Not a Strong Drink: Point Nine

Characters at Point Nine range from being peaceful, reassuring, and empathic, to complacent, neglectful, and avoidant of anything that disturbs their peace. This is the part of us that wants a life free of worries, a world free of conflict. At best, characters at point Nine are able to understand and help resolve divergent opinions.

At base, though, these patterns evolved in order to avoid conflict, which leads to following other people's agendas and forgetting one's own. Characters stuck here will avoid anything that could upset their equilibrium, and they may be passive or passive-aggressive.

In great detailing of cartoonist Charles Schulz's personality, biographer David Michaelis spent almost a decade researching and writing Schulz and Peanuts, referred to in the previous section. I especially like this biography because it shows very clearly how the patterns of people from two different Enneagram points interact. Unless romantic partners are mindful of where each may hook the other's most automatic responses, they can push each other into even more contained aspects of their personality patterns. 

To carry through with the suggestion of Joyce Schulz at point Eight and Charles (called "Sparky" by everyone who knew him) at point Nine, a close family friend said, "He couldn't cope with things that weren't positive; he didn't like confrontation."

Characters stuck at point Nine have difficulty presenting themselves in public. There's a kind of "Who, me?" quality to their self-image. A number of quotes on page 384 of Michaelis' biography show this quality:

"The more visible Schulz became, the more threatening the world seemed . . . His one clear symptom was a chronically upset stomach . . . Asked from the floor at a meeting of cartoonists and comedy writers in San Francisco in 1969, ' Does it frighten you to see that the times reflect you rather than the other way around?' Sparky 'looked up sheepishly,' according to one observer and said, 'Everything frightens me' . . ."

He was increasingly afraid to go anywhere.

Sparky's second wife, Jeannie "was going to great lengths to shield him from aggressiveness . . . Part of his relief and pleasure in her 'niceness' was in direct proportion to Joyce's infamous bossiness. Sparky and Jeannie founded their marriage on a nonaggression pact . . . After they were married, Jeannie traveled the world, but Sparky's fear kept him home."

 In essence, Schulz was Charlie Brown . . . poor Charlie Brown.

A beautifully wrought character who plays out point Nine is Louise Anderson in Iris Murdoch's novel, The Green Knight. Louise's husband Teddy has died of cancer, and she's been loved from afar by Teddy's friend Clement:

"He had fallen in love when he had first set eyes on her, when Teddy Anderson had introduced her as his fiancee . . . Had he imagined that he saw in her eyes some special understanding, some kinship? . . . What he saw might have been her pity for him, her sympathy. Or perhaps just her kindness, the way in which, ever after as he watched her, she instinctively made all things better, speaking no evil, disarming hostility, turning ill away, making peace: her gentleness, which made her seem, sometimes to some people, weak, insipid, dull. 'She's not exactly a strong drink!' someone said."

What a beautifully condensed metaphor: "She's not exactly a strong drink." Murdoch's insight extends far beyond the usual guidelines for deepening character descriptions She  begins building Louise's character on page 1, describing a scene with her friend Joan back when they had been in boarding school together:

"Joan had been expelled two terms after Louise had arrived . . . Joan's lawlessness had cheered the docile younger child, new to imprisonment, with visions of a larger freedom, while Louise, to Joan's disorder, had brought a soothing possibility of order, at least of the permanence of affection" 

By page 4 we learn that Louise's broken heart over the loss of Teddy is not apparent in her face:

"Louise's calm bland broad face bore no wrinkles, no evidence of grief or mental strife . . ."

And by page 11, Joan shows her annoyance at Louise's nun-like demeanor:

"You smooth things over and say things you don't mean . . . you are the most inhibited person I know . . . You've led an easy life; other people have made the decisions."

Louise's well-loved but bland character is evident even in her choice of clothing; she typically wears a light-brown day dress that won't draw attention to her.

The main conflicts and resolution in The Green Knight are with other characters, and though we see no change in Louise, her peacemaking sustains family and friends though their turbulent interactions.

A character who does finally show some waking up from this trance of complacency is Nathan Staples in A.L. Kennedy's novel Everything You Need. For most of the novel, though, he's not taking the one action he wants to take, with all kinds of excuses, including a soothing tactic at point Nine, minimizing any difficulty by comparing oneself to those who have it worse. The author Alison Louise Kennedy is also a stand-up comedian, and I laughed out loud at Nathan Staples' minimizing in the very first scene on page 1:

"But things could, most assuredly, be worse . . . The Persian Eye Cups, for example . . . Person, or persons unknown, but presumably Persian, might whip out a pair without warming and fit them on snug. They'd prise back my eyelids . . . then they'd buckle all the necessary straps . . . I would naturally scream and jabber while my eyeballs both subsided into froth and the acid gobbled up my optic nerve . . . Eventually, all I remember would gargle clear out of my ears in two repellent streams and that would be that  . . . Which would be worse--of course it would."

Poems for Point Nine