(Above: Kevin the Slacker / Kevin the Control Freak)
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I was a slacker.
I could not hold down a day job. I was constitutionally unable to work in any field other than bringing words to life – drama, theater, show biz. Try to make a living at that, as a 20-year-old in St. Louis – I dare you. I was an atheist, but I had a vocation, and I knew it. I had a call that I had to answer, even if no one was on the other line when I picked up the phone.
And I filled in the best I could. I did quite well performing singing telegrams – over 2,000 of them in a five-year period. I supported myself for short periods in various ways – as a stand up comic, a magician, a drama teacher. At one point, I toured to military bases in Korea, Japan and Australia with a show I wrote and produced. I worked for a year or two as the Fool at the Royal Dumpe in St. Louis. I sold inflatable entertainment items to colleges across the U.S. – sumo wresting suits, inflatable obstacle courses, etc. I delivered flyers door-to-door while listening to cassette recordings of stage plays on my Walmkman.
One year things were so bad that I had to count the pennies in the penny jar my grandma had given me. Seventeen dollars in pennies, money that I used to buy food the week my cash ran out. This was at a time when I was living in a house where the rain would literally pour through the roof, but since I couldn’t afford to pay the rent, the landlord wouldn’t fix it. He eventually evicted me. I found a dryer place.
***
Ten years later, I was a control freak.
I spent every waking hour working for my business, Upstage Productions. When I wasn’t touring with shows, I was in the office writing, selling, rehearsing, directing. I would almost never see my family. My wife, who married me when I was a slacker, couldn’t believe the transformation. And she didn’t completely like it, for I had gone too far in the opposite direction.
What happened?
I had found a way to make a living at something I loved. Murder Mystery Dinner Theater shows gave me the opportunity to write and perform in productions that were funny, that involved improvisation and acting, and that paid very well – and it was an opportunity that seemed hand-crafted for me and my unusual mixture of talent and temperament. Frustrated as I had been all those years of having such dearth prospects, I threw myself into murder mysteries with gusto, to the detriment of the rest of my life.
But what was the rest of my life?
The rest of my life was then and has since been the great mystery of libido – by which I mean not merely sexual energy, but “liking”, “desire”, “interest” – indeed “love”. Jung used the word more in this sense, and it is in this sense I use it – a term that includes sexual desire, but that is more than just sexual desire. It is the motivation that provokes our interest in something else, the urge to get out of bed in the morning for a particular thing or person we seek. Eros is perhaps a better term for libido, but Eros has a more specific sexual connotation, as well as a more expansive spiritual connotation – and libido can be content with worldly things, while Eros is never quite so content. I suspect many people struggle with libido and their struggles mirror mine, though mine have been particularly dramatic, in a life devoted to drama.
***
What do I mean by all this psycho-sexual gobbledygook?
First, libido is scary. God calls us to serve Him by serving our neighbor, by engaging in our states in life, by working through the imperfect place he’s put us in. But doing this requires an abandonment to His will – actually more of an affirmation of His will – which means a renunciation, a sacrifice, a loss of control over our own little patterns and schemes. And so, out of fear,we either draw back and become slackers or go hyper and become control freaks.
Let me give you some examples of the problems of libido (the problems of love), all taken from real experiences, names changed to protect the innocent.
- A depressed person is known primarily by his or her lack of libido – a withdrawal of interest in life. Similarly, slackers and bored teen-agers are known by this lack of general interest in life. The great tragedy of the bored and depressed is that they cannot engage in the world around them.
- At one time I employed the Sclubb Brothers, as I call them, to act in our touring Theater of the Word shows. The Sclubb Brothers were a pair of 20-something slackers who had no interest in evangelizing through drama, but who thought smoking pot and staring into space was a hell of a lot of fun. Getting rid of the Schlubb Brothers and hiring actors who actually cared about Christ and His Church was the best thing I ever did.
- Pornography and masturbation are the stop-gaps for men who have trouble channeling their libidos. It seems like the perfect solution – handle your sexual urges while keeping a handle (literally) on your sexual urges – fulfilling them after a fashion while making sure they don’t draw you out of yourself; for the essence of sex (as I’ve elsewhere written) “is to be drawn out of oneself, and into another; it’s a kind of death to self for the sake of the other, and the new life that such sacrifice brings with it.” And that’s pretty darn scary and challenging, a lot more scary and challenging than the “imaginary harem” of porn and onanism. (For more on this, see the C. S. Lewis quote below).
- The most passive-aggressive thing a student or a friend can do is to withdraw interest. Students who sit there brain-dead and answer any question with “I dunno” are impossible to reach, no matter how many tricks you as a teacher have in your bag. Tap dance on your head, if you can, you won’t reach the deliberately disengaged student, the student who hoards his or her libido and won’t invest it in anything. And worse than this is when a friend withdraws all libido from an existing friendship, while denying that any such thing is going on, and all the time the air is slowly seeping from the tires. In either case, your hands are tied.
- Similarly, adult life (maturity) is about finding the thing you love, seeing that loving it will be fruitful, investing your libido in it (or in him or her), and yet practicing proper Stewardship of Love so that you don’t get taken advantage of or waste the libido you’re investing.
- Many other defenses against the challenge of libido (the challenge of love) present themselves in people – a cultivated cynicism which keeps us safe from the pain we cynically disdain; aiming low and settling for jobs or people that are well within our grasp and who offer no threat of real excitement; a shield of ignorance or belligerence when faced with art or literature or philosophy, which is simply a refusal to allow a spiritual insight or a reasoned argument to reach us and change us (see almost everywhere on the internet, and most recently the combox here).
For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete and correct his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back; sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover; no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself. Do read Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell and study the character of Mr. Wentworth.
I’m not too fond of Charles Williams, but Lewis’ description makes me want to read that book.
Kevin,
I understand you. What you call (perhaps correctly–I don’t know) “libido,” I’ve always called “creative energy.” I always believed everybody has it and that everybody has it to the same degree. I’ve never understood bored people, and assumed it to be a psychological affliction more than a temperament….
I am presently reviewing Lorraine Murray’s The Abbess of Andalusia (forgive–I don’t know how to make italics in comboxes) for CatholicFiction.net, and last night, I ran across yet another of O’Conner’s quotes that rang stunningly personal: “I never completely forget myself except when I’m writing and I am never more completely myself except when I’m writing. It is the same thing with Christian self-abandonment.” The quote appears in a letter she wrote to a potential convert who was asking theological questions. I knew what she meant about writing, but I never made the connection to Christian self-abandonment. The quote so jumped off the page, and now this morning there is your post…. Perhaps–just perhaps–people whose homeostasis is boredom are simply incapable of self-abandonment….
This occurs when I’ve been hurt–again–by someone I called “friend,” and your comments about passive-aggressive persons have helped me to begin to understand. Nothing else helped, not even prayer. I’d been looking for some fault in me that caused it, and experiencing the frustration you describe in trying to reach the disengaged. I had learned that hard lesson when I was a teacher–but I had never made the connection to persons I didn’t regard as “students.” Come to think of it, perhaps your post was the answer to my prayer for understanding….
Thanks, Dena. I know exactly what you’re saying. I’m glad my post was helpful to you.
The insight that inspired it was helpful to me as well – I’ve been writing on “libido” or “creative energy” for some time, but I never really saw how it comes from God, how it’s a grace, and how if someone doesn’t cooperate with this grace, there is nothing you can do. We can’t make another person interested in us or in anything. In teaching, we can point to something, explain something, show how beautiful or complex something is, but if the student won’t engage his or her “creative energy” in that thing, there’s nothing we can do. If, however, the student does engage – then that’s where teaching really kicks it, exploring and explaining all the things that can be seen and appreciated about the subject.
The other key part of this whole process is that “creative energy” (“interest”, “engagement”) is indeed “libido” / “Eros” – it is an aspect of “love”, and it must always involve a form of self-abandonment, as O’Connor notes. When we teach an appreciation or understanding for literature, we are teaching how more fully to love it.
Anyway, thanks for the words of appreciation.