Bruce and Chuck and Harry and Me and All Y'all Too

“We are all simply more human than otherwise.”

--Harry Stack Sullivan

Quite a few years ago Bruce Springsteen was interviewed in the wonderful documentary about Chuck Berry, Hail, Hail Rock and Roll. Springsteen talked fondly of, before he became any kind of Boss, having been in a pick-up band that played backup for Berry once when he came to town. Apparently the great musician liked to travel solo and just call ahead and have someone round up people who could back him. Berry was not, apparently, worried about rehearsing with them.

“About five minutes before the show was timed to start,” Springsteen says gleefully, “the back door opens and he comes in by himself. And he’s got a guitar case, and that was it, he’d come in his own car, no one was with him. And he comes in the band’s room… and we’re like, ‘Is the show gonna go on? What songs are we gonna play?’ And he says, ‘Well, we’re gonna play some Chuck Berry songs.’”

            I’ve been trying to come up with an explanation of what I want to write in this blog. I know what interests me, and I’m variably comfortable that some of it will interest readers as well. I’ve always had a love for my native Gulf Coast and New Orleans, and I spend a lot of time mentally gazing in a Southeasterly direction from my home in Seattle. The tension between those parts of me itches like crazy, and I scratch it with words whenever possible.  That’s part of what I’d like to do.

           

In fact, the tension between me and the world in general has always been strong and interesting to me, not because I think I’m so fascinating, but because we all are. We’re a complicated and remarkable species, bordering on magical, more often than not rubbing right up against crazy as we hold onto the things from which we’ve created our sense of who and what we are. We depend on one another for love and assurance, even when we’re fighting—sometimes most especially when we’re fighting. I like that about us. We create and relieve tension and seek comfort in sharing that experience. I like it so much I have spent the last fifteen years talking to people about it in my psychotherapy and psychoanalytic practice, and a lifetime talking to an imagined bunch of people in my poetry and fiction.

            Talking to that imaginary audience has produced a pretty good body of work. I’ve got a lot of published poetry (more later on that), and an award-winning novel, The Last of the Pascagoula (a lot more later on that), I’m writing a sequel to the novel, have a lot more itches to scratch, and I just closed the doors on my private therapy practice so that when I die I can at least tell myself I gave the writing all I had. This blog is part of that.

            But I’m still an analyst. I couldn’t make this leap without some company, so I brought along the words of an analytic forebear, someone I think felt a lot like I do about people, the wonder and the craziness and the sheer magic of what we do, our fragility and beauty and strength. His name was Harry Stack Sullivan. He worked with the most difficult of people, those whose realities are way out on the borders of most of our own. He was one of the first people to realize that, no matter how many varieties we come in, no matter how much tension there is among our ways of being, “We are all simply more human than otherwise.” I like that. After talking to hundreds of people and slyly watching thousands more, and after being a human myself, I agree with it. Beneath our cultural differences and the dearly held convictions that cause us to make everything from art to war, beyond the things that keep us apart are the things that keep us together. We are very much alike. And we’re fascinating.

            So with that broad idea in mind and with an appreciative nod to both Chuck Berry and Harry Stack Sullivan, I’m going to write some Rebecca Meredith posts. Let’s see what happens.