Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Notes

1 Also the first American-born poet ever in the Nobel Prize for Literature’s distinguished 94-year history to receive it, the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature.

2 Never the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, however: thrice rejected early in his career, he had reason to believe that something personal and/or political was afoot with the Guggenheim Fellowship committee, and had decided that he’d simply be damned, starve utterly, before he would ever again hire a graduate assistant to fill out the tiresome triplicate Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship application and go through the tiresome contemptible farce of ‘objective’ consideration ever again.

3 That is not wholly true.

1 The multiform shapes the therapist’s mated fingers assumed nearly always resembled, for the depressed person, various forms of geometrically diverse cages, an association which the depressed person had not shared with the therapist because its symbolic significance seemed too overt and simple-minded to waste their time together on. The therapist’s fingernails were long and shapely and well maintained, whereas the depressed person’s fingernails were compulsively bitten so short and ragged that the quick sometimes protruded and began spontaneously to bleed.

2 (i.e., one of which purulent wounds)

3 The depressed person’s therapist was always extremely careful to avoid appearing to judge or blame the depressed person for clinging to her defenses, or to suggest that the depressed person had in any way consciously chosen or chosen to cling to a chronic depression whose agony made her (i.e., the depressed person’s) every waking hour feel like more than any person could possibly endure. This renunciation of judgment or imposed value was held by the therapeutic school in which the therapist’s philosophy of healing had evolved over almost fifteen years of clinical experience to be integral to the combination of unconditional support and complete honesty about feelings which composed the nurturing professionalism required for a productive therapeutic journey toward authenticity and intrapersonal wholeness. Defenses against intimacy, the depressed person’s therapist’s experiential theory held, were nearly always arrested or vestigial survival-mechanisms; i.e., they had, at one time, been environmentally appropriate and necessary and had very probably served to shield a defenseless childhood psyche against potentially unbearable trauma, but in nearly all cases they (i.e., the defense-mechanisms) had become inappropriately imprinted and arrested and were now, in adulthood, no longer environmentally appropriate and in fact now, paradoxically, actually caused a great deal more trauma and pain than they prevented. Nevertheless, the therapist had made it clear from the outset that she was in no way going to pressure, hector, cajole, argue, persuade, flummox, trick, harangue, shame, or manipulate the depressed person into letting go of her arrested or vestigial defenses before she (i.e., the depressed person) felt ready and able to risk taking the leap of faith in her own internal resources and self-esteem and personal growth and healing to do so (i.e., to leave the nest of her defenses and freely and joyfully fly).

4 The therapist — who was substantially older than the depressed person but still younger than the depressed person’s mother, and who, other than in the condition of her fingernails, resembled that mother in almost no physical or stylistic respects — sometimes annoyed the depressed person with her habit of making a digiform cage in her lap and changing the shapes of the cage and gazing down at the geometrically diverse cages during their work together. Over time, however, as the therapeutic relationship deepened in terms of intimacy and sharing and trust, the sight of the digiform cages irked the depressed person less and less, eventually becoming little more than a distraction. Far more problematic in terms of the depressed person’s trust and self-esteem-issues was the therapist’s habit of from time to time glancing up very quickly at the large sunburst-design clock on the wall behind the suede easy chair in which the depressed person customarily sat during their time together, glancing (i.e., the therapist glancing) very quickly and almost furtively at the clock, such that what came to bother the depressed person more and more over time was not that the therapist was looking at the clock but that the therapist was apparently trying to hide or disguise the fact that she was looking at the clock. The depressed person — who was agonizingly sensitive, she admitted, to the possibility that anyone she was trying to reach out and share with was secretly bored or repelled or desperate to get away from her as quickly as possible, and was commensurately hypervigilant about any slight movements or gestures which might imply that a listener was conscious of the time or eager for time to pass, and never once failed to notice when the therapist glanced ever so quickly either up at the clock or down at the slender, elegant wristwatch whose timepiece rested hidden from the depressed person’s view against the underside of the therapist’s slim wrist — had finally, late in the first year of the therapeutic relationship, broken into sobs and shared that it made her feel totally demeaned and invalidated whenever the therapist appeared to try to hide the fact that she wished to know the exact time. Much of the depressed person’s work with the therapist in the first year of her (i.e., the depressed person’s) journey toward healing and intrapersonal wholeness had concerned her feelings of being uniquely and repulsively boring or convoluted or pathetically self-involved, and of not being able to trust that there was genuine interest and compassion and caring on the part of a person to whom she was reaching out for support; and in fact the therapeutic relationship’s first significant breakthrough, the depressed person told members of her Support System in the agonizing period following the therapist’s death, had come when the depressed person, late in the therapeutic relationship’s second year, had gotten sufficiently in touch with her own inner worth and resources to be able to share assertively with the therapist that she (i.e., the respectful but assertive depressed person) would prefer it if the therapist would simply look openly up at the helioform clock or openly turn her wrist over to look at the underside’s wristwatch instead of apparently believing — or at least engaging in behavior which made it appear, from the depressed person’s admittedly hypersensitive perspective, as if the therapist believed — that the depressed person could be fooled by her dishonestly sneaking an observation of the time into some gesture that tried to look like a meaningless glance at the wall or an absent manipulation of the cagelike digiform shape in her lap.

Another important piece of therapeutic work the depressed person and her therapist had accomplished together — a piece of work which the therapist had said she personally felt constituted a seminal leap of growth and deepening of the trust and level of honest sharing between them — occurred in the therapeutic relationship’s third year, when the depressed person had finally confessed that she also felt it was demeaning to be spoken to as the therapist sometimes spoke to her, i.e., that the depressed person felt patronized, condescended to, and/or treated like a child at those times during their work together when the therapist would start tiresomely lallating over and over and over again what her therapeutic philosophies and goals and wishes for the depressed person were; plus not to mention, while they were on the whole subject, that she (i.e., the depressed person) also sometimes felt demeaned and resentful whenever the therapist would look up from her lap’s hands’ cage at the depressed person and her (i.e., the therapist’s) face would once again assume its customary expression of calm and boundless patience, an expression which the depressed person admitted she knew (i.e., the depressed person knew) was intended to communicate unjudging attention and interest and support but which nevertheless sometimes from the depressed person’s perspective looked to her more like emotional detachment, like clinical distance, like mere professional interest the depressed person was purchasing instead of the intensely personal interest and empathy and compassion she often felt she had spent her whole life starved for. It made her angry, the depressed person confessed; she often felt angry and resentful at being nothing but the object of the therapist’s professional compassion or of the putative “friends” in her pathetic “Support System”’s charity and abstract guilt.

5 Though the depressed person had, she later acknowledged to her Support System, been anxiously watching the therapist’s face for evidence of a negative reaction as she (i.e., the depressed person) opened up and vomited out all these potentially repulsive feelings about the therapeutic relationship, she nevertheless was by this point in the session benefiting enough from a kind of momentum of emotional honesty to be able to open up even further and tearfully share with the therapist that it also felt demeaning and even somehow abusive to know that, for example, today (i.e., the day of the depressed person and her therapist’s seminally honest and important piece of relationship-work together), at the moment the depressed person’s time with the therapist was up and they had risen from their respective recliners and hugged stiffly goodbye until their next appointment together, that at that very moment all of the therapist’s seemingly intensely personally focused attention and support and interest in the depressed person would be withdrawn and then effortlessly transferred onto the next pathetic contemptible whiny self-involved snaggletoothed pig-nosed fat-thighed shiteater who was waiting out there right outside reading a used magazine and waiting to lurch in and cling pathetically to the hem of the therapist’s pelisse for an hour, so desperate for a personally interested friend that they would pay almost as much per month for the pathetic temporary illusion of a friend as they paid in fucking rent. The depressed person knew all too perfectly well, she conceded — holding up a pica-gnawed hand to prevent the therapist from interrupting — that the therapist’s professional detachment was in fact not at all incompatible with true caring, and that the therapist’s careful maintenance of a professional, rather than a personal, level of caring and support and commitment meant that this support and caring could be counted on to always Be There for the depressed person and not fall prey to the normal vicissitudes of less professional and more personal interpersonal relationships’ inevitable conflicts and misunderstandings or natural fluctuations in the therapist’s own personal mood and emotional availability and capacity for empathy on any particular day; not to mention that her (i.e., the therapist’s) professional detachment meant that at least within the confines of the therapist’s chilly but attractive home office and of their appointed three hours together each week the depressed person could be totally honest and open about her own feelings without ever having to be afraid that the therapist would take those feelings personally and become angry or cold or judgmental or derisive or rejecting or would ever shame or deride or abandon the depressed person; in fact that, ironically, in many ways, as the depressed person said she was all too aware, the therapist was actually the depressed person’s — or at any rate the isolated, agonized, needy, pathetic, selfish, spoiled, wounded-Inner-Child part of the depressed person’s — absolutely ideal personal friend: i.e. here, after all, was a person (viz., the therapist) who would always Be There to listen and really care and empathize and be emotionally available and giving and to nurture and support the depressed person and yet would demand absolutely nothing back from the depressed person in terms of empathy or emotional support or in terms of the depressed person ever really caring about or even considering the therapist’s own valid feelings and needs as a human being. The depressed person also knew perfectly well, she had acknowledged, that it was in fact the $90 an hour which made the therapeutic relationship’s simulacrum of friendship so ideally one-sided: i.e. the only expectation or demand the therapist placed on the depressed person was for the contracted hourly $90; after that one demand was satisfied, everything in the relationship got to be for and about the depressed person. On a rational, intellectual, “head” level, the depressed person was completely aware of all these realities and compensations, she told the therapist, and so of course felt that she (i.e., the depressed person) had no rational reason or excuse for feeling the vain, needy, childish feelings she had just taken the unprecedented emotional risk of sharing that she felt; and yet the depressed person confessed to the therapist that she nevertheless still felt, on a more basic, emotionally intuitive or “gut” level, that it truly was demeaning and insulting and pathetic that her chronic emotional pain and isolation and inability to reach out forced her to spend $1,080 a month to purchase what was in many respects a kind of fantasy-friend who could fulfill her childishly narcissistic fantasies of getting her own emotional needs met by another without having to reciprocally meet or empathize with or even consider the other’s own emotional needs, an other-directed empathy and consideration which the depressed person tearfully confessed she sometimes despaired of ever having it in her to give. The depressed person here inserted that she often worried, despite the numerous traumas she had suffered at the hands of attempted relationships with men, that it was in fact her own inability to get outside her own toxic neediness and to Be There for another and truly emotionally give which had made those attempts at intimate, mutually nurturing partner-relationships with men such an agonizingly demeaning across-the-board failure.

The depressed person had further inserted in her seminal sharing with the therapist, she later told the select elite “core” members of her Support System after the therapist’s death, that her (i.e., the depressed person’s) resentments about the $1,080/month cost of the therapeutic relationship were in truth less about the actual expense — which she freely admitted she could afford — than about the demeaning idea of paying for artificially one-sided friendship and narcissistic-fantasy-fulfillment, then had laughed hollowly (i.e., the depressed person had laughed hollowly during the original insertion in her sharing with the therapist) to indicate that she heard and acknowledged the unwitting echo of her cold, niggardly, emotionally unavailable parents in the stipulation that what was objectionable was not the actual expense but the idea or “principle” of the expense. What it really felt like, the depressed person later admitted to supportive friends that she had confessed to the compassionate therapist, was as if the $90 hourly therapeutic fee were almost a kind of ransom or “protection money,” purchasing the depressed person an exemption from the scalding internal shame and mortification of telephoning distant former friends she hadn’t even laid fucking eyes on in years and had no legitimate claim on the friendship of anymore and telephoning them uninvited at night and intruding on their functional and blissfully ignorantly joyful if perhaps somewhat shallow lives and leaning shamelessly on them and constantly reaching out and trying to articulate the essence of the depression’s terrible and unceasing pain even when it was this very pain and despair and loneliness that rendered her, she knew, far too emotionally starved and needy and self-involved to be able ever to truly Be There in return for her long-distance friends to reach out to and share with and lean on in return, i.e. that hers (i.e., the depressed person’s) was a contemptibly greedy and narcissistic omnineediness that only a complete idiot would not fully expect the members of her so-called “Support System” to detect all too easily in her, and to be totally repelled by, and to stay on the telephone with only out of the barest and most abstract human charity, all the while rolling their eyes and making faces and looking at the clock and wishing that the telephone call were over or that she (i.e., the pathetically needy depressed person on the phone) would call anyone else but her (i.e., the bored, repelled, eye-rolling putative “friend”) or that she’d never historically been assigned to room with the depressed person or had never even gone to that particular boarding school or even that the depressed person had never been born and didn’t even exist, such that the whole thing felt totally, unendurably pathetic and demeaning “if the truth be told,” if the therapist really wanted the “totally honest and uncensored sharing” she always kept “alleging [she] want[ed],” the depressed person later confessed to her Support System she had hissed derisively at the therapist, her face (i.e., the depressed person’s face during the seminal but increasingly ugly and humiliating third-year therapy session) working in what she imagined must have been a grotesque admixture of rage and self-pity and complete humiliation. It had been the imaginative visualization of what her own enraged face must have looked like which had caused the depressed person to begin at this late juncture in the session to weep, pule, snuffle, and sob in real earnest, she shared later with trusted friends. For no, if the therapist really wanted the truth, the actual “gut”-level truth underneath all her childishly defensive anger and shame, the depressed person had shared from a hunched and near-fetal position beneath the sunburst clock, sobbing but making a conscious choice not to bother wiping her eyes or even her nose, the depressed person really felt that what was really unfair was that she felt able — even here in therapy with the trusted and compassionate therapist — that she felt able to share only painful circumstances and historical insights about her depression and its etiology and texture and numerous symptoms instead of feeling truly able to communicate and articulate and express the depression’s terrible unceasing agony itself, an agony that was the overriding and unendurable reality of her every black minute on earth — i.e., not being able to share the way it truly felt, what the depression made her feel like inside on a daily basis, she had wailed hysterically, striking repeatedly at her recliner’s suede armrests — or to reach out and communicate and express it to someone who could not only listen and understand and care but could or would actually feel it with her (i.e., feel what the depressed person felt). The depressed person confessed to the therapist that what she felt truly starved for and really truly fantasized about was having the ability to somehow really truly literally “share” it (i.e., the chronic depression’s ceaseless torment). She said that the depression felt as if it was so central and inescapable to her identity and who she was as a person that not being able to share the depression’s inner feeling or even really describe what it felt like felt to her for example like feeling a desperate, life-or-death need to describe the sun in the sky and yet being able or permitted only to point to shadows on the ground. She was so very tired of pointing at shadows, she had sobbed. She (i.e., the depressed person) had then immediately broken off and laughed hollowly at herself and apologized to the therapist for employing such a floridly melodramatic and self-pitying analogy. The depressed person shared all this later with her Support System, in great detail and sometimes more than once a night, as part of her grieving process following the therapist’s death from homeopathic caffeinism, including her (i.e., the depressed person’s) reminiscence that the therapist’s display of compassionate and unjudging attention to everything the depressed person had finally opened up and vented and hissed and spewed and whined and puled about during the traumatically seminal breakthrough session had been so formidable and uncompromising that she (i.e., the therapist) had blinked far less often than any nonprofessional listener the depressed person had ever shared with face-to-face had ever blinked. The two currently most trusted and supportive “core” members of the depressed person’s Support System had responded, almost verbatim, that it sounded as though the depressed person’s therapist had been very special, and that the depressed person clearly missed her very much; and the one particularly valuable and empathetic and elite, physically ill “core” friend whom the depressed person leaned on more heavily than on any other support during the grieving process suggested that the single most loving and appropriate way to honor both the therapist’s memory and the depressed person’s own grief over her loss might be for the depressed person to try to become as special and caring and unflaggingly nurturing a friend to herself as the late therapist had been.

6 The depressed person, trying desperately to open up and allow her Support System to help her honor and process her feelings about the therapist’s death, took the risk of sharing her realization that she herself had rarely if ever used the word “sad” in the therapeutic process’s dialogues. She had usually used the words “despair” and “agony,” and the therapist had, for the most part, acquiesced to this admittedly melodramatic choice of words, though the depressed person had long suspected that the therapist probably felt that her (i.e., the depressed person’s) choice of “agony,” “despair,” “torment,” and the like was at once melodramatic — hence needy and manipulative — on the one hand, and minimizing — hence shame-based and toxic — on the other. The depressed person also shared with long-distance friends during the shattering grieving process the painful realization that she had never once actually come right out and asked the therapist what she (i.e., the therapist) was thinking or feeling at any given moment during their time together, nor had asked, even once, what she (i.e., the therapist) actually thought of her (i.e., of the depressed person) as a human being, i.e. whether the therapist personally liked her, didn’t like her, thought she was a basically decent v. repellent person, etc. These were merely two examples.

6(A)As a natural part of the grieving process, sensuous details and emotional memories flooded the depressed person’s agonized psyche at random moments and in ways impossible to predict, pressing in on her and clamoring for expression and processing. The therapist’s buckskin pelisse, for example, though the therapist had seemed almost fetishistically attached to the Native American garment and had worn it, seemingly, on a near-daily basis, was always immaculately clean and always presented an immaculately raw and moist-looking flesh-tone backdrop to the varioform cagelike shapes the therapist’s unconscious hands composed — and the depressed person shared with members of her Support System, after the therapist’s death, that it had never been clear to her how or by what process the pelisse’s buckskin was able to stay so clean. The depressed person confessed to sometimes imagining narcissistically that the therapist wore the immaculate flesh-colored garment only for their particular appointments together. The therapist’s chilly home office also contained, on the wall opposite the bronze clock and behind the therapist’s recliner, a stunning molybdenum desk-and-personal-computer-hutch ensemble, one shelf of which was lined, on either side of the deluxe Braun coffeemaker, with small framed photographs of the late therapist’s husband and sisters and son; and the depressed person often broke into fresh sobs of loss and despair and self-excoriation on her cubicle’s headset telephone as she confessed to her Support System that she had never once even asked the therapist’s loved ones’ names.

7 The singularly valuable and supportive long-distance friend to whom the depressed person had decided she was least mortified about posing a question this fraught with openness and vulnerability and emotional risk was an alumna of one of the depressed person’s very first childhood boarding schools, a surpassingly generous and nurturing divorced mother of two in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, who had recently undergone her second course of chemotherapy for a virulent neuroblastoma which had greatly reduced the number of responsibilities and activities in her full, functional, vibrantly other-directed adult life, and who thus was now not only almost always at home but also enjoyed nearly unlimited conflict-free availability and time to share on the telephone, for which the depressed person was always careful to enter a daily prayer of gratitude in her Feelings Journal.

8 (i.e., carefully arranging her morning schedule to permit the twenty minutes the therapist had long suggested for quiet centering and getting in touch with feelings and owning them and journaling about them, looking inside herself with a compassionate, unjudging, almost clinical detachment)

1(B)(optional) Explain whether and how receipt of the additional information that the lady had herself grown up in an environment of unbelievably desperate poverty would affect your response to (A).

1 (i.e., the father-in-law’s)

2 See abortive PQ6 above.

3 (The way Y says things like ‘Show Up’ and ‘Be There’ makes X somehow conceive the clichés as capitalized, not unlike the way he hears his wife’s family talk about the insufferable annual ‘Get-Togethers’ at the Ramada C.C.)

4 (This was according to one of X’s brothers-in-law, a Big Six junior associate who hadn’t cherished the old man any more than X had, and was right there bedside with his serotonin-flooded wife when it occurred.)

1 (Right from the start you’d imagined the series as an octet or octocycle, though best of British luck explaining to anyone why.)

2 (Though it all gets a little complicated, because part of what you want these little Pop Quizzes to do is to break the textual fourth wall and kind of address (or ‘interrogate’) the reader directly, which desire is somehow related to the old ‘meta’-device desire to puncture some sort of fourth wall of realist pretense, although it seems like the latter is less a puncturing of any sort of real wall and more a puncturing of the veil of impersonality or effacement around the writer himself, i.e. with the now-tired S.O.P. ‘meta’-stuff it’s more the dramatist himself coming onstage from the wings and reminding you that what’s going on is artificial and that the artificer is him (the dramatist) and but that he’s at least respectful enough of you as reader/audience to be honest about the fact that he’s back there pulling the strings, an ‘honesty’ which personally you’ve always had the feeling is actually a highly rhetorical sham-honesty that’s designed to get you to like him and approve of him (i.e., of the ‘meta’-type writer) and feel flattered that he apparently thinks you’re enough of a grownup to handle being reminded that what you’re in the middle of is artificial (like you didn’t know that already, like you needed to be reminded of it over and over again as if you were a myopic child who couldn’t see what was right in front of you), which more than anything seems to resemble the type of real-world person who tries to manipulate you into liking him by making a big deal of how open and honest and unmanipulative he’s being all the time, a type who’s even more irritating than the sort of person who tries to manipulate you by just flat-out lying to you, since at least the latter isn’t constantly congratulating himself for not doing precisely what the self-congratulation itself ends up doing, viz. not interrogating you or have any sort of interchange or even really talking to you but rather just performing^* in some highly self-conscious and manipulative way.

None of that was very clearly put and might well ought to get cut. It may be that none of this real-narrative-honesty-v.-sham-narrative-honesty stuff can even be talked about up front.)

* [Kundera here would say ‘dancing,’ and actually he’s a perfect example of a belletrist whose intermural honesty is both formally unimpeachable and wholly self-serving: a classic postmodern rhetorician.]

3 Note — in the spirit of 100 % candor — that it’s not like it’s any kind of Olympianly high aesthetic standards that have caused you to toss out 63 % of the original octet. The five unworkable pieces just plain didn’t work. One, e.g., had to do with this brilliant psychopharmacologist who’d patented an incredibly effective post-Prozac and — Zoloft type of antidepressant so efficacious that it completely wiped out every last trace of dysphoria/anhedonia/agoraphobia/OCD/existential despair in patients and replaced their affective maladjustments with an enormous sense of personal confidence and joie de vivre, a limitless capacity for vibrant interpersonal relations, and an almost mystical conviction of their elemental synecdochic union with the universe and everything therein, as well as an overwhelming and ebullient gratitude for all the above feelings; plus the new antidepressant had absolutely no side effects or contraindications or dangerous interactions with any other pharmaceuticals and practically flew through FDA approval hearings; plus the stuff was easy and inexpensive enough to synthesize and manufacture that the psychopharmacologist could make it himself in his little home laboratory in his basement and sell it at cost via direct mail to licensed psychiatric professionals, bypassing the rapacious markups of the large pharmaceutical companies; and the antidepressant meant a literal new lease on life for untold thousands of cyclothymic Americans, many of whom had been the most endogenous and obstinately miserable patients their psychiatrists had had, and now were positively bubbling over with joie de vivre and productive energy and a warm humble sense of their great good fortune for same, and had found out the brilliant psychopharmacologist’s home address (i.e., some of the patients had, which turned out to be pretty easy, given that the psychopharmacologist direct-mailed the antidepressant and all anybody had to do was look at the return address on the cheap padded mailers he used to ship the stuff), and they began showing up at his house, first one at a time, then in small groups, and then after a while converging in greater and greater numbers on the psychopharmacologist’s modest private home, wanting just to look the great man meaningfully in the eye and to shake his hand and to thank him from the bottom of their spiritually jump-started hearts; and the crowds of grateful patients outside the psychopharmacologist’s home get steadily bigger and bigger, and some of the more determinedly grateful people in the crowd have set up tents and mobile homes whose sewage hoses have to be fed down into the curb’s storm drain, and the psychopharmacologist’s doorbell and phone ring constantly, and his neighbor’s yards get trampled and parked on, and untold dozens of municipal health ordinances are broken; and the psychopharmacologist inside the house eventually has to phone-order and install special extra-opaque shades across his front windows and to keep them drawn at all times because whenever the crowd outside catches any glance of any part of him moving around inside the house an enormous ebullient cheer of gratitude and praise rises from the massed thousands and there’s an almost menacing-looking mass charge for the modest little house’s porch and doorbell as the newly whole patients en masse are overwhelmed with a sincere desire just to shake the psychopharmacologist’s hand with both of theirs and to tell him what a great and brilliant and selfless living saint he is and to say that if there’s anything at all they can do to in any way even partly start to repay him for what he’s done for them and their families and humanity as a whole, why, to just say the word, anything at all; so that of course the psychopharmacologist basically ends up a prisoner in his own home, with his special shades drawn and phone off the hook and doorbell unplugged and multiple expanding-foam earplugs crammed in his ears all the time to drown out the crowd-noise, unable to leave the house and already down to the last of the very most unappetizing canned food from the very back of his pantry and getting closer and closer to either slitting his radial arteries or else shimmying up the inside of the chimney to his roof with a megaphone and telling the maddeningly ebullient and grateful crowd of newly whole citizens to go fuck themselves and leave him the fuck alone for the love of fucking Christ he can’t take it anymore… and then true to the cycle’s Pop Quiz format there are some fairly predictable queries about whether and why the psychopharmacologist might deserve what’s happened to him and whether it’s true that any marked shift in the total joy/misery ratio in the world must always be compensated for by some equally radical shift on the other side of the relevant equation, etc…. and the whole thing just goes on too long and is at once too obvious and too obscure (e.g., the second part of the ‘Q’ part of the Quiz spends five lines constructing a possible analogy between the world’s joy/misery ratio and the seminal double-entry ‘A = L + E’ equation of modern accountancy, as if more than one person out of a thousand could possibly give a shit), plus the whole mise en scène is too cartoonish, such that it looks as if it’s trying to be just grotesquely funny instead of both grotesquely funny and grotesquely serious at the same time, such that any real human urgency in the Quiz’s scenario and palpations is obscured by what appears to be just more of the cynical, amusing-ourselves-to-death-type commercial comedy that’s already sucked so much felt urgency out of contemporary life in the first place, a defect that in an ironic way is almost the opposite of what compels the deletion of another of the original eight little pieces, this one a PQ about a group of early-20^th-century immigrants from an exotic part of E. Europe who land and get processed through Ellis Island and after passing their TB exam have the misfortune to draw this one certain Ellis Island Intake Processing Official who’s psychotically jingoistic and sadistic and on their Intake documents transforms each immigrant’s exotic native surname into whatever sort of disgusting ridiculous undignified English-language term it in any remote way resembles — Pavel Shitlick, Milorad Fucksalot, Djerdap Snott, doubtless you get the idea — which of course the immigrants’ ignorance of their new country’s tongue keeps them from objecting to or even noticing, but which of course soon becomes and remains over the balance of their U.S. lives a hellish source of ridicule and shame and discrimination and the source of a gnawing E.-European-vendetta-type resentment that lasts all the way into the nursing home in Brooklyn NY where a fair number of the nomologically afflicted immigrants end up in their old age; and then one day a ravaged but eerily familiar old face suddenly appears at the nursing home as the face’s owner is processed and admitted and wheeled with his portable oxygen tank into the old immigrants’ midst in the TV room, and first sharp-eyed old Ephrosin Mydickislittle and then gradually all the rest of them suddenly recognize the new guy as the enfeebled senescent husk of the malignant Ellis Island I.P.O., who’s now paralyzed and mute and emphysematic and totally helpless; and the group of a dozen or so of the victimized immigrants who’ve borne ridicule and indignity and resentment almost every day for the last five decades have to decide whether they’re going to exploit this now perfect chance at exacting their revenge, and thereupon there’s a long debate about whether cutting the paralyzed old guy’s O₂-cord or something is justified and whether it could be any accident that a just and merciful E.-European God caused this particular nursing home to be the one that the sadistic old former I.P.O. was wheeled into versus whether avenging their ridiculous names by torturing/killing an incapacitated old person would transform the immigrants into living embodiments of the very indignity and disgust their English names connoted, i.e. whether in avenging the insult of their names they would come, finally, to deserve those names… all of which is actually (in your opinion) kind of cool, and the scenario and debate do have traces of the odd sort of grotesque/redemptive urgency you’d wanted the octet to convey; but the problem is that the same spiritual/moral/human issues this piece’s ‘Quiz-questions’ ((A), (B), and so on and so forth) would interrogate the reader on are already hashed out at enormous but narratively necessary length in the piece’s climactic twelve-angry-immigrant-men-type debate, here rendering the post-scenario ‘Q’ little more than a Y/N referendum; plus it also turned out that this piece didn’t fit with the octet’s other, more ‘workable’ pieces to form the sort of plicated-yet-still-urgently-unified whole that’d make the cycle a real piece of belletristic art instead of just a trendy wink-nudge pseudo-avant-garde exercise; and so, as gravid with import and urgency as you find the story’s issues of ‘names’ and of names ‘fitting’ instead of just denoting or connoting, you bite your lip and toss the piece out of the octet… which actually probably means that it turns out you do have standards, maybe not Olympian ones but standards and convictions just the same, which no matter how big a time-wasting fiasco the whole octet’s become ought to be a source of at least some small comfort.

4 (or rather ‘duo-plus-dual-attempts-at-the-third,’ whatever the Latinate quantifier for this would be)

5 (or whatever)

6 (You’re still going to title the cycle ‘Octet.’ No matter if it makes any sense to anybody else or not. You’re intransigent on this point. Whether this intransigence is a kind of integrity or just simply nuts is an issue you refuse to spend work-time stewing about. You’ve cast your lot with the title ‘Octet,’ and ‘Octet’ is what it’s going to be.)

7 (That might not be the right word — too pedantic; you might want to use the word transmit or evoke or even limn (palpate’s been overused already, and it’s possible that the weird psychospiritual probing you mean it to connote by medical analogy won’t come across at all to anybody, which is probably marginally OK, because individual words the reader can sort of skip over and not get too bothered about, but there’s no sense in pressing your luck and hammering on palpate over and over again). If limn doesn’t end up seeming just off-the-charts pretentious I’d probably go with limn.)

8 (Be warned that this has become a near-nauseous term in contemporary usage, relationship, treaclized by the same sorts of people who use parent as a verb and say share to mean talk, and for a late-1990s reader it’s going to ooze all sorts of cloying PC and New Age— associations; but if you decide to use the pseudometaQuiz tactic and the naked honesty it entails to try to salvage the fiasco you’re probably going to have to come right out and use it, the dreaded ‘R’-term, come what may.)

9 (Ibid. on using the verb to be in this culturally envenomed way, too, as in ‘I’ll Be There For You,’ which has become the sort of empty spun-sugar shibboleth that communicates nothing except a certain unreflective sappiness in the speaker. Let’s not be naive about what this 100 %-honest-naked-interrogation-of-reader tactic is going to cost you if you opt to try it. You’re going to have to eat the big rat and go ahead and actually use terms like be with and relationship, and use them sincerely—i.e. without tone-quotes or ironic undercutting or any kind of winking or nudging — if you’re going to be truly honest in the pseudometaQuiz instead of just ironically yanking the poor reader around (and she’ll be able to tell which one you’re doing; even if she can’t articulate it she’ll know if you’re just trying to save your own belletristic ass by manipulating her — trust me on this).)

10 You may or may not want to spend a line or two inviting the reader to consider whether it’s strange that there are literally a billion times more ways to ‘use’ somebody than there are to honestly just ‘be with’ them. It depends how long and/or involved you want this PQ9 to be. My own inclination would be not to (probably more out of worry about appearing potentially pious or obvious or longwinded than out of any disinterested concerns about brevity and focus), but this’ll be a matter for you to sort of play by ear.

11Ibid. footnotes 8 and 9 on feeling/feelings too — look, nobody said this was going to be painless, or free. It’s a desperate last-ditch salvage operation. It’s not unrisky. Having to use words like relationship and feeling might simply make things worse. There are no guarantees. All I can do is be honest and lay out some of the more ghastly prices and risks for you and urge you to consider them very carefully before you decide. I honestly don’t see what else I can do.

12 Yes: you are going to sound pious and melodramatic. Suck it up.

13 (among other things you’ll have to puncture)

14 Yes: things have come to such a pass that belletristic fiction is now considered safe and innocuous (the former predicate probably entailed or comprised by the latter predicate, if you think about it), but I’d opt to keep cultural politics out of it if I were you.

15 (… Only worse, actually, because in this case it’d be more like if you’d just bought a fancy expensive take-out dinner from a restaurant and brought it home and were just sitting down to try to enjoy it when the phone rings and it’s the chef or restaurateur or whoever you just bought the food from now calling and bothering you in the middle of trying to eat the dinner to ask how the dinner is and whether you’re enjoying it and whether or not it ‘works’ as a dinner. Imagine how you’d feel about a restaurateur who did this to you.)

16 (… and of course it’s very probably also the issue they’re feeling self-conscious about — w/r/t themselves and whether other people at the party are liking them—and this is why it’s an unspoken axiom of party-etiquette that you don’t ask this sort of question outright or act in any way to plunge a party-interaction into this kind of maelstrom of interpersonal anxiety: because once even just one party-conversation reached this kind of urgent unmasked speak-your-innermost-thoughts level it would spread almost metastatically, and pretty soon everybody at the party would be talking about nothing but their own hopes and fears about what the other people at the party were thinking of them, which means that all distinguishing features of different people’s surface personalities would be obliterated, and everybody at the party would emerge as more or less exactly the same, and the party would reach this sort of entropic homeostasis of nakedly self-obsessed sameness, and it’d get incredibly boring, * plus the paradoxical fact that the distinctive colorful surface differences between people upon which other people base their like or dislike of those people would have vanished, and so the question ‘Do you like me’ would cease to admit of any meaningful response, and the whole party could very well undergo some sort of weird logical or metaphysical implosion, and none of the people at the party would ever again be able to function meaningfully in the outside world. **

*[It’s maybe interesting to note that this corresponds closely to most atheists’ idea of Heaven, which in turn helps explain the relative popularity of atheism.^**]

**[I’d probably leave all this implicit, though, if I were you.]

17 This tactic is sometimes, at belletristic-fiction conventions and whatnot, called ‘Carsoning’ or ‘The Carson Maneuver’ in honor of the fact that former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson used to salvage a lame joke by assuming a self-consciously mortified expression that sort of metacommented on the joke’s lameness and showed the audience he knew very well it was lame, a strategy which year after year and decade after decade often produced an even bigger and more delighted laugh from the audience than a good original joke would have… and the fact that Carson was deploying this Maneuver in LCD commercial entertainment as far back as the late 1960s shows that it’s not exactly a breathtakingly original device. You may want to consider including some of this information in ‘PQ’9 in order to show the reader that you’re at least aware that metacommentary is now lame and old news and can’t of itself salvage anything anymore — this may lend credibility to your claim that what you’re trying to do is actually a good deal more urgent and real. Again, this will be for you to decide. Nobody’s going to hold your hand.

18 (at least I sure do…)

* (In this, her epiphany accorded fully with the Western tradition, in which insight is the product of lived experience rather than mere thought.)

* [N.B.: narr tone here mxmly flat/affectless/distant/dry → no discernible endorsement of cliché.]

** [/‘cloven’? (avoid ez gag)]

1 Her parents, by the way, did not beat her or ever even really discipline her, nor did they pressure her.

2 Her parents had been low-income, physically imperfect, and not very bright — features which the child disliked herself for noting.

3 The phrases lighten up and chill out had not at this time come into currency (nor, in fact, had psychic shit; nor had parental abuse or even objective perspective).

4 In fact, one explanation the soon-to-be mother’s own parents gave for their disciplining her so little was that their daughter had seemed so mercilessly to upbraid herself for any shortcoming or transgression that disciplining her would have felt, quote, ‘a little bit like kicking a dog.’