Resistance...

"When they poured across the border,
I was cautioned to surrender.
This I could not do.
I took my gun and vanished."

This one is going to be a little roundabout.

The text is from a song by Leonard Cohen, "The Partisan."

I had known his music but not him. Anyone who has listened singers from Jennifer Warnes to Johnny Cash has heard covers of his songs. I finally caught up because of a cartoonish super hero movie that came out two or three summers ago that used Cohen's rendition of one of his most covered songs, "Hallelujah!" for a love making scene. The movie wasn't particularly good, but the song caught me and I downloaded "The Best of..." album to my ipod and played it pretty much constantly for the next few weeks much to my wife's annoyance.

This week in the graduate class I teach online we were studying a case that featured issues around feedback and resistance, and I got into a conversation with one of my students about someone in a case she characterized as "stuck in his ways" and having to be coerced to perform, and by extension of course to a supposed many such unmotivated employees. I spent some time, I'm not sure very successfully, asking her to look underneath her diagnosis, to answer the question "why?"

So, as I have often done in my work, I myself began to reconsider the issue of resistance. I remember reading many years ago an article by someone well known in my field to the effect that "there is no such thing as resistance," that what we experience as resistance is actually a rational response to change that brings with it the prospect of loss. While I think this was mainly a device to do the same thing I was trying to do with my student--consider the causes of what we see as resistance--I do remember the article as a useful thing to keep in mind in such instances.

Of course in any serious consideration of the idea, one has, I think, to look to the laboratory at hand, one's self, to do the inquiry justice. Which led me this morning to think about the song quoted above. Nominally a narrative tale of a partisan in "resistance," it seems to me a very useful allegory for the self in resistance.

"When they poured across the border,..."

When I get assaulted by feedback dissonant with how I experience myself... when my borders/boundaries are penetrated by criticism...

"I was cautioned to surrender..."

A more conservative and cautious voice inside of me says to give up to it...

"This I could not do...."

But ego, good old ego, says "no." For preservation of self, I cannot do that...

"I took my gun and vanished...."

Which is one way certain to avoid the penetrating event and not have to deal with it. I think of how often I may have done that. Probably lots more than I want to admit... taking my gun and vanishing.

Interestingly, later in the song comes this line:

"... the frontiers are my prison..."

This is, I think, the consequence of being unable or unwilling to take what our environment and the people in it tell us about us and consider it and integrate it. The self cannot grow and its frontiers/boundaries become our prison.

 Saturday morning with 11 months to go to 70...