* * *
—
When Peter suggested I join his group of fourteen people, which he ran with a woman partner, at first I flatly refused. Then I realized: why am I here if not to confront my worst nightmare—talking and responding freely within a group? I was sick of the straitjacket of my lifelong reticence. When I agreed to join, Peter explained the two basic rules—no conscious sadism allowed, no socializing with members outside the group—and reiterated the ideal of plain, straight-up honesty.
Sitting in the circle, I re-enacted the frozen silence of my childhood and school years, held back and down by a familiar chokehold of dread. I didn’t feel like an elective mute; there was no choice involved. Week by week, I was stirred by the raw emotional courage of men and women whose unspeakable childhoods of abuse and neglect made mine look like a teddy bears’ picnic. Many of them held down high-powered jobs and were raising families even as they struggled to wrest a semblance of meaning and purpose from life.
As people took turns revealing themselves, I strained to respond, but I was paralyzed by acute self-consciousness. Unlike in school, we weren’t marked or humiliated for making mistakes, yet my past held my present hostage. If I opened my mouth, the words had to be nothing short of perfect, but I was nothing if not less-than; still, what is more perfect than a godlike silence? Peter was struck by the split: one-on-one, face-to-face, held by his sympathetic listening, I was often passionate, articulate and insightful. But in the group, even with Peter present, I disappeared.
After months of silence, I was invited to come forward for the first time, and I spoke haltingly of my terror of speaking. I was handled with a gentle brilliance, but for a long time to come, I still needed to be “asked out.” When I agreed to participate in my first psychodrama, a woman named Susan was cast in the role of my indomitable narcissistic mother. Standing behind a mattress held up by three men, she needled, taunted and teased me with the hauteur of a matador. At first I gave her nothing but silence, but then I cut loose with a barrage of punching, kicking, bellowing, ranting. While the catharsis felt pivotal, I sensed I was just starting.
Week by week, year by year, September through June, I trudged the twenty-five-minute walk from my apartment to group. At first I felt as if I was marching to my execution, but gradually I forged delicate, tentative links with others. I was, Peter noted in a well-timed moment, a “classic self-holder”; I still could not trust anyone else to handle the job. I was learning that as children we are open vessels, immigrants crossing borders, psychologically rooting ourselves deep inside our parents, and they in us, captivated by our captors; much darkness and light comes of it. In time, I would see myself as a diver slipping into a black hole in the arctic ice, descending in slow stages, coming back up for air and attaching to the circle of warm-blooded mammals, the next time plunging a little deeper, as much as I could tolerate, toward the motherless core and the chance of rebirth. But in these early years, I mostly played it safe, clasping my habit of ironic distancing close to my heart.
* * *
—
Pandora’s Box was meant to be opened, for hope lay at the bottom. In a black three-ring binder, year by year I captured the fragments of my dreams. Like the bending of a dowser’s stick, my unconscious was imparting a radically new sense of direction to my life.
Wave after wave, the dreams came, my own and from the members of the group, sexy-violent head movies of censored and uncensored childhood wish. As actor, writer, set designer and director, I was swept up into dense, intricate narratives, shifting from fantasy to horror, musical to farce, idyll to massacre. “All that one has forgotten,” the writer Elias Canetti reminds us, “screams for help in dreams.” I experienced the phenomenon of the “day residue”: how a seemingly random daytime word or conversation plumbed the bottomless unconscious, rooted around in the archive of imprinted experiences and latched the present experience to a prototype from the past. Dreams, when they were attended to, delivered a state-of-the-art update on your current psychic state. I found that the subtle work of tentative interpretation of a dream in turn generated a problem-solving “correction” dream: the Dream Factory never closed.
And yet, for many of us, the salutary power of dreaming remains a well-kept secret, relegated to the bogs of superstition. We casually dismiss one-third of our lives—decades of sleep and dreaming—as insignificant, even counterproductive. The UCC old boy and workaholic corporate czar Ted Rogers spoke for more than his own class when he declared, “Sleep is for wimps.”
No single theory captures the full mystery of dreams, but any therapy that denies them may as well deny the weather. Do dreams serve an adaptive, evolutionary function, a throwback to our primordial caveman past? Do we dream of fending off the predations of the saber-toothed boss as an undressed rehearsal for when the real thing happens? Freud believed that dreaming is designed to preserve psychic equilibrium, presenting us with sights that we have perceived while awake yet have not fully registered. Unsolved traumas are resubmitted to the dreamer to work through and master. My own dreams felt like communiqués from the unconscious, frontline bulletins ripped hot off the wire—all the news that’s unfit to print. Most dreams melt away entirely, and others are censored or redacted, black bars blocking the eyes of the guilty; still, it’s a mistake to neglect the morning mail sitting on your pillow. Just read between the lies.
Step by step I became more consciously aware of my ferocious superego, the sleepless inner critic who flays and lashes with the mania of a slave-driver; no matter what you achieve, it is never good enough. But it is also the source of my conscience: it is good to be good. I started to grasp the dynamics of my resistance to the help I was seeking and my projections and transferences onto people who represented past relationships; I began to understand the rigidity of my defences and why they were vital to my survival. In the stories of my group members, I glimpsed flashes of greatness, victims as slowly self-realizing heroes, struggling to reconcile our gifts and curses. I was intrigued when Peter told me how he was struck by the number of high-powered corporate CEOs who passed through his office with the same complaint: they felt like complete frauds.
The group members were meant to use each other, in the best sense of the word, as emotional surrogates, a flock of black sheep falling in love and hate with one another and everything in between. In a real-life relationship, if you expressed yourself authentically you risked losing that relationship. But here, we did what we couldn’t do with a parent or partner and survived each other together. We were not here to make friends, yet what we said to each other could stick for a lifetime: James, you are like a gentle racehorse.
Gradually I felt guilty that people were helping me but I couldn’t help them. I never knew true reciprocity or honesty in my own family, so I should not have been surprised. Inch by inch, I felt my unvoiced responses to the struggles of others coming up over the hilltop to meet me. Experiencing moments of seeming telepathic connection, I realized the phenomenon was not supernatural but natural. I dreamed of a woman in the group emerging impossibly defiant and unscathed from a gang rape, but I didn’t bring it forward; in an ensuing session, we learned that her mother had survived rape by Russian soldiers, and only then did I reveal my dream. When I guessed from the sight of her empty chair that a young woman of Irish blood, an aspiring writer who physically reminded me of Sally, had attempted to kill herself, my subsequent reaching-out and her reception of it enlivened us both; in the months to come she would credit our relationship in the group as lifesaving.
As Sally had once done, the group slowly oiled the rusted joints of the Tin Man who had stood too long in the rain. Each time I found the courage to speak, I was breaking the silencing guilt of my suicidal childhood household. I was rewarded with irreplaceable, irreducible, face-to-face, voice-to-voice, heart-to-heart human contact.
In the above-ground workaday world, I started to crawl out of my manhole, absorbing the knocks and bumps of everyday interactions with a newfound
resilience. I was less quick to bash myself into the ground or let myself off the hook or do the same with my parents. I relate, therefore I am. As I stood back and appreciated, for the first time, my parents’ strengths and gifts, I realized my own were best invested in anyone but them. Perhaps they believed they loved us, but it was not love if they never gave it.
* * *
—
Working one-on-one with Peter on Mondays and the group on Wednesdays, I experienced a hopeful recurring dream in which I returned to my childhood haunted house on Balmoral, now under a state of renovation by new warm and welcoming owners. But the sunny dreams invariably triggered a backlash: at the foot of my bed, dragons loomed and menaced, and taking them for real, I jerked and thrashed myself awake.
In the years since 1968, Sally kept making unpredictable cameo appearances in my dreams, alive but aloof, pretending she didn’t know me, unaware of her fate. Was my desire for the dead still alive, my desire for the living still guilty?
Then, one night, came the rock-bottom mother of all dreams.
I was a newborn baby gripping a long umbilical cord that swung me like a pendulum across a spacious courtyard. My mother, Janet, was standing at the railing of a third-floor balcony, as hypnotically beautiful as a Hollywood star. On my cord, I arced back and forth like a baby Tarzan, reaching for the comfort of her breast. But each time I drew close enough to touch her, her glowing face burst into a grotesque gargoyle of alarm, disgust and revulsion. With each swing, the cycle of beauty and terror repeated. When I awoke, I was convinced that the Janus-faced oscillations would never end.
Was the condition inherited from her own brittle, corseted Victorian mother, and thus ultimately forgivable? No matter; my hesitant, stutter-step adult relationships with women now made sense. How could I woo them when I had failed to court and win my first, primal love? For it was impossible to see the failure as other than my own.
Yet the dream validated what I’d been feeling in my gut as far back as I could remember, and even earlier. The dream persuaded me that even in my wordless infant state, I’d perceived a harsh truth that I could never fundamentally change: my mother’s essential unreachable nature. But I did not have to carry on the same as I ever was.
My father and grandfather, scientists both, would likely have dismissed my dreams of Balmoral, of my mother, and of Sally as meaningless brain-flotsam. But they were the blinkered, overreaching racehorses who had both raced off the cliff, and I was not keen to follow. I knew I was not crazy for still dreaming Sally, both a person and a symbol, long after her death. Like all the important figures and pre-figures in my dreams, she was a messenger, and an audience, pushing herself to the centre stage of my nightly shows in an especially insistent way.
I felt that Sally, my first love outside the ring of the family, was telling me that something remained, and would always remain, unfinished, untalked, unlistened, unrealized, unsung, undanced, unswung. At the same time, she stood for everything cosmically possible, like the emotional and spiritual opening of the sixties itself: as if she understood what happened, what was happening and what would happen next; as if agnostic James might yet convert to the faith that the sunlit face of hope, swinging on its pendulum, could hold its own against the dark side of the moon.
* * *
—
In the spring of 2016, while I was revising a sentence in the section above, the uncanny once again paid a surprise visit. I now knew from long experience that surprising was the only way it could visit.
Originally I had used the word “boomerang” to describe my recurring dreams of a black incubus figure who, despite all my therapeutic work, kept appearing at the foot of my bed, as if to say, Not so fast, I’m not dead yet. Such is the nature of dreaming and healing: two steps forward, one step back.
I decided I did not like the word “boomerang,” and in the very moment I tapped the keyboard and substituted the word “backlash,” I was startled by a sudden crash and the showering of glass fragments at my feet. I swivelled my chair to find that a framed black-and-white eight-by-ten photograph of my childhood home at 186 Balmoral Avenue, perched on the windowsill behind my back for the past seven years, had fallen on the floor. Had my keyboard turned into a Ouija board?
The photograph of my brother, sister and me standing in front of the house had been taken in the fall of 2009 as my memoir, What Disturbs Our Blood, was in the final stages of production; the image, one of dozens, was not published in the book, so I’d decided to frame a single image for myself.
During the shoot, the young photographer, Christine, had been intrigued by the Gothic house built by my grandfather and the suppressed scandal of his mysterious end. She urged me to tell her the secret of his demise, but I insisted she read the book herself; otherwise, it would be like spoiling the narrative of Citizen Kane by blurting that Rosebud was a sled.
As Christine packed up her camera, we stood on the sidewalk in front of the house. She had not stopped badgering me to make the Big Reveal, so I relented. I explained how, while under suicide watch in a bed at Toronto General Hospital in 1940, my grandfather, a Canadian medical hero, slipped a knife off his dinner tray and severed his femoral artery, bleeding to death—a scandal that was covered up for decades.
Seconds later, I felt a gust of cold wind brush the left leg of my corduroy pants. I looked down and discovered a surgically precise six-inch rip in the seam, exposing the flesh of my thigh to the October air. The femoral artery is located in the thigh, and my grandfather was left-handed.
I turned to show Christine the uncanny rip in the fabric of my reality: “What do you make of this?”
“Opening old wounds, James?” she replied.
“How about healing old wounds?”
I turned to my grandfather’s house to salute the crafty spooks. My book cast light on the darkness, yet night forever follows day.
It was Christine’s photo of Balmoral, taken that charged October day, that fell to the floor the second I typed “backlash,” a phenomenon that Jung would not hesitate to claim as classic synchronicity.
Three hours after the photograph-smashing incident, I appeared at a book club in the city’s west end to speak on my memoir to an audience of forty. As I entered the room, my eyes were drawn to a large screen set up to show an introductory video, where instead a photograph of 186 Balmoral Avenue stared back at me. I learned that a member of the book club lived a block south of the house, and only yesterday, after reading my book, she’d walked up to take a photo, then decided to project it on the screen. I didn’t tell my hosts of the coincidence; it felt like far too much extra work. What else to do except take yet another mystery in stride?
TWENTY-ONE
The Bell
Across a distance of three thousand miles, Stewart worried that George might succumb to his latest crisis. At the same time, Stewart had never ceased marvelling at his friend’s resilience.
In 1984, with a fourth child on the way, Stewart quit his steel-working job and entered teachers’ college; like George, he took the long way around to his true calling. Beginning a new career at Valley Heights High School in Port Ryerse in Southwestern Ontario, he taught seventeen subjects, from math to law to art. He’d spent his life refuting the “stupid” label that George’s mother and others had so casually flung in his path. He told his students, “I failed Grades 1 and 2. I didn’t learn to read till I was eleven and now I’m your teacher. How do you like me so far?” He also loved telling the story of the night he was struggling to read a bedtime story to his exasperated three-year-old daughter (the future Crown attorney), when she exclaimed, “Send in someone who can read!”
In his classroom, Stewart often related how his sudden premonition in Dublin on August 13, 1968—“the single most intense psychic experience of my life”—converted him from an atheist to an agnostic. At the funerals of headstrong teenagers who’d been killed in car crashes, too many to bear counting, he stood firm and open under the twin avalanches of pain and grief
. He learned the true value of work and deepened his commitment to the ceaseless asking of questions as the indispensable driver of education. “That’s why they forced Socrates to drink hemlock,” he said. “It was not what he was saying but the questions he was asking. Our generation no longer asks, Why is this guy lying to us? Mass propaganda is capsizing the facts.”
* * *
—
Every crisis conceals an opportunity, and on the basement foundation of a collapsing life George assembled the planks of a new stage. In September 1989, he started teaching at BCIT, the broadcast journalism school from which he’d graduated a decade earlier. In his ten-year run as a reporter, editor and producer, he found the formula for effective broadcast storytelling, and now he was poised to bequeath what he had mastered. Being fired was proving therapeutic.
The split with Ronda deeply affected the kids, and he realized it was time to pay attention to others at work and home; it was not all about him. Nick, the inward contrarian, sided with his father, while Lily, an energized, independent, sassy blonde, allied more with her mother. Religious about seat belts—the simple technology lacking in Sally’s bus—George drove the kids to and from school every day and signed them up for soccer, baseball and ballet. He became “The Dad Who Shows Up,” chatting up parents on the sidelines on all-weather Saturday mornings. George had no intention of driving his offspring into years of therapy.
At BCIT, he transformed the curriculum into the one he would have liked as a student a decade earlier, synthesizing his hard-won knowledge into a two-year job-ready course in TV news reporting. His students learned how to reduce a news story to a single compelling sentence and how to work up a game plan before heading out the door. He counselled his charges, “If you can’t fashion an empathic and imaginative question for a victim of tragedy, you should not be in the business. Never ask a victim, ‘How do you feel?’ Rather: ‘Tell me about your child.’ ” With a ruthless blue pencil, he exterminated all clichés: “If I find the phrase ‘It’s only a matter of time’ in your copy, I will fail you.”
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