Fragile bags (this would be the cup-half-empty perspective)

The closer I get to a client – I mean literally closer: inching forward on my wheely chair – the more I feel and care about the humanity, feelings, meaning and history of him or her. If I’m at a clinical distance, five or six feet, the interaction may be too intellectual except for occasions when we’re deep into emotive work. But whatever the distance, I always see people as fragile bags, fragile bags waiting (sometimes their whole lives) to explode or implode, shake apart, rip, melt, go crazy, become gibbering insensible vacuums of a non-existent Self. I see them as untenable chemical solutions poured mindlessly into a test tube, with eyes attached to a deep fire, hearts attached to twisted gear systems run amuck, minds running from early nightmares. I see people as absurd unfortunates, entities barely holding themselves up, trying to create a homeostasis of viability out of some unrealistic supposition.

This is what childhood does to us.

We are made to become a paradox: anarchy and multiple pains wanting to have meaning and a positive identity. We have stopped and do not move on when we suppress ourselves in childhood. Our mind, now braked by suspended animation, destroys itself by pushing us on. Our ideas instantly become and remain nonsense: gaseous escapes that are not – were we to feel deeply into them – us.

The body is roiling sludge on fire, and that’s what the mind should be.

Even the most outrageous berserker patient or criminal out there is a held-together, false and censored person, still following rules, talking in mature sentences, sitting upright with his hands in his lap. But the bleeding out-of-sync energies within him want to bash against walls, lacerate them, scream every muscle, vein and organ projectile-wise out of his body or drown him in his tears. Our pain and wrongness want to scream and explode. But we don’t.

Here is the person: Picture a landscape ablaze, a great country burning, all of its history and loves destroyed. Now see it from afar, as in a movie, and hear sad or heroic symphonic music in the background. The scene is poignant now, meaningful, it has the contour of life, and we can accept it. But walk into the landscape, stop playing the music, stand there. You have the person in her natural state.

Imagine sitting two feet away from her for the hour.