on her own

The grey cat sleeps next to me on the coffee table. She's mostly slept here all day, on the table, under the window looking out over the back yard. Looking out the window I can see the garden Jami planted: tomatoes, squash, collards, peppers. Now it is dark outside, that time of day when the only image in the window is the reflection of lighted space inside the house.

I haven't had a therapist in three years now. I speak with Nibs - who has some counseling skill. I wonder what it would be like to speak with someone new. Is there anything left to plumb? The unconscious is a factory of desire - says Deleuze. Certainly I've used the unconscious in my art ever since I was a teenager. My unconscious is what liberated me from my artist's block.

Freud, in his book on Jokes, says that we don't want to know what the unconscious has to say. Not so much scary as uncomfortable. We tend not to be closet monsters so much as very fallible people. It's hard to admit that we're less than we'd like to be. Some people seem to talk about how they're not good at anything - but they don't believe that. I've noticed that people that don't believe they're good at anything aren't very teachable. Not being good at something seems a good first step in learning. If I thought I was any good, I might resist learning. So there's my crazy logic. That's my logic.

Calvin talks about how becoming teachable was the beginning of his conversion. "Becoming teachable is the beginning of Salvation [healing]" - wouldn't that be quite the motto of our schools. Calvin, unfortunately, didn't remain teachable. His teachabilitiness was an interlude. How else to explain his authoritarian excesses in Geneva and with Servetus?

I am going through a great theological shift - great at least for me. After years of being centered in Reformed theology, I find myself more and more in agreement with Frederich Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher is the bugaboo of conservatives. In response to the enlightenment, he saw that the task of theology was not done - that orthodox theology might have made sense according to an old view of the cosmos, an old view of humanity, but that that old theology could not account for the reality of faith in the new age.