Default Goodness

 In recent days my dad has had a bad case of "ICU delirium" in the hospital—by all accounts not an uncommon condition, when someone has been trapped in an unfamiliar setting for days, with irregular sleep and meals, and a rotating cast of faces. 

The result, whatever its cause, is that dad's subconscious self is coming out into full view, in the form of hallucinations and misconceptions about his surroundings. 

The thing is: it turns out to be practically the same as his fully conscious self. 

Yesterday, he was patiently explaining to someone, the same as he always would, his plans to build communities to promote spiritual wholeness. 

He just happened to be addressing an invisible third person who wasn't there. 

A friend of his from the community walked into the room, and I was terrified for a moment that my dad might say something off-color or embarrassing—simply because it was hard to predict what might come out of him in his current mental state. 

But all he did was turn to the invisible third person again and start introducing his friend in the same kind voice he would use under any circumstances. "This gentleman here is an expert and advocate for maternal health," etc. 

It's like no matter what a disease does to him—even when a condition is attacking his brain—he still has only one mode. It's the same default goodness he brings to any situation. 

I'm used to thinking of life to the contrary as a business of masks and personae and sublimations. I always related to D.H. Lawrence's lines about "image-making love"— 

About how people had an image of him they fell in love with, but that it was just that—an image—something they "mistook for me," as Lawrence put it—and which barely disguised the sublimated cauldron of rage within. 

But my dad is just actually good. No mask; no role. And as such he seems to defy all of modern psychology. 

Even before his latest bout with the ICU, he had a brief period when he was experiencing mild visual hallucinations as a side-effect of his brain tumor. 

But they were always mental pictures of essentially happy things: his grandson's cherubic face, for example. 

(I have no idea what would emerge if you cut away part of my brain and then put me in direct visual communication with my own subconscious, meanwhile. But I assume it would look something like "Saturn devouring his children.")

The Freudians tell us all this should not be possible. They say the human mind in every case is made up of both an Id and a Superego, locked in eternal dialectical struggle.

And they say that the Unconscious in every one of us is the domain of the Id: a place of unbridled libido and aggression. 

To be sure, we learn to repress this part of ourselves for the sake of civilization. But the mask never penetrates deeper than the skin. 

The theologians tend to agree: No man, they assure us, can escape original sin. 

To which I say: yes, I agree with you; I agree with you that this applies to everyone—apart from my father. He is the sole exception. The universe and history's first thoroughly good man. 

They tell me this is absurd. There is no such thing as goodness. Only drives and repressions. 

"[T]he deepest character of man consists of impulses of an elemental kind which are similar in all human beings, the aim of which is the gratification of certain primitive needs," as Freud authoritatively pronounced. (Brill/Kuttner trans.)

The unconscious knows nothing of socialized or civilized motives, he insisted—only "egotistical" ones—and so, these are the only ones that appear in dreams (and presumably, by his account, in hallucinations too). 

To which I say, again: yes, that's true of practically everyone—it's certainly true of me; it just happens not to be true of my dad. 

And if you say, "but this defies science," then I reply: well, it is a mystery then. I have always found it such. 

His goodness certainly doesn't appear to be genetic. I would have gotten a bigger dose of it, surely, if it was, and wouldn't have all my Lawrentian troubles about terrible inner rage and all that. 

I don't find that same goodness in myself, then, and I cannot hope to account for it. 

But I can humble myself before it. As I wrote yesterday, it's the closest encounter I've had in my life with something divine and inexplicable. 

"What thinketh no evil but sings?" as Hardy put it. "This bird," he said. "My dad," I say. 

That's why I quoted Gottfried Benn yesterday, in a line which seems to encapsulate the fundamental mystery at issue—without intruding upon its mysteriousness, or attempting any false explanations.

The line has served as a kind of summa of my own private theology: 

I have often asked myself and never found an answer

whence kindness and gentleness come,

I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself.

(Hofmann trans.)