Lesson #1 “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”
Part One. Essay Assignment: The War Between the Ego and Empathy in Where I’m Calling From
In page one, profile someone who suffers “the type of swollen ego that results in solipsism and isolation from sanity, maturity, and the human race.” Then in your second page, profile someone who embodies the “sweet grace of empathy” and show how this person’s empathy connects him or her to others.
Then using an appropriate paragraph transition such as "Similarly" or "Likewise," you might start your thesis paragraph this way:
The above characters are antithetical to each other. Similarly, the stories pit characters at war between their egos and the liberation of empathy. Egotism in the stories (choose no fewer than 3) of Raymond Carver has grave consequences, which include _______________________, _________________________, ________________________, and ____________________________. In contrast, empathy has a healing effect on the downtrodden evidenced by _________________________, _______________________, __________________________, and ______________________________.
Your body paragraphs will correspond to the components you use to fill in the above blanks. Your conclusion will be one sentence, a brief, dramatic restatement of your thesis. Your final page, your Works Cited page, will show the sources you used from Where I’m Calling From, from my blog, from interviews, or from other helpful sources you find. Your Works Cited page and manuscript must conform to MLA format. Be sure to make your own catchy, creative title.
Part Two. Reading Questions
1. What ways does Mel represent the kind of egotism that precludes understanding, sympathy, and empathy? This cardiologist knows nothing about the real heart because he’s obsessed with the hearing the sound of his own voice, pontificating, bloviating, and bullying his opinions and higher truths over others. His boastful pride compels him to dominate all discussions. He is, to use modern parlance, a know-it-all. Even his theology studies render him ignorant about spiritual matters. He worships his Ego and Smug Self-Certitude more than he cares about love in the real world.
2. What does the title suggest about the story’s theme? When we talk about love, we talk about everything BUT love. He who talks about love knows nothing about love. Why? Because in part love is not intellectual. Nor is it imposing opinions over others.
3. Why does love so often result in hate and violence? Terri discusses her previous man Ed on page 170. You’re vulnerable to be betrayed on the deepest level. You’ve stuck your emotions on the table and are in a position to get hurt resulting in rage and sometimes violence. Once you’re in a relationship so deeply, it’s hard to escape so sometimes you feel cornered and this is where abuse occurs. Even though Mel doesn’t want to admit it, often love can go awry, turn into a passion gone wrong. Terri knows this from experience. Love can be the rich custard flan tres leche caramel or love can curdle into rancid chunks of cottage cheese. Mel wants a tidy theory about love that comforts him, but he is embracing a mythic over simplification of love, not the truth. In truth, love has a dark demonic side. Most violent crimes are crimes of passion.
4. What evidence is there that Mel is a narcissist completely ignorant of love? He says after arguing with Terri about love, “That man tried to kill me.” He makes every conversation about himself, rather than coming to an understanding. See page 171.
5. What stage of love is the narrator Nick in with his woman Laura? Eros, honeymoon, infatuation. See page 172. His love is untested because at this stage it’s an “easy love.” See page 174. Most Americans have an infantile notion of love as being that first stage in which love is a giant goody box. Whenever you want a goody, you reach into the goody box until the goodies are gone and then you get a new goody box.
6. What is Mel’s obsession? Love. He always turns the subject toward love? Why? Because he hungers for a kind of ideal love that will ameliorate his raging egotism. He knows deep down something is wrong with him but his ego prevents him from laying it out on the table. Mel’s hunger for love is noble and true and authentic but his quest for love, finding a theory instead of love’s reality, is MISGUIDED and therefore doomed to fail. The more Mel searches for the perfect theory of love, the lonelier he becomes and this makes him hunger for love all the more. Thus Mel is trapped in a vicious cycle.
7. How does Mel respond to Terry’s plea for empathy and understanding on page 172? He’s supremely unconcerned with her needs, only his need to be right.
8. Why is Mel in part insecure or threatened by Ed’s demonic love? Because Ed was willing to die for love, something Mel can’t do because Mel cannot let go and lose control. His relationships must be very controlled due to his insecurities.
9. How does Mel’s immature character force Terry to act? Like a mother. Mamma love. Too many women are mammas for their men. See page 175 as Terry assuages Mel’s insecure ego. Too many men are trapped in Mamma Love. They become helpless cripples nestling in the Womb of a relationship that renders them infants forever and ever.
10. What journey are the characters embarking on? An exploration of love without defenses, without preconceptions. The alcohol is like a truth serum and they unshed their defenses and only when they have been reduced to a tabula rasa or blank slate can they see love in a new way. See page 176. A “forbidden” journey.
11. Where does Mel show some humanity and humility? He expresses self-doubt and concedes that maybe Terri was right about love going bad. Yes, love curdles, goes rank. See page 176.
12. What is Mel searching for on page 177. Permanence and transcendence. These are nice qualities of love, but they are absolutes and ideals and suggest a man who is more in love with the IDEA of love more than love itself.
13. What makes Mel an interesting character? He can long for a “higher love” but be full of a serpent’s spit, venom, and hate. See page 178.
14. What is one of Mel’s chief regrets? He never followed his passion, food. He probably became a doctor for status and now he feels compromised as a human being and dreams for some kind of fantasy love, an ideal love. See page 180 where Mel longs for chivalry. Chivalry is just a mask, a form of “armor” that prevents Mel from getting his hands dirty in life and facing his demons. See page 181.
15. What if anything is profound about the story’s ending?
Part Three. What 10 Things Should Mel Do to be a Happier, More Loving Person?
1. He needs to take a “chill pill,” that is, learn to relax. He gets too worked up over things and as a result he becomes blind to his anger, egotism and obnoxiousness.
2. He needs to become a better listener, listen more, talk less.
3. He needs to learn to accept himself. He appears to be consumed by self-hatred. Why? Because he demands a perfect love from himself, an ideal life and he knows he’s fallen short. Worse, he does nothing to close the gap between his behavior and his so-called higher ideals. He is frustrated with himself and he lashes out on others.
4. He needs to accept the demonic in others and himself in order to be less demonic. People who don’t acknowledge their inner demons are more dangerous than those who don’t.
5. He needs to open his mind to definitions of love that are less ideal than his own. Perhaps he should incorporate a “dirty hands” philosophy.
6. He needs to confront and acknowledge his insecurities rather than being in denial about them as he rages on Terry.
7. He needs to see how he treats others, a sign of maturity, and maybe he’ll act more loving instead of talking about love all the time.
8. He needs to realize his own cowardice and egotism have brought him frustration and unhappiness instead of blaming others.
9. He needs to develop the courage to be honest when he’s sober, not just when he’s drunk.
10. He needs to learn how to have conversations with people rather than lecturing people.
Part Four. Filling in your mapping components by answering a key question.
Egotism in the stories (choose no fewer than 3) of Raymond Carver has grave consequences, which include _______________________, _________________________, ________________________, and ____________________________. In contrast, empathy has a healing effect on the downtrodden evidenced by _________________________, _______________________, __________________________, and ______________________________.
Two Important Questions: Your Answers Will Outline Your Essay Number 1
Question One. What are the dangerous consequences of Mel’s egotism?
1. Mel is obsessed with being right in his theory of love more than he is interested in connecting with people by listening to them and empathizing with them and making compromises with them.
2. Mel is more interested in the idea of love, which assures his ego, than he is with real love, a complex beast that threatens his ego. Real love isn’t as safe as idealized love. Abstractions about love are just theories, stale formulas relegated to effete college professors. Abstractions don’t cut it in the real world. People tell me you can read parenting books until the cows come home, but until you parent a child, you know nothing about parenting. Mel can talk about love until he’s blue in the face, but until he really loves, he is an ignoramus about love.
3. Mel’s egotism has blinded him from a painful fact. He doesn’t have conversations with people. He talks down and lectures to them. This disconnects him and pushes him into the world of solipsism in which he becomes the only reality.
4. Solipsism, failing to connect with others, is a form of insanity. The telling signs of solipsism are self-pity, resentment, and narcissism (you’re the only one who matters, your suffering is worse than everyone else’s, your grievances are more compelling to everyone else’s). Tell the students about the doctor whose wife left him and the student who never dated after 20 years. These are two examples of people who are withdrawn into themselves and cannot connect with the outside world and as such are insane.
Question Two: What are the healing effects of empathy?
1. Empathy, the ability to stand in someone else’s shoes, is liberation and “a vacation” from the prison of self-centered egotism.
2. Empathy reveals strength and security. Only strong, mature, secure people are relaxed enough to let go of their ego so they can listen and be of service to others.
3. Empathy gives us real self-worth because we actually see the value of us helping people. In contrast, egotism is a false self-worth because we have to constantly aggrandize ourselves with vanity. Vanity is the Mother of False Self-Worth.
4. Empathy allows us to listen. Listening helps bring in new information, which forces us to let go of our old, stale ideas. Often we need new information to cleanse us of our old, stagnant ideas and to establish a tabula rasa or blank slate so we can begin anew.
Part Five. Student Activity
Think of someone you know who suffers from egotism and solipsism. This one-page profile could be used for the first page of your essay.
Part One. Reading Questions One. What is the irony of using a blind character in the story as a way of developing one of its major themes? See page 391 where the narrator recounts the blind man burying his wife and how “he had never seen her.” Who’s really blind? Two. Explain the title. A Cathedral is where miracles happen. The miracle is that a dead man will be resurrected. The dead man is equated with the image of skeletons that occur later in the story during the TV show. Clearly, the narrator is dead and reborn by the story’s end. Three. How does the narrator reveals himself in the first paragraph? He’s a defensive ignoramus and a man so isolated from the complexity of the human condition that he is a walking corpse. He’s a dead man. Later we find that he’s friendless. His wife says he has no friends. He lives inside himself, a prisoner of his own solipsism, which is fueled in part by fear. Four. What is foreshadowed in the second paragraph? Robert’s sensitivity, tracing the wife’s face, will be passed on to the narrator at the story’s end. Five. What is the narrator’s real source of jealousy? Dead people don’t like to see people living life fully. They want everyone to be as dead and miserable as they are. The narrator resents the blind man for living life fully. Six. What do we know about the narrator’s habits? They’re reductionary. He does the same rituals over and over to close himself from emotion. The TV watching, the fear of silence, the fear of conversation, insomnia, the depression, the smoking dope until he can crash in bed. The blind man represents change, a threat, an interference with his routine. Our routines comfort us, but they also imprison and eventually kill us. Seven. What is the story’s turning point? Where Robert apologizes for monopolizing the talk with the wife. He shows empathy, something the narrator is lacking. He shows he has this quality, empathy, which evinces Robert’s maturity and gives him the credentials to be trusted as a parent figure for the narrator who is essentially a frightened child. Once that dynamic is established, the miracle can begin. Eight. What contradiction about maturity do we learn in the story? The adult is relaxed enough to be a child and possess a child’s hunger to learn new things. We see this on page 397 when they’re watching TV. One of life’s contradictions is that we have to be mature enough to be children, to be relaxed enough to let go and let our child explore. Nine. How do we know the narrator is a scared little kid emotionally? He keeps saying, “I’m not doing so well, am I?” He needs an adult’s approval. Ten. How does the narrator change at the end of the story? In the beginning he is disaffected. By the end, gets excited, his legs become numb, he’s possessed with a sense of urgency and life purpose. He says at one point, “It was like nothing else in my life up to now.” Part Two. Disaffected, adjective; Disaffection, noun: To be disaffected is to be emotionally withdrawn, disengaged with the world, depressed. Disaffection is the condition of having given up on life and in essence being a member of the walking dead. Part Three. The Causes of Disaffection 1. You lack confidence to engage with others so you withdraw into yourself. Perhaps you were hurt in the past and don’t want to get hurt again, so you avoid people. 2. You get married more for convenience and to shelter you from the world. 3. You become addicted to your routines, which shut out the outside world. 4. You are reflexively hostile to anyone new because they represent a threat to your existence. You hate change. 5. You act like a churlish (grouchy) know-it-all who has all the answers, a person who dismisses everything as a “joke” and “utter nonsense.” 6. You are incapable of listening to others. The only thing you listen to the Cynical Voice constantly grumbling inside your head. 7. You are lethargic in your self-centeredness and numb yourself with various addictions in order to undergo your “slow death.” 8. You teach yourself that there is no hope for change or a better life so you succumb to learned helplessness. Part Four. Journal Entry In a paragraph, describe someone you show who has over time become disaffected. (McMahon: talk about the divorced doctor)Lesson #2: "Cathedral" (356)
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