If you’ve been in therapy, then you’ve presumably been told how (and how often) the mind/brain/thinking screws around with us. That our mind is not our identity; that we are not our thinking. So my racing thoughts, my obsession with all the overwhelming small things (and whether or not they’re “small” or not in the first place…), and my overanalysis about the things that are beyond my control: all of it is that dastardly mind.
As a longtime yogi, this idea wasn’t exactly new to me when it was raised, but I had thought it was confined to the feelgood ‘be in the present’ attitude often pursued in yoga talks. In therapy, this idea rises to a higher level of importance. In group, we’d learn about DBT and CBT (dialectical and cognitive behavioral techniques…or maybe the “t” stands for thinking? I can’t remember…small thing, perhaps…), which included stuff like radical acceptance and managing boundaries and letting “it” go. Many of the DBT and CBT lessons work to reduce or mitigate the role of our mind as merely one part of who we are.
This approach got some attention recently in the second season of Fargo on the cable channel FX. Unlike the first season, the second is set back in 1979, but like the first season, there’s a lot of beautiful violence (akin to my previous post’s observation of beautiful violence in the film American Beauty). For example, a drawn out march through a winter forest (very thicket-like, actually) on a gorgeous sunny day ultimately ends in an uncle killing his niece. More time is spent on the beautiful trek and tramp into the thicket. The camera not only wades through the brush but also hovers above it. The aerial shots in particular remind we viewers of our ability to luxuriate in succinct, chaotic patterns formed by precise lines of shadow cast by naked trees across the snowy earth. It creates a quiet, peaceful tone even though we have a pretty good sense of how the scene will play out.
But back to our struggles with our minds…and so, back to Fargo. The beginning of the eighth episode (S2E8) is likewise beautiful and surreal, and though it takes a mocking approach to people’s preoccupation with attaining self-actualization (remember? set in the late ’70’s?), I found it meaningful. Ultimately, Peggy’s conversation with herself comes down to her ability to recognize the difference between thinking and being. “To be is simply to exist,” says Peggy’s imagined male alter ego. “Try it,” he says calmly in almost a seductive whisper, “try simply being.” But Peggy is too dim to understand this, so her life-coach alter ego derisively observes that she is “aroused by an insistence for meaning. Seeks and finds nothing but contradiction and nonsense.” Peggy looks beyond this thicket of words and says that, as a woman, she is worried she is not living up to her full potential. But all her male alter ego offers in response is: “Think or be. You can’t do both.”
At the risk of obsessing about this short exchange, I think it is interesting how the episodes immediately before and after this one are incredibly physical and visceral–less talk, more bullets. But this entire episode stays on the same tone as Peggy’s imagined conversation: it’s a delicious mindfuck of various thickets; the claustrophobic cabin in the woods that offers temporary retreat for Peggy and her husband is only one of several mental thickets–if you’ve seen the show, you know I’m also referring to Hanzee (“the Indian”) and what we see as a turn in his response to the brutal history applied to his people. One aspect that might help explain this is the episode’s title, Loplop, which refers back to German surrealist Max Ernst and his birdlike creature, the Loplop.
(I wonder whether or not it’s merely coincidence that the male alter ego talking to Peggy in her basement looks a lot like Ernst.)
I want to elaborate more about this, how the mind/brain/thinking screws with us, but will save it for a future post. Too many small things, you see, to sort, and I’m only getting started.