Blog by Author Traci L. Slatton

by author Traci L. Slatton

Traci L. Slatton

Art historians, modern literary crap & the stink of scientology

by /Leave a Comment/ Filed Under: anarchy, art, errors, language

I found myself writing to a former professor that the translator of Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” should be taken out behind the ivy tower and shot in both knee-caps. The reason being that the “Lives” are wonderfully gossipy and dishy, once the reader gets past the god-awful diction. Unfortunately, and unforgivably, the frequent infelicities of language make it hard for a reader to stay that long. We should be indulging ourselves in guilty pleasure, the naughty deliciousness of scoping out intimate, graphic details of the actual personalities of master artists from Cimabue to Sansovino. Instead we’re slogging through a contorted, antiquated dialect of English to which it is very hard to relate.

So regular, civilian readers do not get to savor these all-too-human lives. Thus the ravishing nourishment they offer the soul passes from our collective awareness. We’re left with the fetish of reality TV, which is probably another post on how the decline of story is a barometer for the decline of civilization.

So what is it about art historians and scholarship in general that demands impenetrable rhetoric? Does writing that badly prove how smart they are, because the rest of us can’t understand it? Or are they just boorish and don’t care how sentence after crabbed, meaningless sentence affects their readers? I read a lot of art history for research purposes for my novels, and I am boggled by how badly written most of these books are.
And it’s not just art history that’s poorly written. People in the publishing industry complain about how there are fewer readers every year. Well, why do they expect people to partake of the meal, when the fare consists mostly of wormy fruit and twinkies? Take what is considered literature these days. Ninety nine percent of it is precious, self-congratulatory, and self-referential, with unlikeable characters. It’s an absolute dereliction of a novelist’s duty to write that way.
Self-reference and self-congratulation has been a post-modernist virus, nurtured carefully by the moral relativism of psychotherapy. I am all for self-esteem, but in my opinion, we are not going to build it within ourselves by telling ourselves that whatever we do is okay. We are going to earn it. By acting in honorable ways: keeping our word, choosing integrity, behaving with courtesy and respect for others, accomplishing difficult and worthwhile tasks, and so forth. By returning to those old-fashioned values that have stood the test of millennia. Let me state right now that I do not refer to perfectionism, with is a virulent form of self-hate. Nor have I been a paragon of model behavior. I’ve made a lot mistakes, broken a whole bunch of the 10 Commandments, and hurt plenty of people. But that’s not who I want to be. I aspire to better.
And I think that self-reference is what puts people off about scientology, despite the enormous appeal and considerable talent of its most famous proponent, Tom Cruise. There’s this queasy sense of arrogant self-entitlement that radiates out from scientology, so it doesn’t feel like a religion with any spirituality to it. Spirituality has to do with love, charity, kindness and compassion that elevate beyond the self.

Dying & Transference

by /Leave a Comment/ Filed Under: friends, missing people, passings

Dying & Transference

A man I both like and respect told me recently that his relative passed away. Someone he cared about, someone beloved in his extended family. The kind of infectiously good-humored guy that everyone would miss at the next wedding. The kind of guy who was funny and perceptive, and made it a point to connect with people where they live.

My friend was sad, filled with dark energy that probably contained some elements of anger: loss makes us angry as well as bereft. I knew before I interacted with him that he had something going on. In the way that healers do consciously, and a lot of people do without full awareness, I had reached out with my consciousness and scanned him. I had sensed something dark and roiling in him; to my long-distance senses, it looked and felt like heavy dark clouds in the blob of his being, which is usually large, harmonious, and light-filled. But I read the dismal energy as relating to me, and wondered, What have I done to piss him off?

I perceived accurately, but then misinterpreted what was going on. It was another lesson to me, in the ongoing curriculum of this life, about the filter through which I view the world, and the pitfalls of psychic senses. Even if a psychic perceives a phenomenon correctly, the information can get distorted within a psychological context!

And then I wanted to comfort my friend, who is a good guy himself, immensely supportive. But what could I really say? When someone beloved dies, nothing except time can comfort a grieving person. I try never to minimize that, or to respond with nonsense and platitudes. It’s never ‘good enough’ that someone had seventy-six years of life, if we love that person. Plenty of people live to be a hundred, why shouldn’t sweet, generous Aunt Bess? So I told my friend that I was sorry.

“Come with me if you want to live”

by /1 Comment/ Filed Under: review, television

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

I can’t watch a movie or television show without analyzing for story. Occupational hazard. I wonder if dentists find themselves examining teeth when someone smiles at them, or if dermatologists inspect complexions of faces, however innocently, turned toward them. Somehow when your profession becomes deeply grafted into your identity, the profession becomes the lens through which you experience the world, people, events, and relationships. Writers are terminally infected with this. We’re always looking for raw material, for primary life experience, with which to create, and creation is the ultimate imperative.

Years of laboriously re-inventing the wheel have taught me that story reduces to three things:
1. What does your character want?
2. What keeps your character from getting it?
and 3. How does your character solve that problem?
Out of these three questions arise character and plot.
So it was with pleasure that I watched “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” last night. I readily confess to being a long-time “Terminator” fan. The first “Terminator” was a perfect movie that observed all of the unities of time, place, and action, and in which every detail was exquisitely honed to reflect the theme of the evil of machines taking on intelligence. The message of Sarah’s answering machine: “Even machines have feelings….” Well, no, they don’t, that’s why they were out to annihilate the human race. The bar into which a desperate Sarah fled when she thought Kyle Reese was stalking her: “Tech Noir.” It’s a virtuoso performance: the streamlined perfection of detail in this movie.
Television never shows the same level of craftsmanship, but it can entertain with flair and drama, and “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” do that. Sarah’s introductory voiceover was intriguing: “What if the only dream you can share with your child is a nightmare?” Sarah wants to save humanity with an apocalyptic intensity, and the show wastes no time getting into danger, conflict, struggle, issues of trust and fear and hope. Enjoyable, watchable. I hope the show makes it, that it survives all the obstacles new shows face: trigger-happy executives who yank a show before it can build a core audience, finding it’s voice and perfect time spot, and right now, the writer’s strike. I want this show to live.

The Internal Triangle, and the Failure of Psychotherapy

by /Leave a Comment/ Filed Under: art, authors, redemption, reference, research, review, transference

My neighbor upstairs, Lucy Holmes, has written an interesting book called “The Internal Triangle: New Theories of Female Development.” Lucy’s a smart lady and the book crackles with life and intelligence. It’s well-written and absorbing. She’s also set herself an ambitious goal: to use Freud’s drive theory to explain female development. The back cover explains that she’s the first woman to attempt this in over sixty years. I haven’t read a lot of Freud, but didn’t he theorize that women long to have penises, and that’s why women are all so messed up?

This despite the archetypal message of the blind prophet Tiresias, who spent seven years as a woman. He tells the gods unequivocally that a woman experiences greater sexual pleasure.

For me, the most arresting part of the book was the exquisite attention to transference and counter-transference as Holmes relates anecdotes about women patients from her many years as an analyst. Some of her patients idealized her, some hated her, many did both, some wanted to kill her, some wanted to have sex with her. In response, Holmes worries, is tormented and feels inadequate. She wants to help them. Does she?

It threw me back into my years as a hands-on healer, and my years in therapy. When you lay hands on people’s bodies with love and the intention to heal, miracles happen. So does powerful transference. And wicked strong countertransference. A practicing healer has to be on her edge, standing with her toes touching the line every second. I made some big mistakes in my practice when I wandered off that edge.

And because we are all human, mistakes, blunders, errors, and inadequacies happen. A decade of my personal psychotherapy imploded in heartache when I divorced my first husband. My therapist was also my husband’s therapist, and our marital therapist, and it was all too fuzzy and intertwined. And when the negotiations between my ex and me grew contentious, I wrote a letter to the therapist saying it wasn’t right for me that my therapist was counseling someone with whom I might go to court. It was something I had to do to stand up for myself. She didn’t write back but she must have agreed, because she terminated her work with him. Of course, he blamed me. A lot of hurt and pain here, for everyone.

Which brings me to qualms about conventional talk psychotherapy. Does it really work? Can it? Therapists are all too frail and prone to err, even with the best of intentions. And, of course, therapists make their living through people showing up regularly, once or twice or three times a week. They have an investment, acknowledged or not, in their patients’ ongoing mental unhealth. Too many patients feed their therapists’ investment, falling into what Caroline Myss so aptly calls ‘woundology,’ cherishing their suffering. They don’t move on. They start every conversation with, “My therapist says….” Don’t we all know people like that?

And my most serious criticism of psychotherapy is that, largely, it doesn’t turn people into better human beings. Here is a the beginning of an imaginary, all too likely, session:

Therapist: “So, you’re an ax murderer, you lure innocent people into the woods where you chop them into little pieces. How do you feel about that?”

Accountability is anathema to psychotherapy. What modern psychotherapy has contributed to the zeitgeist, the way it is largely practiced, is the demolition of judgment and accountability. What psychotherapy should do is teach people how to hold their feelings without acting on them, and without shattering. If human beings can feel a range of emotions from -10 to +10, and can perform actions on a decency scale from -10 to +10, (-10 is genocide, +10 is risking or giving your own life to save someone else’s), then psychotherapy should help people feel and contain their feelings on the full scale, but limit their actions to, say, -2 to +10. But that’s not what’s happened. People who feel below -2 and over +3 are put on medications. And censoring actions is considered bad form.

We’ve become a culture, thanks partly to modern psychotherapy, that confuses prejudice with judgment. The pendulum has swung that far as we try to dismantle millennia of discrimination on the basis of gender, race, religion, sexual orientation. Discrimination is a great evil that I hope to see largely dissolved in my lifetime–though I probably won’t.

And judgment is still imperative. There are reasons why so many of the great, ancient, spiritual texts say, “Thou shalt not.” We need to be able to say, “That action is not okay!” The higher octave of discrimination is discernment, the wisdom to separate the chaff from the grain. Despite the moral relativism of psychotherapy, there is still chaff, and it differs qualitatively from grain.

Inquiry & Redemption

by /Leave a Comment/ Filed Under: kindness, marriage

My husband and I went to marriage counseling this morning. Between us, we have four children, his daughter, my two daughters, and the mischievous little minx we have together. We’re a modern blended family, with all the complications that brings, in addition to the usual stresses of married life: finding time for romance, communication, finances, dealing with teenagers. As we shared our stories, the counselor prompted us to turn our statements into questions. “Inquire of the other,” he said. “The more you define the other person, the farther you get from actually knowing them.”

It’s a point well taken. I think back to all the times my former husband told me who I was: “You’re crazy!” was probably his favorite definition of me. And every time he made like Webster’s this way, I would look at him and wonder if we inhabited the same planet, and what mirror he was trying to look through to see me. Of course, I did, and do, the same thing. I’ve been known to tell my current husband that he lacks the compassion gene.
“But turn that into a question,” said the counselor.
“So are you feeling cold and uncaring in that moment?” I managed to ask, with only a little bit of squirming. It really didn’t kill me to ask.
“I’m feeling scared,” my husband admitted, “that I don’t know how to fix this for you, and you’ll get angry with me. I’m trying to protect myself.”
Inquiry has broader implications than promoting understanding between wife and husband. At the end of the session, the counselor shared an observation. “I travel a lot. I’m in the Muslim world for a few weeks every year. I listen to them talk about Americans. They don’t know diddly about Americans. They think they do, but they don’t. Then I come home and listen to Americans talk about Muslims. They don’t now diddly about Muslims. I keep wondering, when will we all sit down and inquire of each other? Inquire and discover?
“But we won’t do that. And so we’ll go to war. A hundred years war, devastating, all because we won’t inquire.”

New Hampshire, messages and King George

by /Leave a Comment/ Filed Under: Uncategorized

I am a registered Democrat. That said, I have been, like so many people, disillusioned with the Democratic party. It used to stand for fair labor practices, civil and gender and racial equality, funding education, and progressive thought in general. Now what does it signify? The Democratic party is a muddled, message-less mess, which has only strengthened the Republican party. Republicans know what they’re about and what they want.

Which is why I’ve liked Barack Obama. He’s had something shiny to say, and his very wet-behind-the-ears affect has been a strength, because it makes him believable. I believe that he could be as idealistic as he sounds, because I haven’t watched him compromise himself–and poll himself–into mediocrity for the last decade. I have hope that a naive Washington outsider could effect changes that an experienced insider wouldn’t even attempt. Obama lost the New Hampshire primary last night, but he could still come out as the people’s Democratic presidential candidate. If so, and if he were elected, would he be able to get us out of the war in Iraq? How would he do that without leaving a gigantic blighted mess there? Can he repair the damaged US reputation? Would he try to turn the US into a welfare state? Would his inexperience ripen into an asset, or an obstacle? Can he live up to the bright message he’s delivering?
I also like Hilary Clinton, even while having doubts about her. She’s smart, tough and competent. She has an ace up the sleeve: charming, rascally Bill Clinton. She’s been around. But has she turned into an irredeemable bureaucrat? My husband says she’s rigid, that she wouldn’t be capable of creative thought, that she couldn’t galvanize people around her into concrete change. She’s infected with Washington inertia and we’d get more of the same, only a little less so. I’m not sure I agree. I think Hilary’s ‘rigidity’ could be the same quality that we call ‘determination’ in a man, and that she wants better things for the American people.
Kucinich intrigues me, too, but that’s another posting. For now, whether Obama or Clinton is the candidate, Democrats would benefit. They bring different strengths to the table, but they both want change and improvement. But is this all moot, anyway? Someone in the government told a friend of mine that Bush will invade Iran in the fall and use that as an excuse to suspend elections.
It seems fantastical that even Bush–who claimed the Oval Office after not being elected to it–would go this far. In general I am a big fan of conspiracy theories; I like creative imagination and I think Americans are too willing to buy whatever’s spoon-fed to us by a media that’s largely controlled by a few very biased, very wealthy individuals. So when my friend told me what he’d been told, I laughed it off. The problem is, it has the queasy ring of plausibility to it.