No Place to Rest: Point Eight

This is the part of us that steps up and takes charge when we have to, that can shoulder whatever responsibility is required because there's no one else who can or will. Characters stuck at point Eight are more aggressively controlling and unwilling to acknowledge vulnerability. 

Even in tyrants though, there can be one person to whom they show a soft heart. Underlying this pattern is a childhood where there seemed to be no safe place to rest one's head. Very early in life, people at point Eight realized they had to take care of themselves. 

A character who shows this strength that covers fear of weakness is Javier Fuentes in Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt. Kingpen of a Mexican narcotics cartel, Javier is also charming and intelligent, loves to read, and regrets the role he's grown into, protesting that circumstances forced him into it. He often visits a bookstore in Acapulco and engages the owner Lydia Perez in conversation about their mutual favorite books, without her knowing his occupation. She grows to love him as a dear friend; he falls in love with her. 

Lydia's husband, Sebastian, is a journalist who is determined to publish the truth about the cartels, even though others have been killed for doing so. When he publishes an article fingering Fuentes, Sebastian and Lydia's entire extended family are murdered during a birthday party celebration in their back yard; only Lydia and their son Luca happen to have been inside in the bathroom and managed to hide. The rest of the novel centers on Lydia's attempts to escape Acapulco with Luca and hopefully to find their way to the U.S. and a long-lost uncle there.

Lydia and Luca hide in a hotel room, but only briefly because they know the cartel is looking for them to finish the job of killing Sebastian's family. The message that Javier sends to their hotel room is so telling about point Eight: "Your suffering will be brief." This is the kindness he offers to a woman he loves: that she and her son will simply be killed, not tortured at length!

It's common to think of men at point Eight, but there are many strong women in life and in fiction. I especially like V.I. Warsahwski to represent this point in fiction because I so admire the author, Sara Paretsky, who has changed the face of contemporary crime fiction. Not only has she created a strong woman with heart in V.I. Warshawski, but she also founded Sisters in Crime, an organization devoted to "helping women who write, review, buy or sell crime fiction."

A few excerpts from Shell Game show Warshawski's strength and social consciousness. She is following up on a project for a client that requires checking out a neighborhood where the men wear kufis or Sikh turbans and the women are dressed in hijab:

"When people saw me watching the building, they moved fast: only an immigration officer could be staring at them so intently. I felt a flush of shame, shame that I was inspecting people as if they were specimens, shame that my government could create such fear in people . . . None of your business anyway, I snarled at myself on the road home" *pp. 47-48).

Warshawski shows the growing self-awareness that characterizes any of us when we begin to take the difficult first steps out of the strictures of our childhood programming:

". . . I went into the bedroom to dress. A poster-size photo of my mother hangs there, Gabriella on the brink of a concert comeback before ovarian cancer ravaged her . . . I touched the glass over my mother's face as I passed. It's been thirty years and still Harmony's chance comment could send a spasm of grief through me. There are no balance scales to loss: my mother's too-young death, Clarissa vanishing in the present . . . All these losses are an opening into an abyss. When we start falling in, it's hard to climb back up" (pp. 69-70).

Warshawski can be as tough as is necessary. She refers to her eyes when she's angry as "Death Star eyes." She also has a sense of humor that's not uncommon at point Eight. For example, when her lover Murray Ryerson tries to find out the name of her current client, she says:

"It's a terrible secret, Ryerson, so this is completely off the record, but I was protecting Kim Jong-Un's love child with Dennis Rodman" (p. 105)

In Paretsky's memoir, Writing in an Age of Silence, she says her literary career was born out of the conviction that it ought to be possible to "create a woman who was a person, not an angel or a monster," and that's who we find in Warshawski:

"I carried my breakfast with me in the car and ate in a precarious and unhealthy way, swallowing fruit and yogurt at traffic lights, choking on toast crumbs, spilling coffee on my coat. When I finally parked across the street from the Rest EZ branch, I looked as though I'd been wrestling in a restaurant dumpster. I also hadn't combed my hair or bothered with my makeup. I dealt with my hair, but didn't try painting my face, just removed as much food as I could from my clothes" (Shell Game, pp. 113-114).

The concerns of characters at point Eight are typically big ones. In Warshawski's case we've already seen her sensitivity to dangers for people in a subculture. Here's how she describes her ex-husband in their brief marriage the summer after law school:

"For some reason, I'd thought Dick shared my passion for social justice. For some reason, Dick thought I shared his passion for his career. We'd both been hideously wrong, but we stuck it out for twenty-seven months, while he kept trying to make me act like the wife of an upcoming associate and I'd tried to make him act as though he cared about people at the bottom of the food chain" (p. 128).

For an example in nonfiction, I draw from Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis' deeply researched biography of cartoonist Charles Schulz, because Schulz and his first wife Joyce demonstrate how two different Enneagram points in a relationship can push themselves more and more into their boxes if they don't pay attention and talk about how they're hooking each other. 

You'll see in the next post that Schulz, called "Sparky" by everyone who knew him, seems to have been stuck more and more at point Nine. Here we see that Joyce, as portrayed in others' recollections, was reflecting the dynamics that are typical of point Eight: 

A visitor noticed, "He was all warm and gentle. She was a tough broad" (p. 304)

"He really never did stand up to her when she pushed" (p. 315).

"His abdication pressed Joyce by default into absolute authority with the children . . . Leaving Joyce to do the hard parenting by herself only widened the rift between them as a couple . . . Joyce dictated to Sparky in front of other people" (p. 368).

Though she was deeply hurt by Sparky's affair with the woman who would become his second wife, Joyce wasn't going to show weakness. She did go to a therapist but never revealed to Schulz how deeply hurt she felt. "'I did all my crying in the psychologist's office,' she said years later" (p. 464).

Enneagram Point Nine

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."

Poetry & Personality