Impotency

How’s that for an eye-catching title?

I’m watching Life on Mars with Donnie and a soldier who is suffering from PTSD as well as having lost the use of both legs makes a rather poignient statement. The chief of police goes to tell this young man that his father (a police officer friend of the police-chief) has been killed. At the end of the conversation, after listening to the young man’s frustrations, the police-chief says “I’m sorry.” The young man responds: “Don’t be. I’ve heard that so many times it’s lost its meaning.”

I’ve been really struggling with one of my classes this semester: Novel and Psychoanalysis. In this class we have to view literature through the lense of the psychoanalysis Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s psychoanalytic topology is so anti my world-view that I’ve really be having trouble understanding what he’s saying because it seems so… un-understandable.

But one thing he does believe that I can see is that words leave us impotent because we can never fully say what we want. “All communication is mis-communication,” in Lacan’s view and it’s easy to see how. The mental image I see when you say “car” and the car that you see are different. This leads to inherent misunderstanding in communication.

“I’m sorry.” Bad things happen and we’re impotent to fully express our empathy; our sorrow; the sense that we all have, Christian or not, that something is wrong in this world, we weren’t MADE to be this way, to have these bad things happen, that we’re aliens in this world, created for something MORE.