Tag Archives: Marriage

Ermines and Marriages

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DOG AND MASTER
by Henri Cole

Consider the ermine—
territorial, noxious, thieving—
its dense fur whitening
when light is reduced.
Mesmerizing its victims

with a snake dance,
killing with a bite to
the back of the neck.
Born blind, deaf, and toothless,
the male is called a “dog,”

a roamer, a strayer,
a transcient. But huddled
in my arms for warmth,
with my fingernails
stroking his underbelly,

he forgets his untamable
nature. His rounded
hips shiver like mine.
In folklore, he holds the soul
of a dead infant; and in life

he prefers to give himself
up when hunted, rather
than soil himself. Thus is
civilization, I think, roughly
stroking his small ears.

But then suddenly
I’m chasing him around
the dining room screaming,
No, I told you, no! like two stupidly
loving, stupidly hating

creatures in a violent
marriage, or some weird
division of myself,
split off and abandoned
in order to live.

(Need I say more? Well, of course not. But that would never stop me so I’ll add one note: makes me think of the oft-quoted Auden wisdom, “We wage the war we are.”)

A Poem about Parents, Family, Sex, and Life

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I never had children. I guess it was not in the cards though I fear it was merely a lack of faith, a lack of faith in the Universe and in God and confidence in myself and my wife, though mainly myself. I guess I thought too much about it and I always remember what Hamlet said about his own tendency to think too much, saying that if this pensiveness were “quartered, it would be one part wisdom and three parts cowardice.”

Here is a beautiful poem by Sharon Olds as she conjectures about her own conception, eloquently describing her parents meeting in college, the story of their life together, the doubts and fears of their marriage, and the sexual union which produced herself. Olds’ image of coitus is just stunningly beautiful, consummately poetic.

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

“The Silver Lining Playbook” and Mental Illness

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Oh I just love mental illness! How could I not, having been a “mental health counselor”. You see, many eons ago, human culture realized that they had a bunch of people on their hands who “just didn’t get it” and started calling them…for lack of a better term…”nuts.” So, they rounded them all up, tossed a ton of money their way, and said, “Go amuse yourselves.” (One might say, “Go pleasure yourselves!”) So, the “village idiots” congregated on the hinterland and shortly thereafter divided up between the “mental health providers” and the “mentally ill.” I fortunately managed to gain admission to the former group though I’m sure that some of my family and friends would beg to differ with me!

But, seriously, I find mental illness fascinating on so many levels. I’d like to discourse on the subject with regard to a recent movie, “The Silver Lining Playbook” starring Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper, and Robert DeNiro. Cooper has the lead role of “the crazy guy” who has just been released from a mental hospital back to his family which proves to be rife with dysfunction itself. (Who would have thunk it!) He is sure it is going to be different this time and has convinced his family, his father being played by Deniro. But problems start immediately. “The crazy guy” notes at one point that he has trouble “filtering” what he says and this is apparent early on when, shortly after an awkward greeting by his father, he discloses that his mother had told him only moments earlier that his father was a bookie. His mother was stunned. Deniro was stunned and angrily asked his wife, “How could you tell him that?” Well, she could tell him that because she had forgotten something she should have known from this first 30 years of “the crazy guys life”–he does not have this “filter” which allows him to use good judgment in what he says and does. He discloses inappropriately routinely. He behaves inappropriately routinely. His judgment is glaringly deficient in most social situations. He does not know how to “filter” and participate in a social moment with regards to the subtle social arrangements that are in play. He merely says what is on his mind. That, in this story, is a vivid illustration of mental illness—the inability to exercise judgment, control internal impulses, and behave appropriately. One could even say it is the inability to be insincere as the social façade that is day to day life is just that—a social façade designed for more or less smooth functioning of the group. But when someone like “the crazy guy” can’t fit smoothly into this façade, the whole enterprise is jeopardized and he will be labeled “crazy” as he should be.

But, in this movie “crazy guy” has met “crazy gal” (Jennifer Lawrence). They negotiate their craziness and the minute they start to “negotiate” with each other….as in “negotiate” with another individual…they are less crazy. And they learn to love each other, to respect each other, and in so doing probably…I would assume…learn to love and respect the rest of the human race.

And I close with a lovely snippet from an Edgar Simmons poem:

Proofrock has been maligned.
Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors,
Absorbing the tic, the bothersome twitch.

Marriage and Boundaries

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Boundaries are one of the essential lessons of life. Sometimes life does not afford us stable families and so learning to set boundaries takes us decades and decades. It often takes many difficulties, many failed relationships, and even incarceration at times. I have had clients before who thrived when incarcerated and were able to make good choices upon their release. I’ve known others who can only make good choices when they are incarcerated and frequent incarcerations are part of their life. I’ve known other young people start to thrive when they get into the work place and discover the reward that comes from fitting into the structure of the work place.
Marriage also can provide a ‘container” in which boundary issues can be addressed. Yes, some wits might even think of it as “imprisonment! If two people can make a commitment, and somehow honor that commitment through the vicissitudes of day to day married life, many of an individual’s “rough edges” can be smoothed off.

Edgar Simmons put it this way in a poem:

Proofrock has been maligned;
Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors,
Absorbing the tic,
The bothersome twitch.

If Hamlet could have endured the tedium of “domestic corridors,” the routine of “hearth and home”, he could have avoided his madness and premature tragic death.

I now include the whole of the poem from which the above excerpt was extracted which might make it more meaningful to you.

BOW DOWN TO STUTTERERS
By Edgar Simmons

The stutter’s hesitation
Is a procrastination crackle,
Redress to hot force,
Flight from ancient flame.

The bow, the handclasp, the sign of the cross
Say, “Sh-sh-sheathe the savage sword.”

If there is greatness in sacrifice
Lay on me the blue stigmata of saints;
Let me not fly to kill in unthought.

Prufrock has been maligned
And Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors
Absorbing the tick, the bothersome twitch.

Let me stutter with the non-objective painters
Let my stars cool to bare lighted civilities.

 

W. H. Auden on Love, Marriage, and Conflict

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W. H. Auden really had an unusual approach to life which is one of the reasons he was such a great poet. He felt that male and female were poles apart in their essence and that their union produces great passion, great intensity, and that at the root of it all lies violence. “Outside the civil garden of everyday love lurks the passion to destroy and be destroyed,” he noted in one poem. Of course, he was addressing the deep dimensions of the unconscious which most of us avoid with some version of an “Ozzie and Harriet” relationship. In the following poem he likens marriage to “particles pelting” each other in some inter-galactic conflagration:

If all a top physicist knows
About the Truth be true,
Then, for all the so-and sos,
Futility, and grime
Our common world contains,
We have a better time
Than the Greater Nebulae do
Or the atoms in our brain.

Marriage is rarely bliss
But, surely, it would be worse
As particles to pelt
At thousands of miles per sec
Around a universe
In which a lover’s kiss
Would either not be felt
Or break the loved one’s neck.

Though the face at which I stare
While shaving it be cruel,
Since year after year it repels
An aging suitor, it has,
Thank God, sufficient mass
To be altogether there,
Not an indeterminate gruel
Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet, Euclidean space—
Exploded myths, but who
Would feel at home a-straddle
An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind
For the process of finding out
Is a fact one can hardly doubt,
But I would rejoice in it more
If I knew more clearly what
We wanted the knowledge for—
Felt certain still that the mind
Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,
And whether our concern
For magnitude’s extremes
Really becomes a creature
Who comes in a median size,
Or politicizing nature
Be altogether wise,
Is something we shall learn.
(“After Reading a Child’s Guide to Modern Physics”)

W. H. Auden on Love and Marriage

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W. H. Auden is one of my heroes.  He led a complicated, often tortured life, and out of his pain came some beautiful, inspiring poetry.  As Emily Dickinson  noted, “Essential oils are wrung.  They are the gift of screws.”  Here are several stanzas of one of my favorite Auden poems, “In Sickness and in Health”:

 

Beloved, we are always in the wrong,
Handling so clumsily our stupid lives,
Suffering too little or too long,
Too careful even in our selfish loves:
The decorative manias we obey
Die in grimaces round us every day,
Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice
Which utters an absurd command—Rejoice.

Rejoice. What talent for the makeshift thought
A living corpus out of odds and ends?
What pedagogic patience taught
Pre-occupied and savage elements
To dance into a segregated charm?
Who showed the whirlwind how to be an arm,
And gardened from the wilderness of space
The sensual properties of one dear face?

Rejoice, dear love, in Love’s peremptory word;
All chance, all love, all logic, you and I,
Exist by grace of the Absurd,
And without conscious artifice we die:
O, lest we manufacture in our flesh
The lie of our divinity afresh,
Describe round our chaotic malice now,
The arbitrary circle of a vow.

That this round O of faithfulness we swear
May never wither to an empty nought
Nor petrify into a square,
Mere habits of affection freeze our thought
In their inert society, lest we
Mock virtue with its pious parody
And take our love for granted, Love, permit
Temptations always to endanger it.ty

 

Paean to Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry is one of my favorite contemporary poets. He is a farmer and a poet as well as a retired professor from the University of Kentucky. His love of nature enriches his poetry. Here is one of my favorite of his poems:

To the Holy Spirit

O Thou, far off and here, whole and broken,
Who in necessity and in bounty wait,
Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken
By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.

I also highly recommend “The Peace of Wild Things” which you can find on the internet with a Google search. I recently answered a friend’s question, “How would you define grace” with the quotation of this poem. And I love his poem entitled “Marriage” which describes the torture of intimate relationship— “it is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever.”

Redemption in Marriage

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Boundaries are so important. I think that the concept of boundaries is relevant to every problem that mankind deals with, even on the biological level. Even cancer is a boundary problem as those bastard cells are running amok and will devour everything in sight. And certainly on an emotional/spiritual level, boundaries explain most if not all of our maladies.

One simple clinical intervention I used when in practice was to try to teach some simple little boundary for a client to set in his life. This could be something as simple as planting a flower and caring for it, this simple act of “caring” being one bit of order in a life that often had little structure.

And then I like to think of marriage as a boundary setting on a grand scale. I see marriage as an imposition of order on chaos, two disparate individuals with their own whims and fancies about life, choosing to commit to the “arbitrary circle of a vow.” (W. H. Auden) If this vow can be honored, marriage can be a container in which two individuals mature together and resolve many of the interior haunts they brought into the union. In short, marriage can be redemptive.

Let me close with an excerpt from a poem by Edgar Simmons entitled, “Bow Down to Stutterers”:

Proofrock has been maligned.
And Hamlet should have waived revenge,
Walked with Ophelia domestic corridors
Absorbing the tic, the bothersome twitch.