Another Birthday, thankfully

I will turn 71 years old this week. Last year I turned 70 and next year I will be 72. I can count. I am about eight months into retirement. I am finding my way and drinking single-malt scotch from the Highland region of Scotland.
     Somewhere in Terry Eagleton’s early memoir, The Gatekeeper, he talks about his love of writing. When the publisher asks when the next book might be expected, Eagleton sheepishly acknowledges that the book is already complete. Perhaps his writing enacts Eagleton thinking. Often it is confusion and laziness that keeps me from writing and thinking.
     I read. But I don’t take enough notes and I forget. This is more than a problem of age; indeed, I have a very excellent memory, sometimes astonishingly so. Nevertheless, there are so many books on my physical and mental shelves that I know have somehow influenced my thinking, but I often cannot remember what I read in them. Only that I did read these books and that I know that I speak from their influence every day. But then suddenly, lying in bed at night too far from sleep, a sentence or idea flashes like a neon sign crackling somewhat feebly alight. But I can’t recall from where that reference derives; or if I remember from which book or article the thought derives, I don’t know how to find the exact reference except by studying, even rereading the entire text to find it again. And this assumption posits that the passage is somehow noticeably marked and highlighted. And even if I had once taken notes from the texts, these notes are in notebooks uncategorized, unclassified, archived and gone. I wish I were (had been) a more assiduous scholar. But I suspect now that not much will change: indeed, I have frustratingly spent the past 15 minutes looking for a post-it note on which I had placed a thought I wished to remember. I can’t find the note and cannot remember what book I placed it in. Certainly I can’t remember the thought or why I wanted to remember it.
     However . . . while I was looking for that note in some books I came upon this idea that I had earlier marked. It gave me pause. In a fragment D.W. Winnicott refers to confusion as an organized defense. Winnicott says that this confusion “must be analyzed if the patient is to get to that which is always at the centre of the individual, a primary chaos, out of which samples of individual self-expression organize themselves.”  I am not quite certain that I fully understand Winnicott’s statement, but it does offer me something about which to think. I have always thought of confusion as a state out of which one must move towards comprehension. I have argued that to students for almost fifty years: I may have been misinformed. That belief would entail a rationality which might be already a defense from anxieties and doubts. Similarly, I suppose that I could use confusion as a way to defend me from the arduous work that would be required to achieve understanding. Which strategy I suspect might already be a defense.
     More positively, perhaps when I say “I am confused” I could be asking for support: confusion demands that the confused one be held. Winnicott even links this state of confusion to that of depression and says that in this circumstance depression implies hope. While confused, the depressed individual is trying to sort out or tidy up the inner subjective world: the anxiety, the guilt and the instinctual experiences. To deal with it. It is not necessarily a pretty picture, but it is an authentic one. Tolstoy said, “If we allow that human life can be governed by reason, the possibility of life is annihilated.” Confusion as a defense might be the experience of anxiety, guilt and instinctual experience and the refusal to acknowledge ownership of these feelings. I think of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Chased by the posse viewed in the recurring and closing distance, Butch wonders aloud, “Who are those guys? They’re good.” But they have to keep running away from them in order to survive. Those guys in the end must be accepted and dealt with.
     An odd birthday posting. And I am relieved that during the day I did find the note for which I was looking and that began this writing. I’ve enjoyed the process. And I enjoy this birthday that I will celebrate.