|
Audio: Listen to this post.
|
Raymond Carver, in the short story “Where I’m Calling From,”[1] arguably his masterpiece, abandoned the traditional narrative established by Aristotle 2,500 years ago. In in his Poetics, Aristotle examined what made Greek tragedies successful. He observed that “tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete and whole, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well-constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard but conform to these principles.”[2]
These principles seem abstract and obscure but are simply illustrated by a well-told joke.
Jesus walks into a bar.
The bartender asks him, “Sir, what would you like?”
Jesus replies, “I’ll have a glass of water.”
“That’s all you want?”
“Yes,” Jesus answers. “I will change the water into wine later.”
The beginning, middle, and end are obvious, as is the tension and resolution. In a traditional narrative, this pattern is repeated many times, and the various resolutions may be positive and comforting or negative and disturbing; in some cases, the tension is unresolved.
To write an excellent Greek tragedy, such as Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, or an ensemble movie script, such as Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, requires focus and discipline. Most of us wander in our thinking and storytelling, which is readily seen in seminars on classic texts. Suppose the opening question of a seminar is, “What does Tocqueville mean by equality of conditions?” Three minutes later, the participants are discussing the siege of Richmond. Through associations, the discussion hurried from equality of conditions to slavery to Ken Burn’s Civil War to the Siege of Richmond. And soon, if the seminar leader did not intervene, the discussion would have moved on to the film Gone with the Wind and Clark Gable’s last line: “Frankly, my dear. I don’t give a damn.” There is, of course, no logical, physical, or psychological connection between the equality of conditions and Gable’s exit line. If we step back and examine our “thinking,” we would find, perhaps to our amusement, that much of what we take for thinking is the mere association of ideas that often has nothing to do with the actual structure of the world or the interior life.
When Carver abandoned the traditional narrative structure, he adopted associative thinking, which is much closer to our interior life. What holds the narrative of “Where I’m Calling From” together are three images of space: the dry well, the fireplace chimney, and the cozy bedroom.
The story begins with J.P. and the narrator sitting on the front porch of Frank Martin’s drying-out facility. J.P. and the narrator are drunks. Less than a week before, J.P. was brought into Frank Martin’s for the first time by his brother-in-law and his father-in-law. The narrator, slightly older than J.P., checked himself in for the second time two weeks before. The narrator is smoking cigarettes and is thinking more of lunch than listening to J.P. ramble on until J.P. tells the defining event of his life. When he was twelve years old, he fell into a dry well near the farm he grew up on. At the bottom of the well, all he could see was a “circle of blue sky” directly above him. He “suffered all kinds of terror in that well, hollering for help, waiting, and then hollering some more.” Alone and terrified that no one would come to save him, J.P. wet his pants. “Everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.” Although occasionally a white cloud passed over the blue circle and even a flock of birds, “nothing closed off that little circle of blue,” J.P.’s circle of hope that someone would save him. His dad appeared with a rope, and soon J.P. was “back in the world,” but J.P. told the narrator that “being at the bottom of that well had made a lasting impression” on him.
In his minimalist storytelling, Carver presents J.P. much as we would meet him in real life. We do not know what falling in the dry well has to do with J.P.’s alcoholism. All we know is that his explanation of why he is at Frank Martin’s drying-out facility begins with falling in the dry well. Carver refuses to be an omniscient narrator who has access to the interior life of J.P.; he forces us to use our understanding of human relations and our imaginations to speculate about J.P.’s interior life.
We can safely assume that like Homer and Sophocles, like Tolstoy and Hemingway, Carver desires to show us something important that is commonly shared by men and women. If we read literally “Where I’m Calling From,” J.P. would be of no interest, for virtually no one has the experience of falling into a dry well. The readers of the short story must see what is universal about such an experience. What corresponds in the real world to J.P.’s total isolation from others? Unlovable. If I am unlovable, no one wants to hang out with me, no one wants to share the good things of life with me, no one cares what happens to me or how I fare in life. I may not be detestable, but I do not have a single friend to confide in; my “colleagues” at work treat me with indifference, even my mother dislikes me. If I die tomorrow, no one will care. I am at the bottom of the well; “the circle of blue sky” for me is the desperate hope that someone will come along and pull me out of the well through love.
This reading of the dry well is confirmed by what J.P. later says about his life. After hearing the defining story of J.P.’s life, the narrator is now intrigued and says, “Keep talking, J.P. Then what?”
Six or seven years later, when he was eighteen or nineteen years old, out of high school, and with no idea what he wanted to do with his life, J.P. visited a friend to drink beer and gab about nothing. Soon, the doorbell rings. The friend opens the door and sees a young woman chimney sweep with her cleaning things; her name is Roxy. She’s wearing a top hat, the sight of which knocks J.P. for a loop. Roxy goes to work and cleans the chimney while J.P. and his friend play records and drink beer. They raise their eyebrows when the upper half of Roxy’s body disappears into the chimney.[3]
Roxy finished her work and took a check made out to her by his friend’s parents. Then, she asks the friend if he wants to kiss her. “It’s supposed to bring good luck,” she says. His friend shyly pecks Roxy’s cheek. J.P. puts his beer down, gets up from the sofa, and goes over to Roxy as she is starting to go out the door. “Me, too?” J.P. says to her.
“Sure,” Roxy says. “Why not? I’ve got some extra kisses.” And she kisses him a good one right on the lips and then turns to go.
J.P. follows Roxy out the door and blurts out that he would like to see her again. They arrange a phone call for that evening. J.P. is in love, filled with unfamiliar sensations carrying him every which way. He realizes what he wants to do with his life. He wants to do what Roxy does. He wants to be a chimney sweep.
J.P. and Roxy start going on dates, to the movies and dances. J.P. talks Roxy into letting him go along with her on her jobs. Soon, their courtship revolves around cleaning chimneys together. The fireplace chimney replaced the dry well of his youth. Roxy with her love has pulled him out of the well; he can now stand in a chimney (the well) and not experience the pain of total isolation from others.
They marry, and soon Roxy has two children; she quits working to care for her children and leaves J.P. to work alone. Looking back on these days, J.P. says, “I was happy. I had everything I wanted. I had a wife and kids I loved, and I was doing what I wanted to do with my life.” Then, he begins drinking, first beer and later gin-and-tonics. The narrator offers no reason for J.P.’s drinking; he merely says, “Who knows why we do what we do?” Once again, the readers are forced to give a reason for J.P.’s behavior. The reason here is simple: J.P. sees Roxy’s love of her children and the time spent with them as a withdrawal of her love from him; J.P. is slowly slipping into the well, and he drinks to relieve the pain of being unlovable.
J.P. and Roxy begin to have real fights. She breaks his nose; he dislocates her shoulder. Somehow, Roxy manages to find a boyfriend, and when J.P. finds out, he goes crazy, fights with Roxy, gets her wedding ring off her finger, and cuts it into several pieces with a pair of wire cutters. J.P. is at the bottom of the well.
The narrator confesses to J.P. that he and his girlfriend arrived at the drying-out facility drunk. She left, and he guesses she got home okay. What precipitated this drunk was that several days before, she had received news that her Pap smear was not good and that she should see her doctor as soon as possible.
J.P.’s first Sunday at the drying-out facility, Roxy visits him for lunch. She always calls him by his given name, Joe. Carver in his short stories carefully assigns names. Think of the difference between J.P. and Joey. The latter name suggests a friendly person everyone likes to be around; the abstract name J.P. conveys no image, and this chosen name indicates that Joe sees himself disconnected from others. And the same is true of the narrator; we do not know his name.
Roxy and J.P. go in for lunch, and the narrator begins thinking about chimney sweeps, and for no apparent reason, he recalls a house that he and his wife once lived in, a house without a chimney. One Sunday morning, at twilight, he hears something scrape against the side of the house. Nude, he jumps out of bed and goes to the window to look.
His wife laughs and says, “It’s Mr. Venturini. I forgot to tell you. He said he was coming to paint the house today. Early. Before it gets too hot. I forgot all about it.” She laughs again and says, “Come on back to bed, honey. It’s just him.”
Instead, he goes to the window and sees an old man in coveralls that are too big for him and wearing a baseball cap to cover his bald head. The narrator remembers, Goddamn it. If he isn’t a weird old fellow. And a wave of happiness comes over me that I’m not him—that I’m me and that I’m inside this bedroom with my wife.
Twilight, a cozy bedroom two stories up, in bed nude with one’s beloved is the antipode of alone, standing at the bottom of a dry well; these two images, one of unlovable and the other of lovable, are the beginning and the end of “Where I’m Calling From.”
The coda is the narrator thinking of calling his wife before his girlfriend. If his wife answers the phone, she will ask him where he is calling from, and he will have to tell her Frank Martin’s drying-out facility, but the real place he is calling from is the bottom of the well.
The Unlovable
“Where I’m Calling From” does not resolve the tension between being lovable and unlovable; it is as if the author observed events that he suspects are of great significance, but he is not sure why, something that a few of us may have experienced. Carver forces us to move beyond his story, and many of us will do that in different ways.
For my part, I recalled a story about His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In private conversation, His Holiness asked several well-known American teachers of Buddhism, “What kinds of challenges are you facing?” Sharon Salzberg replied that one challenge we face is that so many of the people who come to us to learn how to practice meditation hate themselves. His Holiness said, “No, they don’t; impossible.” In traditional Tibetan and ancient Indian cultures, there is no notion of self-hatred, and the foremost spiritual obstacle is self-centeredness, or inordinate self-love. To say self-hatred in the Tibetan language is difficult, but when His Holiness understood what was said, he was shocked.[4]
Being in the well is a common experience in modern life, as is confirmed by the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, begun in 1985 at Kaiser Permanente San Diego. The ACE Study correlated current adult health status to childhood experiences decades earlier. The average age of 17,421 adults in the Study led by Vincent Felitti was 57, with almost half men and half women. The racial makeup was eighty percent White, ten percent Black, ten percent Asian, and slightly less than one percent Native American. Seventy-four percent had attended college; everyone had high-end medical insurance. Clearly, a middle-class population. Robert Anda, the epidemiologist for the Study, observed, “It’s not just them; it’s us.”[5]
Because the average study participant was 57 years old, the Study measured the effect of childhood experiences on adult health status a half-century later. Furthermore, Felitti and his colleague monitored their large cohort of participants for at least five years. Given the statistics, the surprising results of the Study are indisputable.
The ACE Study is the most important medical study in the second half of the twentieth century. Felitti correctly claimed that “the findings are important medically, socially, and economically: They provide remarkable insight into how we become what we are as individuals and as a nation.” Given the Study’s conclusions, modern Western medicine focuses on “tertiary consequences far downstream” from the source of many diseases.[6]
The Study considered ten categories of adverse childhood experiences that generally are kept as family secrets and hidden further by shame and social taboos. The ten categories were 1) recurrent humiliation; “you are the stupidest kid I’ve ever seen;” experienced by eleven percent of the participants in the Study 2) heavy-duty physical abuse; severe beatings with fists, sticks, or other objects; twenty-three percent 3) contact sexual abuse; twenty-eight percent for women and sixteen percent for men 4) major emotional neglect; fifteen percent 5) significant physical neglect; ten percent 6) growing up in a home where the mother was treated violently; eleven percent 7) someone in the home was an alcoholic or a user of street drugs; twenty-six percent 8) a family member was chronically depressed, suicidal, or in a state hospital; twelve percent; 9) not having biological parents present in the home; what was most devastating was maternal abandonment; twenty-four percent 10) one family member was imprisoned; five percent.
The researchers created an ACE score that tabulated not the number of events but the number of categories. In this obviously middle-class population, sixty-seven percent had an ACE score of one or higher; eleven percent, one in nine participants, had a score of five or higher. A key finding was that a person with an ACE score of six or higher had a shortened life expectancy of almost twenty years and was 22.2 times more likely to commit suicide than an individual with an ACE score of zero. An adult with an ACE score of four or higher had 1.9 times the odds of getting cancer and 2.2 more likely of having ischemic heart disease, the number one killer in the United States.[7]
The Ace Study established beyond dispute that regardless of income, race, or access to care, adverse childhood experiences are a risk factor for the most common serious diseases in America. Yet, the medical community ignored this landmark study published in 1998 probably because the Study applied to all of us, not just the marginalized, and because the study exposed the what not the how. Felitti and his fellow researchers offered no explanation for how having an ACE score of four or more increased the chances of an individual fracturing a bone by 1.6 times and for developing diabetes by the same likelihood. No apparent connection exists between breaking bones and high blood sugar.
How the Body Responds to Adverse Childhood Experiences
Jacqueline Bruce and her fellow researchers suspected that adverse childhood experiences affected cortisol levels. The researchers compared the morning cortisol levels of 117 maltreated 3- to 6-year-olds in foster care with non-maltreated 3- to 6-year-olds living consistently with at least one biological parent. In this latter group, household income was less than $30,000, parental education was less than a 4-year college degree, and the family did not have any previous involvement with child welfare services.[8]
In this study, published in 2009, severe physical neglect meant parental failure to provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, or medical care; emotional maltreatment designated parental rejection, abandonment, or failure to protect children from witnessing traumatic events. The researchers discovered that “maltreated foster children showed significant alterations in their morning cortisol production compared to non-maltreated children. . . . The foster children with low morning cortisol levels had experienced more severe physical neglect, whereas the foster children with high morning cortisol levels had experienced more severe emotional maltreatment.”
Bruce and her colleagues suggested that a physically neglected child has chronic stress that decreases cortisol production; in contrast, an emotionally maltreated child is subjected to periodic acute stress that makes her hypervigilant, which increases cortisol levels. These stress patterns are carried over into adult life, which explains the correlation between ACE scores and many diseases in adulthood. For instance, high cortisol levels counteract insulin and bone formation and thus lead to diabetes and bone fractures. Low levels of cortisol are implicated in autoimmune disorders. The researchers noted that “high morning cortisol levels might be an adaptive response to the unpredictable, acute stressors experienced within emotionally maltreating environments. However, it is likely that this initially adaptive pattern of cortisol production would be less adaptive in new environments and would be detrimental to the children over time.”
Self-Hatred
At least six categories of the ACE Study cause the child to think she is worthless and unlovable. For instance, repeated humiliation produces “unbearable feelings of loneliness, despair, and inevitable rage of helplessness. Rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self, in the form of depression, self-hatred, and self-destructive actions.”[9]
Consider Pam, seven years old, an only child, living with both working parents who recently bought a “nice” house in a suburb of Boston. Every Saturday morning is devoted to a family activity, cleaning the house. Invariably, her father, in a lousy mood, lines Pam up against a wall and shouts at her, “You are the stupidest kid in the world. Why can’t you ever do anything right?”
Pam experiences almost unbearable emotional pain; her father belittled her and reduced her to worthlessness. She has only two explanations; either her father is a bad person or she is. Pam knows that alone she is helpless and needs her father for survival, for food, shelter, and clothing, but above all else, she wants her father’s unconditional love, so her father cannot be a bad person. Without her father, she is lost, and she concludes that she is the bad person and not worthy of love. Pam suppresses her anger toward her father for his unjust treatment of her and, instead, directs her rage against herself.
Two paths are open to Pam. One: She is so unlovable that self-hatred controls her life. As a teenager and later as a young adult, she engages in self-destructive behavior—alcohol, street drugs, promiscuous sex, anything that will slowly kill her, a wretched being, anything that confirms her worthlessness.
Two: She will show her father and the world that she is worthy of love. Pam may decide to demonstrate that she is lovable by becoming physically attractive, a charming woman no one dislikes; everyone admires her beauty and grace. Or she may earn a Ph. D. in mathematics to prove that she was always the smartest kid on the block. Or she may go to graduate school at Stanford and then join the leadership team of one of the biggest firms in Silicon Valley. In our gender-fluid society, she may be the only source of income for her family; her spouse quits his job and becomes a stay-at-home dad.
But not one of these futures is satisfying. Underneath the success is the nagging fear that she is not loved for who she is. No one wants to be loved only for economic success, intellectual achievement, or physical beauty. Earned love always leaves the lingering doubt that one is not loved for oneself but for the status and pleasure that accrues to others. Earned love cannot be a substitute for unconditional love.
Despite the dissatisfaction, Pam is now addicted to the course of action she chose to earn love from others; being attractive, smart, or successful almost works; maybe the next time it will; so, Pam does Botox, writes another mathematics paper, or moves up to a better job—and on and on it goes, in an impossible, tragic quest for love. Her survival strategy as a child—I am unworthy of love—kept her connected to her father but was disastrous for her when carried over into adult life. To get out of the well by making oneself more lovable never works.
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh observed that “people have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”[10]
Consider Katie, a patient of Alex Howard, the Founder of The Optimum Health Clinic and Conscious Life. Katie complained of depression, lack of motivation, and loneliness. She said, “I’ve been craving all my life to be loved and nurtured and cherished. I don’t know what it feels like to be unconditionally loved and to be the most important thing in somebody else’s eyes. I always felt unlovable.”[11]
Alex told Katie, “I think part of the reason why that’s so painful is because of the emotional neglect that you experienced as a child.”
A local firm sought Katie for a new job. She was shortlisted, interviewed, and offered the job. The same day she accepted the position, one of the campaigns she ran the previous year was nominated for an award. Instead of being elated over her new job and the nomination, her response to the good news was, “Why am I doing this? You know, it’s all about seeking validation to prove to the world that I’m good enough, but it’s a big, big, big load of shit; I’m really none of those things. I want to just be me, but like I said, at the beginning, I don’t even know who me is.”
Katie is caught in a double bind. From her adverse childhood experience, she concluded she was unlovable, which may have served her well as a child but not as an adult. Her success in the workplace earned her praise and commendations, not the unconditional love Katie yearned for. But to give up her identity as an unlovable wretch would require her to enter the scary domain of not knowing who she is. As much as Katie hates her life, it is not as painful as having no identity, free-floating in a void.
No One Is Condemned to Being Unlovable
In 1939, William T. Grant gave Harvard University several million dollars to fund a unique opportunity to follow a group of promising young men for a lifetime. At the time, the wisdom of William James, the great American psychologist, ruled medicine: Human development at age thirty was over. It took the Harvard Study of Adult Development until the twenty-first century to convincingly prove William James wrong. Following 268 men from adolescence until ninety-five showed that we not only change as we age, but we become more empathic.
Consider Godfrey Camille, a participant in the Harvard Study.[12] He had the bleakest childhood in the Study; his parents were upper-middle class, socially isolated, incompetent, and pathologically suspicious. Later in life, Camille confessed that he neither liked nor respected his parents.
As a college student, Camille sought love and care through frequent visits to the infirmary. In his junior year, the usually sympathetic physician contemptuously dismissed him with the evaluation, “This boy is turning into a regular psychoneurotic.”
On the tenth anniversary of joining the study, each man was given an A through E rating, anticipating future personality stability. When it was Camille’s turn, he was assigned an E. The Study consensus was that he was “not fitted for the practice of medicine.” Nevertheless, he went to medical school, and shortly after graduation, he attempted suicide. He was overwhelmed by the thought that he would have to take care of other people when he could not take care of himself.
At the age of thirty-five, Camille had a life-changing experience. He was hospitalized for fourteen months with pulmonary tuberculosis. His time in the hospital was like a religious rebirth: “Someone with a capital ‘S’ cared for me,” he said, and, of course, he received months of loving care from nurses. Camille gave up his search for love and transformed his life by dedicating himself to the love and care of others. As a result of the change of orientation from the needs of self to the welfare of others, he founded a clinic, got married, and became an excellent father. By loving others, he received the abundant love that had been absent during the first half of his life.
In his fiftieth Harvard reunion autobiography, Camille wrote, “Before there were dysfunctional families, I came from one. My professional life hasn’t been disappointing—far from it—but the truly gratifying unfolding has been into the person I’ve slowly become: comfortable, joyful, connected, and effective. Since it wasn’t widely available then, I hadn’t read the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, which tells how connectedness is something we must let happen to us, and then we become solid and whole.
“As that tale recounts tenderly, only love can make us real. Denied this in boyhood for reasons I now understand, it took me years to tap substitute sources. What seems marvelous is how many there are and how restorative they prove. What durable and pliable creatures we are, and what a storehouse of goodwill lurks in the social fabric.”
Godfrey Camille discovered in his journey through life that began with a bleak, painful childhood that if a person never received unconditional love as a child, he is not condemned to a loveless life. A person gets out of the well not by becoming more lovable but by loving others.
Main image by John Hain courtesy of Pixabay.
Endnotes
[1] Raymond Carver, “Where I’m Calling From” in Cathedral: Stories (New York: Random House, 1983).
[2] Aristotle, Poetics, 1450b21-34.
[3] My chimney sweep said that he has never seen a fireplace chimney that he could stand up in, nor has any of his colleagues he contacted around the country. Carver’s realism, in the main, ignores the physical world, for he concentrates on human behavior, which he does extraordinarily well. For instance, the storytelling of J.P. and the narrator does not follow a beginning, a middle, and an end; everything is scrambled together by association as if neither of them could tell a joke properly.
[4] See John Dunne, Self-Compassion & Going Forth, a Dharma Talk given at the Upaya Institute and Zen Center, Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 15, 2021.
[5] Robert Anda, quoted by Jane Ellen Stevens, The Adverse Childhood Experiences Study—the largest, most important public health study you never heard of—began in an obesity clinic, October 3, 2012. Available https://acestoohigh.com/2012/10/03/the-adverse-childhood-experiences-study-the-largest-most-important-public-health-study-you-never-heard-of-began-in-an-obesity-clinic/.
[6] See Vincent J. Felitti et al., Relationship of Childhood Abuse and Household Dysfunction to Many of the Leading Causes of Death in Adults, 1998; Vincent J. Felitti, The Relation Between Adverse Childhood Experiences and Adult Health: Turning Gold into Lead, Winter, 2002; and Vincent Felitti: Reflections on the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, June 21, 2016.
[7] Since the original ACE Study was published, thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia have collected ACE data. The data shows that between 55 and 62 percent of their populations had experienced at least one ACE category, and between 13 and 17 percent had an ACE score of four or more. See K. Gilbert et al., “Childhood Adversity and Adult Chronic Disease: An Update from Ten States and the District of Columbia, 2010. American Journal of Preventative Medicine 48, no. 3 2015): 345-49.
[8] Jacqueline Bruce et al., “Morning Cortisol Levels in Preschool–Aged Foster Children: Differential Effects of Maltreatment Type,” Developmental Psychobiology 51, no. 1 (2009): 14-23.
[9] Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Penguin, 2015), p. 136.
[10] Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life (New York: Bantam Books, 1991).
[11] Rediscover who you are | Katie #2 | In Therapy with Alex Howard (Available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHTdI5Duq_s) and How to shift a NEGATIVE STATE | In Therapy with Alex Howard (Available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM-V4M1LjA4).
[12] George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 44-51 and George E. Vaillant, From emotionally crippled to loving personality (Ted Talk, November 2014).