what i'm reading

“It is extremely dangerous,” he said. “There’s a high correlation of chronic alcoholism to suicide. I can’t tell you strongly enough, you have to play every card you have with her – play the guilt card, play it shamelessly – tell her you would never have another good day if anything happened to her. If ever there was a time to make her feel she has to take care of you, protect you, this is it. I’ve treated suicidal patients, I’ve been on the inside of this, I know how they think, they manage to convince themselves that everyone they love would be better off without them, would get over it, would be better off not having to worry any more. You have to disabuse her of this in the strongest possible way.”

Last week, I said, I said I had realized that I had a certain investment in Quintana’s dependency. If Quintana was dependent on me, I was still young, still powerful, her mother. I thought when I said it that it had to do with my getting older, needing to feel that I was still in an earlier stage of my life. I have thought more about this, I said, and it seems to me now that I had always – even when I was much younger – had this investment in her dependency.

“That’s it. It’s the expectations that are unstated – they can never ever be met, because they can never really be known. There’s always the possibility of some greater expectation.”

“Children who sense that a parent is always worried feel insecure, from a very young age. They have no idea what the parent is worried about, so they anticipate the worst outcome they can imagine. They’re afraid the parent may lose control of the situation, may not be able to take care of them. They carry that fear into adult life. That’s what she’s working on with Dr. Kass. But she needs to feel that you’ll be all right.”

“He was angry because he felt guilty. That’s a useful thing to remember. Parents of children in emotional trouble tend to feel guilty, hopeless – what did they do wrong, what could they have done differently, where did it all fall apart – and they sometimes show it by getting angry. When people get angry, fly off the handle, they’re usually feeling guilty, mad at themselves, they should have known better and so forth.”

“Some adult children – and I think this is one of those instances – have the capacity to place their parents in virtually impossible situations. If you confront them, their unconscious mind says you never trust them, why bother, why not do what I want and lie about it. If you don’t confront them, the same unconscious mind says this proves you don’t love them, don’t care about them.”

I then said that one of the things that troubled both you and me about AA – not AA as an idea, but AA in its more unforgiving mode – was that this kind of theatrical failure seemed built into it. It assumes all-or-nothing. You want a drink and give in, you don’t just end up with a hangover and a case of the guilts as you would in real life, you end up in the gutter, or in a bar picking somebody up who’s going to hit you.

I said I may have been overprotective, but I never thought she saw me that way. In fact she once described me, as a mother, as “a little remote”. Dr. MacKinnon: “You don’t think she saw your remoteness as a defense? When she uses remoteness herself as a defense? Didn’t you just tell me? She never looks back?”

“People with certain neurotic patterns lock into each other in a way that people with healthy patterns don’t. There’s clearly a very powerful dependency that goes both ways between you and her.”

I realized that I had a very closely calibrated idea of my physical well being, very fearful of losing control, that my personality was organized around a certain level of mobilization or anxiety.

We are served by organic ghosts, he thought, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.

Metabolism, he reflected, is a burning process, an active furnace. When it ceases to function, life is over. They must be wrong about hell, he said to himself. Hell is cold; everything there is cold. The body means weight and heat; now weight is a force which I am succumbing to, and heat, my heat, is slipping away. And, unless I become reborn, it will never return. This is the destiny of the universe. So at least I won’t be alone.

But why hadn’t the TV set reverted instead to formless metals and plastics? Those, after all, were its constituents; it had been constructed out of them, not out of an earlier radio. Perhaps this weirdly verified a discarded ancient philosophy, that of Plato’s ideal objects, the universals which, in each class, were real. The form TV set had been a template imposed as a successor to other templates, like the procession of frames in a movie sequence. Prior forms, he reflected, must carry on an invisible, residual life in every object. The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface once the later imprinting unfortunately—and against ordinary experience—vanished. The man contains—not the boy—but earlier men, he thought. History began a long time ago.

But, he thought, this is projection on my part. It isn’t the universe which is being entombed by layers of wind, cold, darkness and ice; all this is going on within me, and yet I seem to see it outside. Strange, he thought. Is the whole world inside me? Engulfed by my body? When did that happen? It must be a manifestation of dying, he said to himself. The uncertainty which I feel, the slowing down into entropy—that’s the process, and the ice which I see is the result of the success of the process. When I blink out, he thought, the whole universe will disappear. But what about the various lights which I should see, the entrances to new wombs? Where in particular is the red smoky light of fornicating couples? And the dull dark light signifying animal greed? All I can make out, he thought, is encroaching darkness and utter loss of heat, a plain which is cooling off, abandoned by its sun.

“Oh, yes,” Runciter said. “Now we come to Wendy Wright.”

“Isn’t it too late?” Runciter said, surfacing momentarily from the depression into which this happening had dropped him.