On Johnny Cash, Existentialism, and Self Esteem

Today I was reading a text concerning co-dependence and self-defeating behavior. In it, the author says that people with low self-esteem rely on what she calls other-esteem; that is, that they define themselves in terms of how others see them. They evaluate themselves based upon their actions and the reception of those actions, rather than believing that a person has inherent worth and value, as imbued by a creator (a "Higher Power," as she calls it). She makes a distinction between "human beings" who have a sense of self-worth independent of their actions and "human doings" whose self-worth is dependent upon their interactions with others.

I am not a "human being" in accordance with this definition. Indeed, there have been many times in the past when I thought about membership in a species, including homo sapiens sapiens, as being conditional. One scientific definition of a species is that its members are capable of true reproduction--that is, mating and producing viable offspring of the same species as the parents. In the many years in which I had no access to sexual intercourse I questioned my own validity as a member of the human race. I wondered many times whether this lack of access was biological or psychological or social...but in the end, I concluded it didn't matter. If I couldn't mate with another human being, for whatever reason, I wasn't fully human.

I struggle, really seriously struggle, with the idea that people are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Quakerism posits that all people have access to the divine, and that all life is worthy. This leads to the Quaker prohibition against violence (how can one person use force on another when all are equally worthy?), and the Quaker tendency away from absolute doctorines and towards Testimonies that have their root in human experience and not abstracted ideals.

It's not that I cannot see the value in such an approach. But it's difficult for me to accept and believe.

I think people are defined by their actions, not some innate quality of being. Or at least, that's how I define people. When I have to summarize somebody, I think of him in terms of profession: he is an engineer, a soldier, a singer. I think of him as doing these things well or poorly: he is a competent engineer, a poor soldier, an excellent singer. Maybe I think of him as being a good person or a bad person, as expressed by his actions that tend to be either towards a general good or towards a destructive selfishness. I might think of him as a friendly person, or a rude person, a giving person or a cruel person, but again these evaluations are based on expressions of these qualities. I rail against that easy conceit whereby somebody is said to have a "stern mouth" or "intelligent eyes" or "kind hands," and all that can or needs to be known about him is expressed in his innate physiology.

I am obligated to be re-reading Tess of the D'urbervilles, and Thomas Hardy does this kind of thing a lot. You can tell all you need to know about a person just by looking at him; Alex D'urberville has sensuous lips and a long moustache which he tends to twirl; only Tess can recognize the cruelty and crudity of him, but that's because the other characters in the novel are simple and stupid people with broad cheeks and big hands, while Tess has the delicate and transcendent beauty of Innocence and Intelligence Wronged. So fuck *that* shit.

I am a writer, an ethical person, a boyfriend. I am a friend, and a member of my family. If I fail at these things--if I write poorly, if I have a lapse in ethics, if I am a disappointing boyfriend or friend--what am I? Do I have some value outside of my failures? If I do, I cannot see it.

I don't pay much attention in any serious way to defining myself in terms of nationality, sex, or race. I don't think of such definitions as being valid. I am an American...but what is that? Either it is expressed in my actions and in my way of thinking about reality, or it doesn't matter. A person is a competent engineer or an excellent singer; does it matter if he is black or she is Indian? Not really; not to me. I know these definitions are very important to others. But I only think of them as being important in their act of expression, in their capacity for shaping choices, not in their "beingness."

I don't even like to think of people in terms of names. I forget names; I never pay attention to them in the first place. Titles have meaning; they are indications of achievement. Quakers are against titles. But I am against names. Especially American names, which are a mish-mash of Hebrew and European traditions and which are usually chosen for their sound or popularity and so evacuated of their true meaning. My first name means "Beloved;" beloved of whom? Of God? Of my parents? If so, then my name is more of a lie than a truth. Is it a reference to the Biblical King David, that singer and sinner and giant-killer? Did I express some analogous qualities in utero that caused my parents to pick that name for me? Or do I just have that name because my father had it, and his father before him, and should I believe that there's some kind of inherent "Davidness" in me?

Another thing I rail against is someone saying "You're such a David" or "I never met a Tim that I didn't like." What the fuck is this essential "Davidness" or "Timness" by which the individual is being compared? It cannot be anything more than the comparer's composite experience with Davids and Tims, and thus is an expression of experiential qualities, not essential ones.

My middle name is Michael. Michael is a question: "Who is like God?" in the Hebrew. It's the battle-cry of the right angels as they go to fight against the fallen. I've been thinking a lot about this question of late. There's no answer to it. No one is like God; no one can do what God can do. Anyone who is like God would be spared the angel's wrath. But no one is like God. And so anyone would deserve to be spit upon an angel's flaming sword.

What is physical beauty, but an admiration for the potence and potential in a person? Muscularity is beautiful in men, fertility is beautiful in women. Men are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as providers and defenders, women are beautiful based upon their expressed capabilities as lovers and mothers. Why do you think it is that men are drawn to a woman's breasts, if not as an implied promise that she will be a good provider for children? We admire youth and health--the capability to act, and express one's will upon the world. We do not admire sickness and impotence. We exalt athletes. Capability is attractive. Confidence is attractive. Ineffectuality is ugly. I am ugly, because my body is largely ineffectual, and reflects years of poorly chosen actions.

Wisdom is beautiful in those who are older, but even that has a relative quality; would wisdom have worth if it could not guide the young? Wisdom is beautiful, but senility is awful. Or, at best, tragic.

Does a person whose actions have no value to others have worth outside of those actions? Does a serial rapist have worth? I don't know. I wouldn't think so. Does a person who is bound to a wheelchair and who exhibits no brain function have worth? I wouldn't think so. I wouldn't think of such a person as much of a "person" at all. Maybe the serial rapist or the invalid have value to their families or friends, if such are available, but would that value be the valuation of some inherent quality in the loved one, or a projection and creation of value on the part of the loving one, and so an action and a subjective assertion of value?

I would think any person would have the right to be free from inflicted pain and suffering. But this isn't really an estimation of a person's value. It wouldn't be right for me to stab you with a knife or steal from you or poison your dog, whether you were an average person or a great humanitarian or a serial rapist. The prohibition to not cause pain to people does not show that people have worth. It just shows that pain is terrible in the infliction and in the receipt. I am not obligated to go around preventing other people from being stabbed or robbed or having their dogs poisoned because all people should be free from these things. I am only obliged to not do it myself, because the power in the action of inflicting pain on a person is overwhelming and negative and can cancel out whatever else that person has done. Simple acts of cruelty can destroy whatever worth a person has. Else why the tremendous prohibitions against violence? It is action used unfairly and unconscionably.

I can act to prevent other people from being stabbed or robbed, but that is a choice I can make--an action I can take--and isn't required or expected of me in the way that not stabbing and not robbing and not caniciding are expected and required.

We exalt the fireman who rushes into the crumbling tower to try to save a life, and so taking action. He is a hero. We don't exalt somebody who stands on the sidelines, and is merely being there. He does not matter.

History remembers Alexander, the conqueror of the world. History even remembers Alexander's horse, Bucephalus, so essential to that conquest. Does history remember the soldier who was assigned the ignominious duty of sweeping the shit out of Bucephalus' stall? It does not. His actions did not matter. Now he does not matter.

How do we assign value to non-human organisms? We value those which are useful to us--apples, cats which at first killed rats around Egyptian granaries and were only later seen as pets or gods, aesthetically-pleasing trees. We do not value weeds or parasites. The biologist might, because she can see things that the rest of us can't, but often that is a respect for the capabilities of these organisms and their success in their respective fields or the value of their genes, not because something just "is." If there was something inherently valuable in life, we would value Rhinovirus cells as much as we would value the life of a beloved pet, or the President of the United States. But we don't. At least, I don't see many people boycotting anti-biotics because we believe that the billions of cold virus cells have as much claim to life as their human host.

Increasingly, people put a value on animal life in accordance with its intelligence--its capability to understand, and to act upon that understanding. Certainly most of us would think it abhorrent to kill a gorilla that could speak in sign language, or a parrot that could speak in complete sentences. I think back on a National Geographic article from some months back in which it was described how a family of gorillas had been killed by guerillas (the verbal irony was quite funny to me) in the Congo. When rangers found the "murdered" gorillas, the rangers carried the great apes out of the jungle on biers and gave something akin to a funeral. Villagers *mourned* the loss of these animals. We would feel no such compunctions about jellyfish or tapeworms. When was the last time you saw a funeral for a maggot? There are those among us--many among us now--who extend the valuation of awareness and capability far beyond its traditional limits, but even then it is largely circumscribed by a recognition of human-like intelligence in the animals so valued, now that intelligence is evaluated in differences of degree, rather than absolute differences of kind. One of the commonest arguments I hear from people decrying the consumption of meat is that pigs are intelligent animals, as intelligent as dogs, and suffer under their living conditions and experience terror when they know they are to die. I hear no such arguments about plants, which are assumed to be immune to feeling and fear. So it is intelligence, then--the capability to assess, and to act upon that assessment--which is valued. Being, in itself, has little meaning or worth.

All this is to say that I see every interaction with another person as a performative interaction by which I will be judged. If I am praised, then I feel validated. If I perform poorly, earning scorn or even ambivalence or disinterest, then I question where my worth as a person might be found. I do not believe, as the author of this psychiatry book does, that existence preceeds essence and that I have value outside of my actions and interactions.

The concept of unconditional love is so surreal to me. I've often thought of unconditional love in terms of being that which is given freely, and hence that which has no worth. I don't think I had much of that in my own experience. Even now, among the people who care about me most, I am just one or two offenses away from alienating them utterly. I am ever only one or two offenses away.

The concept of a God who loves unconditionally is perverse to me. A God who evaluates and hates his creation, finding it wanting, hating humans for not being able to live up to impossible standards even as He created them to be inadequate, a God that banishes people to the darkness beyond the wall where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth--that God is also perverse, and yet He seems more real to me. More believable. I reject Him now; I hate Him. I reject that Father so like my own father, who would punish His creation for His own inadequacies. I reject that God who would hold sinners in his angry hands just barely out of the reach of a destroying fire. And I cannot believe in a universe that would have such a cruel organizing principle. Or I refuse to, anyway, even if I suspect all the while that it might in fact be actual. At the very least, I can refuse to adore and validate such a God, even as all the while I scramble to please him and dread the utter anihilation that will come with His pleasure as I writhe in fire forever and ever after I am dead.

But a God who would love and forgive me for my failures--even unto such things as rape and murder--does that God make any more sense? A God who blindly loves, rather than blindly hates, is still absurd, even as the person who tries to hug everyone is as mad as the person who lashes out and bites anyone who comes close. Or maybe divine love is just beyond human reckoning, in which case I am an idiot to try to fathom it, and I should spend no more of my effort on it. Certainly I find no evidence of divine love in my life--or divine anything--nothing I can touch or taste or see or hear or feel or measure and objectively know. I interpret this emptiness as an absence most times, when I do not interpret it as contempt or as that dreadful anticipatory silence in which the cop need only wait for the criminal to fuck himself over with his babbled lies and contradictions and so prove himself the guilty party (See the ending of Til We Have Faces for exactly this). I cannot accept, then, as the author of this book asserts, that I have worth inherent in my being created by a Higher Power.

She says that forming a healthy sense of self-esteem is contingent upon believing that I have inherent worth. Certainly, I can see that my tendency to constantly question my own worth in so many things and to rely almost entirely on feedback from others to be able to guage the efficacy of my being is extremely hazardous. But I will have a great deal of difficulty in accepting that I somehow am worthy and even loveable simply by being.

I was thinking about all this in the lonely hours of last night after a writing workshop that had exposed flaws in my work to which I had been oblivious, and left me feeling as though I had little worth as a writer, and hence as a person. I turned to probably my greatest spiritual guide in life, Johnny Cash. In his songs, he posits that people have value and dignity independent of their actions. The first song that came to mind was "The Man Who Couldn't Cry." The protagonist of the song fucks *everything* up.

To wit:

"The Man Who Couldn't Cry"

There once was a man who just couldn't cry
He hadn't cried for years and for years
Napalmed babies and the movie love story
For instance could not produce tears
As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts ran dry
He grew to be a man, the feces hit the fan
Things got bad, but he couldn't cry

His dog was run over, his wife up and left him
And after that he got sacked from his job
Lost his arm in the war, was laughed at by a whore
Ah, but sill not a sniffle or sob

His novel was refused, his movie was panned
And his big Broadway show was a flop

He got sent off to jail; you guessed it, no bail
Oh, but still not a dribble or drop

In jail he was beaten, bullied and buggered
And made to make license plates
Water and bread was all he was fed
But not once did a tear stain his face

Doctors were called in, scientists, too
Theologians were last and practically least

They all agreed sure enough; this was sure no cream puff
But in fact an insensitive beast

He was removed from jail and placed in a place
For the insensitive and the insane
He played lots of chess and made lots of friends
And he wept every time it would rain

Once it rained forty days and it rained forty nights
And he cried and he cried and he cried and he cried

On the forty-first day, he passed away
He just dehydrated and died

Well, he went up to heaven, located his dog
Not only that, but he rejoined his arm
Down below, all the critics, they loot it all back
Cancer robbed the whore of her charm

His ex-wife died of stretch marks, his ex-employer went broke
The theologians were finally found out

Right down to the ground, that old jail house burned down
The earth suffered perpetual drought

See, the protagonist is forgiven all his sins and errors. Note that he gets his dog back before he bothers to retrieve his arm. His worth is not in what he has done--all of which has failed--but is inherent in his being. Johnny Cash songs are full of such forgiven failures--indeed, if anybody could actually make me believe in a Jesus who forgives people for their errors and finds worth in human beings independent of their actions, it would probably be Johnny Cash. I think he sincerely and seriously believed in such redemption.

But can I believe in such things? It might be healthy--or effective--for me to do so. And yet it is such anathema to me.

The writing of this blog entry was a performative action. I don't think anybody reads this blog; therefore, the action will fail. Funny, that. Or not funny. Tragic, maybe; tragedy is about an actor going beyond his capabilities, and that actor being brought to task and punished for his transgressions. But even in that punishment, does not the actor prove his worth in trying to
do what other men do not dare to do? Yes, he must be blinded and exiled and murdered, but what wonderful and terrible things he has done. If Oedipus had never been king and taken up that forbidden bed and tried to cure the plague, Oedipus would not matter. If Achilles had never raged against Hector and the sons of Atreus, Achilles would not matter.

My God, I love tragedy.

"Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things."--Philippians 4:8

Arete.

If I am not excellent, I am not anything.