(Also see “Whose Reality“)
They say that sardonic guys in their 20s are more likely to take the opportunity to reinvent an outlandish persona for themselves when it comes to filling in our national census. Some are born in Antarctica, others become the 99-year old Indigenous person from Burkina Faso. Such people are among the scores of citizens whose religion is Jedi (there are about 64,000 nationwide followers of the Force) or Pastafarians.
Such illusions are colourful, uplifting and playfully subversive.
Likewise, for those who struggle with a hostile or adverse reality, the need for illusions is paramount. The kidnapped journalist enduring two years in an al-Qaeda prison needs to hope for a swift release.
At her husband’s funeral in 2011, Vicki Hopkins, Australia’s youngest war widow believed that her husband died making the world a better place. Clinging to what some might see as an illusion, she believed that the war in Afghanistan was helping to rid the world of terrorists, and to rid the dictionary of the word “fear”. Such dreams and hopes are unrealistic to many people and would suggest that she may indeed be compromising her reality, but to Vicki such dreams are absolutely critical to her ability to move on and provide a rosy future for her son. She must believe that her husband died for a good cause.
If you were a paraplegic, you would need some fantasy to inspire you to keep going. Daniela di Toro, who excelled at wheelchair tennis was 12 years old when the wall collapsed on her at a swimming event. As Daniela states, “without such a consuming obsession; without the dream of winning a tennis title I would surely have wallowed in despair”. Yale professor and author, Andrew Solomon, (“Far from the Tree”) interviews hundreds of juvenile criminals and analyses their tenuous and problematic grasp of reality. He notes that above all, the prisoners need to cling to hope. He says, “reflections on the future from inside a prison are fantasies of sorts, but the coherence and hopefulness of any particular fantasy has considerable bearing on the inmate’s ability to turn his or her life around after prison.”
Whilst hope and illusions are vital to a productive life, they also help us to recreate our past, present and future.
Memories
We don’t know what children will remember, we don’t know why we remember what we do from our own childhoods, we don’t know which if any of today’s experiences we’ll remember in twenty years and we don’t know which little ordinary action or dumb object might release a flood of memories.
Elaine Blair (New York Review of Books) notes, “our confident daily sorting of the noteworthy from the ordinary belies a larger uncertainty about how to appraise the significance of events. We are not wrong in identifying the momentous ones. but we fail to anticipate how the rest of it will get recorded in memory and what it will mean to us later. Indeed we must fail to anticipate it in order to have a memory overtake us with its full force, to experience the exalted Proustian moment when we are freed from the order of time.”
According to Professor David Gallo, psychologist and director of the Memory Research Laboratory at the University of Chicago, every time we retell an event, reimagine it or repeat it, this “basically gives the brain another chance to encode it”. And as such, we “set down another memory trace that is then remembered as part of the original. It then becomes very difficult to differentiate the two. If the way you are thinking about the memory the second time is different than the way it happened the first time, it’s a way to potentially introduce biases or distortions in how we remember.”
Death of a Salesman
In his stage directions in Death of a Salesman Arthur Miller writes, “in the scenes of the past these boundaries are broken and characters enter or leave a room by stepping through a wall on to the forestage.” It is as if the boundary between past and present is blurred: these time zones intermingle in complementary and contradicting ways, so that once again, the process of remembering is also a convenient means of forgetting.
In this regard, the (remembered) figures of Dave Singleman and his brother, Ben, loom large in the way Willy Loman remembers or encodes the self and imagines his world.
Willy lives and breathes the American dream, which is not so very different from our Australian “pauper to riches” desire for aspirational self-improvement. This Dream, so aptly named because of its tendency to provide an avenue for people to indulge their fantasies, provides Willy with a coloured lens through which he judged his worth as a person. The lens is shaped by the materialistic, economic and social values of the time.
The myth of popularity is everything to him. He believes, that as a salesman, he can rival Ben.
Specifically, he judges “success” according to his brother’s, Ben’s, successful adventure in Alaska. He wants to believe that he could have made a fortune in the “diamond mines” but chose, instead to follow his other hero, Dave Singleman. Both Dave and Ben capture the spirit of the times; it is about making your fortune and becoming popular and thereby respected and admired. “Attractiveness and likeability”, are the keys to success as far as Willy is concerned, who exaggerates his reputation, status and popularity to suit the times.
The “remembered” or “encoded” self becomes a figment of his imagination as Willy boasts to Biff that he is greeted by mayors in the major cities such as Providence and that he is well known, “they know me up and down New England”. As a measure of his status and reputation, he can park “my car in any street in New England and the cops protect it like their own”. Willy imagines that his funeral will be massive. “They’ll come from Maine, Mas, Vermont New Hampshire”. He dreams of his “own business” (23) and wants to be bigger than Uncle Charley, because he is not “well liked”.
Apparently, at one time in 1928, Willy was so successful, that he was making up to $170 a week in commissions. However, in essence, he is actually captured by a dream that is torturing him. He soon realises that “I haven’t got a story left in my head”. The salesman who is “vital in New England” imagines his last story and farewell: his funeral would be a pompous affair. Sadly, only a teary-eyed family and a few distressed relatives turned up.
In Willy’s case, the fusion of the encoded and illusory, reputable self lead to a tragic split personality and rip apart his family, especially Biff whom he wants to see as a ‘young god – Hercules’. During his darker moments, Willy is gripped by a kind of existential angst whereby he “still feel(s) kind of temporary about myself”. Admitting that life is always on “higher purchase” (57) he is engulfed by despair and the ghost of the past hovers ever nearer.
Miller plants numerous signs of psychological instability as the encoded past and imagined present intermingle in obsessive ways: the most notable concerns are his obsession with driving and cleaning the “hubcaps”. He has “such strange thoughts”. The swerving car serves as a metaphoric representation of his state of mind. Biff used to “simonise that car” but Willy is heading for a tragic accident. He inhabits what Leunig refers to as “the emotional exile called madness”.
Willy is not listening
Ashamed, rather than proud, that he “stole that carton of basketballs”; disappointed that he was just a “shipping clerk” and a “bum” rather than the “young god – Hercules”, Biff tries to deconstruct the wily machinations of Willy’s coded memories.
But Willy is not listening. “Today I realised something about myself and I tried to explain it to you,” states Biff, which is that he is just “a bum”. However, Loman, as Arthur Miller explains in his autobiography, Time Bends, signifies, to him, a “terror stricken man calling into the void for help that will never come.” (See Whose Reality.) Biff continues: “You blew me so full of hot air” that he could never take orders from anybody and most disconcerting of all, he never followed his heart’s desires. After Biff fails a critical Maths exam, he turns to his father for help and discovers his affair. Biff becomes bitterly disappointed and rejects the illusion of success that he has been conditioned to believe as part of the Loman brand.
Willy interprets his resistance as the attitude of a “spiteful mut”, which in many ways becomes a projection of Willy’s own shortcomings and deceit that neither father nor son will truly resolve or uncover.
A dose of reality: “Unto thine own self be true” (Shakespeare)
Biff rejects the American dream of opportunity and wealth and the cult of personality that consume Willy. He rejects materialistic false competitive values that judge a man according to his status, reputation and the brand of his car and size of his house. He rejects a system where people feel a need to “get ahead of the next fella” when all he really wanted was to “be outdoors, with your shirt off” herding cattle.
However, so deeply engrained are the values associated with the materialistic rat race, and so conditioned have the Loman children been to imagine themselves as “stars” that it becomes difficult for Biff to see himself as anything but a failure.
From an artist’s perspective
In The Persistence of Memory and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory Salvadore Dali depicts how people’s memory of events or experiences can change over time and this can give rise to different perspectives. Our memories are selective; often we focus on different aspects or objects as we change and develop or make new connections (such as the fish in his painting), or we forget other things that may no longer hold significance for us (the change in the mountain) and the foreground seems to be cracking up suggesting age and disintegration that also affects our ability to remember. Or we seem to view the past differently as we mature, as we accumulate knowledge and/or experiences.
Traumatic memories: the burden of remembering
The memories that we are most intent on suppressing are often those that come back to challenge us.
As many psychologists or commentators remind us, quite frequently, the more we try to shape and control our realities through our memories the less control we may have, especially if we are trying to forget painful experiences. Sigmund Freud claims that traumatic experiences are often repressed in the subconscious but lurk beneath the surface and are often recalled during troublesome times. Accordingly, these experiences will have a big impact upon our realities.
We have a ‘compulsion to repeat’ which refers to the process of remembering or recalling aspects of our trauma which surface in distorted ways and interferes with our current day realities. This means that there is a kernel of truth, but the truth is distorted and displaced so that our memories become a product of both fact and fiction.
He maintains that: “Contrary thoughts are always closely connected with each other and are often paired off in such a way that the one thought is excessively intensely conscious while its counterpart is repressed and unconscious. The relation between the two thoughts is an effect of the process of repression. Repression is often achieved by means of an excessive reinforcement of the thought contrary to the one which is to be repressed. This process I call reactive reinforcement, and the thought which asserts itself with excessive intensity in consciousness and cannot be removed I call a reactive thought.”
Depending upon the intensity of the trauma or the extent of the pain, we may fabricate an idealised and illusory reality to compensate for the darkness that we experienced throughout our childhood or teenage experiences.
During times of natural tragedies, children often bear psychological scars that imprison them for decades. Fear dominates the horizon and the “real” becomes increasingly dislocated. For example, Matthew Jones was nine years old when he was trying to save his friend’s house during the Black Saturday fires. He was traumatised upon returning to his own burnt house and the realisation of the death of his neighbour and grandparents. Ever since, bright red sunsets, fierce winds, and the mists in the morning trigger memories of the fire and lead to phobic reactions and panic attacks. He has frequent nightmares and at times is unable to breathe.
According to holocaust psychiatrist, Paul Valent, both adults and children “don’t join the dots [over emotional problems causing the physical symptoms] because behind that lies thoughts like ‘life has no meaning because I didn’t save so-and-so’ or ‘because I killed so-and-so’. He states that the problem leads to disconnection that threatens their wholeness. “But when you kill off parts of yourself, you can’t negotiate what you will kill off. If you kill off guilt, you also kill off love. If you cut off from fear, you experience psychic numbing. You can’t be loving and creative and whole anymore.”
“Certain words spoken” : the language of memory
Melbourne psychoanalyst Peter Elling states that we recover the past through words – it is stored in “snatches of sentences and visual impressions recalled in words that only mimic reality”.
So if this process of recovery mimics reality, then the past is possibly yet another story, created in language – sometimes more fanciful than others.
- The words or phrases represent the person’s attempt to make sense of the cluster of possibly confusing or contradictory events and associations.
- The way the person makes sense of these events, is always a recount or a recall. It involves a degree of distortion, because, as Elling reminds us, the “past can never be repeated”.
See A life lived through the lens of material success: Willy Loman and his contradictory relationship with The American Dream.
PLEASE NOTE:
I have a lot of essay plans and sample essays that have been modelled/perfected over the past few years. If you would like to join me for an essay-writing session on Whose Reality, please fill in the contact form below. Next class is 13th February from 2 – 3 pm. (Cost: $40 to $55 depending upon numbers – maximum 6.) Address: 37 Kerr Street, Blackburn.
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Please see dates and times of Year 12 Featured Classes.