For better or for wurst, I find myself as I darn-near always do motivated by some deflective combination of unseriousness and humor, choosing the subject of this post almost entirely on account of the pun in the title, which occurred to me on a whim earlier today. No doubt, my role as the youngest has been on my mind for the better part of half a decade, motivated by a latent “ill-at-easeness” I’ve felt with said role. And much like my previous post, I thought it compelling to run the following premise by my dear friend Claude: “What does it mean to be the youngest sibling in a family from a Jungian lens?”
Evidently, there’s this idea of puer aeternus or “the eternal youth.” Three years of Latin helped me guess only the obvious half of the literal translation. The puer aeternus is a concept developed by a gal named Marie-Louise von Franz in her book entitled… Puer Aeternus (1970). The puer is allegedly “creatively gifted, resistant to commitment, perpetually existing in potential rather than actuality, and tethered in complicated ways to the mother.” I wouldn’t dare claim to relate at all to the first aspect, but I’d like to tackle each of the others in due time. The focus of this particular web log will be on the “perpetually existing in potential rather than actuality” bit. More specifically, brotherly relational potential.
Part of this unlived potential manifests in the puer aeternus never quite outgrowing the family. A bit like what Matthew McConaughey’s character in Dazed and Confused said about high schoolers. No matter how old the family gets, the puer aeternus stays the same age. Alrighty, alrighty, alrighty. Older siblings over time get promoted in the family hierarchy of responsibilities, and thus flows the respect. I find myself frozen in time as the embryonic, “easy-going-with-the-flow” naive, unserious, but also somehow is seriously alleged to “think his lifestyle is better than everybody else’s.” Now, no one of us formally decided this arrangement, other than I guess Nature. And so that’s just the way things is and best not question it. But, question I will.
How about this for a shoe-horned reference: today, at work, I was feeling again a combination of civic duty/national pride/FOMO and tuned into whatever the hell that space mission broadcast was today. During the broadcast, where the earthbound folks kept getting interrupted, they referenced the “lunar sphere of influence”, or, the point where the shuttle feels the pull of the moon more so than it does Earth. I’ve had my own space missions, hoping to launch a life update and have it enter the family’s consideration for conversation. Often, I would sit and wait at the launchpad. Pounding BOGO beers and going over the mission plan. The brief launch-window would arrive. I’d attempt liftoff. And then, with the reliability of astro-physics (what’s with sciences combining themselves), the slightest disturbance would carry the conversation away. A waiter asking “do y’all need anything?” (the answer is always “No ma’am we’re good,” even if we did indeed need something). I’d watch the shuttle, with me in it, miss the mark and drift into the vastness of space. Sometimes I wonder if it is for the best to just have an Apollo 13 style blow-up. But hey, at least in these cases the toilets have always worked.