2 essays, a tribute, silk scarves
Greetings, this favorite of Sunday mornings:
Summer🌞time!
This nostalgic revisit to newshrink 2022 is a do-over for last week’s technical glitch. Sincere apologies to the several who clicked to open, only to land at a virtual dead-end even after fixes at this end. Here’s a clean link to original 2022 Smiles of a Summer Solstice, Soul Men/Whole Men. (That year’s June calendar for the week combined Father’s Day, Summer Solstice, the Juneteenth holiday — and a whole lot else.)
Next up today…
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A tribute in memoriam
This weekend brings loving time in ritual — to honor June, in June. It’s with people in relationship I have long come to understand as Jung’s meetings of the soul-Self, recognized via markers of the soul’s-code according to Hillman. (A bit more about these terms and their meanings is below this section.)
My lifelong honorary-Aunt, June Fleenor White, 95, died last fall at The Pines in Davidson. This weekend we remember her in an intimate, mostly family, graveside interment service in Charlotte. Here is her obituary.
Born in Charlotte on October 29, 1928, June was the daughter of Lloyd Jefferson Fleenor and Verna Kilbourne Fleenor. In addition to Mack, her husband of 73 years, survivors include her sons, Dr. Mack White, III (Mary Virginia), of Charlotte, and Jim White (Julie), of Black Mountain; grandsons Henry, Lewis and Gordon White, all of Charlotte; great grandsons Aidan and Everett White of Charlotte; and nieces Ann Freese and Emilie Freese. Along with her parents, June was preceded in death by her sisters, Helen Freese and Elaine Prather.
Along with Mack, June was educated in Charlotte city schools, graduating in 1946 from old Central High School. She graduated in 1948 from St. Mary's School in Raleigh and in 1950 from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she was a member of Chi Omega sorority. June taught school after college and continued devoted advocacy for children while raising her family as an active member of Charlotte’s Covenant Presbyterian Church, where she served as a elder.
After raising their boys, June and Mack moved in the 1970s to create a 22-acre wooded, retreat-like home just outside Davidson, where her renowned herb- and woodland gardens were a popular gathering spot. It was destination for popular day-long silent retreats she hosted with Charlotte friend Mary Hunter Daly and others. Later there came Yoga, study- and artwork-groups for the endless curiosity and lifelong learning that June and Mack so valued and embodied.
June became active at Davidson College Presbyterian Church, and along with Davidson College students began a 20-year tradition of visiting and carrying needed materials, services and projects to do with inmates of the men's prison then located in North Mecklenburg. June was honored with the Davidson Algernon Sydney Award for this community service.
A character inspired by June’s long relationship with “her prisoners” appears in a 2006 novel by her longtime Charlotte neighbor and acclaimed author-friend, Judy Goldman. (June’s capture of literary hearts and imaginations also shows up via a character in two of novelist Gail Godwin’s most popular Asheville-based workss.)
Here is a link to “Weaving it Forward” in Tapestry (newShrink 2.11.24). It captures a delightful story presented at a gathering awhile back by June’s usually introverted husband, my adored Uncle Mack. We celebrated his 97th birthday a couple of weeks ago with his first visit to the Charlotte condo (where many of “his Jungian books” now live.)
On Soul-Self relationship and The Soul’s Code
In Jung’s view there can be relationship and connection with one another from what he termed the “capital-S” or soul-Self (as distinct from our conscious ego personality.) Deeper, sometimes beyond, our vast array of biological, familial, societal, community roles and functions, for Jung each such rarer meeting-of-Soul relationship is experienced as a “recognition” — even at the outset between strangers, or adult and young child. He compared such meeting of two personalities in this way as “like the contact of two chemical substances: If there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
James Hillman further developed how character-building and nourishing this level of soul-recognition — and its encouragement of what is most deeply trying to come to life in us — is for each of us at every age.
Particularly when it’s from people who aren’t our parents, or those otherwise standing in their various ego- or authority-roles, however well-intended.
Particularly when we are young — but also when at the challenging thresholds at every decade and life-stage.
Literally since the day I was born, I have been profoundly blessed in both of these ways through Aunt June and Uncle Mack White.
(Hillman’s 1996 book is The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. The New York Times bestseller was a rare Jungian mass-audience crossover hit!)
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Shifting forward, here’s some advance reading in prep for coming editions.
2 Essays
The first piece here, by Steve Almond from back in 2012, was a favorite for relevant citing in my PhD dissertation research in depth psychology (along news and newShrink-related themes.) And recently this— along with the whole subject of memoir — is popping up, also as a timeless favorite, in conversations with friends who are some combination of veteran journalists, published authors in long nonfiction and fiction, graduates of MFA writing programs or longtime participants in strong writing workshops.
Increasingly, we seem to be talking about and coming-at the same thing, from different directions. For now I’m thinking of that “thing” as “Memoir-(ing), the Verb,” focusing newShrink exploration in four areas:
As examined in the Almond essay: memoir as an increasingly popular literary genre and subject area for MFA nonfiction programs and many kinds of writing workshops. (Beyond minor editing for length, most of the full essay is posted here. Its structure balances several different key ideas in a clear way that’s lost with limited excerpts.)
Of similar interest is the converse to the Almond piece: the very similar ways, tools, practices involved in memoir (book and literary) writing are essential in the deep-narrative. writing-as-a-psychological process in the work of depth psychology with adults individuating (and trying to.)
In both psychological and literary “memoir-ing” there’s reckoning with kind of a Goldilocks factor — from “too (emotionally) “hot” to “too cold/why are we here?”
Last is more at the news and cultural level: how, or even whether, we are connecting with, knowledgeable about and applying our collective story and shared memory. (Here’s where I’m pulled to look, in comparison, at my late grandparents’ experience amid life-splitting public events 100 years ago.)
For starters, here’s the Almond piece.
#1. ‘What They Really Want Isn’t Fame or Fortune but Permission to Articulate Feelings’.
(The original title by Steve Almond when published in The New York Times Magazine, March 3, 2012.)
Subheads within this essay are those of its author.
In Which the Author Reveals a Scandalous Motive for Attending Grad School
When people ask why I became a writer, I tend to emphasize the era, in my mid-20s, when I turned off the television and became a more serious reader. I talk about the sentences of Saul Bellow and Lorrie Moore, how enraptured I was, how I wanted to emulate them. It makes for a nice story.
But it’s not the part of the story that really matters. What really matters, it seems to me now, is that I was bored with my job as a newspaper reporter and depressed. I was living in exile from my family and driving away the people I loved with an astonishing efficiency. What I needed was therapy.
As it happened, I applied for a Master of Fine Arts in fiction.
Most of my comrades arrived in similar states of disrepair. We did our best to conceal the worst of it, to play the part of eager newbies grateful for the opportunity to hone what we referred to majestically as “our craft.” But the crazy inevitably surfaced, under the aegis of booze or pot or some brisker narcotic. After parties, we stumbled into the night howling songs of loneliness and sorrow. At least I did.
Around the workshop table, our instructors urged us to focus on technique: point of view, sentence structure, show don’t tell. We were permitted to discuss the suspiciously familiar afflictions of our characters, but to probe too vigorously into psychology was to invoke the cardinal rule of workshop: writing is not therapy.
This made sense to me. As the child of two therapists, I knew the process well enough by then. My sessions were tedious affairs, thick with self-pity and grievance — the trademarks of the young solipsist.
I figured I had gone into the literary racket because I had urgent and profound things to say about the world and because I was a deeply creative person.
But looking back, I can see that the instigating impulse for me, for all of us really, was therapeutic.
We were writing to confront what Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself.” And not just any hearts. Our hearts.
A Theory More or Less Guaranteed to Rankle Therapist and Writer Alike
A generation ago, when “Annie Hall” won the Oscar for Best Picture, talk therapy occupied a prominent place in our collective imagination, whether or not you partook. If you wanted to spend several hours a week baring your soul to a stranger who was professionally obligated to listen and react, you went into therapy.
Today you join a writing workshop.
Plenty of folks still seek therapy, of course, including writers. And not all of us are damaged individuals who write to work out our neurotic conflicts. (I’m sure there are plenty of well-adjusted authors, even if I have never actually met one.)…
…[The trend] has clear roots in the rise of psychopharmacology. Drug companies have been hard at work over the past three decades, marketing meds to troubleshoot our faulty brain chemistry. As managed care has compelled more and more psychiatrists to trade their notebooks for prescription pads, the classic image of the patient on the couch has been replaced by an Rx-rep with a pill in his palm…
…But my sense is that people remain desperate for the emotional communion provided by literature.
Consider this: Back when I started writing fiction in the early ’90s, there were a few dozen M.F.A. programs in the entire country. I had no idea the degree existed — and I was an English major from a liberal-arts college. Today, there are nearly 200 such programs, along with more than 600 other undergraduate and graduate degrees in creative writing. Thousands of people attend literary conferences and take courses at writing centers…In each case, what strikes me aren’t the particulars — age, attitude, ambitions — so much as their essential motive.
What they really want isn’t fame or fortune but permission to articulate feelings that were somehow off limits within the fragile habitat of their families. They are hoping to find, by means of literary art, braver and more-forgiving versions of themselves…
…It is at this point that I can hear the phantom convulsions of my literary comrades. “Damn it, Almond,” they’re saying. “You really are making workshops sound like therapy.” Fair enough. The official job of a workshop is to help a writer improve her prose, not her psyche…
[T]his task almost always involves a direct engagement with inner life, as well as a demand for greater empathy and disclosure. These goals are fundamentally therapeutic.
What’s more, the workshop is (or should be) only one small part of a larger creative process that involves reading, reflection and writing.
It is this solitary work that marks the writer’s most sustained investigation of the self…
The beauty of the artistic unconscious is that it allows us to sneak up on our own intentions…
The Internet Enters Our Story
Back in the old days, the Internet was billed, rather quaintly, as an “information superhighway” that would ease the exchange of data and ideas. As anyone with a smartphone knows, at this point it functions more frequently as the world headquarters of narcissistic recreation, a place people prowl when they’re feeling lonely and restless and unrecognized…
But the Internet, while it might excite the desire for creative self-expression and sudden acclaim, does little to slake our deeper yearnings. What we want in our heart of hearts is not distraction but just the opposite…
We want to be heard and acknowledged. It’s the difference between someone “liking” our latest Facebook update versus agreeing to listen to our story, the whole bloody thing, even and especially when it runs up against bruising revelations.
For those with the means, clinical therapy used to serve this function. But it did so in a covert and stigmatized fashion. Creative-writing programs [and the narrative-focused disciplines of depth-psychology] represent a return to the ancient pleasures and virtues of storytelling…
A Word in Defense of the ‘Writing Cure’
It’s become something of a trope for critics to grouse about the creative-writing boom, particularly those critics who cling to the Hemingway model: that artists should be forged by the fires of “real life,” not trained in academies…
…I have no idea whether my student[s] will do the lonely, dogged labor necessary to get novels and memoirs published… What matters is that [they] have found a way to face the toughest truths within themselves, to begin to make sense of them, and maybe even beauty.
In a world increasingly impersonal and atomized, I can’t think of a more thrilling mission.
I recently began leading a new workshop composed of students in their 50s and 60s. All have children and busy careers. And I sometimes wonder, as I look around the room, why at this late stage they’ve chosen to write at all… But it’s hard for me to remain cynical when I think about their motives. What they’re seeking is exactly what I wanted:
the refuge of stories, which remain the most reliable paths to meaning ever devised by our species…
Deft as usual, author Judy Goldman spells out just what kinds of stories in her latest memoir, The Rest of Our Lives:
Genesis stories, I call them, stories that go to the heart of each life passage. Touchstones. That back-and-forthing. Where we are, where we’ve been, how time is a circle…
So, what am I trying to say in these pages?
Maybe this: The past is just sitting in our palms.”
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#2. tending the psyche in the news cycle
I’m appreciating more from The Atlantic, Guardian, and as always The New Yorker in the ongoing balancing of news-content/issues knowledge, self-awareness and self-care skills and an eye on best (on purpose!) uses of time, energy and resources.
Alongside ongoing following of the other Brooks (The New York Times’ David, some of whose recent work will be in focus again sometime soon), I also value the different background and orientation of social scientist, Harvard professor, and best-selling author and podcaster, Arthur C. Brooks of The Atlantic.)
The piece is a quick read, and well-timed for bringing down news-anxiety here. Not only the global, with American bomb-dropping on Iranian nuclear facilities. But more personally over the next week are very real, quite terrifying ICE prospects looming with people I know, respect and care deeply about, and my capacity to help is limited to nonexistent.
The Art of Self-Control in the Face of Provocation (by Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic.)
This article piqued my interest after a recent online post and exchange with friend-reader-author Frye Gaillard, who said:
I have long ago stopped praying for specific outcomes, since, on a few conspicuous occasions in my life, that has proven to be disappointing.
But I think I will darken the doors of a church this morning to pray for those whose lives are being torn apart by ICE — and for the safety of their neighbors who have taken to the streets in peaceful protest.
As I say, I’m not sure how much this will help. But at the moment at least, I’m running low on other ideas.
I responded with how, with similar current incentives, I’m at church serving often as possible, in those smiling, welcoming doorway-greeter/usher roles… and for me even better, serving communion every chance I can. Both are “internally and externally congruent” things that are fulfilling in bigger-than-sum-of-parts ways I haven’t fully understood.
The Brooks piece adds some clarity, for in each case I am able to make the sincere, embodied human-to-human connection — before or without ever having to hear or take-in and process nasty words or jarring gestures that might have occurred just before or just after me! These days I am incredibly grateful for such moments.
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Now, about that other thing…
Silk scarves???
OK, I wear these long silk scarves, the loose ones worn like a rabbi’s prayer tallit, only pretty, lightweight, colorful and cool.
These, and other kinds of scarves and textured shawls have always been a bit of a thing for me in different life- and wardrobe periods. (Corporate women wear a lot of scarves; Jungian women wear drapey shawls and big jewelry! etc..)
Well, OK, but these days it’s only the super-light long silk ones — and even with jean-shorts and flipflops?? Now, just with this question and thought comes the accompanying hand-gesture: Arms straight down and open palms, gently holding/rubbing the two ends of the silk with thumbs and fingers.
It’s incredibly soft, soothing (and let’s not forget pretty) — a lot better than worry-beads or one of those squeezy rubber anxiety-balls.
Now, my open-palmed fingers are recalling, this is what I did as a toddler — when all of the cool on-trend toddlers were thumb-sucking. I had a beautiful, tiny piece of silk, the doll-bed coverlet sewn by my great-grandmother Eliza. It was the kind of silk-taffeta that’s smooth on one side, with a satisfying grain from ridges on the reverse side. With that in one hand, the first two fingers of the other were in my mouth. (I’ve since been told — and my body, at least, remembers — that habit was successfully broken via bribery-and-reward with my first coveted kitten.)
Today with the silk at my fingertips, I can say I’ve had no cigarettes for more than a quarter-century. (No kittens for awhile, either.)
And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
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… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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Sorry for your loss of June, Tish. Married 73 years--they both sound fascinating. And you know I appreciated your 'writing cure'...