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The Fisherman’s Wife.

A man makes a romantic visit to a beauty spot with a girlfriend. She looks about her and exclaims..

‘It’s beautiful! Why have you never bought me here before?’

There’s no getting it right for such a person.

You might wonder about what makes her tick. You might make observations about the avoidance of intimacy, the refusal of gratitude, the enviously attacked moment of togetherness, the sabotage of aliveness…

and you’d be right..

but none the wiser.

A story that expresses this kind of eternal dissatisfaction is the tale of The Fisherman’s Wife. At first glance it seems like a salutary warning about the dangers of greed and an admonishment to be happy with what you have.

The story goes that the poor and luckless fisherman draws in his tattered net one day to find that he has caught the King of the Fishes who promises to grant him a wish if he sets him free.

The fisherman runs back to his filthy hovel to confer with his wife who says straight away that they should have a new house and in the blink of an eye it is done….

but the wife is…

unhappy.

It could be a bit bigger…

Off goes the fisherman to amend his wish. Even though the Fish King is a bit peeved at this shilly shallying he agrees and when the fisherman gets back the house has become a great mansion.

Buuuuuuut…

its just a matter of time before the wife wants a castle…

and a tiara

and a team of unicorns to pull her brand new golden coach…

Each time the fisherman goes back to the fish king the sea is that bit darker, the sky somehow more fierce with cloud tendrils scudded before a lashing wind.

She wants to be Queen…

She wants to be Empress…

She wants to be Supreme Ruler of the Universe..

and have a mountain of calorie free chocolate..

Finally the Fish King’s patience fails..

‘Go back to your filthy hovel!’….

and by the time the fisherman returns all is as it was..

that morning.

Just as history is unkind to the vanquished so too is it difficult to find any sympathy for the fisherman’s wife..

she was a greedy cow and got her just desserts.

Right?

Well yes, but what on earth is going on inside her that no amount of wealth and power can fill?

And by the same token, what is going on such that Consumerism in all its fetid glory has come to typify our age? We focus on the shallowness of Western gluttony..

and feel bad about it..

but consumerism and the relentless greed that drives it are not the problem.

The problem is whatever it is that all that stuff is trying to fill..

So you can slag off greedy politicians, avaricious corporations and insatiable nations without it loosening your own grip on the TV remote one iota while you continue to channel hop entire networks devoted to selling you stuff you don’t need.

from the comfort of your armchair..

or

it would be comfortable if only….

So it may be that…

‘Consumerism is the corruption of the American soul.’ B. Nicholson.

Indeed, much of the literature on Western Consumerism pitches its critique at the level of crumbling social values and greed that is

the pursuit of happiness

by twilight.

We bandy terms like ‘social impact’, and talk about the symptoms of ‘Affluenza’, which is all very interesting…

but no-one is asking what Consumerism is for….

or why the West is stuffing itself like a starvling.

What on earth are we compensating for if our almost religious devotion to posession and accumulation is so great that it gives rise to imbalances of power tantamount to the economic enslavement of entire nations…..?

because you can’t have more than you need without taking bread from the mouths of others…

and, there, now I too am wagging my finger like a schoolmaster,

forgetting the profound levels of inner despair and emptiness, the loss of worth, of self, the hopelessness that leads to such gorging of oneself.

Its so easy to hate the Glutton.

One of the greatest sins at my boarding school in colonial Africa was, ‘uys grazing’. ‘Uys’ is Africaans for ‘by himself’, or ‘alone’.

Eating on your own.

You’d have to plan it. Quickly out of Prep and fly down to the trunk room, a long corridor lined with broad slated shelving for the dozens of black metal trunks stacked nine or ten high. Mine was always on the topmost shelf, not because I had been afforded any priviledge but because my trunk was a gauche, outsize, yellow pigskin affair guarenteed to mark you out on day one as a trouble-maker.

So I’d scamper up there like a spider, way above the glow of the single light bulb on its log flex and lift the heavy lid an inch or two with my elbow whilst pawing about inside for some goody, mentally listing the inventory, checking for theft, bolting down whatever could be found..

heart pounding at the prospect of discovery.

biltong and custard creams..

crisps and chocolate.

Put some in your pocket for later, you can eat them in the toilet.

it looks compulsive, greedy, selfish…

and it is.

just the kind of behaviour you’d expect from boys raised in the absence of women, a continuation of a childhood almost entirely devoid of Mother…

in a culture where the ample lap of the Great Mother is no longer even a dim memory….

where getting properly fed feels like a cross border raid into enemy territory in which you may be ensnared at any time.

So you have to be alert….

and feed yourself..

endlessly.

‘This is our futile attempt to fill a spiritual and emotional emptiness within, to gratify some long-buried need, to heal or at least numb some festering psychological wound. Such self-defeating behaviors are rooted in formerly unmet infantile needs, childhood and adult trauma‘. S. Diamond.

And so much as we might judge and condemn the fisherman’s wife, do we have the courage to go where she could not? Can we nurse the empty child within who has already decided on the basis of experience that there is not enough to go round?

After all, embracing the inner child is not simply a matter of tears, bandaid and kissing it better. There is also the unresponsive child who wants more than you have and will give nothing back.

‘Do you love life? Then love camp life, for that too is life.” F. Dostoyevsky.

For what would love be if it were not willing to suffer everything..

to find meaning in suffering

or grace in the dirt?

Calling ourselves ‘consumers’ is the newest form of a Freudian prejudice that blames baby for not being able to find the nipple or for crying in response to being un-held.

It also keeps alive the illusion that we have got to the bottom of ourselves by confessing our ‘avarice’, by feeling guilty for feeling empty….

please Sir, can I have some more?

and thus immediately raised back up in pious inauthenticity where we join the call for an end to Greed…

that gaping maw where Mother used to be.

 

Gender and Soul Wound.

The psychopathology that attends the loss of the Great Mother seems to be different for boys and girls. I will tease these differences out by comparing two fairytales, the ‘Wild Swans’ by Hans Christian Anderson and the ‘Drummer Boy’ retold by the brothers Grimm.

In the ‘Wild Swans’, the protagonist is Elisa, a princess whose mother has died. The king remarries an awful witch who wants the kingdom all to herself. She turns Elisa’s eleven brothers into swans and banishes them to a far off land. Elisa herself is disfigured with enchanted mud (or blood) that won’t wash off. Her father can’t recognise her and she is cast out.

The swan brothers find Elisa but can’t recognise her because of the foul mud. She must rid herself of the enchantment or die trying and, following the example of a wounded deer, leaps from dangerously high cliffs into a magical pool which returns her to her former recognisable self.

Elisa is carried to safety across the sea by the brothers. She is determined to lift their spell. A crow reveals to her that she must weave jackets made of nettles, one for each prince, which will restore them to their human form. During the time it takes to weave the jackets she must not breath a word or they will all die.

She finds a secret cave in which to begin the work but no sooner has she began than a commotion outside catches her attention. A wild sow is being hunted by the young king of the land who falls in love with Elisa when she rushes out to protect the pig and her babies. He takes her to his castle where his first minister, who is in cahoots with the wicked step mother, plots against her.

The minister spies on Elisa. When she goes to the churchyard for more nettles in the night he sees his chance, wakes the king and denounces Elisa as a witch. The sorry figure of the mumbling, crying girl pulling nettles up in the dark is enough to court suspicion and when she fails to defend herself the king hands her over to the minister who announces her imminent execution .

Even as the tumbril rolls towards the gallows Elisa knits her jackets. Mice from the castle have warned the swan brothers of what has happened and they swoop in, but it is she who rescues them, changing them back into princes as soon as the jackets are cast across their wings.

The second story, the Drummer Boy, with a male protagonist who must redeem a swan maiden, is very different.

In this tale the hero finds a shift of beautiful linen by the shores of a lake and takes it. That night as he settles down to sleep he hears a distressed voice begging for the shift to be returned. It transpires that it is in fact a swan skin that the maiden must wear if she is to return to her sisters on the Glass Mountain where a wicked witch holds them all prisoner.

The boy resolves to help her. He returns the swan skin and sets out next morning for the Glass Mountain, helped by giants whom he tricks into carrying him there by saying that he is the advance guard of a great army which will attack them if they refuse.

Having arrived at the foot of the impossibly slippery mountain he finds two men fighting over a magical saddle which he steals and rides to the top with ease. Once there he finds the witch’s house and asks for board and lodging. She agrees provided he complete three chores on three consecutive days. The first is to empty a huge pond with a thimble and arrange all the fish in order of their size. The second is to chop down the forest behind the house and the third is to set the logs ablaze.

He immediately gives up saying it is impossible. Then the Swan Maiden emerges from the house and invites him to go to sleep with his head on her lap. When he wakes the chores are all done.

Drummer Boy and Swan Maiden return to his home town where he says he must visit his mother. The Swan Maiden agrees but warns him not to kiss her on both cheeks lest he forget her.

But he does kiss his mother on both cheeks..

and he does forget.

His mother chooses another bride for him and the Swan Maiden has to beg to be allowed to speak to her former fiance, efforts frustrated by a sleeping draught poured into his wine by the new bride from which she cannot wake him. Only on the third evening, when by chance he fails to drink the potion, is the drummer boy returned to his senses and his memory returns.

You could say that the wicked witch/evil stepmother in both stories represent the dark aspect of the Great Mother, intent on limiting consciousness and autonomy.

Equally, when the Principle of Relatedness personified by the Divine Feminine is repressed we can expect relationships and consciousness itself to suffer. Loss of relatedness is not just an outer phenomenon. It is also a loss of inner dialogue and a disconnection from the psyche which diminishes consciousness.

The contrasexual aspect of oneself, a man’s inner feminine and a woman’s inner masculine, become alienated from the personality, less differentiated and therefor symbolised in their animal form.

”Something is unlawfully won from, or done to Nature, which results in a curse.” M. L. von Franz. 

Erich Neumann suggests that the loss of the Goddess is a price worth paying for the increase in consciousness brought in its wake. Our stories suggest otherwise, a corresponding loss of humanity and self alienation with diminished consciousness giving rise to a….

”…personality which is split up into partial aspects, that bundle of odds and ends which also calls itself ‘man’.” CG Jung.

Girl and Boy approach their shared predicament very differently. Elisa allows herself to fall from the cliff tops to wash off the enchanted mud. She descends, trusting the example of the wounded stag. She is still connected to her instincts from whom further help comes in the form of the crow who tells her the secret of the nettle jackets, the sow who inadvertantly catches the young king’s attention and the mice who warn the brothers about the minister’s treachery.

The nettle jackets are a symbol of the painful work of individuation, the sheer hard graft required to humanise and make conscious the loss of relatedness that results from the Great Mother’s banishment.

The Drummer Boy’s attitude is very different. He too must make a difficult journey but does so with smooth talk and trickery. His pretense to be at the head of an army intimidates the giants. His theft of the magical saddle carries him effortlessly up the mountain. He doesn’t have to lift a finger. And despite these fortuitous interventions he throws his hands up in despair when given his chores by the witch, declaring they can’t be done. He falls asleep in the maiden’s lap instead.

”You may ride to your highest hieght, but when you get there you will stumble.” F Nietzsche.

This kind of helpless posturing, passivity and entitlement are typical of the narcissistic, motherbound man. Despite his cleverness and trickery he lacks the resolve to do whatever he can. He avoids the despair and hard work entered into by Elisa and so his triumph is a bit academic and by-the-way, evidenced by his failure to kiss his mother only once….

…unlike Elisa whose taboo against speaking is observed throughout all her trials.

The restriction of the second familial kiss is the Swan Maiden’s demand that the Drummer Boy separate from his mother, but he can’t do it and again falls unconscious. Even his final remembering seems like an accident, all rather typical of the ‘Puer’ personality whose fate comes to him from outside and who expects to be given life on a plate.

And so he is swept along by events, freed finally not by his own efforts or courage but by the Swan Maiden’s persistence.

By contrast Elisa is entirely dynamic. She continues her work even as the dreadful tumbril rolls her to the gallows, finally redeemed by her own efforts.

All this suggests something…

and not just that women are tougher than men.

which they are…

It suggests that Consciousness blooms in adversity.

Life is not supposed to do that.

The whole theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest is predicated on the Drummer Boy’s gambit. Move away from negative stimulus towards easier less competitively disputed environs where you are bound to do better…

The subjugation of the Great Mother has had an unforseen and counter-intuitive effect….

the flourishing of feminine consciousness.

Almost-fish and Nearly-bird.

It is difficult to spot things that fail to occur. This is most obvious in Nature. You rarely glimpse the Almost-fish or the Nearly-bird. But the best example in the genre of the quasi-substantial by far is the Bolus Bolan tree, visible only at its roots and very unlikely to ever be spotted at all unless you trip over one that has been upended in a Just-About storm.

A curious property of the Bolus Bolan,  wild scent that can drive a rail spike through memory, makes its whereabouts difficult to recall even if you are lucky enough to get tangled up in its spiky thorns.

Which is why those secretive and wily alchemists will pay their weight in gold for a front door made of planks from the Bolas Bolan.

Difficult to see and immediatly forgetable.

Good for those in fear of persecution..

or being hassled by their landlords.

Ebeneezer Scratchbottom, a noted alchemist, achieved some local fame by carving a chess set of Bolas wood. He stapled himself to the tree so as to keep a sharp eye on it and kept all his tools on strings threaded through his sleeves like kiddy mittens so as not to lose track of them.

He got a bit side tracked but duly carved the chess pieces as well as several spoons, a life-size Buick and a scale model of the Eiffel Tower.

The problem was remembering the rules of the game. You were bound to forget them as soon as you sat down to the wild and tangily scented invisi-board. And feeling for the pieces all the time had some drawbacks too.

There are lots of rules to chess. Most of them come before the game is over. But there are one or two that follow after and for the want of which you risk being classified with the Almost-fish and the Nearly-bird.

My father taught me to play when I was little.

He played me every evening.

Aw.

He always won.

Until one day I was foolish enough to forget the unstated object of the game, to question the covert purpose of his induction…

and beat him for the first time.

The silence was interminable. Peanut beetles droned about  in the uncaring  heat. Cicadaas chirped nervously.  In the background, life was unfolding around the house. But his silence enveloped it all. Slowly it sucked the rumbling vibrancy out of a temperate evening that had done nothing, didn’t mean it and certainly didn’t deserve it.

Eventually he scraped his chair back and left without a word. We never played again.

It would have been better if he’d lost his temper and had a tantrum. At least you’d know what you were dealing with.

A heading and a compass bearing.

Things that fail to occur are, indeed, difficult to spot.

But like Leprechauns..

they will take you to their gold.

The cold silence is not just a witholding of kudos or congratulation. It is also a secret unveiled, slip of a leper’s mask, the furtive life of covert sucking hate. A voiceless howling accusation of betrayal. As though I had struck him from behind against all the rules of honour..

…you have won by a cowardly sleight of hand said the unspoken….

shoulder slump of ingratitude’s complaint….

the unsteady footfall down the hall,

a body carried in rolled up carpeting.

while I sat there, forcing down the equation between success and shame.

over-riding the voice of protest…

that connected the child to reality.

”the disturbing forces that lie below the conscious level of adult life are intuited by the child and give rise to vague fears, apprehensive fantasies, disturbing dreams, disocciation from reality and… anti-social acts.” F Wickes.

And so the boy spends years sabotaging his own efforts, disowning experience, scraping through the fright of  achievment’s unspeakable anguish and spunking endlessly into his hanky.

guns and drugs came later.

The Old Man had been orphaned, molested and abandoned  in that order by the time he was ten.

What do you do with a horror that wants even less to be told than heard by others? You excise it, licence it through repetition and ram it down the throat of the next generation.

You send your own child to a place …

where..

the things that happened.. happen again.

and history repeats itself with all the faithfulness of an old dog waiting for the master’s return.

You distance yourself like the dead

and order safari-suits from your tailor by the dozen….

so that the horrific split from stem to stern of a fractured psyche need never be more than a running sore, need never open right up, or make you want to cry and scream.

One of his favourite stories was how he would have to get a dugout canoe ride down the Mara river to reach civilisation from where we lived on the Serengeti plain in a tin rondavel at the time.

‘The hippos were so close you could have truck a match on their backs!’

and he’d make a flicking motion with his wrist to demonstrate how it was done, so successfully shored up against some silent terror that even a brush with death by terrible tusks was no more than a moment of amusing nonchalance.

But when the boy wins at chess, he might triumph in all kinds of other ways, not to mention throwing off the legacy bequeathed by trauma’s necessity.

It may all still surface yet.

Not to worry.

Send him to war.

Martyrdom will caulk this threatening spillage. Send him to the thickest part of the fighting. He will soon be cut down.

And so I was duly sent. All my comrades were indeed cut down. But I was not. I lived and lived.

I was on first wave Fireforce duty with the Commandos. Heli born hell. White boys with ancient, dull grievances forged to hate and murder…

armed to the teeth..

I’d hurt myself in a para jump. Rocky outcrops can be so unforgiving. I got my lieutenant to change my name on the Ops white-board…

for another.

The siren went before long. Gooks at ten o’clock. The boys blacked up, were duly briefed and scrambled off in some old Hueys.  They were mostly rookies from intake 163, average age, eighteen. The chopper I had been assigned to got hit by a SAM7. Everyone died. Though some managed to survive both the impact, the flaming crash and then crawled 20 metres before being boiled alive in their own subcutaneous fat.

Almost-grilled and Nearly-men.

sacrificial immolation that appeased the Dark God no more than a lost pawn or the muffled bark from an old hound.

Deprivation and Specialness.

When I was at the age that the male neo-cortex starts limbering up for a series of initiatory wilderness trials I was sent instead to the Optometrist for a series of eye tests.

Though, granted, they were conducted in grand style.

Supposedly I had some kind of rare condition.

I was special.

and destined to be the smartypants in the dorm of my new school for the extra-special.

but some quietly devious sprite in me was wise to all this  compensatory drama.

My eyes were fine.

I was being sent away and so as it didn’t look like abandonment there had to be a fanfare.

and Appointments.

The Unreality of it all scared the hell out of me.

So I lost the totemic specs as soon as circumstances permitted..

a brief affair..

now overshadowed by the new question,

‘why has no-one said anything?’

How is it possible that I could be dragged umpteen times to the Opticians, having in-depth instruction about rare conditions and eye charts and clamps, and lens machines like some extra from Edward Scissorhands….

Strip lighting, squinting, grinding glass….

…and the crowning glory, a monstrous pair of tortoise shell rimmed jamjar bottoms with silver lightning strikes up in the corners, a demented owl doing Dame Edna impressions for spare change..

”He’ll have those ones.”

how is it possible that after all that…

nobody says anything when the damn things disappear?

It’s too crazy. Everyone joins in the narcissistic fantasy that I must have had some miraculous cure.

which made it crazier still.

A reprieve from that which never was…

the whole thing was a drama to try and plug a gushing wound of parental failure and disconnection, the means to demonstrate something to the world rather than to fulfil a real need in the child, an exercise in emotional fraud laid bare when the miracle glasses are lost and nobody notices…

and somewhere, so far off I hid them from my own memory of hiding them, the special tortoise shell specs languish. In some dark hollow. Cobwebbed and woodloused.  The lightning strikes buzz intermittently.

You will often find with emotional deprivation that the child has some supposed malady in which the parent invests great attention.

and then none.

intimacy downgraded to the to-do list where anxious fussing can parade as care.

It looks so much like loving concern at the time. But there’s something forced and frenetic about it. The kid is passive, busy fulfilling expectations to be faulty and getting attention the only way he knows.

by going along with it.

Its not all bad.

You get to be special.

Your parent gets to be an expert in the subject.

They start action groups.

I knew a woman who was determined that her child’s legs weren’t growing properly. She took him to the Podiatrist over and again. He needed calipers. Can’t you see how he walks?

The boy was a bit pidgeon toed. But hold.. what light from yonder window breaks? What shoes does he wear?

Hers.

She wouldn’t buy him his own boots. He had to wear wellies that were 5 sizes too big. Of course he walked like a duck. Given an alternate environment the boy is running interschools cross countries within a term…

though he came close to being intrusively ‘hobbled’ whilst clutching the booby prize of his rare condition.

I taught a class for several semesters where more than half the kids had some kind of diagnosis of ADHD or some fancy name on the autistic spectrum. Bad seed. The scary thing was not the narcissistic little monsters themselves but how good and pure and spiritual their parents all proved to be.

Parents who were sooo good and sooo pure that someone had to be designated with the family shit..

sacrificed in fact.

and then compensated for it all with some kind of negative attention that further damned them with their awful specialness.

You may not like them and send yourself to sleep with all the things you’d like to say and do in vengeance for the cold heartedness and cruelty of the narcissist in your life. But they have already paid for their sins.

Narcissists are raised in veal crates.

My analyst, Dreyer Kruger told me I was autistic in our first session….

…which is Narcissism in its Sunday best with golfing two-tones and cleats. The words bounce slowly across the table like fumbled ice cubes doubling for dice in a crap game.

No I’m not…

I just spent three tours of duty getting shot at ….

once, whilst dangling from the hand strap of a Fireforce chopper taking evasive action from angry men with rockets and machine guns.

It wasn’t meant for the job.

angular momentum adds weight to a body…

And I was supposed to be inside the vehicle.

The hand strap was grey..

made of some kind of polymerised plastic….

Hanging in space forever.

….with fine runnels for extra grip….

Ground where sky should be.

….grooved in the grey, just in case your hands get a bit sweaty with the horror of how special you have still become….

Legs dangling, wind screaming, guns roaring, waiting for the hit.

…waiting…..

But, autistic, hey? That sounds like a juicy bit of negative specialness. I’ll take it.

Don’t kid yourself. It just means you grew up against the odds in soil that could not sustain you.

for which you got a badge..

of non-calorific merit.

 

Victim Blaming 101.

A friend sent me a newspaper clip from the Guardian, ‘Therapy Wars’, all about the battle between traditional Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy…

for the hearts and minds of the people.

The article emphasises their differences…

”At their core is a fundamental disagreement about human nature – about why we suffer, and how, if ever, we can hope to find peace of mind.” O. Burkeman.

but there is a great similarity in the two schools of thought that binds them like blood brothers..

and makes them equally nasty.

They both think you are the author of your own misery.

You stupidly bought this all on yourself.

Its a myth that Psychoanalysis has you endlessly trawling through your childhood. You trawl endlessly through what you think is your childhood.

What you say can’t be true.

It’s a fantasy.

Likewise CBT, for less money and time to be sure, will flog you the same idea. You’re being irrational. What happened to you, or failed to happen to you, is irrelevant. Your belief systems are the problem.

You think wrong.

So there is a fundamental point of agreement behind all the sabre rattling.

The child you once were can’t be trusted.

What you say happened can’t be real.

And the reason these two factions are duking it out as front runners, despite their debasement of childhood and disregard for the unfolding soul of a person is because they mirror back to us our own prejudicial, narcissistic contempt for the innocent, for there being any meaning in life other than the treadmill of what car you drive, your next exotic location and that long unrealised bucket list threatening to choke of your windpipe.

”You can measure a society by the way it treats its weakest member.” M. Ghandi.

In our society the way we treat people who have been abused and neglected to the point of despair..

is not to believe them.

‘‘I was at last obliged to recognise these (abuses) had never taken place. They were only fantasies..’’ S. Freud.

and in the blue corner…

”People and things do not upset us, we upset ourselves by believing they upset us.” A. Ellis (father of CBT)

So if you have a problem with being abused/raped/neglected…..

that is your problem.

”We need to teach children how not to upset themselves.” ibid

The inner world of the child is no longer heeded. Of course, we say we are listening…

and we really are…

but we are not hearing.

And we have a good reason for not hearing.

It would interrupt the process of using children as repositories for all the foully perpertrated mank in our own lives….

that nobody heard..

or saw.

And so the imaginal space between adult and child becomes impoverished and tilled with alien seed.

An example will serve…

I spent weeks looking for an old fashioned bike pump for my boy. The shops don’t stock them anymore. Amazon won’t send you one unless you by something else with it. Eventually I ordered the nearest equivalent from a dealer over the phone.

Through wrapping that has you feeling it must be Christmas comes not a lowly bike pump but something Luke Skywalker might keep under his pillow, halfway between a dildo and an icepick.

With a little guagey bit because kids are too stupid to know when the job is done…

And a calisthenically approved, ergonomically designed, fold out handle that will break in a week,

but….

…specially for the young adolescent male (because girls don’t ride bikes) a name branded on the side to give everyone the impression that you are fleeing a horde of  angry, cuckolded barbarians.

Double action valve!

Such things are what Lacan calls ‘part-objects’, a term he borrowed and modified from Melanie Klien to indicate something that has a purpose or significance over and above its function…

the attribution of something unconscious to a person or thing that cannot be allowed into a narcissistic self-construct.

”drive material that has become radically lost in the real” Lacan.

The pump is not for the bike.

It is to contain, compensate and symbolise all the adventures, all the imaginitive time, all the garden frolics and muddy lanes, wet dogs, warm eyes, windy days, and hot chocolate with marshmellows that never happened, that are still in some cosmic suspended animation whilst we perfect being slave to the machine of  a depersonalised world in which children, and our own inner child, are seen and not heard.

 

 

 

Shadow of the Warrior King.

I went down to the shops for a loo roll and came back with half a sack of coal and a mandolin.

Life is random.

And barring emergencies, loo rolls can wait.

Too much order gets oppressive.

I know this because I’ve done Oppression to the max..

and carried a big gun…

and drove around in armoured trucks…

with big wheels..

and 4mm bullet proof glass over tiny little teensy weensy windows with a metal flap on a hinge you could lower over it for your additional comfort and security.

Martial law prevails. You are the law. You are the Warrior king.

And all you have to do to have all that power, is to oppress the creative spirit inside you that might come home with a mandolin.

You will be well compensated.

There will be no horror or regret…

afterwards..

and you know that sharing badges is greater than music and dancing…

but you will need a population of the not-so-special…

upon which to vent your hard on.

and shoulder any feelings of inferiority, of not being wanted…

any… niggles you might have…

We’re shown how to do this in a quaint rail spike of a story from the Old Testament, the story of Sodom and Gomorah. Its not just the prurient morality involved or the titillated fantasy more interested in what those people were up to exactly.

Nor is it the problem that Lot and his missus were allowed to escape simply on the basis of being family to Abraham who was negotiating the whole thing with God. Even though they were as guilty as those left behind to horribly die.

Nor even the dubious justice rendered on Lot’s wife who was killed as dead for an innocent glance as the rest for their supposed orgies of anal delight.

No, what gets me is Abraham’s lack of creative solutions.  He doesn’t opt to be the one good man. Man and God are both just going through the motions of trying to be fair, sending Abraham off on tours of fiendish scum he’s already decided to deal with in a very particular way once the PR visit is over and the cameramen gone home.

It’s a done deal..

just enough time for his sinful nephew and family to escape justice.

In order for Abraham to participate in the dark numen of the Warrior King he has to give up his mandolin, the creative inspiration that might save the day…

truth is, he prefers burning places down.

or, perhaps just watching.

And if he’d been some obscure, inconsequential chieftan in Outer Patagonia or some remote Pacific Island rather than the father of both Israel and Palestine I might not feel compelled to place some much needed context on a war that has been raging one way or another since that ancient time.

because his sons Isaac and Ishmael hated each other.

And it was his fault.

Over a hundred generations and their grandsons’ grandsons are ready for fresh bouts of  fraternal vengeance.

Three thousand years on…

Which makes Abraham’s lack of creative solutions a big deal.

The truth is he has a vested interest in Isaac and Ishmael being at each other’s throats.

His possession by the archetype of the Warrior King is inflating. He’s all the more prone to it because his ego has been weakened by the opportunity to regress by Yahweh. He has to undermine any alliance or friendship between the boys because he hasn’t sufficient faith in his own natural authority or belief that his sons would be loyal till death.

Abraham’s willingness to slit Isaac’s throat at Yahweh’s say so sends both boys a message about where they stand..

you can be slaughtered without notice at any time.

An’ Yahweh knows all about how Abraham is using his sons and fuelling their enmity for one another. How he keeps alive feelings of unworthiness that even the passage of centuries fail to heal so that his own unworthiness in amongst their effects can pass un-noticed.

An Yahweh say nuffin’.

And Yahweh sees Abraham put aside the spiritually motivated possibility of being ‘the one good man’ for Sodom and Gomorah, prefering instead unconsciousness and infant raging.

An Yahweh say nuffin’.

Because Abraham’s failings are in His Name.

A man who has not failed to notice that God can be manipulated..

and all it would cost him is his mandolin.

Everyone suffers.

Abe’s collusive relationship with God has a number of repercussions. He has to participate in the unconscious life of Yahweh who refuses to talk about his ex..

DON’T MENTION HER NAME..

… who was split into three and cast out. So it comes to him as fate instead in the shape of three wives who are divided by rank, age and cast.

destroying the containment of the women’s tent, of childhood and the rules of succession..

so that doubt and envy might pre-occupy the boys rather than their father’s crown.

Each believing that the other has their father’s love, that there must be some failing  in themselves, somehow, yet still run through with hateful jealousy of that which has to exist…

and therefor must be in the other’s filthy possession.

And what Isaac and Ishmael don’t realise is that they have both been manipulated and short changed.

Because anyone who can burn down a town rather than go live in it and bring out its best doesn’t have much time for kids.

When Agammenon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to Artemis for favourable winds to Troy, History gasps in horror at the loss of soul a man must suffer to be so possessed by the archetype of the Warrior King, to kill his own child for plunder.

And yet we’re quite happy to have as the prototypical king of our own marvellous civilisation someone who likes to watch towns burn and would slit his child’s throat…

for the plunder of God’s favour.

Today he would be incarcerated in deep lock up before you could say ‘satanic abuse…’

and yet he is our great prophet..

and theirs..

We faithful children of the Warrior King.

The Crane Wife.

There was a poor weaver who finally had so little that he could not even afford to buy thread for the loom. In despair he goes out into the woods to look for food where he finds an injured crane. He takes it home and nurses it back to health with what little he has left.

After he releases the crane, a woman appears at his doorstep with whom he falls in love and marries. His new wife offers to weave silk that they can sell at the market, but only if he agrees never to watch her at the loom.

The cloth is wonderous.

So they sell the mysterious silk at a great price and live a comfortable life. But he soon makes her weave more and more. The house rattles and shakes with the shuttling of the loom. He fails to notice his wife’s declining health. His greed increases. His curiosity and wanting…

to know..

get the better of him.

Eventually he peeks in to see what she is doing to make the amazing silk. He is shocked to find the crane plucking feathers from her own body and weaving them into the loom.

The crane, seeing him, flies away and never returns.

oops…

Like the western version of this story, ‘the Elves and the Shoemaker’, where the cobbler is likewise down to his last, at the end of his teather, but receives magical help from elves who make the finest shoes…

but make off when the people involved want to know to much.

Curiosity does not kill the cat.

Greed and narcissistic entitlement do that.

The weaver is not simply satisfying a whim, he’s betrayed a trust…

but why should the rule apply to him?

Narcissism is not at all the popularly construed puffing up of the ego, like some grandiose bag of wind though it can look like that..

Nature abhors a vacuum and what takes residence is not always home grown. We naturally take in the psychic undercurrents of family life along which pathways through the under-brush can run forced traffic.

This is why the term ‘Symbiotic Omnipotence’ (M. Kahn) is so useful in understanding narcissistic entitlement. The narcissist is one end of an invisible double act with an intrusive parent who trades off rental space in the child for the greater challenge of living their own life.

This smudgy ‘bond’ creates..

”an imbalance in the articulation  of the total ego-capacities. Mother’s selective sponsoring leads to (ego) retardation.” M. Kahn.

I an’ me not talking.

Jung gives the example of a girl from his village who became a prostitute. He knew the family scenario and helped her to see that she was living out the unconscious life of her profoundly prudish parents. She was being used as a vessel for the sexual shame in the family.

The girl got a a more ordinary job.

The internalised collusive parent lets us off the hook in respect of ordinary standards of behaviour. So the narcissist is really a kind of Gollem. Originally the Gollem were fashioned out of clay and made to do their master’s secret bidding. For all the cold clay of Narcissism the life being lived is not their own.

And so the peeking weaver is both above the law and a slave to the unmediated passions and restless spirits of a destiny not quite his own and out to spoil his experience.

He gets off lightly.

When Acteon  intrudes on Diana’s bath in Greek mythology she turns him into a stag and has his hounds tear him apart.

When Hippomenes ‘knows’ Atalanta in the sacred crypt the furious goddess Cybele..

”considered plunging both as they copulated into Styx, the tar pit of bubbling hell.

But that seemed insufficient to her.

Instead she dropped maned hides over their sweating backs. Hardened and hooked their clutching fingers into talons…

..their loathsome fangs obedient only to the bridle-bits of Cybele.” T Hughes.

Psyche fares slightly better when she intrudes upon the secret of Eros’ face whom she’s been forbidden to see.

Eros wakes from a wounding drop of hot oil from Psyche’s lamp and immediately leaves foreover…

a lover’s tiff that leads to much questing….

strangely rooted in the mud of betrayal and fear.

M L von Franz makes the brilliant observation that there is something lurking in all this, ‘wanting to know’.

”The real motive in this rational depreciation is fear.” M L von Franz.

And given all the gods and giant snakes and tentacled nightmares lurking in the  swamplands of  Psyche its hardly surprising..

In fact what do you expect…?

”Civilised man reacts to new ideas by errecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new.” CG Jung.

and the stab of fear is the challenge, not just to your pride but to your ontological security. The new thing does not just add to your house..

it can tear it down.

And so the weaver sabotages his own good fortune in order to be rid of the uncanny running through his life, the mysterious and unknowable Other.

Out of fear and inner poverty of spirit he resorts to action designed to depersonalise and diminish, rather than be humbled by gratitude. The peeking is a defensive means to an end.

”Enlightenment is a destructive process. It is a crumbling away of untruth, seeing through the facade of pretense, the eradication of everything we imagine to be true.” Adyashanti

To be attended by your creative muse is to be riddled with perplexity, chaos and unknowing.

It’ll be ok.

The house can be rebuilt.

 

Sweet Porridge.

Once upon a time there was a very poor mother and daughter. They were so poor that the only had the clothes on their backs and a tiny, ramshackle cottage with a leaky roof.

They were hungry aaal the time.

”Baby bawled for mama -skull savaged it,

Death-hunger anger, the kissless trap-clamp.” Ted Hughes.

One day all the mother could give the girl was a single dry biscuit.

”Make it last”, she said.

The girl went out into the forest to see what she could find. There she met a very  old lady with a knapsack who knew of her plight.

”I haven’t eaten for three days,” sighed the old lady. ”Do you have anything to eat?”

And so the girl gave her that one biscuit she had.

”Baby bawled for mama -skeleton skelped it,

Clash of crockery knuckles, the shatter bottle bones.” ibid

”That was very kind”, said the old lady, ”and now I’m going to give you something.” And out of her knapsack she pulled out a small iron pot.

”This is a magical pot. It won’t work for me but it will work for you,” she explained. ”When you want to eat, say…

”Little pot, cook!

”And when you’ve had enough, say…’

”Little pot, enough!”

So the girl rushes in with the pot to show her mother. She sets it on the kitchen table and says…

”Little pot, cook!”

And before you know it the pot has filled up with porridge.

”Baby bawled for Mama, grave grinned, gripped it,

windowgap teeth and a flagfloor tongue…” ibid

They had three bowls each.

‘Little pot, enough!”

And they were never hungry again.

Then one day, mother got a bit peckish while the girl was out at play and thought she’d have a bowl or two of porridge seeing as there was such an endless supply an’ all……

….though it took her a couple of goes to remember exactly what to say to the pot…

”Cook, little pot…”

”Porridge, pot…”

”Little pot, cook…”

And when she got it right the little pot duly obliged till she’d had her fill.

‘Stop, little pot…’

”Little pot, stop…’

”Cease and desist, oh pot…”

But the magic words weren’t right and the pot kept making porridge till it started to pour off the table and onto the floor..

”Stop it, pot…”

”Frickin hey, pot..”

”Mama came, with her bull nostrils

Mama came in the skin of a weasel..” ibid

But the pot kept making porridge. It filled the kitchen till the door squeezed off it’s hinges. It squidged the roof off. It poured out into the street and down the hill. It porridged everything.

The girl was coming up the hill and saw the terrible oaty flood, guessing immediatley what had happened..

”Little pot, enough!”

And so the little pot stopped making its porridge…

but not without considerable damage to..

everything.

In a culture where the divine feminine is repressed, relatedness in general and mothering in particular are going to become impoverished. Having had her own sacred bedrock eroded and devalued, mother has less to pass on to her daughter than she might…

precious little to nourish her spiritual life.

A single dry biscuit.

It’s not her fault.

The systematic, unrelenting depracation of the sacred feminine through untold generations takes its toll in every generation, compounded with time, lived out as an unnameable loss, a vague unease, a sense of not belonging, lack of worth and emotional deprivation.

Life unravels where it cannot unfurl.

We pride ourselves on how evolved we are, so much so that its almost counter-intuitive to suggest that ours is a culture wrung through with emotional deprivation. After all, we have everything. And yet one wonders whether this fixation on having to have everything is not part of the problem, our way of trying to deal with it.

Consumer society takes in more than it actually needs in response to a deep undercurrent in the psyche that remains unfed despite the gorging. Likewise, the compulsion to provide the next generation with over and above what they need is a poverty based gesture that attempts to compensate the loss of relatedness endemic in Single System systems…

We will go to extraordinary lengths to deny this..

”People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. …” CG Jung.

We also do this collectively. We do it with aggressive, vehement determination. Our collective inner poverty and emptiness are projected onto nations and peoples in much the same way as the individual narcissist will use those about him to emotionally feed from and into whom he will deposit his waste.

The deprived child needs others, not for companionship (for that ship has already sailed) but as carriers of unbearable anguish. He is pragmatic in his priorities. A culture imbued with the gnawing hunger of this inner poverty will resort to similar strategies. A container must be found and preferably held behind razor wire.

or a nice 6m stone wall….

Having to give up your biscuit is too much cognitive dissonance for the dominant myth of what a pinnacle we are. We split ourselves to deal with it…

schooled in double-think…

and so we’re perfectly happy with the paradox of invading people for their own good and actually need the contradictions of food mountains alongside starving millions in order to be reassured that the madness is really only happening to some one else…

in far far away land.

We bring nations to their knees, militarily and materially, for reasons far greater than stealing their grain store. Or doing the right thing. We create economic systems of recurring famine so that we can have entire peoples to shoulder the projection of our unacknowledged collective hungering.

It’s certainly true that..

”every gun that is made is theft from those that hunger…” D Eisenhower.

but the full irony is that we then point those guns precisely at the Hungry in order to compell them to continue shouldering the starving shadow of the West.

while we help them….

develop

with contracts to fund the infrastructure needed to maintain the poverty we are ostensibly alleviating…

but cannot for that would be to face it in ourselves. The heroine of our story faces the reality of her situation. Her single biscuit cannot be denied.

So the girl has to go into the forest to find something that will feed her.

”If we don’t have what we need from our parents it may be necessary to go to the Great Mother and the Great Father.” Sylvia Brinton Perera.

The daughter gets what she needs from her ancient heritage. It is often the case that deprivation and loss are initiators in life, dark pits that press the youth to brave the wild forest and discover the true extent of her own inner depths.

She meets the Great Mother who tests her to see if her heart is still in the right place despite all her trials and suffering, to make sure that she has not become overly bitter, grasping or turned to self-pity.

The gift of the biscuit is a form of self-sacrifice, a gesture that acknowledges there is more to life than the satisfaction of need . She gives herself in service to a higher principle. Not to mention a brush with death, that great quickener of consciousness….

Its a kindness that cannot go unrewarded. Honouring the deep psyche has a way of making it’s treasures available to us. When you stop trying to bend Life into some prescribed shape before agreeing to live it to the full….

Life loves you back.

The magic pot is a vessel of transformation. Raw and indigestible experience is cooked until it becomes edible and nourishing.

But its important to remember whose pot it is.

Like many a mother whose potential has been hobbled, whose opportunities have been curtailed, the mother in our story unwittingly lives out her forgotten hopes for redemption, her own wholeness, through her child.

Its understandable.

The child,

“will arouse certain longings in the adult … longings which relate to the unfulfilled desires and needs of those parts of the personality which have been blotted out..” CG Jung

The problem is greater than deprivation. Nature abhors a vacuum and tends to fill it with porridge.

Other people’s porridge.

With bull nostril and weasel skin.

”the disturbing forces that lie below the level of conscious adult life are intuited by the unconscious of the child and give rise to vague fears, apprrehensive fantasies and disturbing dreams.” F. Wickes

and its left to the child concerned to put an end to it….

”an irrevocable loss for no new and finer comradeship takes place of the outgrown one….” ibid

all of which means, perhaps, that the greatest thing we can do for our kids is to find our own porridge pot, to have gone looking in the woods ourselves and discovered meaning in life when they are not around.

The Magic Anthill.

I was once locked up in a Zambian jail for an irregularity in my passport, a stinking cell where three African brothers offered to share their single blanket and the newspaper sheets that served as their bed. I didn’t sleep a wink and as dawn broke I noticed a fourth man sitting apart from us. He had been utterly silent the whole night, curled into an upright foetal ball and balanced on his feet to avoid the cold floor. It was a posture that had the print of long practice stamped upon it.

I asked the others about him. In sufficient broken English to make himself understood one of the brothers explained to me that he had been here for many years. He tapped his temple meaningfully.

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Every day a family member dropped off a bag of peanuts and an orange for him at the charge desk. He received no visitors. No-one spoke to him. Even the brothers seemed to shun him. Over the several days that it took to negotiate my freedom I watched him carefully.

Initially I was afraid. After a while I got curious. He said nothing and rarely moved except to sun himself in the open corridor for the few hours of every day we were allowed out of our cell.
He’d perch himself in a corner, trousers rolled up, with his legs dangling out of the bars that ran down one side of the corridor. There he would meticulously shell his peanuts and build a perfect cone of the empty husks. He would attend to this in great detail, balancing each shell with great care.

If any shell tumbled down he’d retrieve and replace it with quiet urgency until the cone was complete. Then he would peel his orange. Each rind was used to decorate and surround the cone. Every last scrap of white pith was removed with infinite delicacy and used to crown his creation. Then he’d break open the orange with all the seriousness and ceremony of a priest presiding over communion.

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Each segment was savoured as if it was ambrosia. Deep pleasure and contentment etched his face as he lingered over every last morsel. When he was finished he leant his entire body against the bars of the prison in exhausted gratitude for several minutes before extracting an astonishingly clean handkerchief from an inner recess of his otherwise filthy clothes and carefully wiped the corners of his mouth. His sacrament was complete.

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On the third day, I was pacing up and down impatiently, waiting for word of my release. As I passed him he looked up at me with infinite kindness in his face and asked in impeccable English, ‘ Would you like a piece of my orange, Sir?’’

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How was it possible? This poor wretch had been imprisoned without charge in a filthy, stinking jail and yet he could still create his artistic cones and offer me some of his meagre rations with a loving smile! I was delighted but confused and humbled. He had evidently found something in his inner world to sustain him, something it would take me decades to discover myself.

Whilst we were all locked up for the remainder of the day I talked with the three brothers. The heat and stink was so great that we had to lay down on the floor to avoid it, noses to the crack under the door where a little fresh air blew in. We told stories to while away the hours. The one I remember best was a folk tale from that part of the world about a magic anthill, which the oldest brother told with theatrical embellishment, urged on and liberally corrected by the other two.

It concerned a young woman, Umushamwise, who refused all her father’s suggestions of marriage. One day as she was collecting water by the river a handsome stranger approached her. He was wounded and asked her to take him to her father’s house where he might rest and mend. She looked after him and gradually they fell in love.

The two were married and the young woman went with her new husband to his far off village as was the custom. Her younger sister was unhappy about this. She didn’t trust the handsome stanger and so she followed them, showing herself finally after the long journey.

Umushamwise was furious, especially whern she learned her reasons, but she was allowed to stay for the time being. Every day the husband went off and always returned with fresh meat. The young sister’s suspicions grew. One day she snuck after him and was shocked to see him climb up an anthill…

”find me fresh meat,’ he commanded.

The anthill magically took off across the open bush in pursuit of game. Even more amazingly the husband became transformed into a huge lion which easily pounced on his quarry.

The young sister rushed back and told Umushamwise the story but she didn’t believe her, scolding her for jealousy. That night the frightened youngster couldn’t sleep and so she was awake to hear the soft padding of great paws outside their hut in the graveyard hours. The lion/husband pushed the door open and was about to devour his bride when the girl let out a warning yell.

”What’s the matter?” asked the husband quickly resuming his human form.

‘Nothing, I just have a stone in my bed.’

Come morning she told Umushamwise what happened. Again she scolded her young sister, so the next night the resourceful youngster tied a thread to her older sister’s finger and when the lion/husband came in she tugged on it and Umushamwise woke up. Her screams chased the lion/husband away and they both fled into the night.

”What shall we do?” cried Umushamwise.

”I know”, said the girl and he rushed over to the magic anthill. ”Carry us home,” she commanded. And so the anthill took off leaving the lion/husband roaming the bush forever in search of them.

Over the years I have reflected upon how this story so well described how the other prisoner in our midst that day could maintain such dignity and how poetically it used cultural symbols to pinpoint the dangers of the creative process.

In order to live  creatively we must metaphorically leave home. Consciousness has to be greater than the product of mere collective ideals represented by Umushamwise’ father’s choice of suitors. She chooses the wounded stranger, the unknown inner man, the’ suffering servant’ which initiates consciousness on the path of individuation.

The creative possibility is now a real prospect though full of trepidation personified by the fretful young sister who fears for the heroine’s safety since ego consciousness is fragile and easily overwhelmed by the Unconscious.

The ambiguous nature of our creative impulses soon appears as the shapeshifting lion/husband who comes stealing into the hut at night.

”The sacred marriage is both desired and dreaded. From a distance it is the source of all yearning. But knocking at the door it is an object of terror.” E. Edinger.

Umushamwise is understandably reluctant to realise what she has let herself in for..

”Pray you never step upon the path, for once there you cannot get off.”Zen proverb.

Drawing upon the wellsprings of creativity deep in the Unconscious is a risky business and she has to become allies with her dark sister, her shadow, that follows her and tells her what she doesn’t want to hear in order to get out in one piece.

This encounter with the devouring aspect of the Unconscious personified by the lion/husband is a necessary precursor to the realisation of the creative self symbolised by the dynamic anthill. Ethologist Eugene Marais’ brilliant work, ‘the Soul of the White Ant’, observes that the Anthill is a single organism. As such it is,  like the Self,  unity in multiplicity, a paradox that requires the sisters be singing from the same hymn sheet in order not to be dismembered.

When threatened by unconscious forces…

”there is still something which can rescue one. The unconscious is not only chaos but also order…’ ML von Franz.

Speaking of the role played by the ants as agents of the Self in the story of Psyche and Eros von Franz says..

”The ants have mysterious unexplored qualities, they just collaborate.” ibid

but only in the wake of a brush with death.

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Creativity is not the same as making things. It is not even a precondition for it.
We confine creativity..

‘’to certain conventional areas of human endeavour, unconsciously assuming that any painter, any poet, any composer, was leading a creative life.’’Maslow 

It is not so. Nor is it so that anyone deprived of paint, clay, wood or ink cannot be creative.

The problem is that..

‘’he who begats something which is alive must dive down into the primeval depths in which the forces of life dwell. And when he rises to the surface there is a gleam of madness in his eyes because in those depths life lives cheek by jowl with death’’. W. Otto.

Creating is akin to dying.

‘’As often as life engenders itself anew, the wall which separates itself from death is momentarily destroyed.’’ (ibid).

The outer world is equally unforgiving. Creative people are invariably sanctioned for their pains, sometimes killed or imprisoned for their vision whether they be playing on the world stage like Ghandi, Kennedy and Mandela or like the nameless sage in an isolated jail who offered me some of his orange.

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If we are to remain truly creative we have to refrain from certainty and the illusion of ‘knowing’. Creativity requires the kind of tension between opposites that threaten to pull us apart like wild horses.

Creativity demands internal diversity, but identity depends upon our inner landscapes remaining fairly static. To be clear about who I am means to be one thing or another. To be neither is just a big mess, not to mention the brush with death that constitutes that first crack opening up between consciousness and its contents.

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The creative moment requires a letting go of the dominant way of knowing ourselves. It is “the ‘sacrificium’ ,

“Where everything is neither thinking, nor feeling, nor sensation, nor intuition. Something new comes up, a completely different and new attitude towards life.” von Franz.

And so, when you feel ‘stuck’, or have some frustrating creative block, you would do well to remind yourself that the lion/husband is breathing down your neck and that what will save the day is not more effort on your part but the shadow sister tugging on your finger.

Healing the Anxious Heart.

We live in what W.H. Auden calls, ‘the Age of Anxiety.’
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“We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.”  W.H. Auden.
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Like no other, our era is suffused with a nameless trepidation that trawls our inner landscapes…
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”like droves of cattle, like soldiers marching, or big flakes of foam on a flooded river pushing on through the brain.” P. Kennedy.
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It is also true that never has so much time and effort been spared to counteract anxiety. We spend billions on therapy and medication to little avail. In fact our efforts seem so fruitless that one cannot help but ponder at the possibility that our remedies are part of the problem.
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The fact is that…
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”nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to know.” Pema Chodron.
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Do we have something to learn from anxiety?
Could it be there for a reason?
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Our age is also one, as never before, that is rooted in material values and aspirations. We pursue comfort and security as if it were the Holy Grail. Our collective goals are not betterment or growth or being part of something, but relaxation, having the kind of life that has as the index of its success being able to lie by the pool.
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We work, not to contribute or to rise to a challenge, but so that we can be protected from tomorrow. Our hopes and dreams are circumscribed by palm trees, white sand and secure investments.
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We veiw pain and suffering as a malevolent force to be defended against at all costs, almost as if it were a sacred duty.
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This polarisation of life restricts us…
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”Consciousness must involve both pleasure and pain. The more we struggle for pleasure (only) the more we are actually killing what we love.” A. Watts.
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Because we can’t or won’t find meaning in anxiety, opting rather for the search and destroy scenario, so to are we compelled to eradicate the pleasures of life and fail to be replenished by them.
Wanting only half the pie we get none of it.
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The Western cult of consciousness leads us to believe that we really can have one without the other. We then suppress and project our anxiety onto unfortunate others, raising razor wire between our successful selves and those who seem to have lost their protective amulets. Like any projection, this exerts a fascination over us and so we sit compulsively glued to the endless newscasts depicting their misery.
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But anxiety is part of life. Material ruin, environmental disaster and the machinations of evil regimes are but a few of Anxiety’s playing fields.
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One of Nobel Prize winner A. Solzhenitsyn’s great insights is that blows of fate are not to be avoided or eschewed as meaningless. He refers to his own imprisonment as ‘concentrated living.’
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”It is extremely important to recognise that the uncontrollable caprice of fate await everyone. Illness, catastrophe, accidents and death are only another form of arrest, trial, prison and punishment camp.” A. Weatherall.
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The more we try to avoid it the worse it gets.
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”The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing.” A.Watts.
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Despite our antipathies Anxiety’s roots are given considerable room to spread from the very start of life in Western culture. The suppression of the Divine Feminine does more than undermine the inner life of women. It undermines us all.
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”In emotional development, the precursor of the mirror is the Mother’s face. What a child sees (there) is…. themselves. What she looks like is what baby takes itself for.” Whitmont
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Regardless of mother’s devotion to her baby, the deprivation of access to the sacred mysteries of her sex, the lived experience of the Great Mother, is bound to leave her inner life anxiously uprooted. These cracks in life’s mirror..
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”interrupt (baby’s) going-on-being and give rise to threats of annihilation.” D Winnicott.
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So we have more than our fair share of anxiety from the start. Yet even this is an Ariadne’s thread to return us to the truth of Christendom’s inner impoverishment and longing that is the legacy of the lost Goddess.
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Moreover, life really is short, nasty and brutish. Our fragility, impermanence and mortality is something to be anxious about. Those who are not anxious in the face of such ontological givens are either sages or psychopaths. The former are liberated only by the paradox of accepting anxiety for what it is and the latter are hardly role models.
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Our issue is not simply that we are suffused with anxiety and continuously at war with it but that..
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”we have forgotten how to be anxious about the right thing.” S Kierkegaard.
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After all,  there is a sense in which the unconscious holds us in the palm of its hand.
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”Something unknown is doing I don’t know what.” E. Ramirez.
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The cult of consciousness dismisses these archetypal stratae of the psyche at its anxious peril. Rather we ought…
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”to experience these forces anew and not wait for our moods, nervous states and delusions to make it clear in the most painful way that we are not masters of our own houses.” C.G. Jung
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Our situation is not unlike the protagonist in ‘the life of Pi’, who finds himself on a small boat with a tiger, except that in our case we never quite get around to really acknowledging the fact and only ever concede to catching the swish of its tail out of the corner of our eye, giving rise to nameless apprehension rather than awe and cautious wonder.
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”Heart, alone in the night, beat.
Beat for all you are worth.
Be the night’s pulse,
Be the blackbird about to sing.
Somewhere under the earth the waters break.” J. Moat