Henry's Superb Surprise
Some Notes on Reimagining Obsession
1.Taking nearly 20 years to publish his magnum opus, in his notebook, as if a totem to keep him going, stood a sketched Tree of Life.
As writer Maggie Jackson notes, the Tree of Life is “an ancient schema that illustrates all that he has discovered: a world of gradual and often-imperceptible change, vibrant connectivity, inescapable cycles of death and life, constant struggle, and fertile time alternating with the fallow.”
Scrawled above it, two words: I think. Two words that might sum up his many explorations and the side journeys of his doubting mind.
He obsessed about his children inheriting his weak constitution and compulsively closed his eyes to make these thoughts go away. He regularly sought reassurance from others to tame his wild imagination. In one instance, after an innocuous conversation with the Vicar of Downe, he couldn’t sleep and returned late in the night to the Vicar’s house to check that he hadn’t conveyed the wrong impression.
1. Charles Darwin might have longed for the words of a poet on another continent:
“I would like to be able to touch a bell and call up my real self, the truly me, because if I really need my proper self, I must not allow myself to disappear.”
2. On those days when obsessions hit, wouldn’t it be lovely to have Pablo Neruda’s imaginary bell? Instead, we turn into another:
“By the world, / I think my wife be honest and think she is not./ I think that thou art just and think thou art not. / I’ll have some proof.”
3. Oh, to be a marginalized misunderstood Moor of a man like Shakespeare’s Othello, each morning losing our center. Who can be trusted, am I a man of worth, does my wife really love me, is all this just an illusion?
5. Again, I think. But what if we felt first? What if backward the way forward?
8. Ah, my fellow obsessionals, forget all this evidence-based treatment they say will give you your freedom, let’s start from the heart, the proper province and purview of poetry.
I know membership in the only club that guarantees progress seems worth the price of checking feelings and meaning at the door. But there’s something about that bromance I’m not buying—something that, when therapy forgets the poetic heart, begins to feel less like healing and more like hazing—pulling you by the scruff of your neck like Iago or Lady Macbeth:
“Wanna get better? You’ll have to be one of us now—screw your courage to the sticking place!”
As if strength meant silencing the very voice that needs to be heard.
13. What is it like to be a poet at your foundation and be told it’s a disorder? What is it like when the culture can’t see you because they cannot abide the poem’s ‘momentary stay against confusion,’ the creativity which bubbles forth from the generative unknown?
21. It is not negative to have this capability. Just ask Keats, how he celebrates this virtue
“when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
34. I started to think about this in earnest one morning after a dream. I had just started a group for obsessional sufferers but it was more like a society.
A Dead Poets Society, and I was its Keating, captain of captains spouting the beauty of feeling first, thinking later—if at all—feeling and thinking becoming their own new substance of creative courage. We were explorers with Darwin on our own HMS Beagle.
55. In the dream, I was on a short line, waiting my turn to speak to the leaders of the International OCD Foundation, today’s psychoanalytic congress of the obsessional world, and I was excitedly troubled about how to share what I knew. Also ready to be excommunicated.
I practiced on two veteran members waiting behind me, one man wearing sunglasses, the other with ungoverned curls radiating outward like a halo, hair I could swear belonged to jazz pianist Emmet Cohen.
Such clever poetry our dreams—Emmet, Hebrew for truth, Cohen, Hebrew for priest—but my turn came so fast I hardly said a word to either man, no matter their high standing.
When I finally had my audience, it was all muddled, it all felt too big. About to roll their eyes and embrace their truest members, I startled awake.
89. What a shame feeling and meaning are so taboo in this brave new obsessional world, nothing but “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
It’s always struck me as funny that this phrase shows up as an encouraging meme for obsessionals when Macbeth was a murderer and the furthest from the empathic reflective creature Freud so ardently defended:
“an obsessional neurotic may be weighed down by a sense of guilt that would be appropriate in a mass murderer, while in fact, from his childhood onwards he has behaved to his fellow men as the most considerate and scrupulous member of society.”
144. But back to feeling. What could it do that is so blithely missed by the behaviorist?
A group member’s obsession germinated that very morning. His son of only six had started asking him if he heard voices in his head too, and now Henry was undone. His boy might be stricken with schizophrenia already, and there was nothing to do.
But something new and poetic happened when we asked Henry more about his feelings, even first validating his terror and confusion as a down payment on a house he didn’t know we were helping him buy back.
233. Each member set out on the trail of feeling, empathy detectives in search of his purloined letter.
‘Henry, when you talk about what so frightens you about your son, what keeps returning emotionally to me,” Cathy said, “is the way psychotic people are so mistreated and left so very alone.”
“And isn’t it interesting,” Mark chimed in, “that our OCD is like a neurotic version of psychosis? It feels so real when our obsessions and compulsions take hold; our one saving grace is that we know it’s sorta crazy and unreal.”
377. Trying to shepherd these leads together, I became a preacher of my own faith, conjuring strength and blessing, thank you dream-friend Emmet Cohen, Truth Priest.
610. “Henry, you’ve been talking the past few weeks about how misunderstood you’ve always felt, how your cold and conventional father left you to house the monsters alone in your head and forced you to mistrust your own sixth sense.
But recently, here in group, you’ve been celebrated for this sensitivity and perceptiveness, and now as you finally grab hold of it, your worst nightmare is coming true. Again!
It’s no wonder your OCD is coming for you, trying to protect you from feeling in full,
but we’ll help you do that safely and creatively now.
You’re no longer alone like you so fear for your boy. The boy in you too,
he is ready to have his voice heard, and we are here.”
987. Amen! But it wasn’t the tears that surprised us in Henry’s face, it was his ‘I knew it all along but needed you to help me believe it’ Cheshire Cat grin. Henry was charmed.
Together, with feeling on our side, we cast a new spell, one that marveled at the poetic brilliance of Henry’s superb symptom. Emily Dickinson might agree, it was a superb surprise!
1597. The obsession was a reminder of what happened and might happen again-if it couldn’t be made into poetry, that is.
If we couldn’t share how marginalized and misunderstood Henry felt and how meaningful and magnificent his negative capability was, the old spell would spirit him away, as it so often did.
But not to fear, poetry saved him. More of a man than he thought. And by feeling first.
Clearer, more grounded now, Henry’s obsession concealed and expressed a core wound: boy viewed as crazy, left alone, no redemptive relationship in sight.
It was a muddled message of what masculinity ought to be, uninformed by Shakespeare, Keats, Darwin, Dickinson, or Neruda. Fortunately, we now had Emmet Cohen—our resident truth priest—sitting in with the band.
So distant and close to his own experience, so easy to miss. Even easier to get lost in its literal message, forgetting the beauty of Frost’s felicitous phrase:
“Poetry is the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. “
Henry’s core wound brought us to the root of his own Tree of Life.
2584. You’ve been wondering about these wild numbers, haven’t you? You felt them before you understood them, and it’s likely you’ve noticed them all around you.
In the spiral of a nautilus shell, in the seed spacing of a sunflower, and the perfect poise of a pinecone.
You feel the Fibonacci sequence just as the OCD sufferer feels a hidden emotional order that only the poet can decipher.
But I’ll leave it to the fox from St. Exupéry’s The Little Prince to say it even more poetically:
“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
