Sacred Disorder

Occupationally, I have two lives. In one, I’m a writer and in the other I’m a PhD in psychology who tries to help clients expand the capacity of the imagination (work that I like to distinguish from psychotherapy). In the last year or so, the only writing I’ve done has been my longtime dining column for Creative Loafing, “Grazing.”

It’s pretty rare for my interests in food and psychology to meet one another (although the formation of taste does fascinate me). Last night, I had a dream in which the two collided.

The dream was set in the food court of a huge multicultural flea market. There wasn’t much of a plot. I was sitting at a bar eating some kind of food I could not really identify at first. The owner, obviously Indian, kept insisting I try this and that dish and I found most everything mediocre at best.

In the dream, I kept thinking about how often I’ve told people that a chef’s ethnicity is no guarantee that the food he cooks is either authentic or good. The most familiar example is Mexican cooking. I’ve been in lots of restaurants where the staff and clientele were Mexican and the food turned out to be mainly Tex-Mex or tasted really bad regardless of authenticity.

Such was the case in my dream. I realized after a few dishes that I was being fed something like really awful Indian fusion food. The climax occurred when the owner presented me a hot dog wrapped in naan bread, insisting that it was a “genuine Indian pig in a blanket.” I burst out laughing in the dream, noticing that the delicacy had been retrieved from a carnival-style cart. The man insisted that it was a regional specialty. He talked nonstop, eventually getting angry at me because I kept laughing at his claim. Then I found myself getting annoyed.

My father appears

At this moment, my father, who died two years ago on Thanksgiving, appeared in the dream. It may be that the man behind the counter turned into him. There was immediate tension between us, just as there inevitably was in real life. (I’ve written a lot about how my father disinherited me.) He stood beside me and his disapproval and contempt were overwhelming.

In the dream, he was young, probably in his late 30s. He asked me, in accusatory fashion, why I was complaining. When I was a teenager, he used to lecture me endlessly about my “bad attitude” and started the same in the dream, telling me I shouldn’t question what the Indian man had been telling me.

“So,” I said, “I’m supposed to simply dismiss my own experience — just like I’m always supposed to do with you. No matter how nasty you are, I’m supposed to pretend like you’re not. You told me I was to blame for my unhappiness all my life but when mama had her stroke you became miserable yourself. You stayed that way until you died and blamed everyone else for your unhappiness.”

Suddenly, my father started crying. It his hard to describe the emotional impact. He lost all his defenses and I felt profoundly sad myself. I also felt love flowing between us. My fear of him was completely gone in that moment. It was such an alien feeling, even in the dream, that I felt like I’d lost control of myself. Everything seemed to be melting.

I woke up sobbing.

Dreaming as usual

It’s not unusual for me to dream about my father. The horrible thing about being disinherited is that it leaves you feeling fated to try to work through the rejection for the rest of your life, with no sense that you can gain acceptance, since the rejecting  parent is dead.

I think the first part of this dream was a metaphorical expression of the reality of my circumstances when my father was alive, especially as a child. I had no choice but to listen to his distortions — like eating the absurd food I was being fed in the dream — because any effort to resist his anger only made him more enraged or icily contemptuous at best.

Dreams often seize the most mundane images of our lives, like eating at the bar of an ethnic restaurant, to express something in a metaphorical, oblique way. Pat Berry, author of Echo’s Subtle Body, compares the work of psychotherapy to the way Perseus slays Medusa. Because looking directly at Medusa would turn him to stone, Perseus views her in the reflection of his shield in order to decapitate her.

Similarly, we often can’t face the ugly truth directly, so we need to find some means of approaching it indirectly. Dream images are one way of doing that. Indeed, humor — like the absurd image of the naan-wrapped hot dog — is another. (And humor is under-utilized in therapy, which is founded on Freud’s tragic view of life.)

In my dream, my actual father is approached through the comedic metaphor of the dining scene. The implication is that his contempt disguises both his actual love and, perhaps, his lifelong fear that the depression he reviled in me was lurking within his own psyche.

The dream doesn’t suggest a particular remedy apart from the usual: forgiveness. I think it also demonstrates the difference between depression and real grief. The former disguises the latter with all kinds of neurotic symptoms like denial and festering anger.  Depression also numbs the heart’s capacity to love, it seems.

I’m certainly not unfamiliar with the process of forgiveness. One of my own therapists stressed it constantly, even as I was waking up to the reality of my experience with my parents. That was 20 years ago. I think I did fairly well with that process with my mother, but not so well with my father, mainly because he scared the hell out of me — so much so that I avoided visiting my mother during her last 15 years as a stroke patient.

I would really like to come to peace with my father’s rejection of me, but I did learn that forgiveness is a slow process. I also learned that its value is pretty strictly the peace it accords. It doesn’t disguise the truth or make one want to enter a relationship with the person who needs forgiving — any more than my sense of humor made me willing to eat a naan-wrapped weenie!

I spent 2.5 hours waiting to vote yesterday. I was surprised to see that my Grant Park polling place was selling an assortment of processed junk food and soft drinks Although, I saw nobody buying the stuff, I was glad to know that if my blood sugar fell during the wait, help was nearby.

I voted for Obama – surprise! — and seeing a black man actually win the presidency has been extremely moving to me. I’m old enough that I remember segregation, which endured long after the Civil Rights Act’s adoption, in many areas of the country.

I spent my first five years out of undergrad working for newspapers in rural Georgia. Yesterday, seeing the spread of junk food at the polls and watching Obama win so definitively, caused me to flash back to those years in the sticks and recall how the ritual of dining was central then, and now, to our political life. I remember, time and again, dining with ordinary people who spouted racism as if it were a common value among all white people. And, of course, all public dining was segregated. Dining itself, so much an expression of community, was strictly controlled by the protocol of racism.

I remember, for example, that I frequently had to cover the weekly Rotary Club meeting, where lunch, prepared by black women, was usually followed by a talk by a politician. I’m not sure why, but I always recall the moment when lunch was being finished. Conversation died away and the introduction of the speaker began. Cigars and cigarettes were lit as the small-town white power brokers prepared to have their asses licked. There were smiles all around and the occasional clinking of a fork on a dessert plate.

Racist euphemisms over lunch

Besides the cooks and service staff, there was not a black face in the room and it was not unusual — not remotely so — to hear a speaker prattle about states’ rights, private property rights, the value of private education and many other euphemisms for continuation of a racist society. During these speeches I often watched the black women cleaning up the dining room. Their faces did not betray any emotion.

Political events were often held outside — at the county fairgrounds or on someone’s farm. These almost always involved a picnic featuring barbecued pork. One of the reasons I do not share other urban foodies’ thrall on seeing a hog and chickens cooked over coals in a pit or in an iron smoker is that I saw this constantly during these years. (Indeed, when I see such sights, I want to know why there’s no squirrel in the Brunswick stew and why there are no chicken feet for sale on the side real cheap.)

I knew I’d crossed the threshold to acceptance in one town when I was invited deep into the woods for a “goat mull.” This too was a political event, or at least that was the excuse for it. Mainly it was elderly white men who sat around telling stories and eating the stew made of a goat roasted on the premises. Much of what I heard that day was shockingly racist, including stories of KKK events and a lynching. I comforted myself by assuming most of it was exaggeration. Still, I don’t think most people under 40, unless they were raised in such areas themselves, have any idea how traumatic integration was and how bloody the battle for it was.

One of my signal memories of the period is a barbecue spot in Elberton. It was open, as I recall, Thursday through Saturday. The pork was roasted in open pits next to the building, which looked like something between a mobile home and a tarpaper shack. The interior of the restaurant was completely decorated with souvenirs of Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s racist campaigns.

The most shocking part of the experience of eating there, though, was seeing that a constant parade of black people lined up at a take-out window, even though they were not allowed to dine inside.

A road trip back to racism

Not quite 10 years later, I returned to Elberton during a road trip with Larry Ashmead, then executive editor at HarperCollins. He had contracted me to write a book about Flannery O’Connor and the Southern Gothic, and I couldn’t wait to show him this barbecue shack, which I’d learned was still open.

When we drove up, I was disappointed that the exterior had been cleaned up a good bit. And the inside was even tidier. Moreover, all the racist memorabilia was removed from the walls. We sat at a table and were soon greeted by the new owner, who turned out to be a black man.

I was stunned that this recent monument to racism was now the property of an African-American man. I introduced myself and asked the man if he knew the restaurant’s history. He said that he certainly did. I asked him why black people had bought the restaurant’s food when they weren’t allowed to dine inside. “Because they were hungry and the barbecue was good,” he replied. A moment of silence followed. I expected further explanation, but the man laughed and went back to work.

The experience was another of those enigmatic revelations of moral ambiguity — not just from the offender’s perspective, but from the victim’s too. That confusion was my experience frequently during the years I worked in the sticks — and, of course, that was one of O’Connor’s persistent themes, too: that evil and grace are often instruments of one another. Outcomes are one thing; the source of their making is another, usually mysterious — like the feeling behind alchemy or cooking.

Thus it is with the election of Barack Obama. The entire nation is stunned by its own act of grace. Nobody thought we’d get here so quickly but here we are in one of those accelerations that seems to unexpectedly occur in evolutionary narratives. I look back to the world I saw in that Elberton barbecue shack during my first year out of college and, honestly, I can’t really make any sense out of how we got where we are today. But, more than any time in memory, I feel (as Michelle Obama did not say) proud of America.

(Image from BarackObama.com)