiar God of quiet reverence arises an altogether alien God, a God as unnerving as the stranger within each of us.  For, if truth is stranger than fiction, and if God is the author of all that truly is, then God’s creation is something stranger than we can even begin to imagine, though we inhabit it every day.   This God speaks to us directly through the unconscious of the author of this humble bumper sticker.  The unconscious, that source of crazy wisdom undergirding each and every one of us, spills forth unintended meaning ceaselessly, both in our dreams and in cases of Freudian slips of the tongue, but also in our everyday routine discourse.  In this case, the bumper sticker author’s conscious intention of getting a laugh was the sheep’s clothing, which cloaked the wolf sent to us by the author’s unconscious in order to devour our timeworn, and self serving, popular spirituality.

 

The unconscious or “secret” message hidden within this bumper sticker is revealed by the simple act of screening out the consciously intended humor.  Read the bumper sticker again, but this time read it as if reading a set of instructions for putting together a piece of Ikea furniture (which, I’ve found, is one of life’s most humorless moments): “The more you complain, the longer God makes you live.”  There.  It could not be any simpler.  God isn’t annoyed by our complaints, instead they are music to His ears.  In fact, given their righteous nature, the signifier “complain” just isn’t up to the task of supporting the weight of the signified.  So, once more we turn to the Jews (I mean really, my wife, Jesus, Einstein, Freud, Sandy Koufax, etc.; what are these people not capable of?), from whose sublime Yiddish tongue comes kvetch, a word as beautiful as it is flexible (it is both noun and verb).  With kvetching, mere complaint attains to its sacred role as existential song.

 

So what does it tell us about God that He would have us kvetch?  Just asking this question throws our accustomed relationship with God off kilter, an effect necessary to disrupt our complacency in our (mis)conception of God.  On the original Batman TV series, whenever the villain’s lair was on-screen the camera angle was tilted noticeably, a cautionary cue that the viewer was encountering a separate, de-centered realm where everyday rules and expectations did not apply.  In fact, the reality which we inhabit every day, God’s creation, has this same quality; everything is always a bit askew, which inevitably leads to a great deal of kvetching.

 

This tilted nature of reality is best captured through the lens of psychoanalysis (from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis we are all like Batman’s villains, in the sense that the prevailing symbolic order would indefinitely banish those Joker or Catwoman elements within each of us to the unconscious).  In his discussion of the film “The Matrix”, Slavoj Zizek, psychoanalysis’ current Mother Ship, insightfully points out the film’s explicit rendering of reality’s bent nature.  Zizek highlights Agent Smith’s speech to Neo in which Agent Smith describes a virtual reality designed for humans without suffering; Agent Smith informs Neo that a life without suffering led to the death of the humans immersed in that virtual reality.  Zizek quotes Agent Smith:  “I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.”  With nothing to kvetch about, humans literally die, which is precisely the secret truth of the bumper sticker.  The requirement of suffering is illustrated in real life by the heroin addict, whose escape from suffering and misery through a needle is a slow fade out of reality.  Zizek encapsulates this truth succinctly: “(T)he experience of an insurmountable obstacle is the positive condition for us, as humans, to perceive something as reality.  Reality is ultimately that which resists.”  I would take this argument to its logical extreme, with a psychoanalytic reformulation of Descartes cogito: “I kvetch, therefore I am.”

 

Look up the word kvetch on Wikipedia and you will encounter the following enlightening passage from Glen David Gold’s novel, “Carter Beat the Devil” (to which I now owe a karmic debt and will have to check out from the library): “Make a commitment, Charlie.  Go with life or go with death, but quit the kvetching.  Don’t keep us all in suspense.”  But the human condition is exactly the inability to make such a choice, and faced with this eternal impasse the only sane response is to kvetch.  The crowning insight of Freud’s genius, what allows psychoanalysis to bring us in direct contact with the God who would have us kvetch, was his postulation of the death drive, the human drive towards the nothingness found only in death.   The death drive, placed in tension with the life force visible in Freud’s concepts of Eros and the pleasure principle, is the last necessary step in Freud’s unrivaled contribution to our understanding of the human condition.  The human subject is at last revealed as a clearing where the irreconcilable elements in Man (and in Woman) endlessly slip and slide past one another. 

 

Against the harmony of yin and yang, Freud gives us the (unavoidable) neurosis of life and death.  I don’t know about you, but I’ve met a lot of neurotics in my day, especially the one in the mirror, but the only Zen Master I’ve encountered is Hall of Fame basketball coach Phil Jackson, and that was on TV.  If nothing else, Freud has sheer numbers on his side; if a billion red Chinese can’t be wrong, then 6 billion neurotics would seem to close the book on the elusive goal of realizing basic goodness, as its called in Tibetan thought.  The kernel of truth in the eastern notion of non-attachment, as developed on the meditation cushion, is the ability to weaken the attachment to one’s neuroses; the notion of abolishing these neuroses altogether through the act of meditation, however, is fool’s gold.  In the kvetch, however, there exists an alternative path through one’s neuroses.  And it is only with the kvetch that we can laugh at the joke God has played on all of us.  As my wife often implores me, apparently afraid that the Joker within me will dissipate on my meditation cushion, go ahead and Google the list of great Buddhist humorists….

 

Lest we Christians feel that the heights of kvetching can only be reached by the Jews, we would do well to remember that Jesus’ last, and perhaps most important act before his death and resurrection, was his kvetch on the cross.  In his last moment clothed in mortal flesh, Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”  With this kvetch, relying for the moment on the definition of kvetch as “to be urgent, or insistent; press; strain”, rather than the more common definition of “a nagging complaint”, Jesus demonstrated the fullness of his humanity in his complete acquiescence to the tragic human condition of being caught inescapably between life and death, symbolized perfectly in his last hours on the cross.  (That Jesus answered the tragedy of his fully human life and death with the fully Divine resurrection, whatever that was, and what he accomplished in doing so, is a conversation for another occasion).

 

Of course, the kvetch, as act, does not stand alone.  In clearing the ground of existence, kvetching opens up the space for its most important counterpart, the kvell:  “to be delighted; to be extraordinarily proud; rejoice”.  Without the counterbalancing effect of kvelling, kvetching, which at its best includes at least a grain of humor (or as in Jesus’ case, heartrending urgency), shrinks down to mere whining, in the process losing its life giving vitality.  That kvelling occurs most often in the context of pride in one’s children informs us that the necessary companion to kvetching is compassion for the other.  If God’s Kingdom ever does come, there will still be plenty of kvetching.  But there will be even more kvelling, by all of us for each and every one of us.

 

 

 

Falling Man: A Novel by Don DeLillo

Delillo explores the open wound left by the events of September 11. His prose is raw, stripped down to the bone. Reading "Falling Man", one is carried along on a slow drift through the ashes and the aftermath. On a personal level, I was pre-numbed by my father's terminal brain tumor when the events of September 11 occurred; in clinical terms I was already experiencing isolation of affect, and September 11 just became an echo of the suffering which my psyche was doing its best to keep at bay. "Falling Man" enabled me to at last engage with September 11 in a meaningful way. Delillo shows us how, after an event such as September 11, the strangest thing is the slow creep back to everyday routines and relationships, a strangeness that resembles a constant droning background noise that you can always almost hear.

On His Majesty’s Secret Service

Theories abound as to the reasons for Michael Jordan’s premature first retirement in 1993, at the peak of his powers.  When Jordan left basketball in 1993 it was as if Jesus had walked on water, delivered the sermon on the mount, but then decided to return to a life as a quiet carpenter rather than enter Jerusalem on his donkey and inaugurate the sequence of events that would lead to his crucifixion and subsequent resurrection.   Indeed, after a young Jordan had torched Larry Bird’s Celtics for 63 points in a playoff game, Bird famously quipped “that was God disguised as Michael Jordan.”  By the 1993 NBA Finals Jordan was obviously so much better than everyone else that he was, essentially, temporarily immortal.  And, it seemed, the best was yet to come.  But by October of 1993, Jordan walked away from it all, voluntarily reentering this mortal coil.  Why?

           

            To solve this mystery it is necessary to dispose of the theories that have been making the rounds since 1993.  But first it is important to differentiate Jordan from Bjorn Borg, whose 11 major titles along with his seemingly inscrutable retirement from tennis while still at his physical peak at age 26, may at first glance tempt us to simply pair Michael Jordan circa 1993 with Borg; two rock star athletes who shone brightly and then faded fast.  But in reality the circumstances surrounding Jordan’s and Borg’s respective retirements are in stark contrast.  Borg’s retirement was astonishing only in the sense that Borg was astonished that he had been beaten.  Winning five consecutive Wimbledon’s and being branded a sex symbol in the process had bred in Borg a sense of entitlement.   Tennis was his.  When that brash young New Yorker McEnroe had dared to share tennis’ center stage with Borg, crafting a “rivalry”, Borg was suddenly at sea.  His retirement was nothing more than a case of the child who refuses to share his toys, and instead tromps off the playground and takes them home.  Michael Jordan had no McEnroe.  Basketball, in 1993, was his.

            Which brings us to the first possible theory for Michael Jordan’s early retirement:  he had become so good that it just wasn’t fun anymore, as there wasn’t enough of a challenge.  This argument ignores the central organizing feature of the competitive professional athlete’s psyche, i.e. “It’s good to be king.”  Don’t think for a minute that Jordan didn’t relish every minute of the butt whipping he put on Charles Barkley in the ’93 Finals.  Putatively the ’93 Finals pitted the Chicago Bulls against the Phoenix Suns.  But legendary players like Jordan, Bird, and Barkley literally ARE their teams, making the ’93 Finals effectively Jordan vs. Barkley. This provided Jordan with the opportunity to definitively assert his dominance over Barkley, a player so menacing and physically powerful that he manhandled other power forwards, despite generally giving up a half-foot or more in size (Barkley was generously listed at 6’6”).  Jordan played the best basketball of his career in the ’93 Finals, meaning the best basketball that has ever been played, and in the process crushed Barkley’s will.  Barkley is reported to have realized during the ’93 Finals that he would never be able to beat Jordan.  The 1993 NBA Finals were officially won by the Chicago Bulls; the real triumph was that a man with Barkley’s outsized ego and genius level physical gifts was completely subjugated by Jordan’s dominance.   If you think Jordan didn’t enjoy that then you don’t know the first thing about men.

            Jordan publicly stated at the press conference for his retirement in October of 1993 that he was leaving professional basketball in order to spend more time with his family.  This reason has been given at countless retirement press conferences by celebrities of all stripes, and is a socially acceptable way of stating that one does not wish to give the real reason for one’s retirement.  Like the vast majority of those who had offered this explanation before him, Jordan subsequently spent no more time with his family then he had before retirement.  Playing minor league baseball, Jordan’s retirement activity, required endless hours on buses between minor league burgs.  Jordan, no fool, spent a small portion of his millions on outfitting a charter-style bus with every available luxury, except, of course, a compartment for his family.  As always, the wife and kids stayed home while Jordan was interminably on the road.  Scratch “more time with the family” off the list.

            So did Jordan really quit basketball to pursue his lifelong dream of playing professional baseball?  Perhaps if Jordan had only half the talent at baseball that he did at basketball, which would have made him a heckuva big league player, this argument might hold water.  But Jordan was in over his head as a minor leaguer, and was never more than a novelty act.  Imagine Tiger Woods quitting golf tomorrow in order to pursue his dream of playing professional tennis.  Picture Tiger playing satellite tennis events in Toledo, a couple hundred bucks at stake as he struggles to lift his ranking from #1,047 to #983 in the world, and you can begin to get a sense of the absurdity in play here.  This, plumbing in Toledo instead of acting on Broadway, was effectively what Michael Jordan, Sports Illustrated’s Greatest North American Athlete of the Twentieth Century, was doing in the summer of 1994.  Something, much deeper than a boyhood dream of playing baseball, was at work.

            Which inevitably brings the conspiracy theorists into play.  The conspiracy theory goes as follows:  Jordan, an inveterate gambler, had wracked up seven figure gambling debts to seedy criminal types, attracting the attention of league commissioner David Stern.  An official NBA investigation was well underway during the 1993 offseason.  Per conspiracy theory, Jordan made a backroom deal with Stern, proffering a premature “retirement” in lieu of punishment for betting on sports.  Which makes perfect sense, if you’re talking about Pete Rose.  Like Rose, Jordan is, for whatever reason, drawn to the unseemly world of high stakes gambling.  Unlike Rose, Jordan is nobody’s idiot, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of dollars that Jordan made OFF the court as the greatest celebrity pitchman in history. 

Jordan gratified his gambling jones at casino tables and at the golf course, obtaining whatever satisfaction is to be derived from losing millions of dollars, and perhaps winning some of it back, in those settings.  But Jordan is simply too savvy, too cunning, to piss it all away by betting on sports.  Rose already has that pathetic angle covered.  Stern’s investigation into Jordan’s gambling quietly ended three days after Jordan’s retirement.  Stern undoubtedly learned that Jordan’s gambling habit brought Jordan into contact with what may politely be referred to as society’s less desirable element.  But there is nothing in the NBA collective bargaining agreement that says you can’t lose a million dollars on the golf course to a scum bag.  Say what you will about Stern, about whom conspiracy theories are a dime a dozen, but if he had learned in 1993 that Jordan had bet on NBA games there is absolutely no way Jordan is back in the league a year and a half later.  Stern, even more savvy and cunning than Jordan, knows more than a little about covering his own ass.

The most plausible of all the existent Jordan retirement theories is that he was overcome by grief at the senseless murder of his father, James Jordan, in July of 1993 at the hands of a pair of two-bit thieves.  Indeed, nothing signals to a man the finality of his own mortality more than the death of his father.  But at the time of his father’s death, Jordan had already ascended to temporary immortality; James Jordan’s death did nothing to diminish Jordan’s exalted status.  Had Jordan responded to his father’s death within the framework of basketball it would likely have been to dedicate his efforts on the court to the memory of his father.  Jordan’s premature exit from basketball was in response to a threat to his immortality, but this threat had nothing to do with his father’s death.  Jordan would have known that his own immortality was in no way dependent upon his father’s corporeal existence.  Since Jordan’s temporary immortality had been won on the basketball courts, it was only there that it could be lost.  Enter, stage left, John Starks.

We all have a role to play in fate, no less so John Starks.  Starks’ preordained collision with Jordan was prefigured by the circumstances of his employment by the New York Knicks.  While trying out for the Knicks in 1990, Starks, a tenacious competitor who worked his way into the NBA by way of bagging groceries and navigating a series of community colleges before landing at Oklahoma State, attempted to deliver a dunk in the face of the Knicks Goliath all-star center, Patrick Ewing.  Ewing, appropriately, was having none of it and tossed Starks to the hardwood.  Starks hurt his knee, and due to the severity and duration of the injury the Knicks were unable (under the collective bargaining agreement) to cut Starks; they ended up keeping him and Starks, inevitably, made the most of this shot. 

Fast forward to the 1993 NBA playoffs.  Starks, by now, is entrenched as the Knicks starting shooting guard.  The Knicks are at home in a preliminary round playoff game against Jordan’s Bulls.  In a tight game with 50 seconds remaining in regulation, Starks has the ball in his hands on the perimeter.  Starks, who has a great burst, accelerates easily past his defender and thrusts towards the basket.  In his way is the relatively accomplished Bulls power forward, Horace Grant, who at 6’10” has Starks by five inches.  But Starks demolishes Grant with one of the most explosive dunks in NBA history.  All well and good, and as fantastic as the dunk was, if that was all that had occurred it would have made for a nice ESPN highlight and been forgotten by the next morning’s coffee.  Watching video of the dunk it is clear that the facial is delivered to Grant.  But at the last moment, as Starks delivers the ball through the basket, Jordan enters the frame.  Like the well trained Tar Heel that he was, Jordan was attempting to bail Grant out by providing some much needed “help defense”.   By doing so, Jordan allowed himself to be caught in a still photograph as if he, not Grant, were receiving the facial from Starks. 

By the fall of 1993 this false image, that of Starks humiliating Jordan, had become a truth.  Nothing is more potent in the imagination of the adolescent male than the images found in the posters that adorn his bedroom wall.  Jordan’s temporary immortality lived in the collective imagination of adolescent boys everywhere, a reality illuminated by Jordan iconography hanging on millions of adolescent bedroom walls.  The poster of John Starks dunking over Michael Jordan, though trafficking in illusion, hung on enough walls that the cloud of adolescent adoration on which Air Jordan had ascended to heaven, had begun to noticeably dissipate.  In order to repair the (highly lucrative) symbolic order that governed professional basketball, a symbolic order dependent upon Jordan’s nonpareil status, Starks would have to be punished for a crime he did not commit. 

In order for the symbolic order to be reestablished, a number of remarkable events necessarily had to occur.  First and foremost among these was Jordan’s retirement.  Starks’ punishment would require that he take professional basketball’s biggest stage, the NBA Finals.  In order to get there, Starks’ Knicks would have to first defeat Jordan’s Bulls, which was, of course, impossible.  Jordan’s retirement is so mysterious precisely because it is dependent on an event that is to occur later, temporally.  The cause of Jordan’s retirement was the necessity, per the requirements of the symbolic order, of John Starks’ appearance in the NBA Finals some nine months later.  Jordan himself had no idea why he was retiring, as evidenced by his vapid explanations and lack of any alternative plans at his retirement press conference.  (Cause and effect were still operative in this sequence of events, but they were not bound by the illusion of the linear flow of time from past to present to future that so beguiles us humans.)

With Jordan removed from the scene during the 1993-94 NBA season, the Knicks quickly became the preeminent team in the NBA’s Eastern Conference Scottie Pippen, the Bulls new on-court “leader” in the absence of Jordan, knew better than to upset the symbolic order by leading the Bulls to a championship sans Jordan. In the 1994 Eastern Conference semifinals game 3 against the Knicks, Pippen famously refused to enter the game after a timeout with 1.8 seconds left in regulation.  Pippen was upset that Bulls head coach Phil Jackson had drawn up the last shot for Toni Kukoc rather than Pippen.  Jackson, the greatest coach in professional basketball history, knew that Pippen was the greatest sidekick in basketball history.  He also knew that sidekicks don’t shoot daggers at the end of regulation in the playoffs.  Kukoc calmly stepped onto the court and won the game, defeating the Knicks, but more importantly, effectively emasculating Pippen.  With their best player unmasked as a chump, the Bulls bowed out to the Knicks.  And while Pippen had been disgraced, he had remained true to his subordination to Jordan’s greatness.  No further punishment would be necessary, and Pippen was allowed to remain Jordan’s sidekick as they later cruised to three more championships.      

The Knicks, and Starks, marched into the NBA Finals in June of 1994 where they would face the Houston Rockets.  On the surface, the Finals were a clash between the NBA’s two best big men, Ewing and the Rockets’ Hakeem Olajuwon, who had previously clashed as college players for the NCAA championship.  But, just as in the collegiate final in 1984, this matchup would disappoint.  It’s just not exciting to watch two seven-footers grind against one another two feet from the hoop.  Of course, the real tension of this series was what fate held in store for John Starks.  In order to maximize Starks’ moment of judgment, the Finals went to a rare Game 7, guaranteeing the greatest possible audience for what was to come.  But along the way to that Game 7, a funny thing happened.  The NBC broadcast of Game 5 was hijacked by O.J. Simpson and his white Ford Bronco.  As O.J. and his hostage cruised slowly down the Los Angeles freeway, pursued by 13 police cars and several LAPD helicopters, the NBA Finals had been subsumed in what NBC commentator Bob Costas described as the “surreal”.  This surreal intrusion of primordial chaos in the person of O. J. Simpson foreshadowed the supporting role that Game 7 was to play for a subtler, more fascinating intrusion.   

In Game 7, the symbolic order would extract its pound of flesh from John Starks, who had performed admirably up to this point in the Finals.  With the NBA championship on the line, and with anyone in the world who gave a damn about the game of basketball watching, John Starks had not just the worst night of his career, he had one of the worst nights anyone has ever had on a basketball court, and it could not have come on a bigger stage.  The numbers, while miserable, Starks shot 2 of 18 from the field, and a “perfect” 0 for 11 from the three-point line, don’t even begin to tell the story of how badly things went for Starks.  Because, after he started missing threes, rather than adjust and drive to the hoop for an easy look or a pass to the open man, he just kept shooting, and missing, threes.  Every time it looked like the Knicks might catch up to the Rockets, Starks jacked, and missed, another three.  It was as if someone (or something) outside of Starks were controlling his body, which we now know to be true.

But Starks was not the only one under the control of outside forces that night in Houston.  Knicks Coach Pat Riley, who, along with Phil Jackson and Red Auerbach forms the Three Tenors, if you will, of professional basketball coaches, inexplicably kept Starks in the game.  While Riley’s bench was thin, at some point after another Starks brick in the fourth quarter any of the twenty thousand people in the building would have been an improvement over Starks.  Everyone on the planet watching Game 7 knew that Starks needed to be taken out of that game.  Everyone, that is, except Starks and Riley, who were complicit that night in their (unconscious) service of the symbolic order as they perpetrated the required symbolic death of John Starks.  Years later, in a candid moment during the 2006 NBA Finals, Riley called his handling of Starks in 1993’s Game 7 the biggest coaching mistake of his career, adding that he has never forgiven himself.  Riley has yet to comprehend that he had no choice in the matter.  For, just as Judas’ shortcomings were instrumental in Jesus’ journey towards crucifixion and resurrection, John Starks’ inability to hit the broad side of a barn in Game 7, with a big assist from Coach Riley, was the turning point that restored the symbolic order of the professional basketball universe, enabling the return of the king, his Airness, one short year later.

As a postscript to this story, it is important to note the sad case of Nick Anderson.  Anderson was one of the most promising young players in the NBA when his Orlando Magic faced the Chicago Bulls in the 1995 NBA playoffs, just days after Jordan’s return to basketball.  Trailing the Magic as regulation waned, the Bulls of course handed the ball over to Jordan, fresh off his almost two year exodus from basketball.  In a blink Anderson made his fatal mistake, stealing the ball with shocking ease right out of Jordan’s previously unassailable iron grip, and stealing the series in the process, as the young and talented Magic hurtled towards the NBA Finals.  The symbolic order had been violated, yet again.  Retribution would be swift.  In Game 1 of the NBA Finals, once again featuring those Houston Rockets, Anderson would have four opportunities in the game’s closing seconds to ice the game away at the foul line.  Anderson missed all four, and the Rockets won the game and, eventually, the championship (making the Rockets the ultimate paperweight, as their superstar Olajuwon was just good enough to keep the NBA from floating away during Jordan’s exile).  His own symbolic death accomplished, for all intents and purposes, Nick Anderson was never heard from again. 

There is a lesson in all of this, and it comes dangerously close to “know your place and stick to it”.  But I’d like to believe that John Starks was a modern day Icarus.  When he soared to the rim and dunked over Horace Grant in the vicinity of Michael Jordan, he just got a little too close to the sun.  And though you can’t look directly at the sun, you just might want to take a peak before liftoff.  Just ask John Starks’ ghost.

             

What Price (Fantasy) Glory?

 

My fantasy football league is switching to an auction style draft this year.  Instead of selecting professional football players for our respective fantasy “franchises” in a pre-determined order, each fantasy  “team owner” will have a chance to bid on each and every available player, each using an equivalent pool of imaginary money.  I am a little uncomfortable with the auction format, as it brings the fantasy “team owner” too close to the unacknowledged shadow side of professional sports, which is the symbolic master/slave relationship between “real-life” professional sports franchise owners and their players.  The mind-numbing salaries paid to these players by their “owners” does nothing to destabilize the master/slave relationship, in fact, it chains them ever more tightly to their “owner”, as it is only in the “owner’s” keep that the players can ever amass the vast fortunes that in turn provide a false sense of liberation to the player. 

 

Of course, a professional football player is theoretically able to walk away from the lure of those millions of dollars in a way that really existing slaves never could, at least without risking life and limb.  But of course, they almost never do, and the rare exceptions, Robert Smith leaving the Minnesota Vikings to pursue a medical degree, Pat Tillman leaving the Arizona Cardinals to “fight terrorism” in the US military, simply prove the rule.  Smith and Tillman answered a higher calling, and in doing so found an authentic state of liberation, in direct contrast to the false liberation of professional football’s obscenely inflated slave’s wages.

 

It will, then, be with a sense of trepidation that I engage in my first fantasy football auction draft.  The lighthearted fun of picking players for my fantasy squad, “Dr. Thunder”, transposed now into the auction format, with bids defining an attendant price for each and every player, including zero dollars for the undesirable players, has too much the trace of the really existing slave auction.  The price of entry into my fantasy league has never seemed so high, a price which has nothing to do with the seventy-five really existing dollars necessary to join league play (although I complain about that too).

 

 

Interpreting a Freudian Split

 

            Slavoj Zizek, the renowned Slovenian provacateur and Lacanian psychoanalyst, describes the (in)famous rupture between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thusly:

“(T)he difference between Freud and Jung is insurmountable: the fundamental premise of Freud’s ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ is that the universe is utterly meaningless- it is not structured in compliance with human desires, there is no harmony between microcosm and macrocosm- whereas Jung reinscribes a psychoanalytical problematic into the frame of ‘cosmic principles’ which guarantee correspondences between human life and the universe at large (yin and yang as psychic and cosmic principles, etc.).”

 

            But perhaps the meaninglessness of it all, which was so evident to Freud, is, paradoxically, the very guarantor of meaning.  Jung wrote extensively about the symbolism of the alchemical effort to transform base metals into gold; for Jung the alchemical process represents the process of individuation, the maturation of the soul.  But the process of individuation, melted down (to extend the metaphor) is nothing other than a byproduct of the individual’s day-to-day reckoning with suffering, a suffering which is rooted in the meaningless void into which we are all thrust as human beings.  Freud’s meaningless ground of suffering becomes the fertile soil out of which grows, respectively, the human soul, the insights of history’s religious geniuses, and civilization itself.

 

            Against Zizek, then, the irreconcilable split between Freud and Jung can be recast as a divergence of exploratory interests.  Freud remained until the end transfixed by the problem of human suffering and its relations to the peculiarities of human sexuality.  His vision of psychoanalysis is announced in his famous statement that the best he could do with the psychoanalytical cure was to deliver his patients from the misery of their neuroses to a state of common human unhappiness (not a small accomplishment in and of itself, to be sure).  As pessimistic as Freud’s insistence on meaninglessness and the inevitability of suffering appear, it is a perspective absolutely vital to the endeavor of psychoanalysis, and appropriate to its founding father.  Freud grounded psychoanalysis in the fact of the meaningless void in which humans suffer.  Everything that we humans accomplish grows out of the encounter with existential suffering.  To deny that is to obscure the profound insight of Freud, and to lose psychoanalysis in the process. 

 

            Jung’s ability to comprehend “man and his symbols”, what Zizek labels “cosmic principles”, comes from standing on Freud’s shoulders, as must all psychoanalysts worthy of the name.  That Jung found meaning where Freud found none simply indicates where Jung’s genius differed from Freud’s; Jung’s genius lay in his willingness to bring psychoanalysis with him as he made the leap that each of the world’s great faiths inspire.  The leap to discover what mysterious, ineffable meaning emerges from the shivering, suffering human soul’s encounter with the meaningless void.  If God exists anywhere, it is there, in the least likely of places, right in front of us in our eternal suffering.  That Jung finds God in the best hiding place of all, the very place that Freud, and Zizek, believe obliterates the very possibility of God, is a testament only to Jung’s willingness to follow Freud’s lead up to the edge that Freud defined as the limit of psychoanalysis, and walk right over the cliff.

 

            We are left, inescapably, with one question: where would we have psychoanalysis lead us?

 

Horseshoes, Anyone?:  Towards an Understanding of Male Sexuality

 

            There is more than meets the eye when it comes to the game of horseshoes.  Traditionally played by men gathered in social settings such as backyard barbeques or VFW halls, horseshoes is the quintessential male bonding activity.  Horseshoes, as a reenactment of the sexual chase, unites men in the shared experience of sexual follies and triumphs.  Each toss of the horseshoe represents a pass at a female of the species.  Inevitably, most tosses of the horseshoe miss their mark, just as in real life most male efforts to attract the opposite sex result in failure; were this not the case we males would all tout Wilt Chamberlainesque sexual resumes.  But the law of averages is with the male, and if he persists in the hunt eventually a female shall, ahem, succumb to his charms.  Throw enough horseshoes and eventually you will score a ringer, horseshoe wrapping itself suggestively around the post.  Bringing us to some rather obvious and unavoidable symbolism….

            

There is a common saying, “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.”  Leaving aside for the moment the implications of this phrase for the endeavor of warfare, it is a key marker of the importance of horseshoes as a male bonding activity.  In horseshoes, the ringer, while sublime, is not the only way to score points.  Get close enough to the target, and points are accrued.  What this tells us is that what brings individual men into the community of men is not the achievement of sexual conquest; you don’t have to get laid to be a man.  As always, the journey is far more important than the destination.  To enter the community of men one must simply make a reasonable effort to get laid.  This participation in the sexual hunt is all that is required to enter the realm of socially defined manhood.  Whether, or who, you’re shagging is beside the point.  Along these lines, not only does “close count” in horseshoes, one ringer is as good as the next. 

Perhaps this explains the general acceptance of the ideal of lifelong monogamy among heterosexual men.  Marriage, as permanent symbol of participation in the sexual hunt, stabilizes membership in the male social bond.  All hunts that end in marriage achieve, in the language of horseshoes, the never-ending ringer, elevating all married “hunters” to the same sublime status, at the same time defusing potentially destructive sexual rivalries among the hunters.  If all ringers are equal, and if all marriages bestow the never-ending ringer, then the community of men is ideally one of equals.  Unmarried hunters are granted full equality of membership, as long as they are engaged in the hunt.  Close DOES count in horseshoes.

The stability of the male social bond is problematized by the presence of the homosexual male.  The homophobic male fear of being labeled a homosexual is nothing other than the fear of being excluded from the male social bond.  The act of male homosexuality is, within the heterosexual male framework, the act of exiting the heterosexual male social bond.  This was illustrated in the famous Seinfeld episode when Jerry and George repeatedly and emphatically proclaim themselves not to be homosexuals, on each occasion adding “not that there is anything wrong with that” (i.e. wrong with homosexuality).  George and Jerry were clearly voicing the truth of heterosexual male homophobia.  From a heterosexual male perspective there is “nothing wrong” with sexual relations between men, in and of itself.  What is “wrong” with male homosexuality, the “threat” that exists in being perceived as homosexual, is the very real danger of being excluded from the heterosexual male social bond.  In the heterosexual male universe, male homosexuality only functions to mark off the boundaries of membership in the heterosexual male social bond. 

This logic is on display with the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the United States military.  “Don’t ask, don’t tell” specifies that there is nothing inherently wrong with the gay male soldier; he is the straight male warrior’s equal in every respect, just as long as his sexuality remains unstipulated.  Even if his sexuality is an open secret, the gay male warrior is accorded full membership in the heterosexual male bond which is the symbolic glue that binds the US military into a cohesive fighting force, an Olympic horseshoes team, if you will.  But once the gay warrior is formally unmasked, his sexuality revealed to the big Other, the symbolic order that maintains US military cohesion is destabilized.      

The instability of the heterosexual male social bond comes into further relief when compared to the rock solid stability of the female social order.  Unlike men, who must compete in horseshoes in order to be accepted as men in the social bond, females must simply achieve menses in order to achieve womanhood.  In this sense, there are no “gay” or “straight” women, just women.  This is why women’s sexuality is frequently and insightfully referred to as “fluid” in a way that the male social bond would never sanction in a man; a woman can sleep with whomever she wishes without ever endangering her status in the female social bond, a status guaranteed by the fact of her biology, while the male’s status as man is stricto sensu defined by who he is sleeping, or attempting to sleep with.   The same reasoning explains not only why men are turned on by “lesbian” porn (granted that the on-screen “lesbians” are of the male fantasy variety), but why it is acceptable in the male social bond to be turned on by hot “lesbian” sex, i.e. there are no “gay” women, just women, so the shadow of homosexuality, the shadow of social banishment, never intrudes on the straight male’s arousal.  In fact, it is said that the truth serum for a man’s sexuality is his arousal, or lack thereof, in response to (male fantasy) “lesbian” porn.  All of this to say that there’s only one kind of horseshoe, the kind that is to be tossed at the post.  It is completely irrelevant, from the horseshoe player’s perspective, why a toss misses the post.  You simply move on to the next horseshoe.  If two errantly tossed horseshoes happen to land on top of one another and intertwine, well the game just goes on as if nothing happened at all.  And, according to the rules of horseshoes, nothing really has.  

Gay males, by definition, can’t play horseshoes.  And, like it or not, for the straight American male in 2009, horseshoes remains the only game in town.  If, as Freud famously postulated, we humans are all actually bisexual, perhaps it is time for a new backyard barbeque pastime.  Tiddlywinks anyone? 

If It Sounds Too Good To Be True....

Apparent wellness, or the absence of observable neuroses, is most often an advanced capacity in the individual for complying with social norms, and is, as such, its own (well disguised) form of neurosis.  Social norms are indispensable in helping us manage to get along with one another, but strict conformity to these norms does nothing to broaden the soul.  A life defined by social correctness dressed up as "sanity" is as stable as the first little pig's straw house when, as they inevitably do, things fall apart.  The extreme exemplar of this phenomenon is the "perfect" college student: straight A's, varsity sports, good looking in a typical fashion, socially and sexually successful, paired with an attractive boyfriend or girlfriend.  But the process of achieving social perfection can so utterly alienate the late adolescent from the process of suffering and enduring everyday pains and humiliations (think bad acne, unacceptable fashion, prolonged virginity, the list of transgressions is almost endless, making the "perfect" adolescent's "accomplishment" all the more astounding and shedding light on where this is headed) that little by little chisel a human soul.  This process of achieving  true social, i.e. external, "perfection" hollows out the late adolescent's soul or internal life with a brutal finality, so that in the end her only means of retrieving her lost soul from its imprisonment in the social sphere is by violating the sine qua non of the social order, the suicide taboo.  Suicide, here, is a tragic act of liberation.

Translated into Buddhist language, this (in)sane figure is similar to the master practitioner of Samsara, who lives a life of comfort and ease, safely sealed off from suffering and assorted discomforts.  Deep in the womb of Samsara, he will be birthed into trauma when things fall apart, as they inevitably do.  Even, and especially, if this birth is the moment of death.