Freudian washed up on Jungian shores

Here’s what I knew earlier today.  The image below was on a piece of paper my father kept folded up in his wallet.  Underneath it was inscribed “People are no damn good.”  I don’t remember the first time my father showed it to me.  I was very young.  It always tickled me.  I can sort of remember my father saying something to the effect that he kept it because he found the image amusing.  Someone had given it to him.  Memory is unreliable, of course, but I think I carried away a feeling that he found the inscribed sentiment brutally true.  I remember him referring to the figure as “some chinaman living in a box.”  My father would have been characterized by most who met him as a genial and pleasant guy, but this cartoon somehow resonated for him.  That, at least, was the conclusion formulated by my younger self.  I saw it as his secret truth.

I decided to take a few minutes and go online to find out more about the cartoon, to investigate, finally, a profoundly significant paternal signifier.  Was this, perhaps, the very “name of the father” itself?  In my perpetually inflated view, I was going to start some journey of psychoanalytic investigation, work my rusty Lacanian chops, and end up with a charming, but nonetheless challenging, bit of literary autobiography.  This little cartoon, with it’s corrosive brief assessment, had always functioned for me as a tiny banner of identity.  I jokingly refer to it as my “birthright.”  And most people would probably characterize me as a genial and pleasant guy.

There was something else.  Behind the amusing clarity of it, I convinced myself I had detected a quality of bathroom banality, of the kind I imagined exchanged by chuckling GI’s from my father’s war years (WWII).  What was I to do with that?

So I began to investigate.  I discovered the artist is William Steig.  Yes, of Shrek fame (the creator of), but also famed as one of The New Yorker’s premiere cartoonists and illustrators through the second half of the Twentieth Century.  I am exultant to think of my father carrying around a Steig cartoon.  It flatters my ego.  But I also realize he may not have known who Steig was.  The cartoon first appeared on a best-selling “studio card” from around 1940.  So it was ubiquitous.  The Shrek of the moment.  The refined had been tempered, or brought back to earth, by the everyday.  I begin to work up to a theme.  I noted, also, that my knowledge of Steig was, until I began exploring today, superficial.  I did not know that I should have been “in the know” about Steig before I began looking into him.   That, too, fit with the self-portrait I was seeking and would fit nicely with the theme that began to simmer.  Then, in search of more appearances of the cartoon on the web, I googled a link…

http://post45.research.yale.edu/archives/904

This is where it gets bizarre.  And to fully appreciate how bizarre, I have to make some confessions.  I have a few quirky interests.  We all do, I realize.  Nothing seriously off the map, I can assure you.  No doubt we all have a collection of topics or themes which inevitably trigger our curiosity should we see them referenced in a book title or in a magazine or online.  Some of mine, many of mine, were all linked together in a network of associations in the article above.  Wilhelm Reich, Kate Bush, Patti Smith’s Horses (which I was reading about just yesterday), Makavejev and his films, including WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Aleister Crowley, Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard.  And in the midst of that was a photo of a button with the Steig cartoon.  It appears as the article makes reference to one of Reich’s dubious achievements:  the Orgone Box.  I did some more digging.

Turns out Steig credits Reich with “saving his life” through his encounters with the emigre analyst in New York in the 1940s.  Steig, evidently, owned an Orgone box and sat in it every day of his life.  The “angry chinaman” is in fact an image in which Steig is exploring symbolically some aspect of his Reichean experience.  Much of his work did.

I’m not a Reichian, but, because of my background in psychoanalysis and my study at the University of West Georgia’s psychology department, I’m intrigued by Reich, and I’m intrigued by others who have been intrigued by Reich, and an image of a large portion of that world of interest was contained in the cartoon in a way that now feels like a marker of destiny.  This was not the exercise in autobiography I was expecting.

Further oddness.  I clicked on another link…

http://www.kevinislaughter.com/2005/people-are-no-damn-good/

Kind of funny.  A collection of “black velvet” work by a Tahitian artist, including a version of the cartoon.  Go down to the comments.  Someone asks who the original artist was for the cartoon.  Kevin Slaughter, who’s blog it is, thinks it’s Donald Hardman.  But he is corrected by someone named “Marc,” who identifies the artist as Steig.  It was not me.  It was some other Marc with a “c.”

So I wound up discovering that the cartoon in my father’s wallet did, in fact, lead to a very accurate portrait of who I am.  It’s amazing to me that so many of my interests, and my identity to a certain extent, was, through the cartoon, thrown up onto a screen in an instant.  Did someone say “synchronicity?”  Why not?  I didn’t get to the root of myself as a misanthrope stuck in a box, however.  I’ll have to work more on my own to put that story together.