The Return of Captain Nemo?
10.30.2004
CAC's comment to the previous entry set me to thinking. In fact, it was a combination of that and the sneaking suspicion that the Groff book is no better or worse than any other xian self-help book. And, like most of these books, I have to fight off the sense that I'm being duped.
And yet I find myself returning again and again to these kinds of books. I'm like any other joe in that sense: I'm the big bass that the marketing department is desperately trying to hook. And I keep taking the fly.
Why am I susceptible to such things?
Certainty is the siren's call for me, and I think to some extent for my family. It's the promise of standing on firm ground again, even if only to die there, rather than be tossed about on waves of uncertainty with no guarantee of a final return or of a final recognition.
It's not just me, either. I've seen this in my entire family: brother, sister, father, mother, grandparents.
It's unfortunately what I think underlies a kind of hereditary smallheartedness among Smith family men. Now, before TJS and JFS react, let me say that I think our family has come a loooooooong way from the early days, and we are starting to act differently. But think about it, guys: how many times have we, in a conversation, smugly laid the smackdown on somebody, rooted in our sense of being uncontrovertibly right? I've seen us do it to each other. I've watched myself do it to people.
What's behind this tendency? What need is it that we are trying to answer in this way? I wonder if it is really about identity: who we think we are, who we secretly suspect or fear that we are. I have jokingly termed this the Smith curse: a perpetual sense of anomie ("namelessness"). After all, what's distinctive about a Smith?
There's this sense that we are nobody. We look into our past and what do we see?
It would be one thing if it were just a sense of namelessness. But the other side of it is that we--I--haven't responded to this condition particularly well. The hereditary response is to try to lord it over others that we know more, that we have the right answers, or that we are competent in some area. Fortunately or unfortunately, we are able to be good at a lot of things, and my friends have in the past looked to me for advice about things. But that kind of expertise can and has been a shield to me from the pain of hearing, deep down, that same message: "You're nobody."
I look at my brother and sister, who for all I love them, seem sometimes to be casting about for something to do with their lives. Like me. Like my dad three decades ago. And whenever we set out on another path toward legitimacy -- a college degree, a graduate program, moving to another area of the country, a new career, or just running 26.2 miles -- more than any other kind of burden, I hear that message. That one voice, deep in me, smugly satisfied and certain: "Nobody. Nobody!"
I guess that's the thing that makes me long for some other certainty -- some clue that there is a home somewhere with my name on it, that there is a career for which I was meant, that there is a reason I struggle with God. It's that kind of uncertainty that lays me open for books like Groff's even while my brain is saying, "wake up, dude, this author's using floral sidebars and 3-page chapters."
But that's not to say that I want to swing the other way and dismiss Groff completely. That would be another form of negative certainty. One thing I learned from watching my friend PM over the past 8 years is the virtue of moderated appreciation: he can, as his email sig advises, "see through the signifier to the thing signified." In this context, it means that he can read a book that halfway stinks, or watch a movie that got a 30% freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes, or listen to factory-made P&W music, and he can find the kernels of gold in all three. He doesn't justify what's bad; he simply appreciates what's good, and refuses to dismiss the whole enterprise out of hand because it's not all Grade A.
That's the way I'd like to approach books like Groff's, and the rest of the stack of spiritual guidance books I'm plowing through. I have to remember myself, and more or less lash myself to the mast as I read each of these books.
And yet I find myself returning again and again to these kinds of books. I'm like any other joe in that sense: I'm the big bass that the marketing department is desperately trying to hook. And I keep taking the fly.
Why am I susceptible to such things?
Certainty is the siren's call for me, and I think to some extent for my family. It's the promise of standing on firm ground again, even if only to die there, rather than be tossed about on waves of uncertainty with no guarantee of a final return or of a final recognition.
It's not just me, either. I've seen this in my entire family: brother, sister, father, mother, grandparents.
It's unfortunately what I think underlies a kind of hereditary smallheartedness among Smith family men. Now, before TJS and JFS react, let me say that I think our family has come a loooooooong way from the early days, and we are starting to act differently. But think about it, guys: how many times have we, in a conversation, smugly laid the smackdown on somebody, rooted in our sense of being uncontrovertibly right? I've seen us do it to each other. I've watched myself do it to people.
What's behind this tendency? What need is it that we are trying to answer in this way? I wonder if it is really about identity: who we think we are, who we secretly suspect or fear that we are. I have jokingly termed this the Smith curse: a perpetual sense of anomie ("namelessness"). After all, what's distinctive about a Smith?
There's this sense that we are nobody. We look into our past and what do we see?
- My father's parents were the children of Virginia coal miners. My grandmother says nothing more about their origins to me, even when repeatedly asked.
- My dad can't remember huge chunks of his childhood. They're just gone. His brother remembers them, though, and they certainly sound like the kind of thing that a body would make itself forget.
- My mom's father made a point not to bless my parents' marriage, and pictures of the wedding suggest that he had just returned from a proctoscopy exercise at a teaching hospital.
- My mom's mother's side basically came from backwoods country people. My grandmother grew up along the banks of the Pee Dee River. We don't know much more.
- And my mom's father was adopted, a fact that he carried with him his whole life in a time when being adopted was not nearly so accepted as it is now.
It would be one thing if it were just a sense of namelessness. But the other side of it is that we--I--haven't responded to this condition particularly well. The hereditary response is to try to lord it over others that we know more, that we have the right answers, or that we are competent in some area. Fortunately or unfortunately, we are able to be good at a lot of things, and my friends have in the past looked to me for advice about things. But that kind of expertise can and has been a shield to me from the pain of hearing, deep down, that same message: "You're nobody."
I look at my brother and sister, who for all I love them, seem sometimes to be casting about for something to do with their lives. Like me. Like my dad three decades ago. And whenever we set out on another path toward legitimacy -- a college degree, a graduate program, moving to another area of the country, a new career, or just running 26.2 miles -- more than any other kind of burden, I hear that message. That one voice, deep in me, smugly satisfied and certain: "Nobody. Nobody!"
I guess that's the thing that makes me long for some other certainty -- some clue that there is a home somewhere with my name on it, that there is a career for which I was meant, that there is a reason I struggle with God. It's that kind of uncertainty that lays me open for books like Groff's even while my brain is saying, "wake up, dude, this author's using floral sidebars and 3-page chapters."
But that's not to say that I want to swing the other way and dismiss Groff completely. That would be another form of negative certainty. One thing I learned from watching my friend PM over the past 8 years is the virtue of moderated appreciation: he can, as his email sig advises, "see through the signifier to the thing signified." In this context, it means that he can read a book that halfway stinks, or watch a movie that got a 30% freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes, or listen to factory-made P&W music, and he can find the kernels of gold in all three. He doesn't justify what's bad; he simply appreciates what's good, and refuses to dismiss the whole enterprise out of hand because it's not all Grade A.
That's the way I'd like to approach books like Groff's, and the rest of the stack of spiritual guidance books I'm plowing through. I have to remember myself, and more or less lash myself to the mast as I read each of these books.
