... the trickster lie, held lightly in order to explain another truth. The trickster lie is the joke told serious, explaining indirectly. The manifest alludes to the truth beneath, exactly the opposite of the stuff of conspiracy theories and the paranoia of the American political climate where the manifest statement declares exactly what’s happening with a certainty that is nearly psychotic.   

In the 1990s, sociologist Susan Lepselter examined the creation of (now quaint-seeming) UFO conspiracy theory narratives. Through their observations of the world, her subjects created new patterns that “follow that quick leg of the semiotic journey where the public sign is internalized, and then reproduced as another sign, or another story...” The anecdote becomes a form of knowledge creating new patterns that ascribe meaning to chance encounters. As Lepselter describes, “this affect as it moves from a fleeting sensation to the center of things,” helps to create the conspiracy theories and fantasies that explain our world with a certainty held tightly against the terror of lives directed by chance.

Charles Simic accepted chance in all its joy and tragedy as creator of our world. In Dime-Store Alchemy, he wrote of Joseph Cornell’s collages and assemblages:

“You don’t make art, you find it. You accept everything as its material… The collage technique, that art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, is the most important innovation in the art of this century. Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized.”

The process of finding the image, the poem, the story, reminds me of therapy sessions where both the patient and analyst are both surprised by what came up by the end of the hour. Collage, like a conversation of unedited associations, allows us to catch glimpses and references of our associations that build our worlds, our ideologies. A meaning begins to hint at itself. Things that were not meant to be linked now are and signify something new, an angle on the world we did not have before.

A therapy session that surprises both the therapist and patient becomes a poem in this way and the arc of a therapeutic relationship becomes a glimpse of that unutterable whole. Like psychoanalysis, poetry is this effort of trying to be as precise as possible, adjacent to direct meaning, while not knowing what it is we’re trying to say.

Psychoanalytic work demands we incorporate the uncertainty of the world, the unknowable, into our existence.  The horrific what ifs, what-nexts, shoulds and the dread of how-do-they-see-me exist, marking the unbearable anxieties left wordlessly outside of our narratives while driving our behavior. These what-ifs are trick questions that demand, humorlessly and impossibly, for definitive answers.  Psychoanalyst Anton Hart wrote that this work is not about uncovering the unconscious as much as building up a tolerance to the unconscious, which is always creating itself anew.

Charles Simic’s humor is that of the trickster pointing out the impossibility of safely knowing the world. Like the 15^th century Zen master, Ikkyu, whose poems venerated the brothels and wine shops but mocked the priests who worshipfully doused their buddha statues with incense. These are the great jokes of contemplative religious practice – jokes that are true, jokes that, like all jokes, hold an edge of hostility in their upending of the receiver’s expectations and tell us something new, and true, about the world.

Psychoanalyst Eugene Mahon traces the “ah ha moment” of an analytic session where the patient takes in an insight that suddenly shifts a perception of the world. Mahon traced the etiology of “ah ha” back to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, when humankind, or the speaker, is faced with a revelation and asks God, “Is this so?”

In conjunction with Mahon’s “ah ha moment”, we have to also hold onto the suggestion from Wilfred Bion, a psychoanalyst whose war experience influenced his clinical work, that we keep “the capacity to have feelings of respect for the unknown.” This is again, akin to the Zen Buddhist sense of self as being more than a singular subject and the paradox of the self that doesn’t exist but is sitting on a hot stove.

Simic’s work asks us to stay open to the possibilities of the unknown as well as the impossible questions with which we are left, reminding me of Michael Eigen’s summary of Bion’s unknowable reality, which Bion labelled as ‘O’, the great unknown: “We cannot count on the niceness of O.” Bion’s ‘O’ also reminds me of a Talmudic scholar, quoted by Richard Rohr, who wrote: “God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.”

That unknown, unformulated thought is where we might create meaning as the coming moment has the potential to change the one just passed. And each moment becomes this perpetual emergence as the past no longer exists except as stories we tell ourselves.

And Simic notes both the safety and threat of the stories we tell ourselves:

“All lives are strange, but the lives of immigrants and exiles even more so. My parents died a long way from where they were born. It’s not how they imagined their lives were going to be. Even at the age of eighty-eight in a nursing home in Dover, New Hampshire, my mother was puzzled. What does it all mean, she wanted to know? What terrified her was the likelihood that it meant nothing.”

***

A New Year’s Note from the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis

Simone de Beauvoir wrote of Americans in her travelogue of 1947:

“They witness the rise, more ominous every day, of racism and reactionary attitudes—the birth of a kind of fascism. They know that their country is responsible for the world’s future. But they themselves don’t feel responsible for anything, because they don’t think they can do anything in this world.”

Little has changed except we’re moving ahead at an AI algorithm’s pace as our government (shorthand for capitalism/colonialism/white supremacy/patriarchy) openly justifies the dehumanization of others unlike themselves.

Beauvoir noted that freedom and responsibility are linked. Poet and critical theorist Maggie Nelson also linked freedom with care – an active care for others as well as the world. For both writers the idea of “freedom” demands work, demands an acknowledgment of the other unlike us. And both touch upon Emmanuel Levinas’ “ethical subject” whose responsibility is to not turn away from suffering.

If we can accept a definition of freedom which places us in the world, interconnected to, impacted by, and responsible for others, then the dialectics of Beauvoir and Nelson ask us to accept things as they are and to simultaneously push to change them.

CCP offers more than professional training, education, lectures, and CEUs; we hope we are creating change in the world, individually and systemically. Our roles as social workers, psychotherapists, teachers, supervisors, and analysts ask us to be nurturing in a neglectful environment.

We have the opportunity and potential to do amazing work, to reduce the suffering of others. The first of the four great vows in Zen Buddhism says: “Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them.” Like most teachings in Zen, the important part is silent: We must count ourselves among that infinite number of beings as we practice and study so we can become the kinds of healers we imagine.

I hope we can continue to take care of ourselves, those we love, and those we don’t even know across the coming year.  

Happy New Year.

Zak Mucha, LCSW. Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis

Among Jon Langford’s cowboy portraits, he has a few of Hank as Saint Sebastian – shirtless, bound, and run through with arrows. Hank is the Hillbilly Shakespeare and the Godhead for  previous generations of country music. I’ve heard him described as the sin-eater for southern whites, his self-destruction saving others from themselves, if that’s how it actually works.

But Hank doesn’t get enough credit as a psychiatric diagnostician. On social media it’s standard now to diagnose one’s ex as having either borderline or narcissistic personality disorder. Hank specialized in the detailed illustration of the borderline and narcissistic personality structures dyad, a relationship where two terribly broken plates fit together perfectly until one or both shatters.

Listen to “First Year Blues” for proof.

Hank Williams was the Redneck Sigmund Freud.

In Not Always So, a compilation of lectures by the Zen priest, Shunryu Suzuki, he declared: “My mind is a garbage can,” with a sense of joy, referencing the freedom to accept all thoughts that pass through without clinging to or refusing them.

The poet Charles Simic said, “A poem is a place where affinities are discovered. Poetry is a way of thinking through affinities.”

The Heart Sutra says, “form is emptiness and emptiness is form…” this ‘emptiness’ is not nihilism but is an interconnectedness of all things and a lack of the narcissistic sense of self which separates us from all things. Nothing can be defined without the existence of and comparison to all other things. The self doesn’t exist without recognition of all things and in those moments where all things are recognized, then the self ‘is’ also, but only for the moment... Zen monk, Dogo Barry Graham once said, “There is no self, but go sit on a hot stove and see who screams.”

As a child in Belgrade, Simic survived the German bombing and Nazi occupation and his childhood became a series of disruptions and displacements as he and his family crossed boundaries delineated by violence, ethnicity, culture, and language. In his poetry, the trauma of multiple displacements is presented by crossing boundaries between consciousness and dreams, magic realism and brutal reality, religious mystery and black humor and accepting each paradox as true. He describes his family’s survival during war:

“… we used to barter our possessions for food. You could get a chicken for a good pair of men’s shoes. Our clocks, silverware, crystal vases and fancy china were exchanged for bacon, lard, sausages and such things. Once an old gypsy man wanted my father’s top hat. It didn’t even fit him. With the hat way down over his eyes, he handed over a live duck.”

Life and death intermingled with absurdity and chance. Buster Keaton again. How else does one survive war and how does one keep their soul? How much do we have to feel in order to, simply, not take it all so seriously while simultaneously knowing this is exactly what life is? How do we reconfigure our perception of the world after trauma redefines the world for us? An absurd, unpredictable universe becomes either a perpetual threat or a chance for freedom.

Simic describes a meal in a restaurant with his Uncle Boris, both of them new to the U.S. after emigrating from Belgrade. Two women at the next table, well-to-do Americans, cannot place their accents, so they interrupt to ask. Boris, a perpetual trickster, gave a sad sigh and explained, in detail, they are part of the last Caucasian tribe of Africans and their language is a dialect that will go extinct with them. This, Simic also says, is poetry: “Poetry should contain every possible lie that can be told.”  

But this is the trickster lie, held lightly in order to explain another truth. The trickster lie is the joke told serious, explaining indirectly. The manifest alludes to the truth beneath, exactly the opposite of the stuff of conspiracy theories and the paranoia of the American political climate where the manifest statement declares exactly what’s happening with a certainty that is nearly psychotic.