An Odd Humility of Recognition

A Rare Journal Entry — Post NYT

If you don’t want to fall, don’t jump.

Pardon the journaling. But I think it may land at a point.

Yesterday morning, after doing the usual things (a too-brief meditation, the mindless boiling of water for coffee, the petting of the dogs), my thumbs succumbed to the gravity of my phone. 

Someone had sent me a cryptic text:

“The comments are so fucked—what’s wrong with people!”

Another texted me the link.

“NEO-HIPPY POP STAR BECOMES GURU”

…The NYT article must’ve come out.

With a title like that, I’d troll me. Was this another nightmare scenario? This time with the world’s 16th largest publication? The writer, Alex Williams, was wonderful. But still. You never know with this kind of thing.

Oh well. I probably wouldn’t read it anyway. I hadn’t read my own reviews or interviews as a rule since 2003, when Rolling Stone’s review of my first album (Ima Robot) began with this choice line:

“Welcome to the newest, most annoying voice in rock and roll.”

24 year-old me let out a punk guffaw and muttered “damn right”. But I was quietly crestfallen. Back then, you had the actual magazine in your giddy little hand. No swiping it away—I had to walk around, hands burning, looking for a trashcan to chunk it into.

So I held off on reading this NYT thing. I’d just woke up. Hadn’t put on my armor yet. I called in Oscar Wilde’s maxim for help:

“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”

Like so many of Wilde’s witticisms, this one is truer than false.

In the 1950s, psychologist Eric Berne developed transactional analysis, in which he coined the term “strokes” as “the basic unit of human recognition”. A positive stroke is something like “I love you”. A negative stroke is something like “I hate you.” Naturally, a positive stroke is preferable to a negative one.

But Berne posited that there was something far worse than a negative stroke—no strokes at all.

Indeed, it is commonly thought that an infant given sufficient food and shelter may still, if deprived of attention, simply die.

A number of alleged studies are used to support this, including one in the 13th century conducted by King Frederick II of Germany. He was convinced that infants untouched and unspoken to would still grow up knowing the German language. Instead, as Italian historian Salimbene di Adam recorded, “They could not live without petting.” The infants all died. Another similar study was allegedly carried out in an orphanage in 1944 to similar effect.

Regardless of the factfullness of these studies, the research of Rene Spitz and others confirm beyond much doubt that infants deprived of attention and touch, cuddling and mothering (hence the term “strokes”) are likely to suffer, at least, lasting cognitive and emotional impairment.

Berne took this information to develop the most crucial aspect of transactional analysis: that infantile need for strokes—any strokes—persists in adults as a desire for recognition—any recognition. Berne termed this desire “stroke-hunger”.

Sounds like an awful, needy, lowly way to live. Do I actually have “stroke hunger”? Do you?

Hell no, we say. We are confident Marlboros, rocks, islands of impervious sovereignty.

Only we aren’t, are we.

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If you don’t want to be sad, don’t get happy.

So I held off on reading the article. I checked my inbox instead.

It was a mesmerizing stack of sameness. Even my most flamboyant swipes of thumb couldn’t find the end of…well, you all. Hundreds upon hundreds of new subscribers to this very substack littered my inbox.

I was suddenly very close to being elated. Of course, however, there was a decision to be made: If I allowed myself to become joyed by any positive recognition, I must likewise subject that joy to the heights from which it must, one way or another, fall.

Many of us have long practiced that preemptive safety of emotional equalizing that saves us from the ups and downs. Its all very “spiritual” and “eastern” and “sage”: the promotion of equanimity, the middle path, not too hot not too cold, not too joyful not too sad—an “enlightened” ambivalence—all in an effort to avoid the pain of the come down, the rug pull, the shoe drop.

Not today, I thought: I’m going to allow this elation, pain and all.

I understood what I was risking; that by embracing this pure fire grist I was sentencing myself to a futuristic spill back to earth. So be it. I gathered my samurai will and… just as I was unleashing my opening salvo, I got another text—this one from my therapist (yes, I have a therapist—it’s Bad Guru, not Good Guru, after all):

“Hey Alex, I’m waiting for you.”

Damn. I had forgotten.

Perhaps it was because I would be embarrassed to be so gleeful in front of such a calm, collected individual. Or perhaps it was because he is a “man” and I am a “man” and men are more manly when they’re stoic or whatever. Regardless, I knew this little roller coaster of fidgets was going to uncork the topic of the day. My joy plunged.

And so I resumed, once again, to that witness state; that place wherein nothing is much of anything, really, but flirtations with the illusion of my humanoid shape.

I’ll cut to the chase, as I’m a bit tired and may have that Omicron (tho the home test did read negative).

What I discovered in that timely therapy session was something rather big—and the reason I’m sharing any of this with you:

The impulse to deaden my joy by calling it no big deal (that impulse which generally gets crowned as monkish), was actually the voice of a scared child; a child who was constantly put down and thrown out, who’s rug was constantly snatched, who’s shoe was always already dropped.

In transactional analysis, blocking out or distorting positive strokes is called stroke-filtering. Stroke filters are something we set up early in our development—those things we received negative strokes for (or no strokes for) as children become aspects of ourselves we tend to filter out later in life.

For instance, throughout my youth I was “bad”. Now, as an adult, when people tell me I’m a “good” person, I have a tough time absorbing it—I freeze, I block it.

So the question was—what were your subscriptions telling me that I didn’t want to absorb?

The answer was apparent, as it was something I’d gone over with this therapist before: my father would tell me I wasn’t “a scholar”, that I wasn’t “smart that way”. At age 14, he wanted to pull me out and send me to trade school (I was 14, he wasn’t). Today, when people tell me I’m brilliant (it happens, believe it or not) I likewise freeze.

Now, I’m not saying that your subscriptions mean you think I’m brilliant… but they would seem to indicate you’re interested in what I might have to say… and that’s still hard to swallow. Because that very “adult”, “measured”, “monkish” voice of “equanimity” I had been obliging all this time was (and still is) a perfect defense mechanism—a mechanism crafted to avoid all that pain of being let down—by staying down.  

But I’ve been “doing the work”, as they annoyingly say, and so letting that mechanism slide was just a matter of choice—and choose I did.

…So I hugged my child and told him it would be OK (its that kooky somatic therapy I do, not the talky talk kind) and that I loved him and that it was OK to celebrate and that we were safe.

And rather suddenly, a grin commandeered my face. Even in front of my therapist, the calm, collected man. I fist pumped and laughed out loud and he nearly did too. And we hung up the phone and I was strutting the house like a freed child; the ever-alarmed barking pair of lonesome pomerenians we were fostering could not bother me as they nipped my heels. My omicron symptoms were trifles. I was terribly happy. 

I sensed that an entire era of becoming had finally transitioned into being. There was a certain arrival-ness to…well…to your subscriptions, really.  There is a certain arrival-ness to all positive recognition.  

…Then I wrote something at the comment section of that NYT article myself:

I would troll me too.

Finally, I read the article—it was honest and true.

Cheers all, and may all your filtering out of positivity be released this year.

Ebert