ADMIRATION

Here’s an interesting question. What is it that makes a person chose a life-goal of endless struggle, to succeed in an ambition that is almost too much for them – perhaps to be a musician or a writer or a sportsman, not just any old artist or athlete, but up there among the best? Maybe they are born with a gift, but why do some of us who are thus blessed go through cycles of intense creativity, only to lapse into periods of inaction and apathy. Why the struggle?

As a young man I had the ambition to be a writer. Notice the way I put this: I didn’t say, ‘I wanted to write’, I said ‘I wanted to be a writer’. That gives the game away at once. It was the role I wanted, a way of being, something to shore up my faint and uncertain ego. I imagined myself in my home, sitting at my desk, my typewriter before me, looking out across a large lake. I wasn’t writing. I was being a writer. I was someone. Sixty years later I might have imagined myself as the lead guitarist of a group, a million star-struck girls screaming for us at the airport.

 I remember, too, our small postage-stamp-size backyard in the East End of London. I was playing an imaginary piano surrounded by a huge audience who cheered and clapped in admiration for my amazing performance. I must have been only 6 or 7 years old.

What on earth was I doing? Why these particular fantasies? I am convinced I was fulfilling something, giving myself something I needed. I think it’s the quality Carl Rogers called ‘unconditional positive regard’. There isn’t a word that accurately describes this quality. ‘Love’ is near, but it carries too much baggage. Roger’s term is clean and precise, although perhaps lacking warmth. ‘Applause’ perhaps. ‘Admiration’ is better. It’s a ‘free floating attention’, completely absorbed by the fascination of the object, the object as it is. Given that, then yes, you can say unconditional positive regard is ‘love’. But most performers discover when they are famous that this is exactly what is missing; all they have is an audience adoring a mock-up.

Rogerian style of free floating attention admires pure existence. If I may starkly drive home the concept: it is the attitude a botanist might have on discovering a new species of dung beetle and is filled with admiration for its originality and beauty. It’s not what the beetle has achieved or what it does that’s the miracle, but the fact that it is.

When you meet someone with this quality of free floating attention you feel seen and understood. It is not altogether a cognitive perception. You can remain unconscious of it because nothing is pushed. Nothing particular stands out; they don’t compliment or encourage – one just feels relaxed in the presence of a person who radiates this quality; its effect is extremely powerful. It is also the condition of all successful relationships; and, most importantly, it is the quality without which a child’s growth will be stunted. There is now ample evidence that a newborn baby picks up the presence or absence of this quality when the mother first holds the infant in her arms – and perhaps even before that.

This brings me back to my fantasy. It wasn’t encouragement I wanted. I got enough of that. Encouragement is not the same as acknowledgement. Encouragement set you off on achievement; I needed someone to acknowledge my existence, someone to see through the fantasies to who it was that was needing something.

 I set up those early goals so that I would become someone who was worthy. You can always tell when an ambition has this motive powering it. There is always a sense of audience present, someone watching one’s achievement. I know my mother was in that audience in my backyard performance as a child.

The trouble is, in the long run, this strategy doesn’t work. It has the seed of failure in it. Even if you succeed, you fail. If I became the great public figure I will get the admiration for the wrong reason; it will be directed at the wrong target: not at me, but the role I project. This is the Marilyn Monroe Syndrome: desired, wanted, admired as the sex symbol of the world, yet she is still little Norma Jeane Mortenson (her real name), desperately lonely and unloved. Her hope is that when she is famous little Norma can cash in on all the admiration. No such luck. In her heart she knows she is not Marilyn Monroe; and the more admiration Marilyn gets, the more the little girl gets pushed into the background, ending up lonelier than ever. Sometimes, at night, the truth breaks through. She is depressed, apathetic and worthless. The demands of  Marilyn and the world join up and ask too much. The day ahead feels like an impossible task. So heavy are they upon the child that sometimes she can’t even get out of bed and dress herself. She wants to give up, yet Marilyn demands that she go on; and the general public joins Marilyn in that overwhelming and impossible demand on the child that she is.

Anthony Summers, in his biography, says that Marilyn was in love with President Kennedy and wanted to marry him; she called the White House frequently in 1962; and that, when the married president ended their affair, she became even more depressed, and turned to Robert Kennedy, who reportedly visited Monroe in Los Angeles the day she died of an overdose*

*Summers, Anthony (1985). Goddess, The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe. Guild Publishing, London. 

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

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