Tag Archives: Angels in America

Change Involves, “Mangled Guts Pretending.”

3 Replies

How do people change?  I’ve always been curious about this issue for I knew very early in life that I needed to change.  Here are two pithy observations about this question, one from-13th century Persion mystic,Rumi and the other from a mere two decades by American playwright, Tony Kushner.

The Worm’s Waking

There is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.

Suddenly, he wakes up,

call it Grace, whatever,

something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.

He is the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,

the fruit, the trunks,

a growing wisdom and joy

that does not need to devour.

Kushner’s play “Angels in America offers a scene in which the internal tension of change is vividly put into words, presented here as a gut-wrenching experience involving a Divine encounter.  Fortunately, most of the time it is merely discomforting or stressful as people like myself do not have the brilliant, sensitive, artistic

temperament of people like Kushner.  Here is a quotation from one memorable scene:

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. 

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That’s how people change. 

December 10, 2020 Conservation

The socio/cultural/political morass which weighs down on us at this moment is very unnerving, even frightening matter; this is because it is a cosmic identity crosis, at least for one teeny-weeny little culture on this “Third Rock From the Sun.” It is teaching us so much about the ego, individually and collectively.

The development of our ego is a monumental event in our life. It is intrinsic to our ability to negotiate what the infant will discover as “reality”, a crisis in which twin poles of our Divinity war with each other. When our ego begins to come into existence, to come online, it struggles within its nascent existence as it loathes discovering its finitude. Only moments earlier, this very core of our being is enconsed in the womb of “no-thingsness” and is on the verge of making the decision to “fall” into this world of existants or remained in the comfortable, Edenic womb.

winnicott’s break down

Tony Kusher, “Change Is Difficult”

2 Replies

How do people change?  Well, most of us don’t; we start out lives in a rut, learn to cling to that rut, find others in a similar rut, take comfort there and try not to deviate.  To deviate is scary.  There is comfort in sameness.  When “deviance” presents itself…and any “difference” often evokes the fear of “deviance”… we are prone to put up the sign of the cross and run away.

But change is part of life.  Life is fluid; and its flow takes us different directions at times and if we resist that flow we will find ourselves in a static dimension of life.  Technically, that is “death.” However, if we are firmly ensconced in “stati-ticity” we will never make this discovery as it would be troubling to the safety we have found there.  There is comfort in living in the bubble.

Playwright Tony Kushner, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his play, “Angels in America.”  In this powerful play there is a scene which the internal tension of change is vividly put into words; here it is presented as  gut-wrenching, which at times it can be.  Fortunately, most of the time it is merely discomforting or stressful as people like myself do not have the brilliant, sensitive, artistic temperament of people like Kushner.  Here is a quotation from one memorable scene:

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching. 

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That’s how people change. 

Change is so painful as it often requires questioning the premises by which we have lived our life.  And “God” is involved often as the change involves premises that lie in the inner most part of our being, basic assumptions that we take for granted and would prefer continuing to do so.  This can be unnerving.  Theologian Paul Tillich understood this when he wrote a book entitled, “The Shaking of the Foundations” based on one of his sermons in which he presented the teachings of Jesus as intended for such a “rattling of our collective cage.”

The culture of my country is in turmoil because of the tension between the need for change and the need to maintain the status quo.  These needs are necessary in any social body and even in any individual psyche.  If any of these opposing impulses prevails to the exclusion of the other, catastrophe will take place.  The need is for some “over-arching” concern that can unite the two, can offer an harmony in dedication to a common cause.