I would be measured by the soul, the mind's the standard of the man.

A few weeks ago Jon and I saw The Elephant Man at BYU with some friends from my MSW cohort. It was an intense, intelligent production. The play was based on the life of Joseph Casey Merrick and I loved it not because it was pleasant, but because there was truth in it, truth that punched me right in the gut of my secret hypocrisies. My supervisor told me that being a therapist doesn't mean having perfect relationships--that's not possible, but it involves admitting your faults, acknowledging where you are lacking and that you are on a journey to figuring things out, overcoming your own darkness and becoming whole. We can know a lot about what would heal us, or just make us healthier, and still refrain from doing it. With that in mind, here is some of what I learned from The Elephant Man:

First, the play offered the conjecture that a deformity or malformation only becomes a flaw if we ascribe it that meaning. It also toys with the idea that many of the attributes that we admire in our culture are actually horrible deformities, we just don't label them as such, and even look on them as virtues. This idea made my thoughts take a very "Revelation" turn (the-first-shall-be-last-and-the-last-shall-be-first), and it occurred to me that even beauty can be a "deformity" if it makes you corrupt, shallow, and selfish, but society will support and applaud that deformity, whereas Joseph Merrick's left him friendless, cast out, and despised.

The play was written with the author's stated intent being to deliberately offend and "alienate" the audience. The actor who portrayed Merrick made the [brilliant] choice to demonstrate Merrick’s deformity by constantly drooling, hasta having strings of saliva swinging from his chin and spraying spit when he talked. One part of my brain was raining with compassion--when other characters recoiled at him, I felt hurt on his behalf and ranted in my mind--“I would have been kind to Merrick! I would have been his friend! How could those people be so awful?” while one was repulsed by the spit insomuch that I wanted to gag when I looked at him, so I found myself averting my eyes whenever the actor spoke. Oh. I get it now. I was amazed that the actor had found a way to stir in the audience a sense of revulsion for Merrick reminiscent of what his contemporaries surely experienced. It was a BYU audience, presumably more soft-hearted and primed to feel pity than most, but he made us recoil. So then I had to deal with that urge to recoil, and think about where else it shows up, how it conflicts with other facets of my character, and what it means.

One of the most interesting aspects of this play was that every character BUT Merrick and Treves, the doctor who arranged for him to live at the hospital, wears a mask throughout the play. The idea is that we all have something we desperately wish to hide--a "deformity" of our own--and that we are rarely truly genuine. At one point a woman removes her mask and this is symbolic of her actually being completely naked. Another character screams at her "Woman, clothe yourself!" Sometimes we don't wish to see each other as we really are--or to be seen. It's too frightening, too sad, it would make us too ashamed. Merrick couldn't hide the flaws on his skin; most of us have the ability to hide quite a bit about ourselves. I thought about the masks I have had throughout my life, for different people, and what I have hidden. How many masks flaked off like dead skin cells when I met my husband, and others that are part of my own skin it seems. I thought about the things I am still masking and what it would take to remove each one. (This is a good thing to journal about, if you want to go there).

There was an interesting constrast between the way the upper and lower classes responded to Merrick. The poor maltreated him, placed him in a freak show, beat him, robbed him, gawked at him and used him for their own pleasure (entertainment and voyeuristic interest). The rich paid for a permanent “home” for him, sent him gifts, visited him, and used him for their own pleasure (it was “in vogue” to look upon him and tell the tale, voyeuristic interest).

The play briefly touched on the idea that no one saw nothing innately “him” that they could love, only what they superimposed as their reflections in him. There was a scene where people proclaimed that Merrick had various qualities--pointing out that he was insecure, well-read, soft-spoken, etc. always ending with the statement: “He is so much like me.” This made me think about empathy, the idea of feeling with someone at the connecting joints of humanity: pain, rapture, grief. Is empathy selfish, because what we “feel with” is only a reverberation or extension of our own feelings? So pity for anyone is really self-pity, and love for anyone is really self-love?

Lastly: Wanting to be “like others” was what finally killed Merrick (in real life, and in the play). Because of the weight of his head, Merrick had to sleep sitting up, but was attempting to sleep lying down in order to be more like other people, whom he desperately wanted to be accepted by. In the scene of his death, the ghosts of women who were once his companions in the freak show sing to him: “Sleep like others you’ve learned to admire, sleep like your mother, sleep like your sire.” I thought about the idea that trying to be like others is what kills us, and I've determined that it is true, at the very least for a myriad of tiny deaths. The death of authenticity, the quelling of a free spirit, the quieting of so many words, "songs we never share." How has wanting to be like others killed parts of you?

I don't know that these thoughts have driven me towards any definite conclusion, just fragmented hope that I can move towards offering an authentic self and work to provide a safe place for anyone I meet to be accepted, to know that they are worthwhile.

Also, here is a sweet picture of Chai being an adorable love, to remind us that there are easy/lucky/free things in the world as well as heavy and complex things. Oh, my own Lolly!