This was originally written on 2/4/2021.
Recently my analysis has taken a turn towards law, a specific law that I picked out and have adhered to for a long time now. So that’s what I’d like to write about here.
The Law and my Decision
The scene I have in mind is from when I was quite young. Younger than 10 years old, older than probably 5. My dad and I are at my grandmother’s house, which has a very large garden. My grandmother, starting to get up there in age, needs a lot of help maintaining the garden, the lawn, the house in general, you know the type of stuff. So we’re helping to dig out some diseased plants. Being a young kid I’m not trying terribly hard, and my dad at some point says to me “If you’re going to do something, you should do it well.”
What followed that scene was a long series of unconscious decisions to follow the law. I don’t think it really took hold until some time later, but things started to divide themselves into “things I’m going to do, and so should do well.” I took school seriously, I took guitar seriously, I took the French horn seriously — or, at least I made it look like I did. What became important to me was seeming as if I followed the law, putting out the appearance that I was doing things well. I’ve written a few times about the anatomy test I failed and subsequently hid from my parents. When I played guitar it was other people’s music — not that playing someone else’s songs takes no skill, but I think that playing guitar “well” should probably include an ability to come up with stuff (for me, anyway). At work I would make sure that the job looked like it had been done, never making sure or asking questions, things like that. The point I’m trying to get at is that I had decided at some point that I was going to follow this law absolutely.
The law (I can even say the law-of-the-father) had effectively been perverted (père-verted, if you will) into something new. And this was the entry point of this small phrase into my analysis. So we talked about it for a while, the various ways the perverted law has entered into my life. After that session I was set to work a bit, it dwelt on me for quite some time, actually.
Something I noticed rather quickly was that certain things began to change — very, very slightly, but still, it made a difference. I found myself reading without trying to grasp absolutely everything. I was a bit more okay with leaving some things un-understood, with leaving several questions. Rather than trying to “get it,” I was getting what I could and leaving the rest to be worked out. What struck me about this very slight change was that it seemed to be a more faithful following of the law. If the law I took on had been “if anything is worth doing then you’d better do it well,” I was now starting to think about it more to the letter. I was reading, taking my time, and using that time well.
There’s one other thing I need to write here before we move on: the space made for exceptions. I won’t go too deep into this because a lot of it I’m not comfortable to divulge all of. But, we can at least understand that there are spaces which act as exceptions to the law as I took it on. If I felt this compulsion to do well — or give the appearance that I had done well — there were other places where I would escape to in order to escape this compulsion. When I was a kid it was the bathroom; as I got older there was my car, the garage, and a few other places, all where I could escape the gaze. In these spaces where there was no gaze, I would do … we can just say things, for now.
So at our next session I pointed this out. As far as I can see my experience is divided into three different spaces: the space of the law as I understood it from childhood, the burgeoning space of the letter of the law, and the space of the exception. All spaces I occupy fall into one of these three categories. Not a whole lot happened when it came to this content, but eventually, I made my way to a new association: the way my physical body takes up space.
I told my analyst that I so often feel like my body doesn’t quite listen. I trip, I run into doors and walls, I get my belt loop stuck on doorknobs what feels like more often than is typical. If you watch basketball (or any other sport, for that matter) you probably know that the athletes can do incredible things with their bodies. They seem to have an unfathomable control of their body in space, they know where their body is, they know where other bodies are, they know exactly what to do with their bodies. When I play basketball, I can’t do any of those things. It’s by far my worst athletic attribute — all I’ve got on my side is my height.
What my analyst connected together here was space as I was talking about before (my divided up experience) and the space occupied by my body. What seemed like a random occurrence, a weird lack of control over my body, was connected to these spaces of the law, and my body was telling me as much. These physical happenings, as such, are not random. They are not contingent and neither am I or very much of what happens to me. I compared myself to a chicken with its head cut off, and the analyst said “what you’re finding is that you’re a chicken with a head.” I told him, “Right, exactly, I’m alive, not a headless chicken wandering around.” We ended.
I apologize if this post seems to be all over the place; I haven’t quite put all my thoughts together, and I expected they’ll take a while to get there. But either way, maybe this was interesting?