The Anarchic* Psyche of Michael A Leavy

Rated WP-MA: mature language, childish language, children (real and imaginary) in danger, an offensive (yet cute) image

The Paper

First time I visited Santa Fe was when I was a struggling grad student in Anthropology, a few years before I began to recover the memories of what happened to me as a child. So, that was before I did The Artist’s Way (addressed in the previous post) and before I began the inner child and inner landscape work that figures in most of the posts to this point. In short: I was blind to many, many things about myself.

So I was in Santa Fe at a conference to present an academic paper to a professional audience for the first time; whether it went well or badly depends on which part of the event and it’s aftermath we choose to point to. It went well, I suppose, in the end, because one of the pre-eminent figures in my sub-field of Anthropology wrote me requesting a copy of the paper, then wrote back to tell me how marvelous it was. Plus, it was nearly published in a collection of papers from the conference.

On the other hand.

After I presented the paper, some absolute nobody from a country that lost at least two world wars stood up and took the entire q & a period to deliver a blistering critique of my paper based on a fundamental and frankly stupid misunderstanding of what it was about. I stood there the while, thinking I must look like the proverbial deer in the headlights, while no doubt looking like an absolute fucking idiot deer in the double-damned headlights from hell. Then I said, “well, you’ve used up all of the question time,” and sat down.

The Frog

Some years later, when we had been writing Morning Pages long enough to have given up all pretense of doing them correctly (which might actually means that we were getting good at them), some of the crew wrote a short tale off the top of their heads that – so far as I can tell – has nothing whatsoever to do with the above upsetting anecdote.

The tale, untitled, is a fairy tale, quite shapely for a spontaneous work, about a giant frog that eats little children. In it, two (inner) children – a timid Fear and a “timider” Despair – are lost in Surewood Forest, where all the trees are giant penises. They stumble onto the hut where the giant frog lives, and find him squatting outside, with a little boy in his mouth. The frog, of course, is ready with the standard three questions.

Before he can pose the first question, though, Ike the Fear throws up. This turns out to be the correct answer to the first question.

Before the frog can get the second question out, Spike the Despair poops, which – yes – is the correct answer to the second question.

And before the frog can get the third question out? Well, the little kid in his mouth pre-empts him by stirring awake and asking, “where am I?” After a moment of confusion on everyone’s part, Ike and Spike prove that they were indeed paying attention when we read Jon Kabat-Zinn and yell out, “Right where you are!”

Task fulfilled, the three boys hot-foot it out of Surewood Forest and into the safety of Big Guy’s arms. (Big Guy: what they called adult Michael in those days.)

I’ll leave it to future scholars to unravel the symbolism of the frog in the original telling of that tale. Here and now, for reasons that are completely opaque to us, the frog represents anger. Initially, when “frog fairy tale” offered itself as the obvious bridge between “academic conference anecdote” and “significantly more painful recollection from our past that will explain the migraine at the heart of this trilogy of posts,” we went with it gladly because that kind of inexplicable impulse nearly always proves to have a logic both unassailable and poetic (trust me).

This time it didn’t. Which almost never happens.

So let’s pretends that it did prove out, and that we have now established to everyone’s complete satisfaction that the child-eating frog serves perfectly as a symbol of what blocked us from seeing immediately why we went into such extreme panic mode over this Julia Cameron thing you’ve read about; indeed why, for decades, we’ve only had the cloudiest grasp of why there are such severe limitations on directly calling attention to ourself and our needs – which frankly, has fucked things up time and again down the years.

That frog, squatting there between us and the truth, is the devouring rage over our inability to do things that, in effect, say “I’m over here, can I have a moment of your time/ could you look at this a moment/ can you give me a hand/ would this be of interest to you/ might I be of service/ might we…?” It enrages us that we can’t, most of the time, even imagine doing things like that, when so many other people do them without a thought. For some people, I gather, asking other people for attention and stuff isn’t even a thing at all, they just do it. Damn. That just pisses me off (at myself, most of the time, but you know how it goes) – and the funny thing is, when we manage to be like other people and seek attention and survive doing so, it almost pisses us off more (at ourself, most of the time, but you know how it goes), because it just makes us think about all that we might have done and contributed but didn’t and haven’t.

“Survive doing so,” we said. The worst part, maybe – and this may be true for a lot of us who spend more time hiding than not – when we do take the risk, like with our academic work, our stage work, our teaching, and more, it’s generally regarded by others as of superior quality (not bragging – it’s what I’m told, not what we believe – maybe they’re just being nice, is what we always fear (which is kind of insulting to them)).

The Racket

So what came to mind in my therapist’s office the week after she had freaked me out – after I’d pulled the kid out of the frog’s mouth, if you will – was a memory from when I was 7 or so. It was at my maternal grandparents’ house. A cousin and I had decided to put on some kind of a show. As I remember it (and this part may be mis-recalled), my father was the sole member of the audience. Apparently it was my task to open the show: I recall “strumming” a tennis racket while improvising lyrics to introduce the show. For most of my life I have recalled it as a preposterous and stupid – really stupid – thing to do, but perhaps it was simply something that a child might do?

The last thing that I recall from that incident is faltering when I happened to catch the look in my father’s eyes: a deep loathing, a terrible anger.

What the eventual consequence was for daring to call attention to myself in that way – solo, in the spotlight, asking for full attention – was, and when it occurred, I couldn’t tell you. The blank spots in our memory of those years, of which there are many, sometimes come from suppression after the fact, sometimes from dissociation during the act. Was the consequence rape? Not every night was a good one for that, so it might have been something else, and if it was that, I might not have been the victim, though this doesn’t seem the kind of circumstance that would have made our little sister the target.

It’s the absence of memory in this instance, the abyss that follows the look in, into, our father’s eyes, that ever after has colored the notion of daring to risk exposure: we look out at, over, the prospect(s) and see no horizon. Then: cue an Enforcer to light up the sky with a migraine, send us stumbling backward into the relative safety of paralysis or the inadequate outcome that will likely result from plowing forward in blinding pain.

We went quite a few months without migraines, after we’d mastered the Existential Kink technique. But then we finished and revised a manuscript; finished and revised a book proposal; thoroughly researched agents and drafted several basic query letters… okay, we haven’t starting sending queries out yet, but.. And we set up a blog and have written and posted a bunch of posts… okay, we’ve done nothing to get them read, but… And we’re signed up for this Writers’ Retreat… okay, the Enforcers might just uncork the mother of all migraines on us, but…

None of them want to. The pressure has been increasing on them, though. We keep indulging in risky behavior, and they keep seeing random denizens of the landscape succumbing here and there to panic and vomiting frogs or something equally colorful, which triggers the urge to bring down the hammer or throw the lightning bolt, to which they sometimes surrender. Sometimes we can talk them out of it, sometimes we can’t.

We don’t have an ending for this one, so here’s

A Gratuitous Photo… Or Not. You Decide.