Deadly Shames

When I was a teenager and my father was going through one of his PTSD post-war 'episodes', I hid in the upstairs hallway and eavesdropped on his conversations with my mother.  Some things were inaudible, but after begging my mother to unravel the root of the latest patriarchal angst, she related a story as best she could.  It seems when he was Captain of the 101st Airborne, he had a driver who happened to be a black man.  They were close; my father was anything but a bigot, although he had his rules and boundaries. Anyway, on an especially perilous assignment, the driver asked him to promise that if he were ever mortally wounded, my father would go to see his family, in the midwest US, and explain in person what had happened.  He wrote down all the particulars, and my father swore. 

As it happened, a grenade hit their jeep; my father was wounded but his driver was killed.  Certainly the family got the mandatory telegram and official condolence. My father recovered from the injuries, returned to active duty until August, 1945.  He'd meant to keep his promise but never did.  Before the end of his life, he apparently confessed this to a group of Old Guard veterans who finally, at 80-something, were facing their war-demons with the help of a professional psychiatrist, and maybe got some relief.  He would not have shared this with me.

Years before, when my mother told her version of the story, she hoped I'd show some compassion for my father who was tough and harsh and suffering from not just combat but private guilts.  It helped for minutes; but it occurred to me as well that it was not too late. 

I've struggled in relationships with difficult men and alcoholics, like my father.  The common denominator is not just the baggage of guilt, but the cult of shame.  Shame allows one to continue to avoid difficult truths, and paves a future path that carries the limp of the past.

At the gallery where I work Saturdays, there's a fantastic Robert Gober show that deals with so many historic, emotional and ethical issues.  One of the pieces he chose is an unpretentious ceramic sculpture by Mary Carlson.  It is a tiny, fragile bust of a woman with long hair, covering her face with her hands.  The artist credits Masaccio for inspiration.  The genius of Gober's curation is that among the layers on layers of interrelated narrative, individual pieces resonate personally for the viewer; it's nearly impossible not to be moved by some object or juxtaposition. There is something for everyone, and for me it is this tiny sculpture.  

I remember well in college visiting the Brancacci Chapel in Florence where I had ample time to study the Masaccio Expulsion of Adam and Eve.  Unlike this tiny ceramic, the figures are monumental and heavy. When I saw them, in the 1970's, they still had the fig leaves which were painted in by order, and removed only in the 1980's after restoration.  But the howling face of Eve, and that of Adam, covered by his hands, are the epitome of human shame.  

Certainly Freudian and other psychologists and sociologists have dissected the subject.  Gober, whose work is impressed with the tragedy and aftermath of the AIDS crisis in New York, is well aware. Studying religious art, I realized that sin is one thing, but shame is the emotional scar one carries.  In the case of my father, and so many alcoholics,  this grows-- it becomes ingrained, and often they manage to transfer it to their children-- like a sort of haunting they fail to exorcise.  Shame, like disease,  is contagious.

Forgiveness is a component of the antidote-- forgiving oneself as well as somehow atoning for whatever crime or oversight tripped us up in the first place.  Most often, perpetrators lack shame, while innocents, overwhelmed with compassion and self-criticism, process their lives as failures, burden themselves with shame they have not earned.  I have friends-- myself included, who feel they do not deserve a happy, healthy home, or some accolade that seems to have come too easily. 

My first husband was a black man.  He was a celebrated musician and a charming person, but interracial marriages were still the exception in those days.  My father was livid.  Both parents boycotted our wedding and basically excommunicated me. The marriage was tough enough; while we're still friends, my ex recently accused me of not wanting a half-black baby.  Of course this couldn't be farther from the truth; I was young and we were both irresponsible. But I began to think about my father, and whether in his sickness he had interpreted the racial issue as a personal reminder of that failure to contact his driver's family-- a thorn which had accompanied his lifelong torment, or more likely simply the scapegoat of a horrific and lengthy war experience.  Being decorated as he was, he always maintained the true heroes had passed away and it was not appropriate to celebrate oneself.  

It's apparent to me that guilt precedes shame... but shame does not necessarily follow.  Still, among the killings, the suicides, the longings and failures, the rejections and divorces, people are suffering; they are sorry, and they regret.  And the legacy of shame distorts not just the narrative but its truth. The current violence not just in Israel but wherever it exists, will ripple down through grief, through pain and bloodshed, and through the lives of all those who perpetrate these acts, who have learned nothing from the past, from art, from the silent wounds that old soldiers hand down to families. It's never too late to repent of poor judgement, to pay for acts of violence which are in the current situation shameless.  Looking at the little ceramic sculpture today, cut off as she is and nailed to a wooden table, I see not just shame but horror.  This is a human reaction not a judgment. And a reminder that these issues, these conflicts... the lineage... goes farther back than those frescoes, farther than any of us can remember.