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The Gods, despite their weighty preoccupations, are not averse to a little domestic moonlighting…..

Eris, the Goddess of Strife, also called Discordia, is particularly easy to persuade to the table. But what is it that catches her attention sufficiently for it to feel like an invitation to join the party?

The clue is at the foot of the painting…

Two small children are playing the grand game of saving-what-you-love-most-about-dinner on the side of the plate until last; so the final mouthful is the most delicious. Mother puts a stop to all this nonsense by confiscating the treasured morsels. So the children begin to leave what they suddenly dislike about dinner on the side of their plate and have that confiscated instead..

The kids come out feeling on top and yet something really horrible is happening. Mother’s shaming is the insidious yet soul destroying expression of envy at their autonomous game, their shared delight. The shaming is dressed up as ‘discipline’ but actually says…How dare you have any imagination? Who are you to exercise any jurisdiction over your plate? You shall not savor, nor anticipate the delicious morsel.

Moreover, you are under scrutiny. Whatever you put in your mouth from one spoonful to the next will have penetrating and intrusive attention. All of which begins to make you feel that even though the food travels from pan to plate it never quite becomes yours. And if the food is not quite yours what about your place at the table?

This is all way too much to consider at the time. You mustn’t make sense of it or use your mind. It has to be packed away by the compensatory glee of beating Mother at her own game, having agreed to trade in delight for deception. You are left with the message, do not win, do not feast on the delicious morsel. Play the game of life but don’t get up on your hind legs and try to be a part of it.

In the process the delicious morsel is lost. In fact, to continue to identify with a mother who-knows-what’s-best the child must excise, confiscate and bin the shameful treasure wherever she finds it.

Children then grow up with the split reality of eat but don’t enjoy and win but don’t play. Their sense of self splits to accommodate all this. Different aspects of the self must forgo knowledge of one another. The jungle pathways between them become overgrown in order to remain unconflicted.

This is a problem. It means that your strategy for self preservation is to stem inner dialogue and renounce autonomy. What to do? The psyche attempts to cover it’s bets with a twofold cunning plan. Firstly, the endless repetition of ordinary pleasures denied, banging at the gate so that one day they can perhaps become conscious, like seeds in hope of fertile soil.

Secondly, the original feelings, though disconnected from their context, still serve somewhat to glue the fragments of self together whilst railroading the voice of authentic experience,..

”resorting to behaviors which evoke strong affects which can be identified with, thereby maintaining a sense of self.” Woods and Woods.

This means practicing the art of creating chaos out of whatever you can find to hand and upping the ante at every opportunity.

”Eris is only a little thing at the first, but thereafter grows until she strides on the earth with her head striking heaven.” Homer.

Curiously 20thC chaos theory echoes the metaphor with what is called ‘the butterfly effect’..

”Tiny errors in the measurement of the current weather do not stay tiny, but relentlessly increase in size each time they are fed back into the computer until they completely swamp predictions”. J Borwein.

Eris makes mountains out of mole hills.

This means life has to be lived with roller coaster intensity in order to be lived at all. Without the secure happiness of a pleasurable connection to the delicious morsel, you have to have wild rides, splintered experience and conflict instead.

Freud said..

”People tend to lose their neuroses in times of war”.

Conflict will evoke intense feelings to identify with as a matter of immediate survival. Nothing resolves separation anxiety better than sharing a trench with someone. Your feud with your neighbor will be eclipsed by something even more guaranteed to focus attention. Self preservation infers a self to preserve. Which means, unfortunately, that conflict may become necessary for the shamed child to feel alive.

In order for children to grow there has to be some ‘temenos’ or sacred space within which there can be the safe feeling of symbiotic attachment, where the enjoyment of imagination can be un-selfconsciously shared and made real, where the soul is refreshed and temporarily protected from the chaos beyond the enclosure.

This space..

”reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided.” T Moore.

In any such temenos there has to be the equivalent of a garden gate which both opens and closes, allowing traffic back and forth. If the gate is compromised or subject to shaming (here’s the key but you’re not entitled to it) then the child has to find her way over the hedge to get in and out.

This is bound to be a bit tricky…. though the puncture wounds endured in the process can become a way of knowing oneself in place of play and imagination, a rather specialized kind of survival strategy.

Greek philosopher Epicurus said that everyday pleasure is the greatest value. His was the spirituality of ordinary life. He called it ‘hedonism’, which originally meant to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world, and to limit one’s desires. Unfortunately, his ideas have suffered the same fate as the child whose simple joys got usurped by the substitute intensity of deception and revenge. 

For Epicurus, the most pleasant life is one where you can achieve an inner tranquility (ataraxia) by finding meaning in simple things, the delicious morsel of ordinary pleasure.

Hedonism today has come to mean the proxy pursuit of Intensity whose unconscious intention it is to plug the very gap where simple pleasures used to be. For the want of depth and sacredness in everyday life, moderate traffic through the garden gate, you are compelled to try and approximate it by going through the garden hedge instead.

In lieu of simple shared pleasures, playful imagination and the enchanted encounter of yours and mine, you have the intensity of being stretched between split realities, fending off blackthorn and bramble, like the drunk who drinks to drown the shame of being a drunk, the addict who lurches from hell to heaven and back again. The spouses whose make up sex needs a vicious fight to kick off with. So long as it’s intense the content doesn’t seem to matter too much, anything to relieve the anxiety of living in a divided world.

Being swung from one extreme to another by the need for opposition is home territory for Eris and her brother Ares, Greek God of War, who don’t really care whether they win their battles or not, so long as some dust is being raised at the time.

Ares relationship with his father, Zeus, was rooted in shame. When he comes home wounded from the Trojan war…..

Zeus, who gathers the clouds, spoke to him:
“Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar.
To me you are the most hateful of all gods who hold Olympus.

But were you born of some other god and proved so ruinous
long since you would have been dropped beneath the gods of the bright sky.”^[22]Homer’s Iliad.

The only redeeming thing about you is that you are my product. You do not belong to yourself. Nor do I love you for your own sake. We have no gated temenos. The threshold of simple shared pleasures that bind a soul to itself will never be yours.

Ares deteriorates, begins to hang out with some unsavory types. He’s difficult enough to be around on his own, but his borderline crew read like a check list from DSM-5 .

Besides Eris (Discord), impairment of interpersonal functioning, there is Deimos (Fear) with his unstable self image; Phobos, (Panic) with his frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment; Famine, chronic feelings of emptiness; and finally, Oblivion, poor impulse control.

This fractured crew symbolize the dissociative tendencies of autonomous defenses in the psyche when faced with parental shaming.

One thing you can be sure of…..

between them they will make short work of the delicious morsel.

It might seem like a bad idea to keep such company. There’s so much suffering involved and no sustenance to be had. But nobody said defense contractors have to be pretty, they just have to do their job, fending off the resurgent feelings of humiliation that surface with every bid for autonomy.

Such a life makes you resourceful, as Paris found out to his cost when Eris turns up to a wedding feast uninvited with a golden apple labelled ‘for the fairest’, compelling Paris to decide which one of three goddesses it should go to and hence what values he stood for.

”Borderlines are extraordinarily persistent and tenacious..” Woods and Woods.

So, all is not lost. There is more to the Eris/Ares gang than meets the eye. If they can be honored for the role they play in defense of the realm, despite the carnage left in their wake, then they begin to demonstrate different aspects of themselves. Hesiod says of Eris, once she’s been put in a better mood…,

‘‘She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbor, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbor vies with his neighbor. This Strife is wholesome for men.” Hesiod

Strife is also striving, making things happen, putting your shoulder to the wheel, doing what you must, gladly. Eris can impel soul searching and break molds like no other. She turns up on page one of many an heroic journey.

”I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free.” Principia Discordia

Appreciating why you might need to lurch from one crisis to another or sabotage intimacy at every turn is a form of compassion for oneself which can change the way Eris operates. When the feelings of being intruded upon can be anchored back to the circumstances that spawned them, shaming attacks demanding capitulation of autonomy, then Eris will manifest some mysterious morsels of her own..

‘‘the delicious contradiction – with orderly effects emerging out of turbulent and chaotic causes. J Borwein.

Below, a martial Cecilia Bartoli, gives voice to Eris’ redemption as an advocate for the shamed child and relief from unconscious tempests.

There is a strange story unfolding in the Sonoran desert, the hero of which is the Southern Grasshopper Mouse. Weighing in at under an ounce, it looks cute enough but is in fact, pound for pound, tougher than Wolverine…

and needs to be..

because the favorite breakfast of Onychomys Torridus, the Desert Claw, is the most poisonous scorpion in North America.

The Arizona Bark Scorpion hospitalizes thousands of people every year. It was responsible for 800 deaths in Mexico during a peak period in the eighties. You froth at the mouth, convulse and die.

The scorpion’s Latin name gives more clues, Centruroides Sculpturatus, pointed tail with toxins that may as well be coming at you like a two inch stone chisel driven by a four pound lump hammer.

It ought to make short work of any mouse whose body weight is several thousand times less than even a small human. Just a scratch should kill it instantly. The mouse piles in for the feast regardless. It may not even defend itself from the scorpion’s tail. When it inevitably gets stung something amazing happens. A protein built into the mouse’s nerve cells not only blocks the toxin, it converts it into analgesic. The mouse endures a moment of pain but not enough to put it off its meal let alone kill it.

The scorpion loses every time.

What do you think it might be like to neutralize and turn into medicine toxic situations that you otherwise can only avoid or be poisoned by? There’s a deep poetic metaphor in there somewhere but for the moment I feel more enamored with the trixy question of how the mouse managed to develop such bio-chemical ninja skills in the first place.

Evolution, as we are taught it, requires random changes in genetic markers plus a process of selection to evaluate these chance occurrences one way or another. In other words, Nature is reactive.

The main sticking point with the negative stimulus argument is that you have to survive the encounter in order to adapt to it…. a fact that limits the evolutionary dance of Torridus to two equally unlikely alternatives.

Either the mice are genetically disposed to immunity, ie, by the strangest quirk of fate they just happened to randomly develop ahead of time the precise amino acid required to ‘build’ into their acetylcholine receptors giving them a thousand fold immunity to toxins they had as yet never met, but are now curiously just across the way.

Or, the grasshopper mouse population decided that the meager pickings of the desert was just their cup of tea and exposure to lethal toxins was an environmental hazard they would simply have to negotiate along the way. ie venom which will put a seriously crimp in the chances of you passing on your last will and testament let alone your genes.

A third alternative, that an arms race in bio-chemical warfare has been ongoing since time immemorial with each party slowly developing its arsenal has a certain poetic ring to it, undermined by the single salient fact that the scorpion was a desert killing machine before the mouse even existed. Scorpions as we know them were doing their thing 430 million years ago in the Silurian period. A mouse that was not also a rat is only 33 million years old. The Scorpion poison was perfected before the mice ever emerged.

So, at one time Point-Tail-of-Stone-Chisel and Desert Claw did not share territory. Then they did. For Torridus to survive the encounter he would either have to chance his paw and get himself killed again and again before defenses could ever be created let alone passed on to healthy babies, sacrificing generations of mice to attain the final vintage of biochemical Reserve needed to survive dinner..

or Nature simply handed it out, as and when it was needed, just as any good Mother would, ahead of the meal.

Either way it’s a miracle.

In darkest Herefordshire there is an old Victorian bridge over a small branch line of the county railway. On either side of the narrow track are rows of formidable spikes to deter you from leaping into the path of the 9.30 from Hay-on-Wye. But evidently someone had given it a go and caused enough mischief to warrant the spikes being carefully boxed up with wooden planks to make sure no further harm was caused.

These, of course, were immediately clambered upon by grateful youth, endangering their innocent if foolish lives. The hazard was resolved by placing an even more scary row of spikes on top of the box sections thus returning to the original dilemma of what to do about the perilous points.

There’s nothing more likely to drive you crazy than trying to make sense of that which will not. You try nevertheless, impelled by curiosity and the need to find meaning in contradiction no matter how split the fabric of reality.

Specially designed to curdle your neurons is the idea that the Industrial Revolution was going to free us from the shackles of work alongside what has actually happened which is that we are wage slaves as never before. Instead of the Elysian fields we have the dark flowering of Karoshi, overwork death.

In 2016, Japan had 2,000 work related suicides. Their government resolved to cap overtime to try and stem the flood. Some companies, notably Apple’s Foxconn, has adopted a more hands on approach, eliciting signed pledges not to top themselves from prospective workers and installing safety nets to catch dissatisfied jumpers, which is very kind of them but hardly addresses the problem.

If you were a worker there, would you feel comforted by the new nets? Would you feel emotionally supported by your employer? Would the nets motivate sufficient loyalty to embrace your fourteen hour day? Or would you be wondering what kind of godforsaken life it must be where the only thing worse than the prospect of killing yourself is that you cannot?

The West is in little better shape. The economic costs of work related stress to Britain last year was £6.5 billion, dwarfed by the US with a wopping $190 billion, nearly 10% of spending on health care.

So the kind of government you have doesn’t seem to be a factor. Something else is making lemmings of us all and it is this….when the divine feminine is marginalized, it doesn’t matter if you are in New York, Moscow or Tokyo at the time, the Universe suddenly becomes conditional. Your worth has to be confirmed daily, your appreciation constantly expressed, your faith demonstrated in real time with feats of endurance and self-sacrifice.

When the warrior/king commands consciousness all on his own he becomes petulant and unbearable. Working to live becomes living to work, everything becomes a treadmill, even leisure, food, sex. Gone is the sense of life being for its own sake, the valued other, the wayside flower….

which is why it was such a joy to see Nancy Pelosi accepting the Speaker’s gavel amidst a gaggle of bouncing kids, choosing to stand there as Mother and Grandmother as well as politician, reminding us what work is for, not as an end in itself by which all your worth will subsequently be measured, but by virtue of your stewardship and connection with one another.