Why Do We Go On?

There was a curious synchronicity between my plans for yesterday, my birthday, and hearing -- the previous night -- that Robin Williams had died. Two weeks ago, plans were set with a friend to meet and discuss a piece written by Annie Pink Reich, first wife of the colorful -- if crazed -- psychoanalyst Willhelm the Mad.

Well, that's not funny ... when a young medical student in treatment with a rather grandiose psychiatrist gets married pregnant, as the biographers claim occurred in 1922 or something. In any case, by 1949, she wrote a piece about a young lady who would use physical comedy to impersonate and embarrass other women, while capturing the attention of other men ... the paper was in the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, KS and was called something like 'Notes on the Grotesque Comic Sublimation.' Maybe, it's out there on line somewhere.

In any case, thinking among analysts was different in those days and had a lot to do with one's genitals ... their form and function. I tend nowadays to fret maybe-silly but different questions, like:

How might the American Constitution (or any other, for that matter) read 

if it had been written by a bunch of Fourth Quarter activists ... 

say, the Grey Panthers?

How might the theories of the various psychoanalytic schools read 

if they had been written by somewhat older folk? 

Freud wrote his 

Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality a year or so before he turned 50. 

Similar conditions existed in other schools. 

Melanie Klein wrote her scathing judgments 

about the grotesquerie of thoughts unconsciously 

-- or so she claimed -- buried in the minds of her own children. 

(One might not be surprised to hear that her daughter, Melitta, 

chose to present to a scientific meeting rather than speak at 

"Mother, My Dear's" funeral.) 

All this is to say that much is written by the young 

at times when they are caught up in the helter-skelter 

parts of raising kids, earning a living, 

and continuing to prove that one is still hot.  

I have no idea why Robin Williams decided that it was preferable to leave himself for witnesses and survivors hung, rather than continue into that Last Quarter of Life that he had just begun with all that it entails.

Those who have been reading my senescent notes for these past several years well know that I believe that continuing to Play in the Fourth Quarter requires a juggling of glee and sadness ... Each of these two very basic emotions -- one representing the dog's wagging tail at saying hello to a friend and the other the inevitable downward tail when GuntherDog or his cousins are left home alone or when he has to leave something behind and buried -- has two forms ... one of which, I would say, makes one vulnerable to feeling it's just not worth it.

The two forms I refer to will, again, be familiar to those who have been following my path through these scribbles. Either Sadness or Happiness can be used to bring others closer. The Baby calls out in the middle of the night with tears and cries that speak volumes:

Be with me. 

It's lonely in this room and -- lookee here -- 

I haven't figured out how to come to you or feed myself, yet.

Please!

In much the same way, the happy child invites others with his or her smile. Eventually, "the kid" learns that when two people share the same space and see the same thing at that moment, there is pleasure, and "the kid" learns the Art of bringing another to that same spot ... learns the Art of the Punchline and well performed physical comedy routines that bring them into the same space-time moment as the other.

The dark flip-side of both these human capacities -- sadness and glee -- uses these same capacities to push the other away. Depression is not, as the TV Big Pharma ads portray, mucho sadness. No, depression is sadness coupled with a wish or propensity to push the other away.

Life sucks.

I'm going to my bedroom to play dead.

I prefer that human shaped bottle filled with the golden nepenthe of life to you.

Wake me up when the game is over.

Your presence makes it no easier to accept the crazy vagaries of living ... 

excuse me but I need to go hang myself, ... now.

And we all know how humor can be used as a distancing activity ... we've all been the victim of sarcasm, facetiousness and obsequious-flattery-with-a-knife's-twist ... "ha-ha!"

I don't know Robin Williams' story. I was moved to tears and laughter for 35 or more years by his portrayals of a whacked out but warm alien (watching with my own youngest whacked-out pre-school spawn), a good neurologist, a therapist, a teacher ... a father in love with his children -- I was quite moved by Mrs. Doubtfire. Wish someone had been about to convince him that there were enough people out there who could be close with him... enough, that is, to make it worthwhile to go on for another twenty years with physical aches and emotional pains that attend playing in maturity.

Or maybe his story is very different -- I don't rightly know.

Annie Reich in her 40's knew the answers to such questions. The answers have significantly complexified since I left the age of courtings and begats. Playing in the Last Quarter is, in no small part, about learning to live without answers.