When I flew out West I didn't know what to expect. I have actually flown out West three times: the first two times for brief periods, one and three months; the last time was for seven years. I could say that I flew out one way, conservative, and returned another way, liberal. That simplifies things too much - labels don't account for how our lives are controlled by signifiers. These popular labels we give ourselves and others are merely the orientations a person assumes toward words and ideas; what makes us up as persons are much deeper mechanisms - mechanisms that are fiercely tied to emotions: I witnessed this in that though a political and theological orientation changed, my anger remained. What I've experienced here, over many years, is that ideological content often is a placeholder of fantasy.
I am fascinated by this: that I've been prey to my emotional attachments so long. For the last 10 years I feel like I've been emerging from a fog, a mental numbness, a detachment from myself. I could not begin to enunciate all the ways Jung, Freud, Becker, Lacan, Zizek, Merleu Ponty, Barth, Barthes, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Schleiermacher and so many others have helped me. I would have to include poets and authors - Pound, Gaddis, Percy, Markson, Pinchon, Seidel, Cavafy, Berryman, Hall, Kenyon, Eliot, Auden, Ashbery, Wright, et cie.
When I was working as a chaplain in North Carolina, I owned my narcissistic wound. Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child helped - as well as a paper written by Richard Sennet and published in October magazine in 1977. This was not an easy time for me, nor an easy thing to do. It has not been the last difficult thing I've had to do, but it has made those things less difficult, less emotionally vexing.
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