Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Voicelessness and Emotional Survival => Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board => Topic started by: sea storm on June 28, 2008, 11:19:05 PM
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This book is a treasure. Steinbeck hits all the criteria for Ns and I can only imagine it is because he knew one. This person in the book is so poisonous to the people who get close to her. She has this sexual magnetism that both males and females are strongly drawn to.
Highly recommended
Sea
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Additionally, along those lines, there is going to be a movie coming out soon (may have premiered in US) starring Julianne Moore that will be about a n-istic woman and how she ruins people's lives. It's called Savage Grace. Can't say it sounds "good", but it could be enlightening (or triggering!).
Thanks, Sea Storm for that heads up as well.
Dandylife
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Savage Grace is about to release in the U.S. About a mentally ill woman who seduces her son. A true story.
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Thank you, Sea! I've never read East of Eden, but will pick it up from the library this week.
The movie Savage Grace, though... no way I could view it. Makes me sick just thinking about it. I see it's based on a book, though... reading the story might be a bit easier to take, but I dunno.
Carolyn
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Always ready for a good book.....
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That's so funny that you post about a novel, because I wanted to as well. I've been re-reading Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and I am deeply immersed in it. It is an amazing book. I guess when I had to read it for a grade in college, I couldn't appreciate it. Or maybe I didn't have enough life experience to understand it.
He also must have known an N or two. He seems to know a lot about the feelings of victimization. He is such a story teller ... and his descriptions of nature and the culture are so rich and poetic.
I know it has a tragic end, but I am going to be so sorry to finish this book. I'm finding it very helpful in thinking about various issues.
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It makes sense that writers would have experienced Ns and tried to make sense of the experience. it is so devaluing and undermining to a person.
In East of Eden, the father builds a myth about himself as a war hero. He talks of his exploits in various famous battles and theembellishments grow with the years. He decides his sensitive son will ammount to nothing if he doesn't go to war. Son does not want to go but does. Dad plays his sons off against each other so that he is the main character in their worlds. He drives the kids to the depths of sibling rivalry by choosing a golden chidl. Meanwhile the golden chidls life is no picnic but the less favoured chidl doesn't get it.
Later the dad ends up in Washington as a big shot, based on his bs war stories. When he dies he leaves his kids a great deal of money and it is pretty obvious that he had no legal way to get the money. The boys are left with realizing that there father is not who they thought he was . As youth they did not have the capacity or insight to grasp what a first class weirdo he was and even when they get the news, it does not really register.
Of course they are set up to be inept at life with little or no judgement that they can trust. Intuition de-railed. So one of the sons marries a Narcissist/pyschopath. He is oblivious to her true nature, but on the other hand she is expert at presenting the exact face needed for the job. He loves her passionately and occasionally we get glimpses of what is going on in her ferral brain. things like ka- ching that means money for me, or I will benefit from this. She does not give a fig for anyone.
This is only page 168 and there are at least another 400 pages.
I think minds have fuses and they actually can get blown. So people avoid overloading them, and choose denial or dont have the resources to understand the N, or have to go through the nightmare as an adult to try to make order of the chaos they experienced as kids. It is all there in this book. WOW>
Sea
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Hi Sea Storm,
I just wanted to comment that I read this book a few years back and I really enjoyed it, despite the one poisonous character.
What was the word or phrase that basically translated to "thou mayest" or something like that ? Timshel ?
Quite a thought-provoking work.
cats paw
P.S. You were posting at the same time I was, so I wanted to add that I liked your metaphor of fuses.
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Sea Storm,
Thanks for the recommendation. I want to read it. I saw the movie w/ James Dean, but it seems, as often happens, the essence of the book did not translate to the screen.
IMO, in the film, the dysfunction of the foo is evident, but not the Nness of the father.
ann
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hi sea storm (and ann3)
Sea,
Have you reached a part in the book where Aaron and Caleb are born?
I'll tell you why I ask.
The original movie is about these 'almost' grown boys (as in "not too mature") and their father. Mother is elsewhere.
I just watched it again online (2 hrs.)
Now another 'East of Eden' was on TV. It began somewhere else with people perhaps a generation or two back, and Aaron and Caleb did not come into the movie until about ½ way through (4 hours--A special) so I imagine the book was followed more closely in the special. I saw it only once and never again.
Does this fit in with what you are reading now? What page? 442 and you are ½ way through!!!
443, you can talk to me
444, go read some more
xx
Izzy
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Hi All,
I am up to the part where the twins are born and father does not have the heart to name them for a year. He is too depressed about losing the N.
The twins were the focus of the movie???????????? That is not what I would have chosen. There is really a missing link in most people's brains concerning Ns. Maybe most people would think it was no big deal if they saw it described in a book, but Steinbeck has it down completely. Even how intergenerational it is.
I would love to see those movies. I have no idea how to download movies. Do you have to pay money for them?
Sea storm
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Hi sea S
Are the twins named yet? Aaron and Caleb? Their father and them are the focus, if that's who they are.
Izzy
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Thanks for the thread sea storm! I love, love, love this book. I love Steinbeck as well. Did you know that he wrote this book as a means to explain to his children and grandchildren the convuluted story of their family history? Only a story so entrenched in real life could be this compelling! What stood out to me was the way Nism travels down the bloodline and the way the female narcissists in the book displayed their cruelty. There were so many triggers for me it was amazing. This book is in my top 5 of all time!
Tiff
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Yes, this book is epic and brilliant. His family history. Wow........ It is so grounded in deep personal experience that it had to be.
So far the men are much nicer than the women. This bugs me a bit. You've got the bitter, competent, rock of Gibralter or the women who eat razor blades for breadfast.
I am reading about the brothers now. This is sibling rivalry gone terrible wrong. Well, no wonder with pops so out of it that they don't have names for a year. The subtlety of the power plays of the dark shadow twin are so creepy. He undermines his brother so profoundly and the brother has no idea. Non whatsoever. But his life is completey altered because of his brother Cals envy. Maybe that is why god gave us intuition. Sometimes we can't consciously know every detail of what is going on but we just feel something is wrong.
The bad brother is a slanderer too and he is so swift and sneaky.
This is
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Ah the downstairs renter just came to tell me he is renting for another month. Goodie.
This is a story of narcissism and the effects on the innocents.
He deals with every aspect imaginable. He struggles with the matter of choice. Life was so proscribed that everything one did was defined and the smaller the box, the better. So how do you explain evil people? Do they choose? or do they just act out a prewritten script. We have all struggled with that one.
There is a whole subtext about lying and trust, freedom and responsibility. I must be coming out of the fog to be able to relish reading this book.
I have read tons about narcissism, pathological lying, swindling, slander, psychopaths. Someone said that psychopaths understand the words but not the music of relationships. This is really the music and the art of understanding the narcissist. What a feat.
Sea storm
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Some of the memorable (and eye-opening for me) quotes from East of Eden re: what Nism looks like:
Steinbeck on “Human monsters”
“I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one’s fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishments for concealed sins.
And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect,but if a twisted gene or an malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-striken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.”
Steinbeck on the manipulative lies of Cathy Ames: (major female N character of the book)
“Cathy was a liar, but she did not lie the way most children do. Hers was no daydream lying, when the thing imagined is told and, to make it seem more real, told as real. That is just ordinary deviation from external reality. I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device or profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar—if he is financially fortunate.
Cathy’s lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also—either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.”
I see so much of my Nmother in Cathy it’s not funny from that smile that plays on her lips as she dispenses her distress to others to that same exact way she structures her “stories.” Steinbeck has really captured the essence of Nism (a.k.a. human evil) in this book.
Tiffany
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Thanks for the quotes. They are so powerful. To think that Steinbeck came to understand this on his own is just amazing. I think that Ns have been around for a long time and in a lot of cultures so it makes sense that there will be literature that tries to make sense of it.
It is a terrible thing to not care how people close to you feel. To just want power over them.
I am sorry your mother was like that. Mine was too. I can face the fact that my ex was an N but looking at my mother in that context has been very, very hard to face. What I CAN see is that is what set me up to seek out n partners and find them enthralling and "like coming home".
sea storm
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Tiffany, thank you for those quotes. The lies of Cathy Ames are exactly the style of my ex-husband, more so than my mother.... although she will lie, in many subtle ways, for the sake of keeping up appearances (especially in order to make it appear that she worked harder than she really did.)
Wanted to tell you also... that I read your latest installment on the story board and just offer you hugs with encouragement.
Still waiting for our little library to get in a copy of this book from one of the other district branches. Hopefully soon!
Carolyn
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What I have seen is that the earth shifts in cataclysmic ways when someone lies behind your back.
Just a lie here and there to the right person and your life is altered forever. What we catch the narcissist doing is only the tip of the iceberg. The implications of their lies ripple on for ages. More and more it is clear that it is important to get away as soon as possible. This requires having great trust in one's intuition. This requires giving up on resue missions. This requires a leap of faith and courage.
That place where I turned and just stopped taking it anymore is a curious place. I invited the wrath of a disordered and wildly revengeful man. It seems that I was crawly on my knees out of that place os darkness and hell for about a year at least. Sometimes I still feel the terror of going against his powerful will and it scares me to the core. My psychiatrist wonders and encourages me to get angry about what happened and the swindling and slander. He says that I am afraid at all levels to get angry because I still fear his retalliation. Its true. But I keep going. There is no snapping out of it like recovering from eating a sour grape. l
This site is so important. At least we can find some intellectual understanding and support for the life sucking and destroying experience of loving ( or working ) with a narcissist.
I'm still standing.
Much love,
Sea storm
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Hi Sea-
Life altering experience of dealing with an N- so true. I feel almost at the end of my rope today,forced to continue dealing with that N relationship, with no end in sight- all of my present and future choices severely limited as penance for my mistake-
I must need to learn this lesson very well, because I must patiently go over and over trhe same ground, seemingly without progress, at a great cost.
An N trap. AS you say, the destructive N power.
Best,
Changing
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I just wanted to follow with another couple of interesting quotes from East of Eden
Steinbeck on human devils:
Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong. But this culture is fenced, and the swimming brood climbs up only to fall back. Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.
Steinbeck on the “fall of gods”
When a child first catches an adult out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little, they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again. It is an aching kind of growing…
Just wanted to say the second quote hits home really hard for me because I remember what I felt like when I learned that my parents were "weird" to say the least. I truly was devastated and as in the first quote felt that surely that "weirdness" implicated me as well. Again, I love, love, love this book!
Oh, and Certain Hope, I appreciate your hugs and support so very much.
Take care all
Tiff
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Sea Storm,
Thanks for the recommendation. I want to read it. I saw the movie w/ James Dean, but it seems, as often happens, the essence of the book did not translate to the screen.
IMO, in the film, the dysfunction of the foo is evident, but not the Nness of the father.
ann
I vaguely recall there was a newer movie starring Jayne Seymour. I can't recall exactly when that one came out.
Bones
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As I go deeper into the novel and bring my own experience to reading and understanding it, I realize that a very important part of the book was the idea of choice. This idea really shook Steinbecks world. I guess in those days the way they worshipped and lived and even thought was laid out from a to z. For some people that is how it still is.
In the end he thinks the most important thing is free will and choice. In todays lingo it would be : No matter what happens choose to be a winner. Don't judge oneself too harshly. We all are saints and devils. No matter what happens keep going and don't let the past chain you to a plough that is going uphill. We are gifted with insight and there are people out there who will love you. To throw away your whole life and your psyche for the ingeniously and offhandedly remorseless is too much of a waste.
I can understand this intellectuallly and now I am going to try to open my heart to myself and forgive myself for being such a sucker and for throwing nearly everything I hold dear away for someone who did not give a rat's ass for me.
Sea storm