An Unreliable Narrator

While last week I lacked imagination, this week I possess it in abundance.

This, at least, is the position of the therapist my mother sends me to. The two of them held some sort of forum together, a parent-analyst conference. The topic of discussion: Harold’s Progress. Despite a number of protestations from my therapist, my mother assured him that her complaints regarding my progress would remain strictly beyond the confines of my therapeutic sessions; and, afterall, she was paying for these little chats.

According to my mother, my therapist feels that I am a liar and that my inability to tell him the details of my life accurately is the only blockage between my current state and psychological wellness.

According to my therapist, my mother is concerned with my interpretations of everyday events and that she would like our therapeutic sessions to focus on these issues for the next month or so.

I await the pending judgment as to whether or not my previous description of their meeting qualifies as a lie or as a misinterpretation.

In either case, the therapist my mother sends me to focused our entire session this afternoon on the nature of truthfulness. He explained to me that, in general, truthfulness is regarded as presenting an accurate representation of events or beliefs to another. He added that there are, of course, matters of perspective such as explaining one’s side in an argument. However, beyond these exceptions, truthful representations of events is generally an easily agreed upon matter. I asked how, then, truthfulness is to be determined in the case of arguments. The therapist my mother sends me to said that I shouldn't focus on these exceptional cases. But, I told him, disagreements are a fairly common exception.

I am fairly certain that the therapist my mother sends me to ended our exception with a request to continue this line of questioning with my mother; it was hard to be sure as he muttered to himself and made a note in my file.

Getting back to the point, my therapist began again, truthfulness is an easy state to achieve. As a simple demonstration, he asked me to describe his desk.

I have spent many hours examining the desk of the therapist my mother sends me to. There is no couch or comfortable armchair. There is a moderately uncomfortable mahogany colored chair for the patient that sits just out of arm's reach of the desk's edge. This distance has always made examining the details of smaller or obliquely-angled objects more difficult. I began my description.

The desk is sturdy and broad, made of a real, dark wood, I told him. All of its legs have been raised by several inches by lifts, giving the desk a more authoritative presence in the room. The high back, burgundy leather chair is also elevated to its maximum height, a fact that is evidenced by its slow but audible exhale when my therapist sits down. Together, the effect is to make my therapist seem more ominous and established presence at his desk than when meeting him standing up.

The therapist my mother sends me to interrupted me, instructing me to actually describe the desk. For instance, he suggested, what was on his desktop.

Beginning again, I described the landscape of the desk's surface. A computer monitor sat at a forty-five degree angle on the left corner of the surface. The screensaver was always running its photo slideshow whenever I had been in his office, but I had noticed that all of the images were of famous works of art. Also, I added, these images were all clearly labeled Christie's and, therefore, downloaded from the internet. At the opposite corner of the desk is my therapist's coffee mug. I have never seen him drink from it, but it is a fixture of the desk landscape. It is a glass mug with the emblem of the American Psychological Association etched into it.

The therapist my mother sends me to let his pen drop onto the desktop and began to rub his temples. Despite my best efforts to describe his desk, my therapist informed me that he has a simple mahogany desk set with a computer monitor, papers, and coffee sitting on it. I asked if it shouldn't be 'setting' on it, but he did not answer. He told me that my muddled description of his desk was untruthful because it was made up almost entirely on my own conjecture and contained very little fact.

I told him I think we have different understandings of what it means to be truthful. He asked if I thought it was possible to have different meanings of truthful. I told him I obviously did believe it was possible because I believe it is the case between us. The therapist my mother sends me to only sighed and motioned for me to continue.

I told him that I believe that truthfulness can be in seeing the meaning in things without regard for their labels. By way of example, I asked my therapist if he had ever read the poem Ballad of Orange and Grape by Muriel Rukeyser. He said he had not. This, I told him was likely the reason why we have different understandings of what it means to be truthful.

My therapist said that truthfulness is not decided by poetry, but by accuracy. My description of his desk was untruthful because it was laden with all of my interpretations and assumptions about him, giving an outside listener a wrong understanding of his desk. His own description, on the other hand, was accurate and factual, detailing the objects on and around his desk so that any man on the street might recognize this office from a photo array. His description was truthful because it was specific and unbiased; my description was untruthful because it was vague and subjective.

I mentioned that my description in no way implied some sort of conscious effort, that I was in no way suggesting that he had consciously tried to make his office communicate these sorts of messages. The therapist my mother sends me to told me that all this had been enough for the day and said he would see me next week.

I still do not understand what was wrong with my description. Why is it untruthful when the desk of a therapist, a healer, is designed to bolster only the man who sits behind it and not the one who sits before it? Why is it truthful to describe the objects in the office, which are not particularly dissimilar from any other office in the world, without giving notice to those aspects of the office which make them uniquely owned?

The therapist my mother sends me to has implied that there is something wrong with the way I see the world. This is precisely why my mother sent me to him in the first place. It would appear I've made little to no progress over these many months. At least my therapist already has a topic to discuss at the next progress meeting.

I still believe a friend would help, a friend who believes in the difference between orange and grape.

Ballad of Orange and Grape
Muriel Rukeyser
After you finish your work
after you do your day
after you've read your reading
after you've written your say -
you go down the street to the hot dog stand,
one block down and across the way.
On a blistering afternoon in East Harlem in the twentieth century.
Most of the windows are boarded up,
the rats run out of a sack -
sticking out of the crummy garage
one shiny long Cadillac;
at the glass door of the drug-addiction center,
a man who'd like to break your back.
But here's a brown woman with a little girl dressed in rose and pink, too.
Frankfurters frankfurters sizzle on the steel
where the hot-dog-man leans -
nothing else on the counter
but the usual two machines,
the grape one, empty, and the orange one, empty,
I face him in between.
A black boy comes along, looks at the hot dogs, goes on walking.
I watch the man as he stands and pours
in the familiar shape
bright purple in the one marked ORANGE,
orange in the one marked GRAPE,
the grape drink in the machine marked ORANGE
and orange drink in the GRAPE
Just the one word large and clear, unmistakable, on each machine.

I ask him: How can we go on reading
and make sense out of what we read? -
How can they write and believe what they're writing,
the young ones across the street,
while you go on pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE - ?
(How are we going to believe what we read and we write and we hear and we say and we do?)
He looks at the two machines and he smiles
and he shrugs and smiles and pours again.
It could be violence and nonviolence
it could be white and black women and men
it could be war and peace or any
binary system, love and hate, enemy, friend.
Yes and no, be and not-be, what we do and what we don't do.
On a corner in East Harlem
garbage, reading, a deep smile, rape,
forgetfulness, a hot street of murder,
misery, withered hope,
a man keeps pouring grape into ORANGE
and orange into the one marked GRAPE,
pouring orange into GRAPE and grape into ORANGE forever.
(1973)