Author: andywhite

Psychotherapist/writer/artist/ author of, 'Going Mad to Stay Sane', a psychology of self-destructiveness, about to come into its third edition. Soon to be printed for the first time, 'Abundant Delicious.. the Secret and the Mystery', described by activist Satish Kumar as, ' A Tao of the Soul'. This book documents the archetypal country through which the process of individuation occurs and looks at the trials and tribulations we might expect on the way. In the meantime..... Narcissisim is the issue of our age. This blog looks at how it operates, how it can damage and how we may still fruit despite it.

Healing the Narcissistic Wound.

Despite the prevelance of Narcissism in our culture, the literature offers little to help us understand how such things have come about.

We have to turn to more ancient, deeper sources of wisdom.

“Myths are a primordial language…  psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul…. healing the conflicts which threaten the child.” CG Jung

So we refer back to myths as a form of public dreaming in order to become reaquainted with our preverbal experience, that within our individuality that likewise seems lost in the mists of time.

”Myths are clues… that have to do with deep inner problems. They carry rich, live, vivifying information [so that] experience will have resonance to our own inmost being and reality.” J Campbell.

A myth that gives us some clues to the problem of Narcissism can be found in the story of Hercules. It describes not only the resolution to psychopathic behaviour but helps us to see how and why it manifests in the first instance.

We will turn to the well known  labours shortly but lets begin with the circumstances of Hercules early life in order to get a sense of the provisional life that besets Narcissism and why it is that creativity and relationships are so problematic.

Hercules’ problems start very young. He is the child of queen Alcmene of Tiryns and the God Zeus. Hera, Zeus’ wife, was none to happy about this. Even though he had been named after her as a gesture of appeasment she vowed revenge….

Alcmene, fearing Hera’s retribution, abandons the child Hercules in a field hoping the gods will take care of him.

The disenfranchisment of the Divine Feminine is sweeping across the known world. Everywhere the goddess is being unseated, cast out and humiliated. A wedge has been driven between women and their sacred counterpart so that mother/infant relations have become unbearably strained.

On the one hand Hercules is ‘special’, the son of Zeus. On the other he is deprived of nurture and care. Alcmene invests all her spiritual longing into her redeemer son. She needs him to fill the gaping hole in her psyche where once her sacred femininity was lodged and with which she is now hopelessly at odds.

Meantime Hercules struggles with being the contradiction of being the future lord of all Greece whilst being left forgotten in the dusty stubble.

By chance, Hera and Athene wander by and see the child. Hera, unaware of his identity, picks him up and suckles him, but he sucks so hard that she  throws him down in anger. Athene, more patiently, takes the child to Tiryns and gives him to Alcmene to be bought up as a foundling. Alcmene, overjoyed, hopes the three drops of milk that Hercules has managed to suck will preserve him from Hera’s ill-will.

Its not to be. Hera finds out what has happened. She’s furious and sends two pythons to kill the baby while he sleeps.

”One suspects that there is often a kernel of truth in paranoid delusion.”       S. Freud

The raging goddess, once the archetypal container of infancy, is now dead set against the child. Her devaluation by Zeus throws her into revolt and overwhelms the maternal instinct to care and protect.

Hercules becomes the proto-type of the deprived child.

As our story indicates, emotional deprivation is not simply the absence of nurture. The emotional vacuum is constued as an aggressive attack the best expression of which is paranoid fantasy. Something, somewhere is trying to get me.

”Maternal failures produce reactions which interrupt going-on-being and [constitute] a threat of annihilation.” D Winnicott.

The snakes symbolise the intrusive, cold-blooded, devouring quality of emotional deprivation lived out on a human scale by the curious detail that Alcmene now raises her son as if he were a foundling. She is a mother playing at being a mother which can only produce a child pretending to be himself.

This pretence is what RD Laing calls ‘elusion’. He quotes an example from Sarte of the waiter in a cafe who is not ‘in’ what he is doing. He is somehow not himself. Not that he is pretending to be someone else, which would be less confusing, but insofar as he is pretending to be himself. He is playing at being a waiter in a cafe and has that touch-me-not quality of Narcissus.

”He is never invested, never completely interested, never “all in”.  From fear and diffidence, he always keeps the essential part of himself out.” K. O’Brian.

I pretend I am not pretending to pretend….

Hera’s snakes are an envious double bind, an attack on both the  burdensome dependence and the dismissive autonomy of the child. Her devalued status makes her cling to him and try to live through the child whose own destiny and unique unfolding gets in the way. Whatever he does he cannot get it right.

In my family this took the form of the contradictory injunctions,

‘If you don’t ask, you don’t want.’

and

”I want doesn’t get.’

There is no way around such a double-bind. Like the twin snakes it can choke the life, or at least the aliveness out of you. Mother, in urgent need to elude ambivalence and pretend not to be pretending reads the ensuing ..

”extraordinary passivity and listlessness as satiation.” G Miller.

It gets worse. The child, faced with mother going through the motions of being herself must follow suit and tie himself up in the knots of pretending to be a small boy. Such pretense must exclude creative possibility since..

”any striving is construed as malign ingratitude..” ibid

I dreamt I was in a jail, like out of a spaghetti western with bars all down one side against which I was smashing a club, screaming to be let out. Behind me, lying down on a bunk with his hat pulled over his eyes is, ‘the-man-with-no-name’. He says,

”door’s open you know”…

I throw down the club and cower in a corner… terrified at the thought that I could leave at any time..

The dream shocked me. I thought I was mature. I thought I was free and creative, despite my substance abuse at the time and the fact that I had no greater aspiration than to turn admiring heads at the traffic lights with my expensive motorcycle….

I thought I was living the bohemian life..

and so long as the life I was living was not my own I could coast along unchallenged..

secure in the knowledge that family and friends would eternally excuse my narcissistic life style and save me from the real world.

The fact was that all this being let off the hook was not the loving indulgence I took it for but rather the active witholding of Life’s Rule Book in order that I continue to accept the constrictions with which I had been raised.

My abberant lifestyle was not ‘rebellion’ at all, but a profound yet hidden conformity that my own destiny was a taboo for which I was both under-resourced and had no permit.

May as well go and pilfer the drug store..

or start a fight.

There’s nothing else to do.

Hercules does not have to play by the rules. Its his compensation for having his soul hi-jacked. And because no-one will discipline him or be sufficiently involved to teach him the ropes he is effectively caged and feral despite being given ‘every advantage’. One day kills his music teacher Linus for daring to correct his playing and instead of having to face the consequences his family spirit him off to the countryside where he can continue to be symbiotically attached to mother by whom he is..

”worshipped like a god and denigrated like a demon.” D Mathers

Hercules is not allowed to grow up. His psychopathic behaviour increases. He goes mad and kills his children in a fit brought on by the hidden hand of Hera, determined that he should not have his own life or live in his own world.

Fortunately, Hercules now has to pay his dues. He becomes depressed and accepts being sent into the service of Eurystheus, his cousin, who makes him perform many labours, a metaphor for the hard work of the psychotherapeutic process.

He has to become aquainted with all his split off aggression symbolised by the Nemean lion, the Cretan bull, the Styphalian birds, his bullshit symbolised by the filthy stables of Augeus, the Hydra that hides in the swamps of his unlived potential.

He has also to realise his own spiritual gifts, all those aspects of his own soulfullness he’s had to put on one side in order to be a vessel for others. These are represented by his task to fetch the Golden Apples of the Hesperides whose whereabouts are hidden deep in the Unconscious that require a night sea journey in a great cauldron for a boat. The metaphor is one of being slowly cooked, being transformed and being able to be taken in.

But Hercules doesn’t quite make it. Despite his successful labours he is tricked by the centaur Nessus who gives his second wife Deianira a poison tunic to give him should his affections wane, which you could pretty much count on given his habitual lack of relatedness.

The tunic consumes him….

and he throws himself on a pyre begging for death.

Then, as now,  your clothes are statements of identity, embodiments of personae. The poison tunic is an identity not one’s own, that stifles soul and gives rise to self destruction.

”Unlived life does not sit idly on the shelf. It will turn around and bite you” ML von Franz.

The great tragedy for the narcissist is not just the poverty of his early years but that it renders him so hogtied when faced with the enormity of his own potential. The first words I ever said as a client in therapy were, ‘I have more energy than I know what to do with.”

”The possibility that a once great capacity for positive living and other potentialities may have played some part in the development of psychopathy.. is worthy of careful consideration…. in reverse they might deserve the estimate of genius.” H Cleckley.

So the narcissist is doubly burdened, firstly by all the split off rage, confusion and pain at being un-mothered and secondly by the creative tension in him that demands expression.

The bonus is that all the material he has to integrate is already his own authentic Self. The difficulty is that he is at one and the same time much smaller than his puffed up image of himself, yet much bigger inside than he could imagine.

If we can accept that our own labours are noble and redeeming, worth doing for their own sake, that our creativity will both unhinge and restore us, that there is meaning and aliveness in suffering, we might fare better than Hercules who at the very least gave us a template for our own experience.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

 

The Soulful Sacrifice. 4.

One of my most impressive childhood memories is of the Vervet monkey cage at Mundawanga Park just south of Lusaka in Zambia. I was ten and we were having a family day out. The Vervets were all I can recall of that day. They had the biggest nobs you ever saw. And played with them constantly. As well as pinching my brother’s fruit pastilles. Straight from his pocket. Hermes would have been proud.

What were they up to? It clearly wasn’t proper monkey behaviour and come to think of it they all looked suitably embarrased whilst carrying on as though smitten with terminal viagra. After a while, about thirty years, I realised that they were chronically overcrowded and had resorted to an unusual stratagem to alleviate their situation.

Everyone knows that masturbation is a private thing not to be intruded upon or interrupted and so each Vervet had managed to augment his greatly diminished territory  with the psychological space derived from being deeply erotically involved with himself. No-one would be rude enough to broach such a sacred institution. Psychological space held them where physical territory had failed.

Without psychological space the Vervets would not have faired so well. They look comical and foolish maybe but they had also ensured a degree of going-on-being that worked more or less.

Such a neurotic solution is a kind of trade off, a kind of three steps forward and two steps back dance number in which all parties get to make it through to the end of the song without being stabbed in the neck.

which is always useful.

even if you look ridiculous.

Projecting our inner nobility out into the world, burdening some poor shmuck who can never live up to archetypal expectations, is a neurotic solution not unlike the Vervets. It alleviates the crush of personal responsibility and the trials of Individuation but everyone gets to behave strangely in the process.

”If we stop looking for persons to put in power, there will be no more jealousies among the people.” Lao Tzu

The gift of the inner king once we’ve stopped looking for persons to put in power, is psychological space, internal elbow room, the square foot house in the square inch field, a capacity to reflect and pay attention that is not tied to circumstance or the governance of outer kings.

So its a big mistake to go unseating them in a big show of gore and torch bearing because that is just more of the same enacted story, ”the king must die..

long live the king!”

What’s actually required is the kind of exchange we find in Greek mythology between Hermes and Apollo after Zeus has laughed off Hermes’ theft of Apollo’s cattle. Once Apollo understands that it is in Hermes’ nature to rob people of their collectivity, their herd-like nature, he stops being angry. Having endured and understood the significance of his loss there is a kind of flowering in the space between them,

”The cause of the blooming of all things, with your resonant lyre you command the axis of the heavens, Placing all in harmony, Tempering all the poles.”  Orphic hymn to Apollo

In turn, Apollo gives Hermes the golden Cadeuces, symbol of healing and of being  Zeus’ messenger.

This exchange of symbolic treasures between the two constitutes what I find  useful to think of as a ‘transitional gesture’. Life is never the same again. Something has opened up.

A man dreams that he is the impoverished heir of an old family castle. Reduced in circumstances, he now acts as a guide to the Crumbling Pile, his life a treadmill of repetition. Finally, he is seeing off the last coach trip of the day. He leans back, exhausted, against a wall which suddenly and shockingly collapses, to reveal a great hall within… indeed, upon which his castle has been built, a great hall full of golden beings who burst into song as he tumbles through, inconceivable harmonies, unimaginable symphony..

Hermes, ever one to prank the complacent, has tapped the wall with his Cadeuces and creates some perspective for our bored hero, inviting him across a threshold that brings with it a new interior that wants its own song to be sung.

”There is what I want to think and there is what wants to be thought.” Hiedeggar.

To be able to entertain the song that wants to be sung is to return to the peace, protection and confidence of natural law.. one that is renewed by the transitional gesture of sacrifice, the making of sacred gifts..

”Give me my mouth, I want to talk. My two hands cling like ancestors. My lips are red as ox blood. Give me raisin cakes and beer. Bless me with ancient dreams. Give me songs green as earth.” Giving a mouth to Osiris, Egyptian book of the Dead

The Gods hunger for symbolic gestures for the want of which they will settle for your children. The raisin cakes, or what have you, made with proptious intent, offered in quiet dignity, will do more than open up inner space. It will innoculate you against the compulsion to make unconscious sacrifices.

When blind Oedipus arrives at the sacred grove of Colonus he makes a ritual gesture to the Furies and says, ‘done the right way, an offering may save ten thousand.’ How is that possible? Because ritual life cuts across the collective knee jerk impulse to send its Youth to war for the sake of preserving god-kings beyond their tenure.

How laughable that our culture thinks of itself as so evolved whilst enduring continuous war. Its like Spartans boasting the equality of the sexes, whilst lording a brutal, deadly grip over slave populations ten times their number.

You could call it hypocricy but it’s actually a split, the intensification of Us-and-Them in place of I-and-Thou proliferates like plague once someone can be conned into being king for a day. The gods must be appeased for the priviledge and for want of raisin cakes and ox blood, paint their lips with sap from the Nation’s finest and gouge great holes in the land.

Sometimes transitional gestures happen by themselves. When they do, all that’s really required is to jump up and down about it. I was in a very remote region of Africa, in a crowded smoky hut with a dozen or so locals who hadn’t seen white folks before and to ease the tension someone produced homebrew which I clumsily spilt as soon as it was passed to me. The place erupted and for a moment I thought I was in serious trouble but it turned out that such a great offering to the ancestors meant many of them were present to sanction the occasion and so everyone was immediately friends despite the absence of shared language or culture..

or beer.

The idea of transitional objects is more familiar, typically the magical comforts of early childhood used to create both a separation and a bond, things that somehow constitutes both me and not-me, by which we condense I and thou from fusion with mother. The child’s bear, the special blanket, a twist of cloth imbued with protective significance create an experience of belonging-with and yet distinct-from, the uncannyness of a strange familiar that opens up ‘transitional space’,

”that space of experiencing between the inner and outer worlds, and contributed to by both, in which primary creativity exists and can develop.” D Winnicott 1951

the in-between that includes the sum of the parts.

”In this space, one finds the most authentic and creative aspects of our personal and communal existence, including artistic, scientific, and religious expression.” Laura Praglin

Transitional gesture, something that happens or is done to clear a sacred space, invites new possibility, evoking a response from the Unconscious.

”Look how the charm rests in the hands of Men. I must look at it. Its silence fills me up. It gives power to my hands, light to my feet. It fills my head with heat.” Giving charms to Osiris, Egyptian book of the Dead.

The usefullness of the transitional gesture in containing collective violence is demonstrated by the tradition of ‘counting coup’ among Plains Indians  in North America. This practice was a way of waging war on your neighbour without anyone getting killed, with the intention of gaining honour and prestige rather than horses…

though the horses were also good..

Each warrior carried a coup stick shaped much like a shepherds crook. If you could touch an enemy with it and get away unscathed your entire worldveiw and status would change forever. People would look at you different. You could wear an eagle’s feather in your hair and stories of your exploits would be told round the fire, the unfurling of sacralised space,

”leading to the whole area of mass inheritance and the accumulated culture of the last five to ten thousand years.” D. Winnicott.

You belong.

For as long as we have our kings on the outside and imbue them with the soul’s authority then transitional gestures will be concretised in the form of punitive executive orders and compulsive warfare that consumes its sacrificial victims no less than the obsidian knife.

Sacrifices have to be made in life. Both Hermes and Apollo part with their precious things, not least of all the notion of what constitutes justice.. If we do not make our own sacrifices in the form of relinquishing the fantasy that the ego runs anything in the Psyche larger than a stapler, or the insistence that life should be fair, then sacrifices will find their way into our lives by alternative means.

What cannot come in by the door must come in through the window.

The Soulful Sacrifice. 3.

In the Gnostic tradition there is a parable that the simple man goes home wondering what is for tea. The complicated man goes home wondering about the contradictions of life and the vastness of the cosmos. The wise man goes home, like the simple man, wondering what is for tea.

The three men represent distinctly different ways of being. The simple man thinks that the world is what he knows of it. To him self-fulfilment is about acheiving his own ends and filling his belly.

The complicated man has lost his appetite because he is plagued by all kinds of things that never bothered him before. He has the sneaky feeling that he is not the master of his own house. In fact he experiences sudden yawning depths in himself he had no inking of when he got up that morning and is all perplexed and turned about. The wise man has let go of trying to figure it all out but only by virtue of racking his brains to the point of exhaustion and allowing in the prospect of mystery..

”not as a cloak for ignorance but as an admission of his inability to translate what he knows into the speech of intellect.” C G Jung

It is the first two men and the transition from one to the other that concerns us. What happens when cosy self sufficiency is suddenly ripped open?  What inner storms must rage when the dustbin you took for the Unconscious contains a sentient beast that not only looks back but meets your gaze and gestures something? What happens when your fear of looking within because of what you will find there becomes the fear of what you will become as a result?

Not all change and growth is by steady increment, though that is difficult enough. There are also the paradigm shifts that change the very way you see things let alone what it is that’s on veiw.

Mostly what we conceive of as ‘resistance’ has to do with facing unpleasant things from the past that won’t stay there, stuff that’s not quite done with us.

 

But then there is the encounter with That which has never been conscious.

I once spoke to a man who had fallen into crisis out of the blue. He was successful and had a stable life but now felt unaccountably panicky, agoraphobic, anxious…

but also angry with himself for feeling so lost, ”Its ridiculous,” he said, ”I feel like I’m lost on a village pond in a row boat”. I could help him directly by pointing out that he’d mistaken the body of water concerned since he was in fact very much at sea and couldn’t help but be lost. Much cheered he begin to learn some navigation and piloting skills.

Realising you are not master of your own house presupposes one who is. One who is also identified with the Gods, the experience of which is a kind of death..

or at least the adrenalin of forty foot waves.

”The merely natural man must die in part during his own lifetime. He will infallibly run into his Unconscious, a fatality he has no inkling of until it overtakes him.” C. G. Jung

This brush with the Self, if it were confined to an event repleat with marquee and canapes, might be tolerable enough. We could give it a name and have a fancy ceremony to try and contain its impact upon us. But it has a way of happening by itself in all kinds of unforseen circumstances that cannot be prepared for.

Ritual, humanity’s response to the Gods, may go some way to contain the de-integrating effects of Zeus’ messenger but it is in the nature of the Self to bust in on consciousness under its own steam leaving the ego deflated and deposed in a way that can feel like eviseration.

Marie-Louise von Franz describes the experience of waking from a dream in which the sense of Inner Other was undeniable,’ I pulled my knees up under my chin and stayed in bed all day.”

She also spoke about her first encounter with Jung at a party aged nineteen. She straightway told him a dream that she had gone to the moon adding, ‘wouldn’t it be wonderful to go to the moon?’ ‘But you have been’, he replied, ‘did you experience it or not?”

She walked away in some shock thinking, ‘either he is mad, or it will take me twenty years to understand what he just said.”

I was at a party once. Someone had prepped a very heavily made up young woman that I was a psychotherapist. She made a bee-line for me and, without qualification, launched in…

”I met a baby dragon in the woods. I took it home and looked after it. When it was grown I released it into the woods again but the villagers came up and beat it to death!’

By now she was crying loudly, the mascara streaming down her cheeks. Everybody staring.

‘What does a dragon mean?’

Do you see,’ I asked, ‘how you just beat it to death?”

Nominal acknowledgment of the Unconscious is a form of suppression because it stays at the level of it being interesting garbage. She didn’t want to know the dragon. She wanted to know about the dragon. She wanted to turn it over in her hand, for it to be an object of consciousness. I knew another woman who ‘had’ a dragon. She hugged it, she said. ‘And paid the price,’ I replied, indicating the livid rash covering her throat and chest, the motivation for her referral. She knew it was psychosomatic but hadn’t quite grasped how.

Dragon burn.

Poor woman. Letting that in is a kind of Copernican revolution of the Soul. The church fathers locked Galileo up for years after they had accepted the maths involved. They just couldn’t accept that they were not the centre of the Universe and that God might be involved elsewhere. Their worlds were turned upside down.

”The personality becomes so vastly enlarged that the normal ego personality is almost extinguished.” C. G. Jung.

Mythologically speaking this dawning awareness is like the sudden descent of Hermes into everyday life. He’s a very disruptive chap. Kicks up a lot of dust, all winged helmet and sandals in your goods. And he steals things. So hang on to your stuff.

It won’t do any good. Bit by bit he will nick whatever you have, your preconceptions and comfy prejudices, your smug delusions, fancy self constructs and pet vanities, your belt and trousers…

So skilled a purloiner of valuables is Hermes that he even managed to steal Apollo’s cattle when he was a mere baby. Eventually Apollo found him out and dragged him of to their father Zeus for punishment. Zeus lets the boy go providing he return the herd. Stealing and trixiness are Hermes’ game.

There’s something inevitable about crossing life’s thresholds that is going to feel like being robbed. Apollo is peeved but forgets that, as messenger of the Gods, Hermes is the executive arm of Zeus himself who has given him the job of messing with his brother to remind Apollo, whose name means ‘assembly within the limits of the square’, of Hermes’ divine perogative to disrupt  boundaries and to turn assemblies on their head.

Hermes shows up when we get to the edge of ourselves, when the way forward is unknown and Other. Whilst He,

”is the creator of new spaces, secret spaces of subtle interiority.” M Stein
so is he also a trickster of betwixt and between that redraws the map and your place upon it.
”the boundary line is a space itself, which can open into a new space and which is permeable to the other spaces.” ibid
handy if you are a seventh level mage armed with magical crystals, wounding and potentially lethal to your carefully laid plans if not.

So, the inner king also slays, but from within. He flays identity in a process the alchemists describe as the mortificatio, attended by what is cheerfully described as ,’the torments’.

‘cutting up the limbs, dividing them into smaller and smaller pieces,  mortifying the parts and changing them into the nature that is the stone.’ quoting Hermes from the Rosarium.

When Innana descends to her dark and queenly sister Erishkigal she is deprived of a layer of clothing at every gate and has to arrive naked and bowed where she is killed and hung up on a meat hook. You wouldn’t wish it upon your worst enemy let alone undergo something similar yourself.

The Gnostics use the metaphor of a hyle of wheat that dies to itself when placed in the ground and the dormant mojo that follows.

and of course something does follow. Life, Jim, but not as we know it. And only after Hermes has had his way with you.

Then, new life does come

”A death blow is a life blow to some, who till they died did not alive become, who had they lived did most surely die…. but when they died, vitality began.” Emily Dickinson.

The story of Hermes and Apollo ends well. Hermes gives Apollo his sacred tortoise shell lyre and Apollo replies by gifting his young brother with the golden Cadeuces. symbol of the messenger that traverses between. And so what starts out as disorienting mindless prank pans out as creative exchange and renewed trust.

What concerns us here, however, is not that they all lived happily ever after but that there is a link to be made between enduring the loss of one’s inner bearings and the fruitfullness of life.

Likewise, between the depradation of outer kings and the Elysian fields of dull normalcy and docile self satisfaction we are then permitted to graze, free of concerns and responsibilities, without thought of your unadventure or anything so discomfiting as being deposed from within.

Inventing a system of leaders who are obliged to be tyrants, looks like a really poor choice of evolutionary development. After all, survival of the fittest also means being able to make it until tommorow.

On the other hand, who needs an encounter with Hermes? He’ll take all your stuff. He messes with your identity and can make you feel like a worm..

or like God

or both.

At least with outer kings what you see is what you get. Let them deal with Hermes. Lets watch and laugh as he fills the Jackass with inflated godliness. Then lets commiserate and console one another when vengeful hooves come flailing down on sacrificial substitutes, united in grievance, riteous in contempt.

”The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves”. C G Jung

Its also fair to say that before you can truly integrate something it has to be projected so that you can find a way of both dealing with it whilst denying it, a kind of neurotic solution to a situation you can only glimpse at out of the corner of one eye if it is not to rip you to pieces.

The Soulful Sacrifice. 2

Aztec kings found a way of silencing calls for their entrails to be removed once their alloted time was up by finding an handsome substitute and dressing him up like the god Tezcatlipoca. They made it an annual event. His skin would be painted black. He would wear a flower crown, a seashell breastplate, and lots of jewelry.

He was given four beautiful wives. His only duties were to walk through the town playing a flute and smelling flowers so that the people could honor him.

When 12 months had passed, he would walk up the stairs of a great pyramid, breaking his flutes as he went. As an adoring crowd watched, a priest would help him lie down on a long altar made of stone. Then they’d rip his heart out.

Afterward, they would pick a new Tezcatlipoca and start all over again.

King Aun of Sweden (C6th B.C.)  decided he didn’t fancy ritual dismemberment and prayed to Odin for a way out. Odin replied that he could live for as long as he sacrificed a son every twelve years. This he did, sending nine sons to their deaths. The Swedes prevented him from killing the last and tenth, so Aum died and was buried at Upsala.

On the other side of the World from Upsala the kings of Cambodia and Jambi would ritually sacrifice sons in their place, neatly buying time and eliminating the competition in the same breath, for who better qualified to serve as a substitute than one endowed with the very same qualities of potential kinglyness that make him a deadly threat?

Rather than repair his relationship with Artemis whose deer he killed, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order to secure a different agenda than the goddess intended…

and went to war.

Violence is going to erupt in any society where the instinctive rules governing whether killing is murder have been eroded by the king’s inflation to the point where everyone is alien and excluded from the circle of compassion.  When citizens are unprotected by natural law, when they can be disposed of with impunity, they soon begin to harbour the wish to become a god/king themselves., domestic tyrants, small time bullies, lunch money bandidos.

And of course the Christian tradition is also built on the sacrifice of the son so that others may live….and should have a mention since it promises to make immortal kings of us all..

It may well be true that

‘war is about rich old men protecting their property by sending middle and lower class men off to die.” G Carlin

but the politics of war get an extra twist when you take into account less conscious considerations, the consolidation of power by delegating to sacrificial substitutes the privilege of dying for their country.

All of which raises more questions than answers. Particularly, how on earth can it be an evolutionary advantage to have a system governed by leaders that have a vested interest in the demise of their people?

Queen Ranavalona ‘the Cruel’ (b 1778) of Madagascar managed to bump off tens of thousands of her beloved people using a ‘trial’ of poisoned chicken to determine worthy subjects from those designated as offerings to the gods.

If you didn’t cough up the chicken, you died. If not by poison then by a knife kept handy for the occasion.

Many loyal subjects took the poison trial of their own free will to demonstrate the purity of their hearts or to be taken up as the gods willed it. During her reign Ranavalona managed to kill such great numbers of her subjects that early travellers foolish enough to stay for longer than the time it took to take on supplies commented on the empty streets.

Her afforts were successful and she died of natural causes at a ripe old age.

Elsewhere in the world, sacrificial victims designated to lengthen the days of the king and bring fertility to the land also seemed to be okay with the arrangement.

Amongst the Aztecs, the sacrificial victim..

”had such a quantity of prescribed duties that it is difficult to imagine how the accompanying festival would have progressed without some degree of compliance on their part. For instance, victims were expected to bless children, greet and cheer passers-by, hear people’s petitions to the gods, visit people in their homes, give discourses and lead sacred songs, processions and dances.” Carrasco.

The conquistadors Cortés and Alvarado found that some of the sacrificial victims they freed “indignantly rejected [the] offer of release and demanded to be sacrificed.”

In fact the Aztecs went to war amongst themselves in a ritualised form of combat specifically designed to capture men for sacrifice. They were euphemistically called the ‘Flower wars’ and all combatants knew the rules and consequences of getting nabbed…

”The public spectacle of sacrificing warriors from conquered states was a major display of political power, supporting the claim of the ruling classes to divine authority.” ibid

Stalin took it a step further and sacrificed two million or more of his own troops taken German prisoner by refusing to repatriate them and killing off those who tried to return under their own steam in the gulags..

or by firing squad. All men captured were officially made an enemy of the state by Stalin’s infamous article 270. They were the Other, Zeks, unprotected by natural law, unwitting sacrifices to the maw of Uncle Joe, killed in their millions.

How much of Hitler’s crushing of the Jews and other minorities was about his own need to sacrifice to and appease unspecified Gods? After all, when he invaded Austria the only thing he wanted from Vienna was the spear head of Longinus, fabled totem that pierced the body of Christ, magically conferring kingly power upon whomever possessed it..

Now owned by the Pope..

Closer to home we have Mr Trump whose spiritual advisor Paula White says about him, ”When you are fighting against the plan of God, you are fighting against the hand of God.”

High Priest Pastor Jeffries praised Trump’s aggression as a function of Divine Will, ‘The Bible is clear, God has given Trump authority to take out Kim Jong-Un”

Which Bible verse is he referring to?

”There is no authority except that which God has established”..Romans 13 1-4.

In other words, just by virtue of being in office, he has the right to rule by divine fiat and with an iron fist. As we have seen, this exacerbates the experience of strangeness within borders that were once the very definition of amity for those they contained. Sacrificial subgroups are made less than citizen and war drums beat for the cleansing blood of the Nation’s sons.

Which brings back the question, how come we arranged this for ourselves?

What animal society would accept such circumstances whereby everyone’s safety is eternally compromised, where belonging is eroded, creativity degraded, opportunity diminished?

There just has to be a pay off. But what?

It’s not good enough to say that people are simply subjected to tyrants and have to endure them mindlessly for centuries at a time. , or at least from 9 to 5.

“And how we burned in the camps later thinking, what would things have been like, if people had  understood…that they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers or whatever else was at hand? …We didn’t love freedom enough [and so] purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” Solzhenitsyn.

If its true that we get the leaders we deserve then we might well look about us and ask along with Les Hayman..

”How many mirrors did we have to break, black cats did we have to pass, and ladders did we have to walk under to deserve this?”

Much as the depradations of modern kings catch our attention sufficient to evoke responses quite in keeping with the tradition of doing them in once in a while,  our insistence on having them in the first place must surely grab our attention.

Do we just want to be led at any price? Is our capacity to identify with powerful others so great that its worth being crushed by them? Are we inherently sado-masochistic?

In the course of puzzling over such conundrums we would do well to remember that the evolution of a species doesn’t care to much for the fate of its individual members, neither the king nor those sacrificed on his divine behalf.

The Soulful Sacrifice. 1.

When milk bottles were first introduced, Blue-tits learned how to take the tops off pretty quickly. But the truly impressive aspect of their door step robberies was that they managed to communicate the secret to one another faster than Blue-tits can fly.

How did they do it?

Whatever the answer, Blue-tits are not the only species to have this knack of manifesting collective change without crib notes or peeking over one another’s shoulder.

Give or take a few centuries, humans all over the world changed the structures of their societies without confering nicely or resorting to the pointy end of something more persuasive.

We invented kings and queens.

The characteristics of this new type of leader differed markedly from those that preceeded them. They may look like chiefs with their rides pimped but there are important differences that have an impact on culture and consciousness difficult to get your head around.

”This was not simply a quantative extension of a ranking system, it was a truly qualitative change by which society had entered a new realm.” P V Kirch

These new leaders emerged simultaneously in cultures that had no bearing or influence upon one another which suggests that something greater was at work than big hairy blokes with extra pointy beards wanting a crown.

But what?

Whether you take the Egyptian Pharaohs, or the ancient kingdoms of West Africa, early European lineages or the far-flung Aztec and Chinese emperors from whom they were entirely isolated, there are aspects of this new fangled system of resplendent dudes in metal hats so common to all that you’d think they’d copied each other’s homework.

All agreed, there was to be a fundamental change in how humans got on together with ramifications for Collective Consciousness we can scarcely suspect.

or is that scaredly?

or sacredly?

Superficially, kings meant centralised power, more rigid hierarchies, increased divisions of labour and more highly organised economies. But the most important difference, the most impactful on their subjects, was a shift in the value of human life and the rules about who you can kill without calling it murder…

so you’ll be pleased to know that Kings are only recent inventions.

”The way of life we now take for granted and on the foundations of which we have built civilizations, occupies but one percent of the time of the big-brain’s preoccupation.” R. Ardrey.

We tend to think of kings as something that belongs to history and by which we are no longer affected. In fact it’s the other way around. The institution is very recent and pervades the very viscera of modern life.

Far from being ousted by revolutions or the democratic aspirations of suitably frightened subjects, kings adapted as only the very youthful can. They went underground, as our serf like devotions to the rich and famous, as the farce of rule by deep state oligarchs, as the proliferation of corruption and being above the law whose daily tabloid shenanigins, violent exploits and eternal wars are just the kind of court intrigue you’d expect from period drama.

There are a number of important differences between chiefs and kings, with consequences for those grovelling nearest, but there is one that stands alone in its impact upon us because it affects our perception of what it means to be human.

Not only is the king a political ruler, he is also the high priest and most significant for those within reach, an incarnation of State-Your-Prefered-Deity-Here. Again, you might imagine this to be some amusing footnote of history, a witty anecdote from The Golden Bough and yet its widely accepted by considerable swathes of people in our time that might has right. The powerful are ordained by and represent God. In everyday life this trickles down and manifests in the wider populace as the feeling that, by virtue of your allegiance, you too are special and/or entitled to be exempt and above the law.

‘I like to be offensive”, said a Charlottesville supremacist. After all, what is the point of being above the law if you don’t demonstrate it once in a while? In fact what other way is there to make the point?

The archives of Ethography are rich in examples of how animals of all kinds obey a natural law which distinguishes between neighbour and stranger. This is so that the aggression necessary for survival within a species does not spill over into communal violence. Snakes won’t use their fangs when they fight. The anxiety of the young male baboon to join a new troop is not just for acceptance but for protection. Herring gulls will erupt into a frenzy of squawking and tear up great lumps of grass when anger boils over, without ever resorting to their rapier sharp beaks.

People are the same..

”All known societies make a distinction between murder, the killing of member’s of one’s own group – and the killing of outsiders.” G. Gorer.

In other words the Principle of Relatedness is more fundamental in its distinction of friend from foe than the inevitability of violent outcome.

”It is the effect of natural arangments, not the inoffensiveness of natural disposition that minimizes violent behaviour in a natural world.” Ardrey

Latent violence is there, but it’s subject to the natural law that distinguishes friend from foe. In a society run by leaders who are not ordained by the gods, nor  believed to be so special that they may not touch the ground, everyone in the community is protected from each other by this natural law. Contact with those who fall outside this protection can be made safer by rituals of politeness, exchange, intermarriage and stylised etiquette..

We shake hands, give gifts, let you have the seat furthest from the lavvy…

For folk who have been chosen by God and doing His Will, this natural law works against the majority because the king is removed from the community by a host of taboos which means that everybody, subjects and strangers alike, are now Other, unprotected by the rule which says that even an angry wolf will instinctively muzzle his bite if a pup merely shows him its belly.

No-one is safe.

In 19th C Buganda, not saying thankyou properly, with just the right amount of dust poured on your head, could get you killed. Oh, and also if you were vaguely related, or caused his Maj’ to touch the ground..or if you were unlucky enough to see him eating…. or caught his eye…

and so life is suddenly very precarious…

security and belonging eroded..

defences kicking in.

The rats start to turn on each other.

The advent of King-ship spills contained aggression into explosive violence. Not just between the king and anybody that looks at him funny but between the subjects themselves who are now also objects just a shade higher in worth than a non-believer and scrabbling to secure their positions.

If just deserts are your thing it doesn’t end well for the king. He is inflated and so must die. Tradition has it that he comes to a very bad end.  In Dahomey, if he’s lucky, he just gets murdered for the crown. If he’s not so lucky he has to be chopped up in bits, sometimes having to do the job himself, while he can, before being ritually consumed by the next incumbent.

Sometimes the king’s violent demise is ritualised at the end of fixed terms. Scandanavian kings ruled for twelve years after which they were put to death or a substitute found to die in their place, for just the right kind of sacrifice might appease the gods… sacrifices in their ones and twos all decked out in costumed finery, but then… maybe it would cover all the angles if they were also made in their uniformed millions.

Parts 2, 3, and 4 to follow.

The little Match-girl.

It was New Year’s Eve and dreadfully cold. Down the darkening road, all covered with icy slush, came a young girl, bare headed and bare footed. She had her mother’s slippers when she set off but now they were lost. She staggered along, blue lips beyond shivering, a useless shawl clasped about her thin shoulders with one hand and the matches she’d been trying to sell at the market all day in the other.

Eventually she collapsed into a snow drift beside a fine house, unable to go on. Perhaps if she lit a match she might be warmed a little? So she hesitantly drew one out and struck it against the wall. Whoosh, it suddenly seemed as if she were beside the most wonderful iron stove with brass feet and a bronze ornament on top. She was just about to stretch out her feet when… fizzz, the match expired.

So she struck another. The wall became translucent and upon it she saw the vision of a grand table, groaning with piles of all the most wonderful food. A plump goose, cooked to perfection danced towards her but just as she reached for it,… fizzz, the match went out.

Another, and a great Christmas tree rose up covered with a thousand twinkling lights until they seemed like the stars of heaven, one of which fell….

‘Someone has just died’, thought the girl, for so her late grandmother had taught her.

A final match and there stood Grandmother, more beautiful than she had ever been. ‘Grandmother, take me with you,’ she cried and rubbed all the matches against the wall in a great blaze to help keep Grandmother near….

In the cold dawn, sat the poor child, rosy cheeks and upturned smile, frozen in death.

So what is the story about? Some much needed counterpoint to, ‘they all lived happily ever after.’? Little girl wants to join her grandmother in the afterlife and gets her wish? Cautionary tale for ungrateful brats?

Or is it, dreamlike, offering us a scenario to compensate one sided consciousness? C G Jung had a dream once, of craning his neck to look up at a patient. He apologised to her the next time they met, told her the dream and confessed it made him realise that he looked down on her.

Dreams and fairytales balance conscious perspective. They have a self regulating function and correct matters if it gets lopsided or seduced by how mighty fine it is.

What could such a story be compensating?

It was first published in 1845, a time when the powers of Europe were carving up the third world just like the plump and succulent goose in our story, when child slavery was at its most chilling height, when Western belief in its hegemony justified the rape, pillage and genocide of entire nations and got fat from the profit, a state of affairs which had been unfolding as part and parcel of a patriarchal legacy for centuries during which the divine feminine had been cast out into the cold…

The pursuit of happiness as a right, our mouthy insistence on endless choice, way more than we ever need, speaks of the need to try and fill an icy abyss of emptiness. We even have more nuclear bombs than Earth to blow it up with. The frozen plight of the match-girl depicts the inner world of the West’s endemic, malignant narcissism which is not only tolerated but openly encouraged and aspired to.

A dog eat dog mentality is regarded as normal, even strong and successful, as though your worth in the world could only be measured by how many people you had to tread on to get there. But beneath it all is the chill of the snow drift, the inner feeling of being without resources, the constant dragging exhaustion of having to wear someone else’s shoes, of following a destiny not your own, of wanting to be what you are not, of feeling woefully inadequate to life’s challenges.

But then we are saved! The magical matches! Whatever your aspirations are, imbued with..

the Prospect of Atonement.

such that it becomes… Holy Stuff.

The car that will get the girl, that will create the lifestyle, that will land the contract, that will secure the portfolio, that will improve the leverage, that will be the magical, idyllic house that Jack built.

And there is more…

We cling to what we are not allowed, like a threadbare shift that sustains us not one jot from the cold. Despite the compensatory tsunami of gadgets, toys and entire aisles of chocolates in Sainsbury’s, the thin shawl of living for today, something we mostly have such a prejudice about that we equate it with vagrancy and yet..

‘consider the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin.. be not anxious for the morrow for the morrow will be anxious for itself.’ Mat 6;29.

In fact it’s virtually taboo to live according to such values. People don’t like it. Why? Because it is politically effective. Here and Now is where stuff gets done and we can’t have that. Rather, shake your fist at me and threaten me with tommorrow’s ballot. Satisfy yourself that you’ll do something big, when you next get the chance. Make a flourish… at some point in the future. When you’re not busy. Clutch with pride your freedom to be a political animal… at the next convenient opportunity. Coming soon to an armchair near you…

They say that the Devil’s greatest trick is to pretend he doesn’t exist. We mostly feel that organised religion is on the wane and doesn’t really affect us anymore as a driving force and yet the castrating insistence that future redemption is where it is at, has infiltrated and pervaded the secular world to the extent that it has become a naturalised citizen. The billowing admonishments of priestly classes promising salvation…at some point, becomes the seduction of billboards and advertising jingles, luring the pregnant moment with promises of pain-free gratification once you’ve mortgaged yourself to the hilt and spent the rest on insurance policies to make sure the future does what it says on the tin and coughs your soul back up just in time for death bed wisdoms.

The luminous promise of future spiritual rewards in Heaven, apparently repleat in virgins, has been supplanted by the even more alluring appeal of shiny things which you too might have one day if you press your nose to the grindstone hard enough in the meanwhile and pay into that pension plan….

which you may or may not get to enjoy.

So what remains once we have lifted our eyes to the distant, misty shore of tommorow’s hopes and dreams, is degraded to the kind of misery personified by the match girl. Inner life is left impoverished, starving, unsustainable. We lose not only the beauty of life but the capacity to help ourselves, to confer with one another, to bus in assistance when you need it.

Everything becomes about the momentary glow, the brief sizzle of endorphins, dopamine and adrenaline that you get every time you sit fantasizing about how life could be different, what it should be like, what you’d do with the lottery or the pick of your mates’ wives.

If that seems indecent you might prefer mortgage endowment portfolios tied into an incremental retirement plan. How wonderful life will be then! But then it fizzles and you’re left in your toenail clippings and dog hair, the nasty spot on your belt line and the stench of muck spreading on the neighbour’s field. Powerless to be Now.

Redemption by future stuff  is an ugly mistress. All the uncertainty that attends the reality of brief and uncertain tomorrows has to go somewhere, and so you wind up feeling paranoid and robbed,… like the real American, to bastardise Bill Maher, whose day is spoilt because he can’t flip around the radio without having to hear Mariachi music.

The way we cling to stuff we’re not allowed has a way of bending it out of shape to the point where it may cease to be useful.

The revolutionary simplicity of just refusing to buy into any system that advocates redemption on the never-never becomes a clinging to life-as-we know- it, as though the only way to be in the moment is to stop the world from turning…

and so, strangely, the quest to live for tomorrow becomes, confusingly,  wanting tomorrow to be another version of today.

About getting back with his ex..

‘things are different this time. Before she was demanding and possesive but now she wants me to do stuff and stay with her all the time’ Fry from Futurama.

Before the toll of twelve o’clock Otherness is threatening, hell really is other people. Everything new disrupts and undermines the single point of veiw, that faith in barricading yourself against anyone with whom you aren’t joined at the hip… all of which may well fizzzle out in a moment, but can still be replaced by another and better stopgap, untill you freeze to death in your designer snow drift.

The matchgirl stumbles at the threshold of the New Year, she can’t quite make it into a new arrangement with the world. She dies because she cannot name her true situation or what is actually happening and so she is powerless to help herself.

Letting in how duped she has been, how miserably treated, how seduced with false hopes and petty dreams as well as all the inevitable contradictions of realizing one’s own complexity, also makes possible the idea that the value of life is not simply surviving it as long as you can or cramming it with goodies you’ll never get to suck at but that I and me can confer about some hare brained scheme and discuss whether its actually a good idea whilst I and thou part company the richer from our parley..

Sometimes space does more than contain. Sometimes it squidges out honey.

 

Anxiety and Depression.

What are anxiety and depression?

They are how life seems in response to trauma. We regress to where it’s safe, to Mother, even if it costs us our wings.

But what if the trauma itself is loss of Mother? And what if this loss has been eroding human contentment for millenia?

Loss of the Divine Feminine, stripping motherhood of sacred context, is going to damage baby and is bound to give rise to compensatory, narcissistic defences to bulwark raging inner emptiness.

Sincs we can’t (daren’t) blame God for this we blame the Enemy, the rival predatory suckling, the dark brother, a phantasy demon born of deprivation who holds, who must hold, the good stuff.

Our spiritual emptiness is then ameliorated by riteous hate of the rival whom we can then blame for all our ills.

But there is a problem with this. In order to cover over our anxiety and depression we have to be at war. With ourselves and one another.

We go to war so as to afford ourselves the means to smooth an eternal path of prejudice and depersonalisation over our neighbour, the hated rival, whom we must experience as inferior as well as unduly favoured.

This means that prejudice and paranoia are intrinsic to monotheistic culture. It begins with mockery and ends with napalm.

Reducing the divine feminine to a whore riding her beast in Revelations, paraded up and down like a condemned prisoner prior to execution, has resulted in the collective depletion of the Western psyche. It has had consequences that have washed down through the centuries, culminating in alienation, compulsive aggression, instant gratification and the analyst’s couch.

The narcissistic schism this creates in families is not simply that parents are preoccupied with themselves and the nagging sense of their own incompletness. The absence of the Principle of Relatedness means that they struggle to find value in their kids or pleasure in their company.

The ‘me, me, me,’ is a default position resulting from a de facto failure to attribute sufficient significance to one another or to derive real nurture from our relationships.

Without value inherently invested in the Other we become isolated and shut off, compelled to revisit the underlying and unacknowledged horror of Mother’s loss in any number of substitute situations whilst vainly keeping our heads above water by the power that riteous indignation and eternal sabre rattling has to keep the fragmenting psyche together.

Freud observed that people lose their neuroses during times of war. Why? Because, win or lose, they feel vindicated, can band together and have something other than the condition they were born into to feel anxious and depressed about.

I have been to war so I know about this stuff. We were always so upbeat about everything, even when we knew we were losing. Why? Because the issue of an outer victory was a secondary consideration next to the inner need to have others carry our inferior feelings….

even though they won….

yep, just goes to show how non-rational such things really are. The losers can still de-value the victors and collectively identify with one another in lieu of relatedness.

Or just go and start another war…

Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Iraq.

And its not for oil, or political ideology. Its the need to aggressively ramp up the projection of the Dark Brother so that the fractured template of our spiritual paradigm can be knit back together just that little bit more than it might if peace broke out.

Our Collective Narcissism is caught in a trap. To get out we have to afford the other with value, or at least validity. All the feelings of deadness and loss then wing their way home across the nomansland that formerly separated us from those fragments of soul which give testament to our inner poverty.

What this means is that the resolution to narcissim is by way of anxiety and depression.

Our only health is the disease,

If we obey the dying nurse-

Whose constant care is not to please,

but to remind of our and Adam’s curse

That to be restored

Our sickness must grow worse. T.S. Eliot   East Coker.

Rather than fixing them or using behavioural techniques of suppression we are challenged to live with our affliction, find meaning in them, to acknowledge that there really is something going on to be anxious and depressed about.

‘We become enlightened, not by imagining beings of light, but by going down into the dark’. Carl Jung

Anxiety and Depression are dirty words for the most part. We spend billions annually combating them, little realising that it is our defensive attitude that exacerbates and causes the very condition we are wanting to diminish.

If we would heal our divided self it is by way of embracing the loss of relatedness and mutuality that our superior, holier-than-thou attitudes have bought us. Being ‘positive’ won’t cut it. We have to find a way of relieving what we consider to be ‘negative’ of the stigma we are so determined to attach to it. Only then will we find the humility and compassion to live peacefully with ourselves and with one another.

If you liked this article and want to explore my books, you can type the titles ‘Abundant Delicious’ or ‘Going Mad to Stay Sane’ into the search bar for descriptions and sales.

At a lover’s death..

Banzan was a famous Zen monk from way back. One day his son died and he was weeping inconsolably by the graveside. One of his pupils asked him,

”Master do you not teach the oneness of Being and Non-being, of remaining unattached from samsara … and wordly illusion. Why then are you crying?”

Banzan replied, ‘he was a very personal illusion.’

My ex died. Cancer. I cried like a baby. Was it the suddenness? Or the horrible randomness of finding out on Facebook? Why didn’t anyone tell me?

We did, on Facebook.

But while she was still alive, so that I..

Listen buster, this is not about you. The dying are not in the habit of thumbing through their address book to gratify yesteryear’s voyeur. Its the living that want to mend fences so that they can continue to do so with good conscience.

And now all those things you left unsaid, your regrets at the part you played, the unexpressed tendernesses…

…remain. The opportunity is passed. You feel sorry for yourself and your tears are for yourself… How absurd that you should feel so upset for someone who faced their end with dignity and courage, that you should cry for her when she did not cry for herself.

Oh, but she was so young!

So, never mind the quality feel the width…?

No, no, its that she did not deserve it!

No-one does. All deserving is about being fairly recompensed for deeds well done, but Death cares nothing for fairness or whether you’ve been good.

But she was so healthy..

We all are at one time or another. It passes. In any case what laughable irony that you, the literary scourge of Consumer Culture’s compulsive living-in-the future and wanting more than it has, should now bewail the span of her alloted years with all this crying about unfairness and wanting… more.

You are too hard. No feeling person can share a bed with another for years without greiving their loss even if you’ve parted company. What would it say if I felt no pang at her passing?

Does her death detract from her contribution to your life?

No.

Then your tears are for yourself.

I loved her!

And always will, which is why love trumps death. What the shock of the unexpected does, which is mostly what life is made of, is to remind you that your own alloted four score years and ten are only an outside bet, and that who’s turn it is next – a roll of the dice.

fair enough.

Not only are we temporary, we are indefinately temporary. It’s only a statistical probability that you’ll make it through the day. The horror of it all is such that you keep it entirely in the wings of Consciousness, busying yourself with a myriad soul-numbing distractions whilst reserving your pity for those who can’t be comforted by it untill it bursts on-stage like a drunk at a kiddies Panto.

Then there is no comfort to be had! If my sorrow for others is impotent and compassion for myself is self indulgent…

I didn’t say that. Its that we are all alone, together. Within the extinguishing blaze of Death is a coal of something that is entirely improbable….

..which is why its a good thing you know so little.

The most difficult part of pain and loss is not enduring it or even searching for meaning in it, but by defending against the loss of each miraculous day should we wish it further from our shoulder and a little less like being kicked by a mule.

‘He who is near to me is near to the fire.’ Thomas logia 82

By coincidence I have been reading Voltaire’s ‘Candide’, about a man to whom befalls every sudden ill you can imagine. He soon discovers that everyone with whom he is associated has an even worse tale to tell. He and his companions hear of a man who has had an easy life. Curious and intrigued they go to find him, anxious to prove that the human condition is not one of inevitable suffering…

..and its true. The pompous ‘Cococurante’ has indeed not suffered in life. But then neither does he love or feel gratitude. Sex bores him. Art and literature no longer divert or amuse. Everything is drab and tasteless. The troupe cannot wait to escape him.

And so what Voltaire manages to convey in an afternoon more bloodthirsty than any video game, is that life is not just a vale of tears. It is a vale of Our tears, without which we cannot become fully human or find the compassion it takes to look forward to the Adventure.

How Men are Made.

On the day I turned eighteen my father crossed the yard between our colonial house and the workshop I’d made into my room, all ceremonious, and formally shook my hand. ‘Congratulations, now you are a man.’

He thought he was doing me proud.

which made the empty pit in my stomach all the more gnawing. I was a man on account of the clock. Not because I had acheived anything or showed my mettle, nor because I had gone on some bold adventure but because it was Tuesday.

Of course he secretly knew it was a sham but continued in his proud role of conferring stuff upon me by sending me to war in the hope that being shot at would do the job where his handshake had clearly failed.

Toxic masculinity takes all kinds of forms, mostly noticeably in its impact on women, minority groups and due process, but there is a further privy of splashback, not so noticeable, that still deserves a mention.

A central pivot of the patriarchy’s inflation is the narcissistic and destructive notion that it is a father’s duty to initiate his sons into manhood.

Of course he must fail. It’s vain to believe we make men of our sons. It is a cover story for the often conflicted and occasionally murderous relationships typified by our role models of filial piety down the centuries, namely, kings who lost their heads to princes..

and vice versa.

or,  if you were Edward ll you got to have a red hot poker shoved up your bum instead..

So, I duly went to war and got shot at a lot…

which set me to wondering..

if the purpose of perpetual war, a covert yet shameless foreign policy of ongoing conflict wherever it can be created, doesn’t have some nuances to it above and beyond the obvious profiteering of the Deep State.

More subtle even than the visceral need to have a Dark Brother be the enemy, someone to pit your life against so that you can know you have a life, something to define you in an uncertain world, a bogeyman to help you conjour just the right degree of riteous hate to temporarily cement the fractured soul.

No, boys are sent to war because we collectively subscribe to the madness that it will make men of them. Its a scenario that has overtones of Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac on the mountainside, with the added psychopathic sadism that he’s doing the boy a favour.

Not only is everyone expendable, they are expendable for their own good. So that those dispatching their sons in their uncountable droves can have butter instead of marge or marge instead of dripping and that ‘our way of life’, our comforts, can be maintained.

What  does such an attitude do to a person, you know, deep down?

The kind of splashback in store, in all its hideous glory, is amply personified by the true story of Mel Bernstein, ‘the most armed man in America.’ Mel has millions of dollars worth of legal military hardware on his Colorado Springs ranch. I caught a video of him saying whistfully to camera, ‘these are real men’s guns.’ They conferred masculinity on him in their lethal tonnage.

Unfortunately, Mel’s wife was accidently killed in one of many explosions on set whilst he was making a movie about himself for Discovery. He never says her name.

Now he lives in a bunker, a tardis from the 60’s, with four life size plastic dolls who do have names. ‘I put panties on them,’ Mel explains, ‘I’m a considerate boyfriend,’…

resolving once and for all the question of whether the compensatory need to play with guns affects your mental health, or more precisely, your capacity for relatedness.. Mel says of Discovery’s decision not to make the movie during which his wife is blown up on camera…’so, they cancelled and threw away the whole show.’

Durn fools. All they had to do was edit out the bit where she got kilt. Don’ make no sense….justa wastin my time..

Thankfully, a considerable chunk of a boy’s becoming a man has less to do with his father than the latter might like to think, so long as he manages to survive his pappy’s loving ministrations.

In indigenous cultures, though the various rituals into manhood may differ a great deal in content, what they all seem to have in common is that the youth be thrown back on his own resources, that he have an experience of death and rebirth as a result of an encounter with the Unconscious.

When an Ndebele boy is sent out into the bush with his peers, the presence of the elders, whilst loosely officiating, are not central to the drama at all. They are more witnesses than agents of anything.

What imbues the novice with a sense of the sacred is achieved by a series of ordeals they have to go through.

“And it is primarily these ordeals that constitute the religious experience of initiation – the encounter with the sacred.” M Eliade.

The ordeals are, more often than not, symbolic of death followed by resurrection or rebirth. The fathers wait patiently on the sidelines.

Because they know very well that no matter how enormous their dicks are, rebirth is the preserve of the feminine.

If the feminine is denied or undervalued, the transformation doesn’t take place. Change requires a uterus..

and so because we Western men are largely unwilling to afford the feminine with the role she has in the making of a man, he remains unmade.

What then are we to do? It doesn’t seem right to appropriate other culture’s methods of growing men and yet we have lost our own to vain and empty repetition. Luckily it’s not the form that counts. What seems to evoke change and growth most is precisely the authentic despair that you are stuck and don’t know what to do, because it is then that you are thrown back on your own resources and hidden depths.

So, at least crisis can be meaningful, its own trial of strength or endurance, its own initiatory experience.. The feeling of inner poverty and betrayal can be given some respect and credibility because these feelings are real, they bear testimony to some form of inner truth and can constitute the very death experience, the alchemical ‘mortificatio’, which begins the transformation process, the end of ideals that no longer hold marrow, from which rebirth will happen in Her own time and under Her own agency.

 

 

 

 

 

The Aspiration Trap.

Asked what’s important to them, us First World folk generally get all misty eyed about some ideal cornucopia of future possiblities. Its all such an interesting adventure that the depressing underbelly of the beast gets ignored.

and its depressing because its always about tommorow.

and tomorrow never comes.

Sometimes our aspirations can get a bit like Insurance. You shore up against Life’s woes with a cunning plan for a better future, forgetting that you have just made a bet with the Universe that something bad is going to happen to you. So anxiety increases despite your new found safety.

It seems like a sensible idea, planning for the future, and it probably is when you are six and can’t decide if you want to be a fireman or a farmer. The problem is that we then collectively continue to wonder about what we’d like to be when we grow up…

for the rest of our lives.

We then give this evasion of life a pedigree, the Bucket List. To be a humdinger it must comprise all kinds of unrealistic and even fantasy expectations of oneself ..

which is why folk are generally as depressed as their list is long..

..and with good reason.

Because there is invariably this tacit assumption that ticking off the list is when your life really begins.

Having life begin at some totemic future moment is a mixed bag of voodoo. My friend’s dad bought a helicopter, his ‘life long dream’. So, he flies it over to my friend’s house and lands it in the garden.

‘What do you think?’ asks the dad once the engine has whined down enough to be able to hear yourself think.

‘Oh it’s great’, says the younger man, it’s just that your values haven’t changed for forty years.’

hard but fair.

Its not your fault. You have been sold redemption as a future’s market since you could crawl. With so much focus on what life holds in store, life as-it-is ceases to count for much, like waiting for a bus, for the next bit of real life to come along, something you always wanted.

This means that the real freedom, which is to do gladly what must be done in the here and now, cannot be entered into, because Now is what the Bucket List is secretly pitted against.

‘Life is what happens to you whilst you are busy making other plans’. J. Lennon.

and cannot help but be experienced, not just as dull, but as intrusive and disrupting, the table with our precious map and carefully laid plans being repeatedly overturned, which is why the realm of wishing making it so is also the land of paranoid anxiety.

I think I’m being robbed all the time and I am, by me. So focused am I on the horizon and beyond that the immediate abundance at hand seems not to exist.

“If you focus too far in front, you won’t see the shiny thing in the corner of your eye..” Tim  Mandin.

So why do we collectively obsess over lottery ticket jackpots, exotic locations, selfies of daring-do? To appear more interesting? As a prop for a shaky self construct? Or has the pursuit of happiness just been hijacked by Consumption?

Or, all of the above.

The West certainly seems to feel that Novelty and Choice are constitutional rights, forgetting that this is invariably at someone’s expense. What life should be like and its fantasy of continuous contentment means bread from another mouth.

so its quite a price that is paid

for the sake of magically keeping life on hold. After all, if life only begins when my plans for it prevail I am kept safe from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, protected from all the goblins and dragons I am now free to become in the lives of others.