On Relationalism, Part II

Or, "Harmony of the Soul: Lessons from Dead Man Walking."

Profundity from John Kelly's column in a recent Washington Post, "An unnerving Father’s Day gift has left me pondering portraiture — and the soul":

We’ve all heard about people from primitive cultures who fear photography, certain it will steal the soul. But some modern people have felt that way, too. In his memoir, the 19th-century French photographer Félix Nadar wrote that writer Honoré de Balzac believed physical bodies were made of layers of ghostly images that were laid atop one another like thin skins.

Balzac, Nadar wrote, “concluded that every time someone had his photograph taken, one of the spectral layers was removed from the body and transferred to the photograph. Repeated exposures entailed the unavoidable loss of subsequent ghostly layers, that is, the very essence of life.”

Honoré de Balzac,
photo by Nadar

Ghostly layers of the body, peeled away by photographic portraiture? I think this recondite notion is really a metaphor for the layers of the human soul, not of the physical body. I think a photo can indeed transfer one of the laminae of the soul — again, speaking metaphorically — to a piece of paper or onto a web page.

In my earlier post "On Relationalism, Part I," I talked about my belief that the "stuff" of reality actually consists of a set of relationships and is not merely an aggregate of individual, separate entities that are only secondarily in relationship with one another.

I used the analogy of a seesaw:

A seesaw is only a seesaw when a plank is balanced on a fulcrum. Otherwise, it's just a plank lying by itself on the ground and, quite separately, some sort of "upright pointy thing."

Now let me add that a seesaw is only really a seesaw when the two children we see silhouetted in the picture are playing on it. The kids are an essential part of the seesaw relationship.

OK, I admit that all this is more than a bit recherché and abstruse. You ask, what's the point? I'll try to answer that question now. To do so, I'd like to talk about the movie Dead Man Walking. (The following constitutes a spoiler for the ending of the movie, so stop reading now if you don't want the outcome spoiled.)

Dead Man Walking is the real-life story of a relationship that develops between a Catholic nun, Sister Helen Préjean (played by Susan Sarandon), and a convicted killer, Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn). Poncelet is on death row in a Louisiana prison after a jury has found him guilty of involvement in the killing of a young couple who were engaging in private intimacies while parked in a car in the woods. The young woman was raped and then shot. Her boyfriend was shot to death.

Poncelet, desperate to escape death by lethal injection, has written to Sister Helen to get her help in obtaining a new trial. Sister Helen is not, at the outset, sure why she's agreed to see him at all. When she first visits him, she finds his personality reprehensible. She can't stand the man — and neither can we, the movie's audience.

Though Poncelet adamantly maintains his innocence of committing either murder or rape, she does not feel his tale of innocence matches his personality type. Yet she has a vague notion that her Christian duty means that she mustn't simply spurn him.

Over the course of the relationship between Sister Helen and Poncelet as it develops, she focuses mainly on the fact that he is refusing to own up to the horror of what he did. He, on the other hand, insists that he did nothing except, while under the influence of liquor and drugs, bend to the will of the other man involved in the rape-murder. He, Poncelet, claims he even tried to stop the other man from carrying out his heinous acts.

Sister Helen keeps on visiting Poncelet in prison. Meanwhile, she takes it upon herself to visit with the families of the dead young man and woman, to offer aid and succor. The boy's father meets with her — his wife has left him in the wake of the loss of their son — but refuses to give up his justifiable anger. The girl's parents prove to be even angrier.

Weeks and months go by. The lawyer whom Sister Helen has interested in the Poncelet case tries every available legal strategy to get Poncelet's conviction set aside. None of the strategies pay off. With the day of Poncelet's execution rapidly approaching, that man on death row gets Sister Helen to arrange for him to take a lie detector test. The test is inconclusive. Either Poncelet is lying, or the stress he is naturally under as his execution day approaches has kept him from responding conclusively on the polygraph.

Sister Helen feels intuitively that Poncelet is lying, as much to himself as to the rest of the world. Then the day of his execution arrives. As promised, Sister Helen comes to the prison to stand beside him. This is not because she thinks him innocent, but out of the Christian realization of "the example of Jesus who said that every person is worth more than their worst act."

With just minutes left to live, Matthew Poncelet finally unburdens himself to Sister Helen. He admits, as much to himself as to her or to God, that he was in fact the one who put the fatal bullet in the young victim's head, and that he also took part in the rape of the young woman just before the other perpetrator shot her. Poncelet is now what he never could have been before: truly sad about the pain he has caused the families of his victims. It is a scene in which Sister Helen, like the movie's audience, realizes that in his act of self-honesty and repentance, Matthew Poncelet has finally found God.

As Poncelet takes his final walk to the execution chamber, Sister Helen walks behind him while placing her hand on his shoulder, steadying him. She stills his fear by telling him, "Christ is here."

*****

Diagrammatically, it is as if Sister Helen and Matthew Poncelet match up with the two individuals shown as children silhouetted on a seesaw in the illustration above. And the fulcrum between them is ... Jesus Christ. He is present in the finally fully truthful relationship the nun and the man have at last established within and between themselves at the eleventh hour of the man's appointed time on earth.

But keep in mind that Sister Helen's and Matthew Poncelet's relationship with one another was cemented well before he broke down and repented his acts to her at the eleventh hour ... and well before she arrived at the full self-knowledge by which to explain why she kept going back to the prison to visit Poncelet.

What was going on at that earlier stage of their relationship? I'd say the relationship was at that point one that had been established between two of the shallower layers of their respective psyches.

But neither person was yet being fully honest with themselves, or with each other. Yes, they were already bound together in a relationship that would eventually lead to full self-understanding and reciprocal honesty between them.

Just as David Brooks, in his op-ed piece "Personalism: The Philosophy We Need," tells us "people are always way more complicated than you think," Dead Man Walking tells us the same thing. We see two people, Sister Helen Préjean and Matthew Poncelet, who are as yet only in touch with at best an "outer" layer of their human soul. Yet the movie also winds up showing us the fullness of what every one of us truly is. It shows us, that is, the Christ within.

*****

The many layers of a human soul are a prime example of what I'm calling relationalism. One way to visualize those layers in their relational complexity comes from the nature of musical chords.

A musical chord is a combination of notes being sounded together. The piano notes C, E, and G, played together, make up a C major triad. In general, a "triad" is any group of three notes played together. If you play the notes, not together, but in rapid succession, you have "arpeggiated" the chord.

If the C of the C major chord C-E-G is the lowest note that you play, the chord is in "root position." The "root" of the C major chord is, unsurprisingly, C. The C major chord C-E-G is in root position if the lowest note that is being sounded is C — no matter whether you arpeggiate the chord or not.

Suppose you move the note C up one octave on the piano keyboard. Now the C major triad can be played as E-G-C rather than C-E-G. E-G-C is the "first inversion" of the C major triad C-E-G. It has E as the lowest note that is being sounded. It sounds noticeably different from C-E-G ... and yet the ear can also tell it's the same C major chord.

The same is true of the "second inversion" of the C major triad, G-C-E. The second inversion is achieved by moving both C and E up an octave, making G the lowest note that is being sounded. The ear somehow "knows" that G-C-E, E-G-C, and C-E-G are all in some way the "same" chord, even when different notes of the chord are the lowest sounded notes. And this is true whether the notes of the chord are sounded at exactly the same time or are arpeggiated in rapid succession.

I'd like to extend the analogy, now, by saying that root-position triads and their first and second inversions are all equally "legitimate." G-C-E, E-G-C, and C-E-G are all, if put in terms of music theory, equally harmonious. They all have just as good a place in the grand scheme of things.

The real question is, indeed, one of harmony. When the notes are in proper harmony, the music is sweet. When the many layers of the human personality are in harmony with one another, the soul is sweet.

That, I think, is what it means to find the Christ within: to experience the harmony that comes when the various layers of our psyche are all in perfect accord with one another.

Matthew Poncelet found that perfect accord just before he was put to death by lethal injection. And in finding out why she needed to be there, walking behind him, consoling him, Sister Helen likewise found the Christ within her own soul.

The analogy between musical harmony and soul harmony explains why every human is "different, yet the same." We are all, in so many ways, different. Some of us are men, some women. Some of us are laborers, some lawyers. Some of is are conservatives, some liberals. Yet, just as G-C-E, E-G-C, and C-E-G are all equally harmonious versions of the C major triad, all of us have an equal potential for establishing our soul harmony, the Christ within.