Some people, when stressed, are characterized by
self-doubt,
indecision, and procrastination. In interaction with others, they tend to look for hidden
agendas and can be accusing, especially of those they perceive to have power over them. To
counter their driving force of fear, they may exhibit a kind of reckless courage, then
worry they've shot themselves in the foot... which often they have! I once asked my friend Joe about another's
Enneagram style. "Oh he's an Eight," said Joe. "I can smell
an Eight!" Joe is a Six. In his characteristic view, the world is
dangerous and needs sniffing out. As Rita Dove points out in her poem
Three
Days of Forest, a River, Free:
The terror of waking is a trust
drawn out unbearably
until nothing, not even love,
makes it easier...
Who can point out a smell
but a dog?
You may have heard, "Just because you're paranoid
doesn't mean someone isn't out to get you." That's the problem with
anxiety. There's always some real danger, some anticipated threat that proves
the point. Others benefit from the Six's ability to foresee potential roadblocks
– warning barks if you will. Dove pictures the price paid for being constantly
on guard:
... duty's whistle
slings a bright cord
around their throats.
After mentioning "the things I've carefully left out /
descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily / people behave toward each other,"
John Ashbery (The Problem of Anxiety) leaves
the reader slightly nervous:
...I've saved the descriptions of finger
sandwiches,
and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement
from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.
We all have our glass eye that will
never be appeased. Be honest. Do you get on an airplane without feeling the
tiniest flash of possibility this will be the one that crashes? When you're walking
home alone in the dark and you hear an unexpected sound, do you calmly keep walking or do
you – as I do in my poem
Spooked – picture "gaping spaces in
tooth-torn trees... mouths in silent screams"? Do you really like
snakes?
In
Lizards and Snakes, Anthony
Hecht's Aunt Martha had "an unfair prejudice" toward reptiles, an inflexibility
that he and his friend Joe teased out as boys by leaving one in the basket of socks she
was mending. They got their comeuppance when Aunt Martha outclassed them in scare
tactics:
... we never did it again after the day
Of the big wind when you could hear the trees
Creak like rocking chairs. She was looking away
Off, and kept saying, "Sweet Jesus, please
Don't let him near me. He's as like as twins.
He can crack us like lice with his fingernail.
I can see him plain as a pikestaff. Look how he grins
And swings the scaly horror of his folded tail."
Sixes must do what we all must do at some
time: move into the dark of fear, because "in a dark time, the eye begins to
see." In his signature poem,
In A Dark Time, Theodore Roethke expands on that first line with,
"I meet my shadow in the deepening shade." I can't imagine more moving or
disconcerting lines than these:
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is
I?
Roethke also provides a formula for the Six's
transformation, one that echoes Rita Dove's notion of moving through the forest toward
freedom:
...A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Though the wind continues to blow, instead of
falling prey to the terrors their minds create, Sixes enter within, find their courage,
and become "free in the tearing wind." Instead of letting their fears lead
them by the nose, they behave as William Stafford does in
With Kit, Age Seven, At the
Beach. "What would you tell your
child?" he inquires, if you were gazing at a turbulent sea and he asked, "How
far could you swim, Daddy, / in such a storm?"
"As far as was needed," I said,
and as I talked, I swam.
"This could be forever.../ from here to the distant
edge / where it looks like / you can fall off the world," warns Sharon Thomson in
On The
Flatlands, "... but you don't. We know that. / Breathe..."
Yes, breathe.
The first time I used a poem in coaching, I
read Nina Bogin's
Initiation II to a
Six. His response to her image of walking toward her own home was immediate and
transforming ("When I walked up the road, the string sack / heavy on my arm, I
thought / that my legs could take me anywhere..."). He moved out of his
child-like feelings of powerlessness and into his own "home," as Bogin did:
...I climbed the pink stairs, entered
the house as calm and ephemeral
as my own certainty:
this is my house, my key,
my hand with its new lines.
I am as old as I will ever be.
Note the paradox in "ephemeral as my own
certainty." Certainty may be transitory for Sixes, but they will keep finding
their way home when they realize that – however blown about by external circumstances
– only they have the key. Stephen Spender gives us that key in his poem about
Dolphins leaping out of the waves, "The sun fragmented / To broken glass / By the stiff
breeze... / their delight / Outside, displaying / My heart within":
...The dolphins write such
Ideograms:
With power to wake
Me prisoned in
My human speech
They sign:
'I AM!'
Other Poems by Published Poets that
Illustrate this Personality Style
Afraid So (Jeanne Marie Beaumont)
His Music (Stephen
Dunn)
Skull Trees, South Sudan (Adrie
Kusserow)
Who's Complaining? (Aaron Levine)
I'm Not Complaining (Philip Schultz)
