When I was a young kid in boarding school, White Africa’s version of Eton, I had been left there over a half term, along with a scrawny gaggle of other doubly rejected scum whose loving parents hadn’t the time to bring their kids home for the holidays. Matron had taken pity on us one miserable afternoon and invited us into her flat to watch TV, an unheard of privilege.
I sat there on her carpet, wriggling with the strain of reconciling the rarity of the treat with the circumstances which had led to it. Deep down I knew what I had been sold as privilege and prestige, the very making of my manhood, was a hideous lie. It was no more than a feather in the Old Man’s cap, the means by which my father could climb the social ladder. He pranced with glee when my acceptance came through and ordered three new suits from his tailor to celebrate.
But you can’t let yourself know you are a sacrificial lamb when you are twelve years old. In fact you must learn not to join the dots. To be alone in such a dismal place with such a truth would just be too much for a lad and it was for some. One boy died of a heart attack. Another slit his wrists with a broken bottle. Only one, my friend B—— K—– got away. He ran home, sixty miles through the African wilderness, thick with wild animals and armed men.
The rest of us regressed into pack animals, the worst into rape gangs. There was a war on. The staff carried FN762 assault rifles and the senior boys were armed with Lee-Enfield 303s. There were blast walls, grenade screens and terrorist drills. We were all in a permanent state of fear.
As we watched the otherwise forbidden TV, and listened to actual music, Matron came in with a plate of biscuits. I ate the entire lot without even noticing, much to the annoyance of my equally starved fellow zeks. My desperation for mothering had condensed itself momentarily into Ma Landman’s creamy biscuits and I had eaten the whole lot as if in a dream, though I had not tasted a single one. The empty plate was testimony to my crime. So I further went to war with my hunger, my need and dependence, making an enemy of quite justifiable feelings of abandonment and loss which only ever passed when I made friends with them after years of trying to purge myself of this ‘weakness’.
It would take years for me to discover the value in my authentic experience, to realize it connected me to my own reality, ugly as it was, and hence to others and through them to some of the sublime mysteries of life.
In the meantime I became mean. The problem with suppressing yourself is that it cuts a swathe through your basic values as well which can get you into a lot of trouble, not just because others are likely to take offense, or even that you then become divided against yourself, the redeeming aspects of soul cast as an enemy to be vanquished, but because it is via this ‘crazy’ or ‘negative’ part that the transcendent function tends to show itself. The bit you thought was worthless is what connects you to the divine.
Many years later a very elderly lady came and knocked on my door. ‘Are you the ‘psycho-something’? I confessed that I was and let her in. She explained that she didn’t want therapy, anyone could see time was against her. ‘I don’t buy green bananas anymore.’ But she was afraid she might be mad and wanted me to verify the matter one way or another. She’d had an experience which caused her to doubt her own mind and began to tell the most remarkable story.
She had been making jam in her farm house kitchen. All at once, out of the blue, she became acutely anxious for the safety of her grandson who was working in a barn out of both sight and earshot, some several hundred meters away. Heeding the inner impetus, she dropped her ladle and ran out of the house, through the garden, down the lane all the way to the barn where she found her grandson unconscious on the floor having been hit from behind by a falling hay bale. He wasn’t breathing.
She gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation and the young man came to. The question was, how had she known what had happened? This venerable lady had lived nine decades in a very practical down to earth kind of way. She believed in what she could see. Miracles were things that happened in the Bible. The events of that day had sent reverberations through her world that threatened to splinter and crack it open.
I wasn’t much help. I didn’t know what to say except to offer bland reassurance that these things did sometimes happen and that they were indeed un-nerving. She was decidedly unimpressed.
Soon thereafter I made a trip into town to do some shopping. On the way back I passed the turnoff to her home. All at once I felt an inexplicable force compelling me to change my course and with a squeal of tires worthy of a B movie I flew down the narrow lane. The impulse was as undeniable and full of urgency as it seemed irrational. I fought myself the whole way.
I arrived at her remote cottage and ran inside. She was on the kitchen floor where she had fallen, her ankle swollen like a football and unable to move. She’d been there for hours. On the way to the hospital she started to chuckle, ‘well, if I am crazy, then you are too.’ And so we both had a good laugh about things that are, despite the fact that they shouldn’t be.
Sometimes experiences get labeled as negative or crazy simply because we do not understand what is happening. When events either lack context or challenge our world view it is a kind of knee jerk response to demonize them. It is even fashionable to urge one another to let go (get rid of) anything vaguely whiffing of ‘negativity’. And yet, “in stercore invenitur aurum nostrum” as the alchemists say, ‘The gold is found in the shit.’
This lady had crossed a developmental threshold in emotional sensitivity and a quality of relatedness decades after her own prejudices had told her there was nothing new to be discovered in life. Her views about how relationships are supposed to be were those of an orthodox collective and so she had underestimated the power of her own open heart.
The heart is healed by honoring whatever it offers us, whether it is the pain of the past or a greater connection to Life which, like the uninvited guest, has both the power to curse and to heal.
When the lame and the unlikely are refused they curse life with isolation, hyper vigilance and the gradual erosion of values which must be rooted in authentic experience whatever it is. When they are accepted, no matter how rude or contrary, life opens up, energy begins to move, and a new connection to meaning can be made.
Healing is not about getting help. It is about asking for it, owning your own lack, even if it is to the wind. My analyst Chuck always used to say, ‘95% of the work is done when the patient picks up the phone.’
