Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source
My ex-boyfriend Doug uses the word in describing himself, completist, the way I used to and still sometimes call myself a revivalist or a scopophilic, for me because I like a summarial word that takes care of identity, subsuming identity into character, as my friend Aaron might say—though often I misconstrue what Aaron might say on the subject of character—making myself a member or even an exemplar of a type. There’s a kind of joke in it on complexity—I reduce myself to a kind, and because my true nature is contrarianism (I am a contrarian, but not merely a contrarian, for again I am additionally a complexifier) and I bristle at definitive limits, it is perverse I should be drawn to the elegance of category: one goes into one once, no remainder on the roof. I typify scopophilia because I like to watch something in secret, and I might leave it at that, painful (and therefore pleasurable) as it is not to modify or complicate that appraisal. Doug is a completist, he will say, to anyone reviewing his cd collection—he has all the New Order albums, and is collecting everything recorded at Factory Records, Manchester. He keeps together the stubs of each month’s power, phone, and Direct TV bills, respectively; he has a box of years of Interview magazine, a collection which Warhol would surely have commended and indeed anticipated.
Completism has this to do with death or the death drive. Life is in the commonest measure a duration, experientially incremental and final only when finished, and it is easy to be persuaded by Barbara Hernnstein-Smith or Jean Baudrillard or someone who has done the reasoning to see matters of aesthetics as appreciation of part-whole relations, the analogy an easy one, but real I suppose. The completist, upon obtaining the Mike Schmidt third baseman card, may claim then to have in his collection the entire set of 1981 Philadelphia Phillies player trading cards. The achievement therein is that a comprehensive perspective has been prepared, a panorama in miniature, a panorama ne plus ultra. The completist can see all at once the entirety of the 1981 Philadelphia Phillies club and so has looked upon his own death. That is, he has done the advance work sufficiently to pull out widely enough to see the thing in whole. He even has the manager’s card, Sparky Anderson or Whitey Herzog, and can review the full measure of the set, soup to nuts.
The completist’s real joy comes in the ability to withdraw one member of the set and behold it singly, snugly comforted by the comprehension that it has a place in the lineup, a positional belonging. It oscillates in isolation between object and component, and the overseeing consciousness to whom this is true rests confident in the knowledge that this cannot be disputed. I have used the word overseeing, and the word panorama, and certainly the completist is a god, a just and benign one, since his plenary dominion wants nothing.
My failure continually to complete anything is not, as logic may indicate, a fear of death, but—to the contrary—a fear of life. When I back away from a poem I back away at that exceptional moment it begins to come together under my attentions and other slants of propitious light. The deepest breakthrough I have experienced thus far with Emery Jones, LCPC, of Missoula, Montana, is that when I cried so much as a child, nearly daily until fourth grade, it was often because I had been touched by something or demanded by something and had felt the sudden reality of my presence and then the deep shame—particularly in an embrace with a kind or alarmed adult—that theretofore I had been something (and on purpose, by choice), something other than alive.