- Never eat at a place called Mom's, never play cards with a man named Doc, and never sleep with a woman who has more troubles than you do.
- -- Nelson Algren
Charles Faulkner, a developer and teacher of Neurolinguistic Programming, teaches that every person thinks of their life in terms of a particular metaphor, and that this helps shape that person's life. One person might think of their life as a journey to be completed, another might think of it as a garden to be cultivated.
I could never figure out my own personal metaphor, but I seem to think of my life as something like a work of art, or a novel. The idea is that all the experiences I have and all the things I have learned are supposed to contribute to some final meaningful whole.
Last year I explained this idea to one of my friends in San Francisco and got the following answer back (January 20, 1995). (The initial quoted lines are from my letter.)
> The closest thing I have to a myth that fits my life as it is is the[ End of my friend's comments. ]
> Lonely Guy. Also known as The Watcher. Petra brought a book on the
> Enneagram (sp?) while she was here, and the Watcher is one of the types.
> Really fits me.Tom is quite knowledgeable about Enneagram stuff; the therapist he saw for years worked from that model. He's not sure about me, but thinks I may be a Martyr like him.
Here is my myth for you: A man is walking through the world. Often, he sees people screaming at the center of a pillar of flame. He runs in to rescue them. He looks around, blinded by the heat and light; they are gone, and he is lost in the flame. It consumes the outer layer of his skin and, satisfied, dies down. He goes on walking, skinless. A layer of scar tissue forms where the skin used to be. He does this over and over again. Eventually, the layers of scar tissue get so thick that it's hard for him even to walk, but he keeps on, unable to let the people in flames suffer when he believes that he can release them.
When I first read this, I thought, ``Okay, that sounds like me
all right.''
But then after I had a while to think about it some more,
I decided that it didn't really fit the sorts of relationships
I have with women at all.
Yes, I do have a strong rescue instinct,
which does indeed sometimes cause me to get involved with
women that a saner man would keep his distance from.
I have many times violated the third part of Nelson Algren's
wisdom quoted at the top of this page.
And I certainly do have my share of scars.
But very few of my scars are the result of rescuing women,
as I see it.
A few of them were about women I'd been in relationships with,
but most described much briefer, more casual encounters,
in a few cases women I'd only met once,
who I'd spent an afternoon or an evening with.
Somehow I started feeling obligated
to send a new installment each day,
and I began to understand what it's like for a newspaper columnist
like Herb Caen who has to come up with a new column every day.
(But he has a large staff to help him.)
Finally, after about a month, my other responsibilities
forced me to stop before I had quite run out of women.
It then occurred to me to do a little arithmetic,
and I realized that over the course of a month
I had written about 50,000 or 60,000 words,
quite enough for a short novel.
(``I was wondering when you'd notice that,''
my friend said.)
Unfortunately, for various reasons I am able to include
only a few of these accounts among the Snapshots here.
Anyway, I was so moved to explain to my friend that she is wrong
that I wrote her back about a few of the women who have been
in my life.
And then I started realizing that there were more and more
women I wanted to tell her about,
and I started sending her an episode --
200 or 300 lines of email -- every day.
A few of these essays covered two or three women,
and a few women needed two or three installments,
but mostly it was one essay per women.