Category Archives: book of irv

Repetition Compulsion and me

A longtime friend, Mark Friedman, was the most dramatic example I ever met of someone with a repetition compulsion. Psychologists tell us that the compulsion to repeat the same painful pattern over and over is an attempt to resolve some injurious conflict that tormented us in our childhood.

In Mark’s case, as near as I could figure it, it had to do with feeling that his father never respected him, and that his mother could not love him enough to compensate for this. The primal wound he suffered is somewhat subjective and I don’t want to sound judgmental, but that he was compelled to repeat the same three act play throughout his tormented life is something I saw up close for many years.

The shape of the story was always the same, the three act tragedy identical each time.

Act one was great admiration, enthusiasm and pure enjoyment of a person who was finally able to provide everything he’d been looking for. This person was cool, smart, funny, ingenious, talented, charismatic and a great friend, the very best person he’d ever met.

During Act two cracks would predictably appear in this exaggeratedly perfect facade, which would become increasingly worrying to Mark.

Act three was the final, unforgivable betrayal of Mark, which happened every time as regularly as the sun rises and sets each day.

I don’t know of another case of repetition compulsion as dramatic as Mark’s. It was so clear to see, and so frustrating to me that as otherwise smart as he was he simply couldn’t see it. He’d get furious, in fact, if you pointed out any similarity in his crashed relationships. That, as much as anything else, was the cause of our final estrangement. Which, of course, fit the pattern, betrayal by his trusty longtime best friend was dictated by the three act structure.

While Mark’s self-destructive pattern was easy for me to see, the compulsion is much harder to recognize in oneself. Why was it that I was always attracted to smart, tormented, bitter, angry, darkly — sometimes sadistically — funny people throughout my life?

It was an attempt to work out with them what I could not work out with my own smart, tormented, bitter, angry, darkly — sometimes sadistically —  funny father. In the end each of these relationships ended in a bitter falling out that I tried, sometimes for years, to prevent.

The lesson that was so hard for me to learn was that these people I cared about so much were literally poison to me because they could never give me what I was looking for, what I tried so hard to give to them — the benefit of the doubt, empathy and friendship.

Without empathy or the benefit of the doubt we don’t really have friendship. If somebody is incapable of these crucial things, out of their own injuries, we often won’t notice it until conflict arises. They say conflict reveals character, and it’s true. Under pressure things you can’t see when everything is fine will squeeze you to death. While everyone is laughing together it’s easy to feel like great friends.

And it was this laughter, this often dark, cruel humor, that bonded my father and me in between our long sessions of brutal combat. These moments of shared laughter were a great release, a relief, as well as providing the giddy hope of finding any kind of understanding with my supremely difficult father.

So these sardonic characters who were my closest friends for many years shared this bond of black humor with me and made me feel I’d found indispensable friends and was not doomed to interminable, senseless mortal combat.

It has taken decades for me to finally learn this sadly simple lesson: just because somebody smiles wickedly and laughs at your sense of humor doesn’t mean that they are your soulmate. Funny as it may seem reading these dry, serious pages I post here, I am a very funny motherfucker and make many people smile wickedly and laugh. It has taken me half a century to untangle reactions to my sense of humor from the deadly limitations of some of my onetime closest friends. Droll, eh?

Senseless enmity

My father’s mother, a diminutive red haired religious woman with a brutal temper, used to snarl whenever my father and his little brother fought.  “Seenas Cheenam!” she would say, Yiddish for “senseless enmity!”   They lived in poverty impressive even by the desperate standards of the Depression, their mother openly hated their father, the larger older brother was regularly whipped in the face by his mother, the sickly younger brother was always pampered by that same mother.   Add it up and you get “Seenas Cheenam!”   

My father spoke very little of his deeply scarring childhood, except to point out from time to time that he grew up in “grinding poverty.”  That was the phrase he always used when comparing his lot to my sister’s and mine.  We also heard the phrase “Seenas Cheenam” often enough growing up that it sticks in my head.  I later learned Hebrew and the word cheenam means “free,” or “gratuitous,” if you will,  seenas being the Yiddishized version of the Hebrew seenat, hatred.   

Psychological insight into human behavior is not necessarily a widespread human characteristic.  Certainty, of course, is.  We like to be sure before we whip somebody that we are doing the right thing.  And so it was with my grandmother, an uneducated woman from a family soon to be murdered en masse, prone to fits of righteous rage, a woman who died young, of cancer, a few years before I was born.  The irony of her dismissing any reason the boys might be at each other’s throats in that sadistic experiment they grew up in is not lost on me.  Blaming her boys for being at each other’s throats for no reason was her way of being certain that she was always doing what was best, exactly what God wanted her to do.  Certainty is the human genius.

Before my uncle died (in a rehab center) he told his son and me that he had framed photos of our great grandparents in the house his son was selling.   We looked everywhere, didn’t find them, and, on a last pass through, before locking up the house for the last time after it was sold, I walked into the sun room.   There behind the wicker couch my demented aunt had secreted the almost life-sized portrait heads of my grandmother’s parents, in beautiful oval frames.  I could barely stand looking at them.   These two had created a monster of their youngest child, my father’s violently unlucky mother.  

I can only imagine the household that raises their youngest to whip her infant son in the face over and over.  I look at the face of her mother, in a photo taken before 1914 when my grandmother arrived here in the US.  I shudder.   The father looks a bit more human, though as I look a moment longer I start to cringe.  People who were being photographed for the only time in their lives tend to look stiff, and rigid, and perhaps not at their most natural in the photographer’s studio, but there is something about these two that gives me the creeps.  

It is the knowledge that they raised a girl who grew up to viciously take out her misery on her first born son, a toddler who grew up to be my father.  My father, though he did much better than his mother, also was unable to resist taking out his misery and his unslakable anger on his children.  He was not one to hit, but his brutal words, as he eventually admitted, were as harmful as any regime of slaps, punches or kicks could have been.

We don’t want insight, we want to be right.  Keep it fucking simple, you merciless asshole!  I am right, as my gut is telling me, as my muscular tension tells me, as the surge of fight/flight/freeze chemicals urge me, as my every justification fucking tells me!

My sister and I had a terrible fight almost thirty years ago when my niece was a toddler.  Frustrations from years of conflict flared up and I lost my temper.  So did my sister who began screaming for me to get out of her fucking house.  My niece said, from her highchair, “mom, stop screaming at Uncle Elie!”   Sides clearly had to be drawn more decisively, as they were over the years, until my niece and nephew were convinced not to communicate with their crazy uncle any more.  Right is right when it comes to seenas cheenam, you understand. 

Irv’s dilemma

My father was a friend of the underdog, ally of the oppressed and broken-hearted idealist turned bitter cynic in the latter years of his life.   He truly wanted to instill in me a love of independence, unwavering honesty, fearlessness in advocating for what was right, and resoluteness opposing tyranny in all forms. 

His dilemma was that his own trauma compelled him to behave tyrannically whenever he felt confronted.  He was unable to control this impulse to dominate, by any means necessary, and so he constantly offered himself as the model of the tyranny I must reject, according to the principles he taught me, while wanting more than anything my respect for his authority and my independence from it.  Damn!  Talk about a no win dilemma.

He instilled in me a lifelong quest for justice, even as he insisted on the most unjust proposition imaginable — the child who is being made to suffer is the cause of everyone’s suffering.   

This intolerable proposition had been forced down his throat, from the time he could stand.  His mother, a diminutive redhead prone to fits of uncontrollable rage, used to whip him in the face.   How does a mother whip her toddler in the face?  She truly believes the kid is viciously defying her.  She has to beat this devil out of him.

The kid, in turn, grows up to hate a bully more than anything in the world.   The only problem is that nobody is more prone to bullying others than someone who has been bullied.  The anger toward the bully is there, along with a determination never to be bullied again.  If the only way to avoid being bullied by a challenging, defiant new born baby is to bully them, how is that anybody’s fault?

So my poor devil father had a dilemma that could only be solved by difficult work that was too painful for him to do, too excruciating to even consider doing.  Poor bastard!

“I don’t know how to do this…”

You know what my father said to me before he died? And I mean right before he died, it might have been the last thing he said. He goes “I don’t know how to do this” and I said “it’s okay, dad, nobody knows how to do it” and a short time later he was just quiet and I saw that he wasn’t breathing. I closed his eyes with two fingers of my right hand and took the oxygen tube out of his nostrils.

I understand now that I said the right thing, what he needed to hear in that moment. “Nobody knows how” was a reassuring touch, but the words he needed to hear were “it’s okay, dad” they released him to go in peace. As he did a moment later, as gently as you can imagine.

insight?

When I was in my late twenties, visiting the farm of my parents’ best friemd, Arlene, she laid a great truth on me. As we watched the sun set one evening she said:

“You feel like you disappointed your parents, like you’re responsible for their unhappiness. I love your parents to death, as you know, they’re my best friends, but they are both very unhappy people. They just are, they were that way long before you were born. Their unhappiness has nothing to do with you, there is nothing you can do to change it, the burden of it is not something you need to carry through life.”

Though what she said sounds obvious to me now, it was like she’d reached up and pulled a string to turn on a light in the universe.

That understanding was an immense help to me, comparable to my father’s older first cousin Eli, years later, describing how he witnessed his beloved Aunt Chava grab the thick, burlap covered cord for her steam iron, from a drawer behind her seat at the kitchen table, and whip little Irv across the face with it.

“In the face?” I said.

“Yep, over and over,” said Eli.

“Jesus,” I said, “how old was he?”

“However old you are when you can stand on your two feet without falling over,” he said, with limitless sorrow. He saw it many times after that, and he said that over time all she had to do was rattle the drawer where she kept the whipping cord and young Irv would stand at rigid attention, staring at the ground, trembling, waiting for the whipping to start.

terra incognita!!!

Mapmakers used to describe gaps in their knowledge of the world under the phrase terra incognita.  The legend on old maps described uncharted, unimaginable expanses of unknown terrain.  Krakens, dragons and every kind of supremely destructive beast were presumed to inhabit terra incognita.  Prove they didn’t, using the maps of the day, you couldn’t.  Therefore, under the coercive, superstitious logic of the day, these monsters actually lived in the terra incognita, and if you disagreed too conspicuously, you could be bound and publicly set on fire as an instruction to other monster skeptics.

Armed with better and better maps intrepid explorers, funded by kings, queens and wealthy early corporations (Dutch East India Company comes to mind) bravely ventured into these uncharted areas and the maps became more and more complete until there was no corner of the earth (except perhaps deep under the sea) that was truly terra incognita.  Today the greatest expanse of terra incognita is inside the minds and hearts of homo sapiens.

A friend used to have a footer on his emails (which I was unable to find in a pile of emails to quote verbatim, dagnabbit):  be kind, remember that everyone you meet is engaged in a hard battle.   True, and good advice.  The invisible battles waged by everyone are truly terra incognita.  We stumble into this land of other people’s unimaginable terrors at our peril.   When your interior battle crosses mine, watch out.  

I spent two years, every day, writing everything I could think of about my father, a perplexing man of unlimited potential and unlimited defensiveness.   My father was chased every moment of his waking life by what he referred to as the demons we all have inside us.   After writing and conducting a long post-mortem discussion with him for two solid years I came to truly understand his motivations, though I didn’t always agree with them, and this understanding allowed me to truly forgive a destructive character who apologized for the first and only time at the very end of his life, hours before he breathed his last. Still, as well as I grasp the tragedy that was my father, the recesses of my heart are still haunted, as all such recesses are.

Do the same thing my father used to do, glare with implacable hostility, maintain an angry defensive silence, defend yourself in lawyerly and inhumane ways, create and insist on an insane counter-narrative to make me the aggressor, you the victim, and I immediately find myself in that familiar, terrifying, incoherent terra incognita.   We can’t map this terrain because we can’t bear to look at it for more than a second or two at a time.  It overpowers us and seems to limit our options to fight or flight.  It is primitive, terrible, maddening business.   We push it down because there is little else to do about it.  Anyone seemingly not engaged in a hard battle is very good at acting, until you touch a nerve that sets off their fight or flight response.

We live in a culture where our collective terra incognita has been set on fire. Along with actual record wildfires on various continents, and the rage and violence we see and hear in many of our citizens, a fire rages in the hearts of tens of millions of us.   This fire is fed regularly, and much of its most potent food is incoherent poison, things a healthy body would never put into its mouth.  No matter.  Down the hatch it goes, and instead of digestion, fire belches forth, to singe the eyebrows of anyone who dares to ask “Jesus, are you OK?” 

When you breathe fire, of course, you are not OK, not fucking OK at all!  How infuriating is that stupid question when the burning inside you is actually flaming out of your mouth and singeing the face of your interlocutor?   Jesus, am I fucking OK?  Yes, I’m fine, you’re the one who is about to die, asshole… 

The roots of my need for coherence

Growing up in a home where I was treated as a dangerous adversary from the day I came home as a newborn affected my wiring in fundamental ways.  Because my parents were always ready with anger and blame, and I was often regularly excoriated over trumped up offenses, sometimes things I was not remotely at fault for, I became painfully sensitive to the brutality of an incoherent, self-serving narrative.   

It was much easier for my parents, two overwhelmed abused children who grew up without essential tools to process their own frustrations, to unite in their blame of a kid who was, in their view, just an irrationally angry little bastard constantly fighting for no apparent reason.  In their story their own behavior had nothing to do with their child’s mysterious, unfortunate, completely innate bad feelings.  They insisted they were right, stuck together most of the time, and that was that.

My life’s work was set for me early on — to discover a truth deeper than the harmful bullshit that was being angrily forced on me and explaining to myself coherently the reasons for the insane arrangement I was expected to subscribe to as simply reality.  As I learn reasons that make sense to me I begin to calm myself. 

Understanding is my most important tool and I wield it with as much clarity as I can against the sometimes awesome incoherence of a world that requires little by way of reason or clarity to form huge enraged armies to inflict hell on their enemies.   Finally learning of the extreme abuse my father underwent, from infancy, (I was in my forties when I learned some key details) unlocked a door of empathy and understanding for me that my father was unable to approach, until hours before his death.

Whenever I am confronted with an incoherent reframing of actual upsetting events it gets my back up.   If someone treats me in a thoughtless way that hurts me and when I react with pain tells me I am wrong to be hurt in any way, that it wasn’t thoughtlessness at all, it was an innocent misunderstanding and I have to forget about it because they love me, because they wouldn’t have been hurt at all if I’d done the same to them, it never quite gets down the old craw.   

I literally can’t swallow an incoherent story, maybe because it makes no fucking sense.  Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know.  I think I am probably not alone in preferring a story that is understandable in the light of observation and experience to a senseless one designed to serve an emotional agenda to protect someone else against feeling bad.   

Friends, when they feel defensive, see my need for coherence, which requires an openness to accepting one’s part in things that actually happened, as a relentless need to be “right”.   I can understand why it could look that way to them, particularly in a competitive and violently adversarial culture like ours, but it is a need for honesty and mutual understanding on my part, more than anything else I can put my finger on.   I was forced to defend myself from before I could even speak, in adversarial proceedings brought daily by a father/prosecutor who was very good at prosecuting.  I developed skills in arguing way before I finally, misguidedly, went to law school.   People sometimes tell me they feel overmatched and it gets their backs up, because they need to feel “right” too and I’m a more skilled fighter with words than they are, so their disadvantage makes them fight harder.  There are many ways to fight against something that makes you feel defensive and many are familiar from my childhood.   

Reframing is a famous technique for avoiding any discussion of anything you don’t want to talk about and my father was a genius at constantly steering the conversation away from what his children needed to talk about to a much deeper thing that we were “really” talking about.   Any conversation about being hurt was constantly reframed until we were talking about the real, and only, issue:  what an irrationally angry little fuck I’d always been, and remain.   

If I behave toward you in a way that’s wrong, and keep defending it as a mistake, like all humans make, I am choosing a neutral, understandable synonym to let myself off the hook for hurting you.   I was wrong because I made a mistake and I made a mistake because I was wrong are fairly close, almost interchangeable.  Wrong carries a bit more moral weight than mistaken, since using it accepts responsibility for the harm the mistake caused, so to shift the ground from the moral idea that it is wrong to do something to you that I hate done to me, I can insist on calling it a mistake and put the onus on you, the person I wronged/mistaked to have the human compassion to forgive me without more.  It is a painful thing to be unforgiven and an ugly thing to be unforgiving, isn’t it?  About a simple mistake?  Come on.

Then there is the greatest weapon of all against responsibility or reconciliation — silence by way of response.

This is kryptonite to me, as it would be to you, if applied steadily and consistently over years to make sure there was no possibility of being heard, no chance for reconciliation of any kind.  After months of silence about my last attempt at reconciliation with my father (and, naturally, I’d chosen the infuriating medium of a letter, where I have the unfair advantage of not being interrupted, reframed, dismissed, or ignored while communicating as clearly as I am able) he spoke words that live with me to this day “oh, that letter (the one I’d sent twice before hand delivering a third copy).  Yeah, I read that.  You have to respect my right not to respond to that.”

A debatable proposition, but there you are.  As polite and crisp as my father’s sentence was “you have to respect my right not to respond to that” is, it’s a problematic, even incoherent, response to a loved one expressing a need for something better, even as it attempts to close a door forever, even as it succeeds, until the last night of the poor devil’s life when he admits, hours before he breathes his last and I close dead eyelids over eyes I never really noticed were the stormy grey green color of a troubled sea, that he had been wrong.   Wrong or mistaken, he blamed himself harshly, as he was dying, for things he understood that last night he should have had the sense and strength to work on in himself, instead of being content to blame a baby for being a deadly adversary.

Sometimes there are swamps we walk into without knowing where we are, and clarity is essential here in order to avoid wading into danger for everyone.  We can mistakenly believe that people we love can show us an intimate side, a dark side, make themselves exceptionally vulnerable, and then not act desperately to make painful things disappear.   The private lives of a couple, how they treat each other, show anger to each other, accept or reject each other, is a swamp we must exit as quickly as possible once we see we’ve stepped into it.  Any attempt to protect one against the other will go as badly as reaching into the muddy depths of a swamp to pull at something you can’t see.   

This last piece is recently acquired wisdom, thanks to friends who shared experiences to illuminate the truth of this.  If you doubt the truth of it, try it yourself sometime, spend a few days alone with a couple and begin trying to protect the wife against the open hostility of the husband and tell me you are not suddenly neck deep in a hot, humid, mosquito rich paradise for dangerous reptiles.  Live and learn, my friend, and take the lessons you learn to heart.   Only by doing that can we get out of a dangerous swamp that can easily swallow everything we love.

Harder to sit with sorrow than with anger

Sorrow is draining and terrible, it forces you to feel the pain of loss in its pure form. Anger, while blinding, gives you energy, purpose and a bracing sense of righteousness.

If you are quick to anger, try sitting with sorrow sometime, feeling the loss of a soul you love. It is an illuminating exercise.

My father found it humiliating to feel vulnerable. His early hurt made him unable to risk giving anybody the power to hurt him, so he never let his guard down. His fists were always ready, his blows were struck with glares and harsh words. If he had begun to taste the pain of the ocean of pain he was thrashing in, he would have drowned.

But I couldn’t have understood any of that while I was still his adversary. I couldn’t break free from that endless, senseless vying until I learned about his traumatic infancy. Seeing him as a whipped two year-old flooded me with compassion, and opened a window, for the first time, into his valiantly defended, tortured soul.

My strange belief in the power of understanding

I say strange belief because the world often appears to defy understanding. Look around, and tell me an understanding can be reached between people who hate each other. I believe it is possible for two enemies to become friends, once they learn how much they have in common, how many fundamental beliefs they actually share. It is rare, sure, but it has been known to happen.

The mother of a boy randomly killed by a new gang member tells the kid when he’s convicted that she will kill him. She visits him in prison, sends him books and money. When he’s released she lets him live in her murdered son’s room, which he does gratefully as he finishes his education. They become as close as mother and son. The young man asks one day if she still believes what she said at the end of his trail, that she’d see him dead. She tells him she does, and that his current life proves she did kill that monster he was becoming. He understands the truth of that. A beautiful true story I heard the woman herself narrate years ago on a program about the power of forgiveness. Rare, and wonderful, and also, proof that things that seem impossible can be done, if the heart is right and the actions taken are intelligent and consistent.

I enjoy talking with people, particularly when the conversation goes beyond normal pleasantries and daily observations and takes unexpected turns into new terrain and unknown commonalities are revealed.  There are difficult things we learn sometimes, important life lessons, and I particularly love those rare occasions where conversation takes this deeper turn and we compare the personal details of hard lessons we’ve learned about a particular vexation. 

In my home growing up, though the four of us were all reasonably good at talking, and liked to chat, our conversations often turned into angry arguments.   In that previous sentence we see, I suppose, the roots of my strange belief in the power of listening, speaking clearly, acknowledging — my belief in the importance of understanding.

You can argue adamantly, to prove you’re right, dominating the person you’re arguing with, yielding nothing, ever, or you can argue without stubbornness, open to another perspective and trying to illuminate a misunderstanding or unintended cruelty.  Dispassion is a word Buddhists and others use to describe thinking and communicating that is not the slave of passion, not in service to strong feelings that impede our ability to reason, to weigh things fairly, under a warm light.  If you speak and listen dispassionately you hear better and your responses are not as likely to add fuel to anger.  Dispassion is sometimes derided as unemotional, robotic, inhuman, but the real essence of it, I think, is keeping your thoughts slightly apart from your feelings, particularly strong feelings that will often stir you to assemble the troops to counterattack, and bearing in mind the larger, more humane purpose of the conversation.

In the grips of strong emotion we are often not at our best, emotionally, intellectually or morally.   In the last five years of my mother’s life, on the rare occasions I said something that made her explode in anger,  I became adept at quickly changing the subject to something pleasant.   It worked very well, she’d immediately release her mask of aggression and smile with great relief.  I came to see that the thing she was angry about was something I could immediately stop pressing and the thing I distracted her with showed that I understood her pain and we were now talking about something she liked instead.   I recognized that there were some things, like her painful relationship with her daughter and grandchildren, that she needed to vent about, and get my sympathy for.  She was unable to imagine anything better between them and her hurt and anger got inflamed whenever ideas about how to improve the hopeless situation were suggested by her know-it-all son.   Finally recognizing this inability of hers, an inability she shared with her daughter, sad to say (and which doomed every suggestion I might make),  I would desist in my doomed peacemaking efforts at the first sign of anger.

My father and I had a lifelong debate on whether people can change their fundamental natures.  There are good points on either side of the issue, but I was locked into proving that my belief that we can change much of what is painful to us was reasonable and based on evidence, and he was determined to prove that the idea that we have this kind of autonomy and power to change is a cruel illusion that does more harm than good.  I can see truths on both sides of the debate as I type these words.   Because of the acrimony between my father and me it was never possible to persuade my father of how much we can change our reactions to things that bother us or to move him off his fixed belief about the inevitability of pain, frustration and anger.   

“You admit you’re only changing your reaction, the superficial part, and that doesn’t touch the inborn, fundamental nature at all,” my father would say. “If you are born with a prickly disposition, no amount of navel gazing is going to make you able to resist provocation when it arises, provocation that would not even bother some one with an innately placid nature .   You might get a tiny bit better at not immediately snarling, but you are only changing your surface reactions, not your genetically programmed reflex. The fundamental things about ourselves are immutable and it’s pathetic to believe in something impossible.” 

“But changing your reaction, say not responding with reflexive anger, makes it possible to have a reasonable conversation with others, and that’s not a small thing,” I’d say.  In the end I pointed out that he himself had changed his angry reactions toward me, and that our relationship was better for it.  This proved a bad example to hand to a wartime prosecutor like my father, though he had, in fact, greatly moderated his angry reactions to me in recent years, after a difficult conversation I’d initiated with him one Yom Kippur.

“I only changed my superficial reactions,” he told me, “nothing fundamental changed in me.  I became a better actor, is all.  If I ever honestly told you what I really think of you it would do such irreparable harm to our relationship that we’d never be able to talk again.”   

He rested his decades-long case by saying the one thing that proved he was determined to be right, more than anything else in the world, and this neither he, nor I, nor any power in the universe could change — and here was the final proof.  All this talk of emotional plasticity and the value of a skilled therapist, of introspection, self-criticism and self-acceptance, so much bullshit for contempibly weak people to believe.  As for him, he was man enough to admit the difficult truth about humans — however we are, emotionally, at two years old, is how we are for the rest of our lives.

Therefore, following the logic, we cannot learn anything important, not really.  Superficial things, OK, we all learn to use toilet bowls, and language, academic subjects, but we can never learn how to hurt ourselves and others less.  Some people are born decent, reasonably happy, they get along in the world without friction or conflict.  Others are born riled up, unhappy, critical, ready to rumble, and these angry little ass kickers, who can never be wrong, are doomed to live in a world of hurt.

His tune changed on his deathbed, as apparently not infrequently happens.  Part of it, I believe, was seeing his lifelong adversary quiet, thoughtful and willing to do whatever he could to make his father’s death easier.  He lamented that he’d been unable to consider so many things, had been so limited in what he could imagine, had been so adamant, seen the world as so black and white.   He had painful regrets that he expressed for the first time, and I did my best to reassure him about each one that he’d done the best he could.

Now, it’s important to note how many times I have infuriated people close to me in recent years by my determination to remain peaceful and mild-mannered in the face of escalating bad feelings.   In the end the ugliness where there was once friendship and laughter, the absence where mutual good will used to be, becomes impossible to ignore. In their defense, there is nothing more maddening when you are angry than some fucking prig on the high road, managing to keep the anger off his tongue.

Expressing anger dramatically is a deadly game I’ve played countless times over the years, so, in the end, after enough angry invitations to tell a friend to go fuck himself, I yield to the surge of righteousness I’ve been trying not to express as contempt and tell the person, in detail, all of the irredeemable things about them I can no longer tolerate.   Friendship does not recover from this, because at the point where everything about another person is reduced to their worst and most shameful weaknesses, well, that’s irreparable harm.

So maybe my pre-deathbed father was right all along.  If you are locked in a battle with an adamant rival, intent on winning at all costs, you will, in the end, revert to however you were born to be.   The angry will rage, the placid will cry. You can pursue dispassion, believe in the power of conversation to illuminate difficulties, remove hostility, the plasticity of the human soul, forgiveness and all the rest, but in the end, when a line is crossed that is impossible to get back to the other side of, you are only prolonging the terminal phase of something that is already dead. All your high ideals about the power of understanding are so much useless, smelly, self-righteous baggage. 

Maybe so. 

I continue to work on being clear, and listening carefully to others. It is not the work of a few days, that.  Do we get better at things we practice faithfully?  All signs say we do, however loud the hooting chorus of fatalistic naysayers gets.

Nothing personal — my father’s deathbed Zen koan

Perhaps the most mysterious, profound and illuminating thing my father said to me the last night of his life was that none of the long war between us had been personal.   It took me a long time after he died to figure out what he meant by that.

“You have to understand, Elie,” my father told me in the strained voice of a dying man, “on a real level there was never anything personal about our battles.”   He explained that the hostilities had little to do with me, personally, though I was the one forced to fight.  He assured me he’d have acted the same way with any child, regardless of their temperament.  

Nothing personal.  When I fought you to the death every night, it was, strictly speaking, nothing personal.  My father was fighting his demons, the fears that tortured him all his life, those torments just took on my face when I sat across from him.  When he snarled at me it was difficult for me not to snarl back at him.   Nothing personal became intensely personal, though he told me that last night that I had to understand none of it had been personal, strictly speaking.

It reminds me of the moth joke Norm McDonald used to tell Conan O’Brien.   Norm took a ten second joke and milked it for seven minutes.   The set up is a moth walks into a podiatrist’s office and starts pouring out his heart to the doctor.  In Norm’s telling the moth is tortured by how much he hates himself, hates the reflection of himself in his son.   “When I look at my son,” Norm’s overwrought moth tells the podiatrist, “I am overcome with rage and self-loathing, it’s like looking at everything I hate in myself, and I hate that I hate my own son, which reminds me more how much I hate myself and how much I deserve to hate myself.  What kind of father feels revulsion when he looks at his own son’s face?  I tell you, doc, that kid, it’s like the worst in me condensed into a face I want to literally hit with a hammer.  I’m afraid one day I’m going to act on this rage, and I know it’s irrational, it has nothing to do with the poor kid, who I can see has some good qualities.  He’s actually a pretty good guy, my son, but I continue to stare at him with rage, I can’t help it, and I know how sick it is, doc, but I look at the kid’s face and I literally want to vomit, I’m afraid someday I’m going to murder him…” and Norm continues in this vein for several more minutes as Conan chides him and goads him on.

Finally the podiatrist says “listen, it sounds like you have some serious issues you need help with, but you really need a psychiatrist.  I’m a podiatrist, I treat problems of the feet and lower legs, I’m not the kind of doctor who can help you with what you just described to me.  Why did you walk into a podiatrist’s office?”

“The light was on,” says the moth.

Like the light that went on when I finally understood what my father meant by telling me I had to understand it was never anything personal, strictly speaking.  That he put it in context was helpful.   He told me he’d felt me reaching out many times over the years to make peace, but that he was always too fucked up to reach back.   He told me how much he regretted his lack of emotional maturity, imagination, moral courage.  He said he wished we could have had this kind of honest, back and forth conversation fifteen years ago, after only thirty-five years of constant, senseless warfare.

Nothing personal, like the universe itself had decreed it.  And we, hapless pawns that we are, blown like leaves in the wind, subject to forces too gigantic and terrifying to have any hope of overcoming.  Nothing personal, a great relief and a terrible curse, at once.