Marking Time

“The Irish are the only people completely impervious to psychoanalysis.” - Sigmund Freud

Colin, the Matt Damon character, quoted this great line to his police psychiatrist girlfriend in last year’s multiple-Oscar-winning Scorsese breakthrough The Departed. Though skillful screenwriter William Monahan adapted the movie’s basic plotline from a 2002 Hong Kong police/mob picture, he and Scorsese –and presumably the actors– found a hundred insanely great ways to make this a quintessentially American story: working class heroes, a touch of dark humor (Nicholson’s brilliant contribution), and plenty of excess: booze and broads and violence and melting-pot politics and scared little boys hiding behind macho-man masks.

But that line–that one great, awful, personally resonant quote from Freud — that’s what did it for me with the movie. Because it made me look at my self. It made me think of my family (I’m 25% Irish).  It helped me remember and somewhat even forgive my father for some of his own impervious tendencies.

In my more megalomaniacal moments, I picture myself someday claiming my place somewhere among the all-time-great Irish charmer/brawlers in the arts: guys like James Joyce, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde and all those glorious, moody rabble-rousers of old. Actors like Spencer Tracy and John Wayne. Edgy directors like John Huston, John Ford, Jim Sheridan and Danny Boyle. Current stand-up comedy specialists like King of The Rant Denis Leary and the dangerously confessional Christopher Titus. The back-when Irish roots of Lennon & McCartney. The “do it big” spirit of Van Morrison, the U2 boys, the Pogues –heck, even that ballsy Irish broad Sinead O’Connor– as well as some of their Irish-American counterparts like Billy Corgan and Ryan Adams. And, for what it’s worth, I really do identify with whatever is Irish and screwed-up and sometimes beautiful way down in Mel Gibson’s heart of hearts. (I didn’t actually verify Mel’s Celtic roots, but he fits the type in a dozen different ways, from the drinking to the complicated religious identity to the raging, crying, larger-than-life creative force that seems to compel him.)

I recently discovered a Scottish folk singer named Dougie MacLean who exemplifies more of the soft side, the poetic soul, of this Celtic “warrior/poet” type. He wrote a song called Ready for the Storm, covered a number of years ago by one of my favorite Christian Contemporary singers, Rich Mullins. My favorite lines are as follows:

The distance it is no real friend
And time will take its time
And you will find that in the end
It brings you me
This lonely sailor
And when You take me by the hand
You love me, Lord, You love me
And I should have realized
I had no reasons to be frightened

So now I wait for “time to take its time”. I mark time in this paradise/prison of middle-class suburban American life. I laugh, I cry, I drink, I blog, I write, I teach, I rant and pray. And I try not to be frightened. Because, as Denis Leary wisely observed about his own success in a recent Rolling Stone interview,

“It’s hard to look back without thinking that there was some kind of Grand Plan in place.” 

Hey, I’ll drink to that!