"THE FAR PAVILIONS": a Very Long Journey

Ben Cross and Amy Irving

By chance Netflix delivered the two-disc form of “The Far Pavilions” (book in 1978, film in 1984) just as I was trying to get sense out of the concepts of “narcissism”, co-dependence in persons attached to grandiose narcissists to help support their accomplishments, and — inevitably — anti-dependence in “recovering co-dependents” who have converted all the way past relationship.  (This last idea has neither been defined nor explored by anyone I’ve found so far.)  This film (I haven’t read the book) also addresses the tension between personal desire and political obligation, and rather flirts with same-sex attachment versus traditional (obsessional) “true love.”  Also, familial love and intimacy versus Others.  It’s a lot to think about.

That’s not even considering the echo of this book with “The Raj Quartet” (AKA “The Jewel in the Crown”, 1965-75, film in 1984) which was written by Mary Margaret Kaye’s literary agent, Paul Scott (1920-1978), who became so obsessed with his own huge masterwork that he more or less disappeared into it.  All this writing is set in the northwest corner of India, abutting Afghanistan where wars go to grow old and die.  There’s a lot about Kabul.  (Rossano Brazzi plays The Rana of Bhithor, a corrupt old caliph, clearly the Donald Trump part.  Don’t confuse Brazzi with Rossano Rubicondi, who married Ivana Trump at Mar-a-Lago. He was her third husband, twenty years younger.  The marriage ended but Ivana does not end relationships.)

The hero of “The Far Pavilions” is played by Ben Cross, a far more honorable man, in fact a family man whose genetic family has been replaced by the British army.  An orphan English boy saved by pretending to be native, his first love is the people of India who raise him.  They include a “sister” who is half-caste.  (Half-Russian from the intimacy of a previous Afghan war.)  

After being sent to England to become a “sahib,” he returns to fall in love with a blonde Brit female, a narcissist who chooses an older rich man.  Then he becomes extremely close to a young blonde beauty of a fellow soldier, who remains faithful even into mortal battle.  The half-caste girl returns to the story, in her turn obsessively devoted to a shallow and needy “sister”, a classic narcissist.  No one in this long complex tale ever achieves recovery from either narcissism or co-dependence, but in the end the two lovers ride off up the slopes of the Himalayas described as the “Far Pavilions.”  This is, of course, fantasy.

But for both Scott and Kaye, their epic romances of India fulfill the fantasy of writing a best-seller that will secure them economically and make them famous, justifying all hardships and reinforcing the British middle-class  notion of success-by-publication, which is almost as good as marrying landed gentry, Jane Austen style.  “The Far Pavilion” looks to be a lot like a book store.  Between author and agent, it’s hard to tell which is the narcissist and which is the co-dependent.  Very hard on ordinary human intimacy.

I consider myself an anti-co-dependent who learned from being co-dependent (an enabler) to an artist and later to a vocation (ministry), both of which used and tried to own me, the way the caliph owned women and catamites.  (This is over-stated to make the point.)  But here I am, obsessed with writing a blog, like a frog in a bog, barely saved by a sense of humor and a house full of comedic cats.  Is this post-dependent?

Sending me money or treating me like hired help will trigger reflex actions I cannot control, old and deep defences that will prevent me from ever being published in conventional terms.  I take notice that another of M.M. Kaye’s books, “Shadow of the Moon,” was nearly destroyed by cutting out all romance so as to emphasize war.  (Later she recovered and restored the book.)  I only know one other author who has the same sort of revulsions and panic attacks as I do, and we even trigger the responses in each other.  As I say, it interferes with intimacy.

But it frees us to go places most people never go, indeed, don’t know exist.  “Far Pavilions” indeed, and not idyllic.  In spite of the romantic pretensions of the immature, the historic world of the Plains Indian is a rawhide drumhead, as Ivan Doig said before he turned away to pinafore stories about school teachers and bar tenders.  The prairie is a ground of winnowing where the lightweight are blown away, a kind of dry sea where ships meet hurricanes of wind.

Liberals have been preaching in streams of thought going back earlier than we can trace because writing hadn’t been invented yet, especially in novels which didn’t form until the middle class formed, claiming that people can change their identities, fall madly in love without losing themselves.  Or not.  We think it’s some kind of key when Flaubert says, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”  But we go into a rage if someone says, “Tonto, c’est moi.”

In the end of this film, “Ashton,” who becomes “Ashar" in order to survive, and then is addressed as “Ash” to his intimates, is advised by his surrogate father to resolve the rending problem of his two identities, native or Empire soldier, by creating a third identity that reconciles them.  (The obsessed-with-love half-caste woman is evidently to solve her own problem by devoting herself to Ash.)  This idea of this kind of solution persists, though it is often pretty hard to perform and can cause a girl to be killed if she flubs up.  The formality of Suttee is not necessary.  Domestic violence is just as good an argument against unwary co-dependence.

It’s a little dubious to inflate the structure of families to the dynamics of domestic politics, but there is a sort of fractal relationship.  (Fractals being the idea that big patterns are made up from the reiteration of little patterns.)  Political parties also interact on the basis of identity and economies.  At the moment we seem ready for a third party solution, though some yearn for “far pavilions,” this time as warm climate islands tall enough not to be submerged by climate change and sophisticated enough to be tax havens.

Once sex was set free from the constraints of Queen Victoria’s world, we found the dynamic replaced by money.  (Death and disease have always trumped both, but let’s leave them out.)  Now it is war that complexifies both sex (esp. in terms of families) and money (war machines).  I suspect that we will see internal violence for quite a while and possibly lose cities to atomic bombs.  

("The Far Pavilions" is streamed by YouTube.)

IS TRUMP A NUT CASE?

TRUMP, undisguised.

Dealing with Trump is at least giving us a lot to work with while considering mental health, a subject desperately in need of review for a number of reasons:  the rising tide of Alzheimer’s, recreational use of deranging drugs, interference of cultural concepts with more formal scientific concepts, competing claims about cures, and the enormous new knowledge about neurology.  Then there is the persisting phenomenon of people who protect those who think they are chickens because the protectors need the eggs.  This is sometimes called enabling, or co-dependence.

Lately the new term has been “reverse narcissism” which is feeding the narcissist a steady stream of praise and reassurance.  Characteristically, the narcissist is the one with the power, prestige, and charisma, and then the “tender” tries to appear humble or even secret, traditionally “the power behind the throne.”  In our culture they are gender-role assigned, women meant to be the co-dependent because in the past only men could earn a living — a gender assignment going back to hunting mastodons — or provide protection likewise prehistoric.  In modern times we sometimes see “folie å deux” where symbiotic, interdependent relationships share a delusion that is hard to assign to one or the other.  Which is the primary narcissist between the Duke and Duchess of Windsor?

I’ll come back to this.  First it has become clear that Trump has Alzheimers at a fairly advanced stage.  The average length of time from first diagnosis to death by brain dysfunction is about eight years.  One of the most obvious signs is disconnection and fabulizing to cover up failure to comprehend or remember.  Watching vids of Trump, even edited, shows these signs.  If you are interested in this aspect, use Google, but probably if you are interested it’s because you know someone with it or worry about yourself.  Both scientific and narrative material abounds.  Alzheimers is the 8th most prevalent cause of death in the US.

Second, what Alzheimer’s does by its destruction of the ability to reflect is remove what’s called “executive function.”  Wikipedia is handy.  “Executive functions (collectively referred to as executive function and cognitive control) are a set of cognitive processes – including attentional control, inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, as well as reasoning, problem solving, and planning – that are necessary for the cognitive control.”  In short, the stuff the Executive Branch of the US government (the President) is supposed to do.  By now it’s clear that Trump is simply unable to do these things.  It’s not a matter of temperament or strategy:  he can NOT be presidential, he can NOT perform presidential duties.  He is being stage-managed into an illusion.

In addition, his baseline personality is released from restraint by the Alzheimers.  Persons with benign and friendly personalities remain that way.  This is where the narcissism diagnosis comes in.  Narcissism is a personality syndrome badly named, since it is NOT about being in love with oneself because one is beautiful.  It is rather being totally absorbed in oneself but needing constant reassurance from outside oneself, completely unaware of the reality of others.  The result is lashing out, vindictive revenge, rewards and punishments meant to control, and other refusals to face reality.  This is not cruelty, enjoying the pain of others, but rather amorality, inability to realize that others can be in pain and mocking them when they are.  (Sorry, Sen. Schumer.  If you can’t cry for the debasement of America at this point, what CAN a person cry for?)

So, psychotic, amoral, sociopathic — who approves?  Bannon.  Does he have Alzheimer’s?  No sign that he does except that he’s a slob.  He declares himself to be Leninist, a revolutionary who wants to smash government, which is conceived as like the dictatorship of the Russian Tsar.  Lenin (which is an alias) was from a gifted, privileged, educated family that became revolutionary because of resisting Tsarist control.  This has to do with the struggle of an emerging middle class or proletariat.  I don’t know what Bannon’s personal story is.  In this relationship with Trump he stands somewhere between co-dependent and manipulator.  There’s enough evidence to describe him as a sociopath (one who doesn’t care for society) but also a psychopath (one who injures himself or others without regard for the consequences because of delusion).

We have assigned roles to deal with such people: psychiatrists, who are medical doctors authorized to prescribe meds, and psychologists, who use the research in the field of psychology.  There are also psychoanalysts, who try to understand a person’s thinking in order to find mistaken ideas, unhelpful beliefs, and the like.  (They might be either psychiatrists or psychologists.  The first would treat Alzheimer’s patients.  The second might more likely support and comfort the families of the patients.)  Over the years these functions have become rather gender-assigned in the same way that doctors and nurses are.  MD psychiatrists tend to be men and clinical psychologists are often women.

A curious criteria for psychosis that I ran across was that the client must be in distress himself.  Trump doesn’t seem to be suffering overtly, though many feel he is insecure and grasping at straws.

Because there was an attempt to impeach or otherwise remove Goldwater from the presidential race an ethical rule was devised.  (From ever-useful Wikipedia.) “The Goldwater rule is the informal name given to of Section 7.3 in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) code of ethics^[1] which states it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures they have not examined in person and obtained consent from to discuss their mental health in public statements.^[2] It is named after presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.^[3]

“The issue arose in 1964 when Fact published the article "The Unconscious of a Conservative: A Special Issue on the Mind of Barry Goldwater."^[3][4] The magazine polled psychiatrists about American Senator Barry Goldwater and whether he was fit to be president.^[5][6] In Goldwater v. Ginzburg Goldwater filed a libel suit in response to the article, and he won $75,000 in damages.”

This is what is putting the brakes on the 25th Amendment, which was also a 1964 response to a problem, specifically the death, resignation, impeachment, or otherwise removal of a president.  In a society of laws, it’s ambiguous but useful.  In a sub-society of lawyers (the US Congress) it is a recipe for paralysis.  I don’t know what $75,000 would be in equivalent 2017 dollars.

When one googles these issues, it gradually becomes clear that the medical doctors are more willing to say that Trump is demented and unable to perform his duties.  Partly they are helped by video evidence which demonstrates his behavior.  Partly they are helped by our consciousness of genetics, and the fact that his father had Alzheimers.  But they have to consider their code, though many doctors these days brush codes aside; for instance, when they help torture.

But the clinical psychologists, who tend to be women whose practices are consoling, supporting, and guiding people in distress, trying to understand how they see the world, seem to want to believe that Trump is “crazy like a fox,” merely pretending to be Mortimer Snerd in order to cover his real motives and abilities.  Of course, if one is conscious of his close relationship with Bannon, this is not reassuring because those motives might not be benign.  Bannon has said he is out to destroy the standing order (he seems to ee the small percentage of rich folks controlling the world at the expense of the middle class as a modern version of the Tsar) and it appears that Trump is his instrument, lacking both conscience and awareness.

One suspects that the American subconscious so involved in “Game of Thrones” is particularly susceptible to all this melodrama, especially if they think it is aimed out outsiders.  It may be approaching spring, but winter is coming in the minds of many.

THE AMBIGUITY OF BENEVOLENCE

Tarragon Theatre's production of Benevolence is classic Morris Panych

When people try to raise money for some ghastly situation that has never been properly addressed by anyone, the people who are asked to give often react strangely, demanding to know exactly who will be benefited, the details of what is done, the small facts of the personal (private) lives of the managers, sponsors and founders -- even the persons potentially being helped -- and what the evidence for improvement is.  In short, they appear to think they know -- better than the persons actually involved -- what should be done, how to judge what happens, and the moral issues.  On the one hand it seems they can’t trust anyone short of some multimillionaire whose bankroll is his main credential.  On the other hand people who have a lot of money often acquired it by taking chances, disregarding advice and precedents, and trusting their judgment of the individuals they had to grant power.  Why does it stop when it comes to charity?

Why is this?  Certainly journalists have poisoned the well by “revealing” scandals, inflating matters that were conventional in their context, even inventing their own factoids and examples, which contributes further to the paranoia.  They personalize, demonize, their attacks.  Much of this can be played politically for various kinds of advantages.  The culture itself has shifted away from the days when no one questioned Carnegie’s libraries or Rockefeller’s foundations.   Now big bequests just seem like bribes from wicked old men.   Anyway, the real money is in corporations -- whose fav charity is sports arenas.

Princess Diana with fans

But I think there is another factor, which is a kind of co-dependence.  First of all, philanthropists love watching themselves doing good -- not trying to understand what their help will mean to the receivers.  This means that if you don’t have an adorable blameless child for a mascot, you can’t expect that the do-gooder will think they “deserve” help.  Everyone is shocked, SHOCKED, by shifty behavior on reservations because they imagine “natural” nobility and don’t want to look at what real abuse will do to human character.  Movie stars are so valuable when dealing with AIDS or ghastly trauma because it makes it so easy to imagine oneself walking among the little children, patting their nappy heads, pretending to be Princess Diana.

Doing “good” can be a form of co-dependence, in which the partner of an addicted, self-destructive and dangerous person SEEMS to be helping but is in fact enabling.  Like the family that criticizes one of its members for being fat, but then puts cake on the person’s plate because they don’t want them to be left out.  The UUA used to encourage donations by saying that “giving feels so good.”  It does.  A person can be addicted simply because they are their own enabler, but if they get too committed, invested in a kind of ownership, they can turn vicious.  Fearing this shuts down giving.

On the rez do-gooders are met with suspicion and testing.  The tests can become so drastic that renegades will destroy playgrounds or computer workshops, just to show that the freely funded projects are as fragile as the good will of the benefactors.  They are usually right.

In the case of people aiding sex workers, the mental and emotional image of the people involved is so dangerously seductive that interceders and protectors can never be sure that they aren’t being tricked into the role of pimp.  This is even more marked when dealing with adolescent children, who are ambiguous participants.  We speak of pedophiles according to the legally enforced categories which vary by culture.  Most people think of pedophilia as pre-adolescents, under 12 or 13 and down to infancy.  Seducing and misusing older adolescent children is technically pederasty.  QUITE different.

Our controlling culture assumes the position that children are sacred and asexual -- unless the child is in a stigmatized category or is a “bad kid.”  It’s complex because our culture is also pedophobic.  We don’t really like the disorder, noise, mess, stink, defiance, masturbation, secrecy, ignorance, theft and so on that are natural to childhood.  We have still not resolved the conviction that children, like women and dogs, are possessions.  The passion of ownership -- near to sexual passion because it is near to one’s self image -- can lead to deadly violence, specifically targeted at one person, which is why a safe house must be secret.  Reporters don’t get that -- they become distracted by the drama of it all.  They think they won’t tell -- even drunk -- and forget not to show anyone the photos with location indicators intact.

The next big problem with our culture is the obsession with redemption and our unreasonable belief that punishment will make it happen.  The idea is mixed with breaking horses, converting savages, taming tigers, and other strange preoccupations.  Sometimes the SM dynamic comes into it.  Even in the home one man said that his father would smack him in more-or-less justified punishment, then get a strange look in his eye, go crazy and not stop the attack until he was exhausted.  It was physiological.  Sex workers know.

The Life of Pi

But I think the REAL reason that all these entities demand the specifics of actual people is that they are hungry for life, emotion, participation, and hope to buy their way in to something that from the outside looks quite seductive. They think they can go through the television screen to the “realer” side.  It's like everyone wants to take all the puppies home from the dog pound.  They don’t know what to DO with them and the first time they bite, bark, poop on the rug -- aaaiiieeee!  Tear up the check.

Boys are not puppies.  Boys who have learned the hard way how to “read” people and their motives so they are able to con stupid and indiscreet do-gooders.  Therefore, the presumed leaders of programs must protect the benefactors as much as the receivers.

19th century street boys

I personally have learned to tolerate ambiguity in my own benevolences.  That is, if I give some guy on the street a ten dollar bill, I resist second thoughts.  If I see him later with a bottle in a paper bag, I laugh and shrug.  If I have reason to believe that some society for good is self-serving, I just don’t give them anything.  I’m not BUYING, I’m GIVING.  Trust or don’t trust -- don’t tie a string onto every bill.  Don’t insist on tucking in the winos at night at the Salvation Army, but you could serve soup or sit down with them to eat and visit.  Know where the smart boundaries are.  That means one’s own emotional boundaries.  Not even professional religious are good at it these days.  Some of them, faced with a resistant person, will fly into a rage.  (They come to my front door!)  Today I read the blog of a man in ICU complaining about how oppressive the caregivers are.  It’s their job.

This photo is from a website telling people NOT to give.

At animal control, one of the best ways to get people to cooperate and understand what we were doing was to take them on ridealongs.  These days shelters involve volunteers as much as they can.  But not everyone can face the necessity of euthanasia day after day after day, dog after dog after dog; not everyone can even face a truly nasty soul-less dog.  Unless these gentle folks are guaranteed that they are helping blameless, grateful, and reformed dogs, they don’t want to give either time or money.  Frustrated, some people will flip over into being the most intolerant and unreasonable of critics.  It’s always taking a chance to include them, to take them backstage.  

The answer to stigma is not just to remove truly reprehensible conditions and behavior, but also to somehow teach us to respond self-protectively without resorting to hatred.  We must solve the dilemma of the interface person who must deal with both the privileged and the suffering.  They get bitten on both sides.