Message from the Director, Dr. John Glavin: "It Shoots Disappointment"

So what does one do if, when It Shoots, It Shoots disappointment?  

Disappointment has become a staple of America in the twenty-first century.  Everyone in America seems disappointed with America. Edward Snowden (technically not in America) is disappointed. Barack Obama is disappointed. Everyone else is disappointed by Barack Obama. Job creation, but stagnant wages. Ineradicable and growing child poverty. Wars that end only to flare up again. Even The Matrix sequels were a letdown.

In the ‘nineties Bill Clinton and Al Gore enthusiastically boostered the bridge they were building to the twenty-first century. But when we came to cross it, we found it to be our version of Thornton Wilder’s bridge of San Luis Rey: "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated” everyone crossing it into the gulf below.

Interstellar warn us a dusty Apocalypse looms, and no one scoffs.

So how can I trust It to Shoot what I need, what I want?

But what if what we want, or should want, is in fact more disappointment?

Disappoint comes for a French verb, disappointer, which means to deprive someone of a position, or a job.  The reverse of “to appoint.”  To disappoint is, then, etymologically, to let someone go, to fire him.

So who disappoints us, who lets us go, who fires us?

Obviously, we do: we literally disappoint ourselves. Though usually we prefer not to face that fact, it’s easier to blame someone else. But, since disappointment is entirely an internal attitude, it can only come internally, from within the self.

And, that’s a very good thing indeed.  At least so Freud insisted.

Freud suggests we regard life as more or less a constant series of inadequate substitutions, substitutions that root in a primal discovery (disappointment) that the self is insufficient to its needs, the discovery that the self can never be “the sufficiently gratifying object.” At least this is the way Adam Phillips summarizes Freud in his remarkable book On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, a book I would urgently and unreservedly recommend to anybody interested in retrieving undervalued possibilities for pleasure. That is: to anyone who’s been recently disappointed.

Freud and Phillips claim we disappoint ourselves: that is, we appoint other things to take our place in gratifying the self. Those other things or persons never entirely satisfy our need, of course. That’s the downside.  But the upside is this: that infinite series of replacements and substitutions delivers us into the world, to the world; it makes us human beings.

Though it may seem strange to say so, we would do well, then, to cultivate disappointment, savoring the way it redeems us from our always, in comparison, impoverished self.  Show me the person who’s not disappointed and I will show you someone who’s settled for too little, who quails before the challenging alternatives to just me that a multiple and mysterious world can offer.

Disappointment, thank goodness, clears the way. Without disappointment there’s no reason It should Shoot.

JG