AgainstTheWind

Be afraid...

The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott once wrote an article on the psychodynamics of shoplifting, expressing the idea that it wasn't so much motivated by want or greed, but by hope. That is, in the instant the shoplifter is engaged in his theft, he is temporarily buoyed by the hope that the painful emptiness at the core of his being will be filled. But it never is, so he must repeat the process in a compulsive manner. From One Cosmos today

I have a poem that I've started. The theme is the emptiness, the hole in our lifes that we all try to fill. There's a nagging existential fear that there is nothing that fits that abyss. So yesterday I thought I'd write some sort of an essay on fears, and my fears. Poking around with your fears can open some cans of worms you may not want to open. I had a vivid intruder dream last night; I'll be locking up tightly tonight. In my dream Dana, my brother, either took a bullet and did a magnificent acting job to save me from a bullet, or just did a great acting job, and there was no bullet. The intruder tossed the gun after I started yelling and screaming trying to attract attention, which ran him off.

Is the intruder the empty spot in our lives? Or is the fear truly a fear of someone breaking into my house? A clue is that J-- L-- figured prominently in my dream. The biggest association with J-- is that she started playing bridge after she was 70, and became quite good at it. But now she's dying of cancer. A further trait of J-- is that she was much nicer than most bridge players. Some of us at various times assumed she was a pushover as a player, but she never was, and she was always working to improve.

As I'm typing this, I'm putting together that the hole in my life is a real danger, and J--'s way to deal with it is at least one way. You may have help dealing with the fears but you do have to do some shouting and yelling yourself, too.

By the way, I do believe that there is a fix for that hole, or more precisely, I know there is a fix. But I'm not sure how to write about it yet. It's the false fixes that get us in trouble. My poem that I mentioned above goes into how one fills it with collecting, another with buying protection, another with church work, another with politics and community service. I personally try to eat through my fears, and deny that they exist. Somewhere there's an essay in this.. or a poem reworked. I need a decent thesis I guess. I'll try to find it as I walk tomorrow, or I'll pray tonight and hope to find it in my sleep.

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