Head Squares

“In later years I dreamed about the building again and again. The dreams were similar, variations on one dream and one theme. I’m walking through a strange town and I see the house...”

Bernhard Schlink, “The Reader”

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Dear Alex,

It finally happened: I saw the head doctor along with my husband earlier this week. The goal of our 60 min psychotherapy session was to learn to be better parents. Of anything I’ve written, this is likely the toughest piece for me so far.

And it is not because of how I felt in that room with my head doctor but for the reason linked with what I have not felt. Judged, condemned, shunned - I did not feel any of them.

I was expecting my interior chambers, caves and coves, to be dissected and purged for scientific micro-analysis at the deepest psychological quantum level. I had recurring dreams in secret and shame. I had dreamed about the same demons in the same house over and moreover.

I thought my head doctor would pin me down, isolate me as a curious specimen less curiously curable and poke holes into my behavioral and cognitive triggers and tendencies. I cringed at the anticipation of being examined and then filed away as another pitiful parent to be set right by the auspices of psychology and humanism, science and circus. I was waiting to be confronted, exposed.

But the room was tender, lights low. A frame with curly cursives on mantle called for the spirit of hope. A labrador puppy nestled on rug after grinding its snout on my feet. The affection and nakedness within those walls were too much - words too real, emotions too wild, face melting.

Then it hit me without signal. All at once, once for all: There was no need to present or represent. Just be present, heaven-on-earth clashing for the one in need. Focus on this day, this moment.

Later in the evening, my head doctor sent me a 4-min video clip by a Harvard-trained head doctor. The message echoed our earlier session: Be here, now for her, for him. No fancy cakes or shiny pin. Be and being present, this present in time and ribbon.

I did what I had not done for quite some time that night. I spoke less to my kid, tossed fewer questions. Then her lips curled in cursive smile, colors light, nose in my cheek soggy.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

Today you are asking to use a square of comic I've drawn more than a dozen years ago, at work, while bored, with my mouse, using MS Paint, and here I am left with no choice but to speak about it.  Not that I do not want to.

Before anything though, I want to show you the next square that followed the one above.

I love one-square comic.  It's meant to be a chamber piece, a self-sustained universe that invites disagreement and even derision for being too single-minded in its cynicism and, really, anger.  If a reader somehow finds resonance in what it seems to propose, then I, the creator of this stingy world, is no more than a demagogue--and never sought to be more anyway.  I kinda enjoyed being an irresponsible and irascible iconoclast.  (Batman lookalike, super anti-hero, get it? :P)

Still, beyond the asylum of four equal lines, going from one square to another, there is a sort of continuity to challenge the world-view of the one before and open to that of the next.  Sometimes it is a zooming in to dissect the particulars, other time it might be a parallel universe to echo the prior square or to further equivocate but in a different register.

In this case, what you see is a "jump cut" that is meant to jolt the reader into...I don't know what.  Maybe attention?  Awareness?  I hope that's the least I have done.

Today I have nothing further to add to the two squares: they speak for themselves, individually and collectively.  The footnote (that really is besides the point) is I am glad to report I am still as angry as a dozen years ago.

Here let me end with a passage from a book by Robert Coles:

"In Childhood and Society, his important book on psychoanalytical thinking, Erik Erikson describes the qualities that will make for a good psychiatrist or psychoanalyst.  After cataloging various attributes, he concludes with an interesting quality that he considers the most important of all: 'judicious indignation, without which a cure is but a straw in the changeable wind of history.' Arguing for this kind of indignation that takes on injustice and that kind of evenhanded neutral posture that has become, unfortunately, connected to people like me who sit in rooms supposedly listening to people and saying, 'Uh-hum, uh-hum, that's interesting, very interesting'..."

Judicious indignation.  Without which a cure is but a straw in the changeable wind of history.

Yours, Alex