Author: andywhite

The story of Rapunzel begins with her father stealing the herb Rampion from a witch’s garden for his wife’s pregnancy cravings. He is caught and the witch demands the child yet to be born in payment. She locks the child in a tall airless tower without company or stimulus. The witch visits by climbing up her long tresses having called out..

‘Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your golden hair…’

A passing Prince overhears all this and becomes curious. Once the witch is gone he calls out…

‘Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your golden hair…’

and is soon cooing sweet nothings with Rapunzel who, before long, is visibly pregnant. In a later iteration of Grimm’s story, toned down somewhat for a delicate audience, Rapunzel complains about the Witch’s weight, saying she is heavier than the Prince. Either way her secret is betrayed. The Witch cuts off her hair and banishes her to a far off desert spot where she had to live, ‘in great grief and misery’. Meantime the oblivious Prince arrives at the foot of the tower and calls out..

‘Rapunzel Rapunzel, let down your golden hair…’

The witch lets down the severed locks and corners the Prince once he has climbed up. ‘Aha’ screeches the witch, ‘ you would fetch your dearest but the bird sits no longer upon the nest. The cat has got her and will scratch out your eyes as well. Rapunzel is lost to you and you will never see her again.”

Some versions of the story have the Prince throwing himself from the tower in despair, others have the witch shove him out. Either way he is blinded by the vicious thorns which grew about as he fell to earth. He is compelled, like Oedipus, to wander as a blind beggar for many years.

One day, in a remote desert place he hears someone singing. He recognizes the voice. Yes! It really is Rapunzel who runs to him, splashing his face with hot tears which magically restore his sight.

And so they all lived happily ever after, except the witch, who hears about the news and is crushed by the agony that Rapunzel and the Prince have found contentment despite her best efforts.

How does this all happen? Not by heroic effort. The protagonists are miserable wretches, a suicidal blind man and a beggar woman whose sin is no greater than wanting to be fully alive.

If sin is to be apportioned it belongs with the thieving father who hasn’t the balls to knock on the witch’s door with his cap in his hand and his shoes shined, all creased up with worry whilst he asks ever so politely if he might have a handful of Rampion for his dear pregnant wife for which they would both be eternally grateful. And what might he do for her by way of recompense…ma’am.

So the young lovers are paying for the sins of the fathers. Rapunzel loses her thoughtful tresses. My analyst Chuck told me he often cropped up in people’s dreams as their barber, shaping what came out of people’s heads. But the witch does not come to Rapunzel as an alchemical hair dresser. She is an envious mother complex determined to sever her from her own thoughts and ideas. Moreover her Prince is blind and lost.

The counterpoint to the heroic story is Fate’s intervention when all hope is gone. The ancient Greeks called it ‘Enantiodromia’, when things turn into their opposite because of the extremity of the situation.

Another way of saying this is that the psyche is an autonomous self-regulating system which doesn’t care too much about the intentions of the personality. In fact, it’s likely to oppose the personality if it gets too out of whack, too one sided. What this means is that extreme situations constellate the tendency for a counter intuitive outcome. Stuff that shouldn’t happen does. Its chaos theory at work from one point of view, the intervention of the Gods from another.

Last month a Chechen rebel leader was assassinated by a Putin operative in broad daylight as he took a stroll through a leafy park in Berlin, within walking distance of Angela Merkel’s office. Whilst news pundits focus on the repercussions for international relations and discuss the ramifications of totalitarian hitmen operating freely in democratic capitals, there is an element of the story so dreamlike it might give cause for hope despite the circumstances.

The killer did not get away. Against all the odds, he was caught, not because of any counter intelligence operation or outstanding police response but because the killer was so wrapped up in the theatrics of his secret agent identity that he entirely bungled his escape.

This is how it happened. The killer, ‘Vladimir Sokolov’, approached his victim from behind on a bicycle. He put two bullets into the back of his head with a 9mm Glock 25 and then sped away. So far so good. Assassination successful, killer pedaling away at twenty miles an hour and already out of sight. What could go wrong?

Everything had proceeded according to plan. Only the worst kind of luck could now ensnare the killer; well, that and his own unconscious processes, his secret need to gild the lily. Apparently, Vlad was not happy with the mere success of his mission. He wanted more of a story to tell, one more about flair than it is about murder, one that will make people shake their heads and mutter, ‘what a guy’.

So, two hundred meters from the scene of the crime, he gets off his bike and ditches it dramatically into the river Spree, blind to the several onlookers, followed by his wig, the pistol and a bag of Paprika just in case any sniffer dogs were out for a swim that day. Then he dove into some bushes and began to strip, changing into a pink t-shirt and sandals plus fake mustache during which time the police had arrived and bust him as he was making his 4mph denoument on a kiddies scooter.

Police recovered an authentic Russian passport made out to a fake name and address which immediately pegged him as an FSB operative. He was carrying proof of being a Russian agent, whilst conducting a political hit on German soil. Its like carrying a go to jail forever card.

Justice was served, not by heroic action or valiant effort, but by the unerring tendency of criminal activity given free reign to still somehow fuck itself up, or to evoke forces which will happily do it for them.

‘The Psyche does not merely react. It gives its own specific answers to the influences at work upon it.” C G Jung

This is what lies behind the calamity of Trump off the auto cue, he goes on auto pilot, seemingly egotistical but actually being progressively sabotaged by his own complexes. He passes it off as bullish aggression but it is actually self destruction. The principle of Enantiodromia can be seen perpetually at work. Every time he opens his mouth he makes enemies and offends some block of his own voters.

Just days after the unanimously unpopular gesture of inviting the Taliban to Camp David on the eve of 9/11, he holds off the economic disaster of Chinese tariffs for the worst possible reason, the 70th grand anniversary of communist dictatorship. You couldn’t make it up. Still less might you believe that, rather than bluster, its actually Trump’s unconscious working hard to make sure that he fails in his stated endeavour, in order to balance the scales of his inner world.

The Psyche is self regulating. Those who will not be contained from without, who feel that they are above the law, will be contained from within by the autonomous Psyche which is effectively trying to heal a cramp in the personality deemed to be living too narrow an existence. This is why corrupt person’s will always say and do all the things designed to get them caught. Slips of the tongue and physical tells work against conscious intention. Strange encounters, million to one chances, like the recent American operative who had to be extracted from the Kremlin having had the chance to photo Putin’s desk with documents related to the election meddling sat right on it. Own goals and corrosive gaffs from out of the blue begin to provide the checks and balances otherwise unavailable.

The Principle of ‘Enantiodromia’ compensates Rapunzel and the Prince for the witch’s efforts to deny them life. Sokolov had his pretensions compensated with humiliating capture. Trump cannot help but shoot himself in the foot. None of which is to say that individual efforts are ever wasted. Sometimes it might seem as if you have to wander in the dark for ever and endure being cut off and cast out. Yet it is precisely these experiences of suffering or inflation that evoke the Gods attention, manifest as Grace or the Raven’s Claw respectively, which descends by itself and when least expected.

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.’

A naive king gets lost in the dark, slumberous forest. As night falls a hairy dwarf appears on the path ahead and offers to show him the way out for the price of his favorite daughter, whom he must deliver in eight days. The king readily agrees thinking the little fellow could be no great threat to him, despite his bristling beard. He will simply renege on his promise once out of danger..

The king emerges from the forest in a trice and immediately forgets the dwarf who is now way behind him and can surely do nothing even as he calls out faintly, ‘see you in eight days, oh great king..’ The days slip by. The king becomes more and more distracted, eventually blurting out what happened to his daughters, including the salient detail that the youngest has been forfeit, even though the dwarf has no chance of ever really claiming his prize, right?

Between them they devise a cunning plan. On the appointed day a goose girl is dressed up in royal robes and made to wait on the castle steps having been told to go with who ever should come to collect her. A fox appears and tells the goose girl to sit upon his tail, whereupon he carries her swiftly into the forest. There he stops, asking her to get down and louse him, which she happily does. This shows she is no Princess and so the fox returns her, calling over the castle walls that the real Princess must be ready and waiting by the same time next day.

This time a shepherdess is dressed up and similarly made to wait for the fox who whisks her away on his tail until they’re out of sight when he asks her to get down and louse him with the same result. The fox is angry by now and returns the shepherdess, calling some dire warnings over the castle wall if the Princess herself is not presented the next day.

The Princess, being brave and wanting no harm to come to her father, persuades him to let her be sacrificed as agreed and so she dresses in readiness for the fox who tells her to sit upon his tail till they are out of sight before asking to be loused once more. She refuses and so the fox knows that this time she is the real Princess. He takes her to a little house in the woods where she is to sleep that night. ‘In the morning,’ says he, ‘three doves will fly into the garden. You must catch the middle one and cut off its head. Do exactly as I say’, he adds, by way of warning.

The Princess does precisely as she is told. She catches the middle dove and cuts its head clean off. In a flash a handsome Prince is suddenly stood before her. He explains that a spell had been placed upon him turning him into the dwarf, a spell which could only be broken by one who respected his wishes. They get married and the Prince/Dwarf inherits both crown and kingdom from the now dispossessed and humiliated king who thought he could outsmart an aggrieved dwarf in his own back yard. .

Sun Tzu (544-496C), a Chinese general and author of ‘The Art of War’ advises his reader never to underestimate the enemy.

‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.’
– Sun Tzu

One of my favorite stories from the days of colonial Rhodesia, where I was raised, concerns the way in which the fourteen year bush war for independence was finally won. The belief of colonial powers in the inferiority of the indigenous population was what finally defeated them. This was not simply because they underestimated the military strength and resolve of the enemy but because they lacked the imagination required to attribute the locals with either strategy or cunning.

African intelligence agents could then get un-vetted jobs as ‘kitchen-boys’ at the Rhodesian high command where they spied upon their employers as they served them. Much of the information which lead to victory came from the careless talk of pompous colonial generals and politicians incapable of the belief that their black waiters and drivers could possibly understand let alone co-ordinate the valuable snippets gleaned from their ‘superiors’. So they had to learn equality the hard way.

Whilst Sun Tzu’s treatise is a military manual, it contains much that is useful in ordinary life, predicated on a single, simple principle; under all circumstances treat the other as an equal.

Anything remotely related to ‘first and only’, is doomed to failure. It contains the seeds of its own undoing. The refusal to attribute others with any intelligence or culture means you no longer know what is going on around you. The resulting paranoia will be the least of your concerns.

The essence of such fundamentalism is that there is only one way of interpreting the world. This mono-mentality may comfort in the short term but it entails long term costs that are inestimable. The reason is that everything else must be hived off and projected into the world where it becomes a dragon which must be defeated not once or twice but over and over again until life itself becomes one massive battleground.

The cultural expression of this has been a thousand years of crusades and persecution, against Islam/women/minorities in the outer world; against the devil and his ilk on the inner. These days we may not subscribe to explicit religious sentiment, believing we are free of all that old mumbo-jumbo. In fact we are still as dominated by it in the form of a mono-theism of consciousness which might have shed its ecclesiastical robes but still has us in its grip.

Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower. 

The intolerance of others, constellated as the idees fixee of monotheism, are not limited to folk out-there-in-the-world. It is equally dismissive in its underestimation of the Other within, to the Ground of Being. It’s attitude is ‘the psyche is what I know of it’. It scoffs at the thought that there is anything left to discover, any frontiers of the soul as yet unexplored, as though the unconscious were at best a bin in the basement, the prejudicial conviction that we are simply masters of our own house.

Unfortunately, as the king in our story discovers, development does not stop with becoming a proficient member of society. Aspects of the collective psyche which prefigure consciousness are liable to intrude into life whether we believe in them or not, as part of growth itself. We think we know what our inner worlds are made of and feel offended at the prospect of losing our way, more offended still to find such terra incognita peopled with figures and forces beyond conscious control.

I had a terrifying dream last night. I was walking up the lane and saw a huge Yeti like creature sitting on the side of the road waiting for me. I backed away in fear but then he got up and came towards me. He was about twelve feet tall, maybe fifteen, covered in long matted hair with a ‘necklace’ of slightly paler dreadlocks. His face was not human, more like an orangutang but with great intelligence in his eyes. I yelled and made gestures to keep him away but it was no use. Then I broke a branch from a tree and tried to fend him off but my efforts were to no avail. I was completely defenseless. He could have torn me limb from limb without any trouble at all. I lay down and curled up in a fetal ball, waiting for death. Then he picked me up, like you might a kitten, and began to bound across the countryside with me clasped to his shoulder, delirious with  terror.

Getting acquainted with such forces involves the ego becoming deposed from its place of primacy in the psyche and embarking on a ‘night-sea journey’ an experience of isolation, loneliness, and despair that the king is determined to prevent. He wants the story to continue to be about him which he cannot do except by making an enemy of the Dwarf who is then likely to have an axe to grind in addition to insisting on their bargain.

These mythologems will have their way. The dwarf returns time and again, refusing to be fobbed off by imitation, growing vengeful at the kings inflated efforts to deceive.

”Many who do not comprehend the significance of these new states of mind look upon them as abnormal fantasies and vagaries. Alarmed at the possibility of metal imbalance they strive to combat them in various ways, making frantic efforts to re-attach themselves to the ‘reality’ of ordinary life.’ R Assagioli.

The king tries to claw his old life back by a series of lesser sacrifices justifying this counterfeit as being in the interests of the state. His old life continues for a while as it was, though now it is imbued with a feeling of inauthenticity, of being anxiously fake, even though nothing outward seems to have changed.

Existentialist Viktor Frankl coined the term ‘Ur-anxiety’ to describe something peculiar to modern consciousness,. This is the anxiety of groundlessness, which manifests as feelings of alienation, of not belonging, of having no context. Our monotheism of consciousness involves paradoxical emancipation from the gods which then robs life of meaning and replaces it with vague ‘Ur’ fears.

Ur anxiety is well named. It comes from the story of Gilgamesh, the first great king of Ur in ancient Sumer, whose severance from the gods had to be mediated by the wild man of the forest, Enkidu. It is only by taking Enkidu seriously in both combat and friendship that Gilgamesh can evolve. Only by acknowledging and coming to terms with the objective reality of those which live beyond the castle walls does the king grow in wisdom.

‘Psychological monotheism tends to regard difference and diversity as irreconcilable opposites and reduces all psychological life to moral issues, providing the justification for all types of action and violence against whatever seems ‘outside,’ a prescribed idea of ‘unity’. D Latifa

This can have a profound and immediate affect on daily life in so far as you begin to divide your emotional life up into ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feelings, for ever pursuing one or avoiding the other in an orgy of attachment with all its concomitant suffering. Such insistence on uniformity and life having to look a particular way before you’ll let yourself live it, is just a shade away from being a delusional disorder and the author of much misery.

Conversely, the Princess has learned to take the rough with the smooth and treats the Fox Prince respectfully. Her willingness to take him seriously is what redeems the situation. She evolves, not by heroic action or great cleverness, but by being able to bend with the times in co-operation with the other.

( story adapted from Grimm’s ‘Hurleburlebutz’.)

I thought I was in for an easy evening. My son was away at a festival, the neighbors were on holiday, no-one else for several miles in any direction. It was dry and warm. I decided to go and tuck myself into a little copse of trees way in back of the property, light a fire, crack a cold one and enjoy the gloaming.

As the fire began to crackle and blaze a figure emerged through the billowing smoke and into the copse tumbled the laird of the land. ‘Do you know what this place is?’ he demanded, careening straight on without waiting for an answer, ‘this place is sacred, I won’t see it desecrated!’

He clearly meant it so I thought it best to sit still and encourage the telling of his story. He began, asking whether or not I had noticed the pressing banks around the copse or wondered why this place remained unused when all about lay planted farm land.

I hadn’t.

The laird himself didn’t know the real story of the copse until mid life, despite all this land being in his family since living memory. All he knew was no-one went near the place. Then, one day, he called in a native diviner to help him look for water on the property. He was an old man renowned for his second sight who lived by himself on the edges of a nearby village. The laird thought to try in the copse and asked the diviner to have a look.

The old man walked carefully over to the site and stood looking on at the copse with its gnarled beech trees and protective mossy banks. His eyes glazed over. The divining rods hung limp in his hands. Tears began to run down his face.

‘This is a place of death,’ he said softly. ”When the Black Death came,’ he added, as though witnessing it himself, ‘the village was all but wiped out. Those who would die tomorrow came and buried their loved ones who’d died today. Here,’and he indicated the gently mounded copse, ‘they dug a great pit and put them in.”

As he turned to leave the old man muttered, ‘two crusaders in chain mail guard the dead.”

The laird finished his story and disappeared into the falling night. I was left with my fire, perched upon the mound, the dead piled beneath me and the crusaders a little way off talking quietly but earnestly to one another. I was tempted to run all the way home but something kept me there, some pressing urgency to remain in this dread spot.

Eventually I went over to the knights and sat with them to hear their conversation better. They were speaking of their fallen comrades and of their family who lay here, doing their level best to remember all of the obligations with which they had been charged by the departed so their memory could be appropriately honored.

At some point they looked up and inquired about my own obligations. I wanted to protest saying this had nothing to do with me but I knew it was a lie before the words were formed and so I fell silent and then began to weep for all those I had lost myself, at first quietly and then with anguished abandon.

‘Why must there be so much grief?’ I asked once the storm had passed.

‘To keep us all human’, they replied.

This week the leader of the free world, so hardened to grief that he can boast about crowd sizes and vilify his enemies between mass shooting funerals, endorsed a tweet naming him King of the Jews and then told incredulous reporters that he is ‘The Chosen One’.

Which goes to show how the refusal to feel and the doubling down of eternal invulnerability can have consequences for both sanity and the state of your soul way beyond considerations of political impropriety.

The only other person I know to make such a claim was my mate K_____ who ended his career as Lord of the Universe in a padded cell having been discovered stark naked and knee deep in confetti by his landlord with a box of matches in one hand and a jerry can of kerosene in the other.

At the same press conference on the White House lawn, the glorious leader conflated his august person with the state on several occasions. ‘I have the best economy…’ The last known leader to create a symbolic equation between himself and the nation was Hitler who famously remarked, ‘I am Germany.’ Before that there was Louis XIV, ‘L’etat c’est moi.’ I am the state. It ended badly for both of them.. and their nations.

Denial of feeling blighted the youth of all three of these men with disastrous consequences for those within reach, particularly minorities, though their influence ultimately spread to the character of the entire nation which led to a generalized malaise of spirit, a corruption of national integrity, immuring the souls of those it did not murder.

Voltaire describes Louis’ debilitating effect on the esprit de coeur of the nation in a way that could have been lifted from last weeks Washington Post if only it hadn’t been written nearly three centuries ago…

‘Flattery pleased him to such a degree that the coarsest was well-received, the basest with most relish. It was only in this way that anyone ever reached him. It was this that gave such power to his ministers through the constant opportunities that they had to adulate him. Suppleness, baseness, an admiring, cringing, and dependent air, above all, an air of nullity except through him, were the only means of pleasing him. Year by year the poison spread…’

This poison is essentially a loss of soul which comes about as a result of having to suppress feeling and relatedness which not only separates you from others but also from yourself. The reason for this is that our values are rooted in feeling without which they simply become a negotiable commodity entitled to flip flop which ever way the wind is blowing at the time.

This places the notion that there is any such thing as a ‘negative feeling’ in a much broader context than the quasi morality of judging certain sets of feelings to be bad and wrong, feelings that you simply have to get over, or worse, let go. For every feeling denied, values are eroded, knowing how to think and act are impaired, gaps open up in the soul which have to be filled with toxic drama and adrenalin to hold oneself together. The need for enemies nags at sleep.

Another commentator on the psychology of Louis observed..

”Then came the desire for glory, hence the facility with which Louvois, the Secretary of State involved him in great wars and the ease with which the minister convinced him he was a greater captain than all his generals. He appropriated all with an admiring complacency in himself and believed he was really such as they depicted him. Hence his taste for reviews, which he pushed to such lengths that his enemies called him the “review king”; Lapham Quaterly

The man who stifles down his ‘negative feelings’ identifies himself with the state and, by way of compensation, believes he is divinely appointed. He must then go to war, not just for re-election or to keep the people in fear but to prevent his own utter collapse into psychosis. He goes mad to stay sane, which is a neat strategy, only, the nation gets dragged into the gutter in the process. Reflecting on whether Louis had made France and therefore himself great again after decades of catastrophic wars Voltaire offered this consideration,

”If greatness of soul consists in a love of pageantry, an ostentation of fastidious pomp, a prodigality of expense, an affectation of munificence, an insolence of ambition, and a haughty reserve of deportment, Louis certainly deserved the appellation of Great. Qualities which are really heroic we shall not find in the composition of his character. ‘

The notion that big boys don’t cry is not just a stupid macho trope. For the want of mourning on the mound of the dead, for want of the willingness to be at home in our own skins whatever we may be experiencing means becoming deadened ourselves. We may then never learn to walk a mile in another’s shoes without losing our own. Recourse to action is then limited to the destructive mix of equating oneself with the Gods married up with the compulsive need to lash out at the world.

Trump may fare better than Louis who died a hideous and agonizing death from diabetic gangrene. But what about the rest of us? Or does it take having nuclear codes in the hands of a man who actively needs to go to war for the sake of his rocky internal cohesion to get us in touch with our own gut feelings and the values they may then give rise to?

Once upon a time there was a wealthy and sophisticated man, Mark the Rich, who prided himself on his possessions and personal refinement. One night he had a dream God himself was coming to dinner, so he jumped up and had his servants prepare a great feast. Others he posted at the doors to prevent the poor and hungry from getting any. The people heard about the feast and arrived to beg alms but were chased away.

A bent old man was hurt in the starving, ragged press and collapsed to the floor. He was helped up by a kind woman who took him home and gave him food and shelter whilst the rich man continued to wait for God…

During the night she had a dream that a divine child was going to be born in the next village and that she should tell Mark the Rich. When she woke she went to his house and told him the dream. He went to the village and under the pretext of giving the child a step up in life took the boy home but on the way buried him in a snow drift and left him to die.

“Lie there and freeze; that’s the way to become master of Mark’s wealth!” but huntsmen came along soon after, found the boy and rescued him.

Years passed and one day Mark the Rich happened upon the divine child by chance whilst out hunting in the woods. He questioned him and learned his story, realizing what must have happened. He gave the boy a letter to take to his wife containing orders to kill the bearer. On the road the boy met a bent old man who introduced himself and asked the boy’s business. He showed him the sealed letter he was to deliver which the old man touched, magically changing the contents to a wedding celebration between him and the rich man’s only daughter.

Mark the Rich was determined to get rid of his new son-in-law and sent him to the distillery having ordered servants to throw him in the cauldron and drown him when he arrived. On the way the boy fell ill and could not go on. Impatient, Mark the Rich went to see what had happened but by that time it was dark, the servants in waiting mistook him for the younger man and tossed him in.

The impact of the Patriarchy on women needs little amplification from me. It’s impact upon men is not as well documented or discussed. Perhaps it seems self indulgent to think about, given the overwhelming calamities women have suffered ever since male gods decided to do without their feminine counterparts.

The ethos of entitlement and privilege enjoyed by that part of the male psyche personified by Mark the Rich is often enough to fool himself he can escape the splash back of persecution perpetrated against women and minorities over the centuries. Yet such a conviction can only be sustained by a split in the psyche which even slaves do not have to suffer.

This split is expressed culturally by the poetic antagonism between Isaac and Ishmael, the sons of monotheism’s progenitor Abraham, doomed to be at each other’s throats for the next four thousand years for the want of mamma’s wooden spoon. Yet the divide has implications for the individual psyche of modern men whatever his allegiances, since the personal shadow is bound to be thickened in direct proportion to the degree of ‘sophistication’ enjoyed by those sold on their own PR who would do well to bear in mind the origin of the word. It comes from the latin ‘sophisticatus’ meaning ‘tampered with’ and from which the word ‘sophist’ or ‘liar’ is also derived.

The sophisticated man is misrepresenting himself and doing so in a very dangerous way. Not only does he have to project his animal nature onto others, for which he then vilifies them, but also his creative spirit which then makes him feel robbed into the bargain by all those inferior folk who some how, despite his best efforts, seem to have everything.

”This creative content of the individual’s inner life acquires its negative status in socially standardized behavior which does not allow any individual unpredictability [or] creative insights [which are] taken as a direct threat to the stagnant social order.” Stanislava A. Bazikyan.

What this means is that we are bound to attribute our better angels to others as well as our devils because having one’s own moral compass is a betrayal of the herd’s collective norms. The seduction of knowing everything already easily prizes the harder yet more creative prospect of individual consciousness from the sticky paw of the aspirant who now trades individuation for being-sophisticated and favored-by-the-Gods.

‘The shadow does not consist of only morally reprehensible tendencies, but also expresses a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, reality based insights, creative impulses, etc.” C. G. Jung.

The consequences of this schism within the male psyche, symbolized by Mark the Rich, is far more serious than mere ignorance or bigotry. It constitutes the untethering of yourself from your own personal destiny and the renunciation of ever being a grown up. It is not only the ‘inferior’ aspects of oneself which are repressed and kept from the door but also the more noble, nurturing, generative aspects of masculinity which must be frozen off to qualify as ‘successful’ in what’s now perceived as a dog eat dog world.

This gives rise to a culture which prides itself on its mediocrity, which is happy to be dumbed down, which wants to be uninformed, and for which every contradiction is fake news. In the process the generative male spirit which cares about the legacy it leaves behind is silenced. The value placed on clean air and water for posterity is nipped in the bud.

If you google ‘traits of being successful’, you will find lists not incomparable with the DSM-5 definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.. It’s all about drive, ambition, self belief, self reliance, like being eternally twenty. There’s very little about connection, relatedness or investment in others. Its all first and only.

These greater qualities all seem to have been hived off and projected, either onto women who are then compelled into the role of with-holding harpies, or onto Nature which must then be ransacked for the treasure you just gave away, or onto the material world with all its must have goodies.

Advertisers have an intuitive sense of this and target men by appealing to these compulsions which are in fact rooted in the unconscious desire for wholeness. The depersonalisation and objectification of women contains a secret longing for far more than eternal sexual availability.

The desire to own more than you need derives from a similar attribution to the material world of your own deep spiritual value. This exerts a fascination over us from it’s place of exile, a fact which is easily exploited by those who sense you are as motivated by emptiness and the unconscious longing to be whole as you are by the desire to impress the ladies.

When we freeze off the divine child in ourselves for the sake of maintaining an impressive front built on the definitions of success passed down to us we are bound to fall foul of our own contrivances and instead of distilling spirit, get ourselves self-destructively broiled instead.

The solution is not a premature ‘getting in touch with the feminine’ (which is liable to swallow you up like a vat of 40% proof vodka) but to realize the extent of your own betrayal and incompleteness, the insufficiency of wealth and privilege, the lie of sophistication, the loneliness of waiting for God to come to dinner.

The myth that there is any such thing as a negative feeling is responsible for way more than the petty tyrannies of political correctness. The corresponding puritanical injunction to ‘let go’ of the past disregards the question of whether or not it will let go of you and assumes leverage in the psyche it just doesn’t have. Such a monotheism of consciousness is bound to create alternative facts and to speak with forked tongue, clamoring at the now highly circumscribed and polished persona as if it were the holy grail itself, a form of madness touted as salvation.

How does this happen?

Well, if you take a child away from its mother it copes by regressing into a space where separation cannot reach it, splitting itself off from the traumatic event. In the process it becomes divided against the world and against itself but at least the castle keep of the soul has not been over run and still shelters the scattered remnants of the abandoned child.

What is true for the individual is true for the collective. Ontology capitulates phylogeny as they say down the Saracen’s Head during philosopher’s hour. So if you rob humanity at large of it’s connection to the Great Mother, culture as a whole will regress and begin to live the institutionalized split reality of us and them, good and evil, the chosen and the damned. Over centuries social structures become imbued with racism and prejudice culminating in shit hole countries, border walls, mass shootings and misogyny.

Pundits deplore the orange leader as an anomaly, yet he is the most logical outcome of a culture itself plagued by image and ostentation, deeply split between conservation and consumption, between democratic ideals at home and imperialistic policies abroad.

If we imagine we are evolved whilst laying waste to our environment like a three year old shitting on its own doorstep then we must expect the virtuous suppression of common sense which might forbid the victims of massacres being comforted by those who orchestrate them, rock stars amid the carnage and horror.

What’s needed is not the euphemistic pushing away of ‘letting go’ which exacerbates division, but rather a ‘letting in’, letting in of at least some of the emptiness and disenchantment which underpins our collective hungering so that for the small price of our polished veneer some sense of underlying moral solidity may be had, even if its uncomfortable, even if its painful, even if it costs us the illusion of first and only.

Perhaps if we could refrain from labeling authentic if difficult feelings as ‘negative’ and having to split ourselves off from them, we might tolerate divisive leaders a little less and regain some of the healthy reality testing which can tell con-dolence from con-artist and comfort from snake oil.

The toppling of foul leaders, like charity, has to begin at home. If we wish to be rid of the horrible spectacle then we must take its oxygen, our own feelings of supremacy and entitlement, our own projections of inferiority onto others, our own holier than thou. All this letting go is denial. We must let in, communicate, empathize, find value in the other. Ultimately this is about remembering something we already know, something which now demands we acknowledge the shared wound of the un-mothered twisting its way through the judeo christian tradition for longer than memory. We’ll never be rid of tyrants or their cohorts until we can look at them and say, ‘of course..’

In ancient Lydia there lived an inspired weaver, Arachne, whose tapestries were so beautiful and lifelike that people came to see them from miles around. Arachne soon became as boastful as she was talented and let it be known she considered herself even more skilled than Athena herself. Athena got wind of this and showed up one day in the guise of an old woman. When Arachne repeated her claim Athena revealed herself and challenged the puffed up mortal to a contest.

Athena’s tapestry was a marvel but Arachne’s work was more miraculous still. Her compromising depictions of Zeus and Poseidon embarrassing themselves in their extra-marital shenanigins seemed quite alive. The goddess flew into a rage, ripped up Arachne’s work and magically turned her great pride into an equally inflated guilt so all consuming that Arachne despairs and kills herself. Athena realizes she’s over done it a bit and turns Arachne into a spider, forever after weaving her wondrous web.

The moral Ovid deduces is, ‘don’t think you are better than the gods’, though this seems like an interpretation mostly suited to ruling a pliant population. The fact is that Arachne won the competition. She was the better weaver. Her error was in failing to show gratitude to the gods for her gift which then leads to her mental imbalance, depression and suicide.

People mostly divvy up into those who believe in God and those who don’t. There are a few quibblers who feel they might have confused spiritual experience with indigestion but by far the most under represented are those who are in no doubt about God but still think that religion is a bad idea, mostly given the fact that international terrorism is rooted precisely in people having ‘special’ relationships with bad tempered deities.

Unfortunately, heinous acts against others for the temerity of being different are only the thin, visible, end of this wedge. Monotheism of any kind, including state sponsored atheism and the monotheism of consciousness it breeds, attacks its own people in greater though less obvious numbers.

One of the most insidious ways it does this is via the erosion of gratitude inevitable in any belief system rooted in the cosy entitlement which goes with being ‘chosen’.

The certainty of self this generates goes way beyond suddenly having great swathes of the planet pegged as second class citizens, children of lesser and laughable gods. It seems your neighbors at home haven’t quite got it right either. World Christian Encyclopedia (David A. Barrett; Oxford University Press, 1982) estimates almost 21,000 denominations of Christianity worldwide, each one convinced that some how they were the ones to get the details right.

Only those in my valley have any true knowledge of the world. It’s like claiming to be a gourmand without ever having strayed beyond the borders of your own allotment.

‘Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous’. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower

Back in the day, when there were a sensible number of gods, you might sacrifice at a different altar than your neighbor whilst feeling that you were still going about the same thing. Having a grumble at Hermes one day and offering Hera a gift the next allows life to be complex and contradictory. You are loved but not special and so when the gods show you their favor its cause for the kind of celebration and thankfullness that makes living worthwhile and puts your troubles behind you..

Arachne has to forgo this redemption for the arrogant conviction she is mistress of her own house. Even though she bests the goddess’ challenge, this cannot of itself give meaning to life. In fact she despairs entirely without the healing gratitude of valuing others and being given a gift that came free of conditions.

So, the belief that there is nothing new in the world and that you have a hotline to ultimate truth leads quickly to Promethean-like guilt and deadening attacks on the self.

Despite Arachne’s brilliance it all comes to nothing. The tapestry gets ripped up and her life destroyed, for want of a seemingly impossible ‘thankyou’.

Which makes you wonder about her relationship with her mother….

So I googled it, ‘Arachne’s mother was a common woman who is not named by Ovid’, which was disappointing for a moment, until you ask, ”how can specialness be renounced and symbiotic development take place with someone so marginalized as to be nameless?

The disenfranchisement of women ultimately leads, by torturous paths, to emotionally absent yet ravenous mothers who cannot help but incur destruction of creativity and loss of the will to live in their kids.

Arachne wonders why the fuck she should be grateful. For what? She’s had to pull herself up by her own bootstraps all her life and still managed to beat a goddess at her own game…

all of which is true..

Yet it is also true that adversity yields its own fruit. Perhaps Arachne’s great skill is not in spite of her past but because of it. Compelled to find the means to creatively transcend her suffering, she made tapestries of loss and injustice, symbolically weaving the threads of herself back together, making a great name for herself to compensate for a mother whose name none remember.

The naive spiritual doctrine of embracing good and eschewing evil is developmentally about four years old, when kids want to know who is the goody and who is the baddy in the movie you’re watching.

This does not mean masochistically inviting suffering into our lives. It nevertheless remains that adversity compels us to grow in ways that soft living may never produce. Who you have become is invariably by way of pain and adversity as well as nurture. If you look back on the toughest times in your life they are usually the ones in which you grew most.

Sometimes people say about therapy, ‘oh, what’s the point? You can’t change your past..’ which is true, though you can change your relationship with it which makes redemption and healing possible. This paradoxical process requires gratitude, not as a way of denying or minimizing suffering, but in so far as adversity breaks the kernel of our understanding, provides new frames of reference, questions values you might have swallowed whole, and throws you back on as yet unmanifest self.