Diane Selwyn and Life in the Box

How do we create our own shortcomings? How do we place limitations on happiness in our own lives? How do we build jail cells in our own houses in which to self-deprecatingly suffer? I had two friends from high school that got married. No one at the time seemed to think it was appropriate. Everyone thought she belonged with someone else. (In a few people’s eye’s, that turned out to be me) No one knew who he was supposed to be with. Their marriage lasted 20 years bearing 3 well-reared children. They divorced. Because the woman in the scenario was unhappy, she thought it was appropriate to extricate feelings from twenty-five years ago. “I have always loved you,” she said to me. Twenty years later after three kids, a large house, and what appeared to be domestic success she was telling me she still loved me. We were in several plays together in high school, and in one particular show I was required to kiss her. This made my then current girlfriend madder than hellfire. Although I had to do this for the show, my girlfriend claimed we had an ulterior motive! It seems this divorced woman had flirted with me back in the day raising an ugly jealousy from my girlfriend. I was not aware of the intensity of this jealousy, so I didn’t think much about the kiss. She on the other hand was mortally wounded by the kiss. She made me pay for it. I was punished on a grand level reduced to sobbing on my knees asking her forgiveness. A few years later when I went to a summer music camp for six weeks, I began receiving hate mail from the same girlfriend. She contended I was “seeing other women.” This I had never done, so receiving hate mail instead of love letters for remaining noble to her was a blow. It was a serious predicament. Someone who loved you was both underestimating your faith in them and projecting on you an image worse than the truth! This was the first time I had experienced a neurosis strong enough to cause your relationship to fail. It wasn’t the first time in my life either. Was it worth it? People beget human emotion, and when we as responsible adults don’t control those emotions they can cause our downfall. Are feelings really worth our own decline? In this situation over time I had to make the decision that it was not worth it. We had simply grown apart and her image of me was not who I really was. For a while I could contest her assertion, but if a marriage was to be based upon the relationship I had to make the most difficult decision of my life and call it off. It wasn’t fair for her or me. Certainly the concept of love is a complex one. Mixing pubescent anxiety and sexual maturation in the formula of love can provide to be a wooly mammoth. The wisdom in this situation was our love for one another was based upon an instinctual and physical attraction rather than a cognitive one. When you are an adolescent your hormones are raging, your physical desires can be overwhelming, and we tend to go for the “quick fix.” I don’t think many teens actively think about why they love their spouses. It is often quoted that people “just know” when they are in love. That is a little strange to me, so I have had to do some searching about love. If you let your feelings dictate what you think or decide, then you as a human being are AT THE MERCY OF some unknown and potentially destructive force. Is that force God? God certainly provides us with the tools and foundation for love. It is pretty simple in that He says it is offered as the sacrament of marriage. A couple must get married to receive the boundless glories of sexual fulfillment. The problem with that is, marriage is a difficult structure. Living with a member of the opposite sex for the first time is a huge challenge by itself. Will you be compatible with the other person in a confined living space? How are you to know the answer to that if you don’t try it first? This was my very first liberal thought within the Christian framework. The Ten Commandments work, but you have to interpret them in a modern context. Similarly in current times I feel “Honor Thy Children” is more appropriate, we must use our common sense if we are to survive. I would never marry anyone that I did not really know, because the chances of the marriage failing are too great. Then the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage becomes tainted with the evil ramifications of alimony, child support, and “visitation.” To put these familial privileges in the hands of a judge in the American judicial system is a travesty. We are taking God’s gift of marriage and demeaning it. We literally are “looking the gift horse in the mouth” by not understanding, respecting, and promulgating the sacrament of marriage. Over the years I have all but forgotten this. At the age of forty-four the prospect of marriage seems an inappropriate and distant prospect. If I had only evolved to a level of adolescence then I could myself be a neurotic. “I must be a failure!” “Why haven’t I married?” “Don’t I deserve someone?” If you use your mind to see the clear reality of emotional need, then it is easy to decern emotion is not always the healthiest choice in life. Fulfillment in humanity should not come from the groin. If that hormonal instinct is the only determining factor of love, then we are operating at the most primitive level of the universe. We are merely animals attempting to procreate driven by hormonal instinct. It is the ultimate disappointment when a human being takes the beauty of an instinctual urge and fails to understand and therefore use it successfully. This creation of neurosis, the irrational misunderstanding of feelings, can be the downfall of many. Depression is such a downfall. When hit with it for the first time it can be difficult to tangle with, because it makes you feel bad. Feel. Feel. If it makes you feel bad, then doesn’t it seem necessary NOT TO FEEL? Animals have emotions, and they procreate by instinct. Humans have emotions, but it is our ability to “think” that elevates us above the animals. We have it within our capacity as human beings to understand and control our emotions. It is also imperative as the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism states, we must remain flexible in our lives. “Wu wei” or “without action” means “action without action” or “effortless doing.” In understanding ourselves and our emotions we are finding enlightenment from the superficial constrictions of our own human emotion. By limiting ourselves to a protocol of learned emotional responses we are building the jail in which we will live the rest of our lives. Without a conscious decision to understand and change our emotional responses we will never find enlightenment. Imagine three separate preexisting sets of protocols which are attempting to control our lives as “free” Americans. There is an organized-religion produced protocol with God. There is an “Old South” protocol dictating courtship and marriage. Without our ability to think and reason there is a protocol of human emotional response. Upon reflection of all three of these hypothesis, the notion of becoming a monk or nun doesn’t pale. It seems there are many human-created protocols in existence attempting to oppress our pursuit of happiness. Banning the freedom to ride a skateboard is one of them. There is a movie of which I cannot remember the title where a Catholic nun is raped by several drug afflicted youths. In human terms she could tragically be effected by the rape like many women are, but by virtue of her passionately felt faith to God she is able to overcome her human weaknesses and transcend to a point of forgiveness. This is because in the definition of Christianity we do not matter. It is the ability to forget ourselves and care about others that defines God. This freedom from our own self-imposed emotional restriction is what offers salvation and enlightenment. God is what allows us to transcend our seeming own human weaknesses, step outside the box, and endure. In popular culture in American “pop” music is what represents “life in this box.” David Lynch, in his film Mulholland Drive, effectively embraces this concept using a variety of visual symbols. He suggests there is a mafia in Hollywood that ultimately controls who gets cast in major motion pictures. He shows, by the effective juxtaposition of dream and reality sequences, the stark and often brutal consequences of having to live “in the box.” Betty Elms, an aspiring movie-star niece of a successful Hollywood actress, actually is Diane Selwyn, a lesbian prostitute and waitress at a local diner. Eventually she is forced to commit suicide by the emotional distress caused by her lack of awareness and understanding of the constraints of being demanded to live “in the box.” If we allow ourselves to live only at the level of the human being, it is then we can become destined for such a fate. The presence and acknowledgment of God are what allow us to transcend these emotional weaknesses and find renewed zest in life. “Pop” music uses “the box” to hypnotize its listeners, because some emotionally immature and undeveloped people may only feel safe protected by its false boundaries. Only music that embraces real human affliction will ever allow us to survive and evolve as a nation, shedding the artificial anodynes of corporate America.