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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.

A young Prince and his trusty Servant set out to seek their fortune. At night they come to a hut in the woods. A young girl invites them in but warns them Grandma is a Witch so don’t, you know, touch anything.

Grandma is very polite and tends the Prince with all kinds of goodies which he wisely refuses and so they make it through the night. At dawn, as the Prince rides off, the Witch comes hurrying out and grabs a hold of the Servant who is still adjusting his saddle, forcing into his hand a foaming vial of something vile….

If you stick your tongue out in Tibet you’re being ever so polite by demonstrating that you are not the incarnation of a wicked ninth century king, Lang Darma, who had a black tongue. If you stick your tongue out in the West you’re being rude or suggestive.

The reason you take instant like or dislikes to other folk is because their gestures say everything about them. The eyes are windows of the soul because the look which goes with the gesture speaks volumes in spite of whatever else you might be saying at the time.

Language is to gesture what pink mayonnaise is to lobster thermidor. And if the mayo is slightly off all kinds of strange taste sensations will ensue.

”Give this to your master,” insists the Witch, thrusting the horrible brew at the Servant. He accidentally spills it on his horse which promptly dies a terrible death. Panic stricken he runs off to tell his master what has happened. When they return to retrieve the saddle a raven is pecking at the dead horse. The servant grabs the bird to make a broth for their dinner and gives it to the innkeeper to prepare at the next tavern they find.

When what’s being said and what’s being done are out of whack dissonance is created. Strangely, whether we are damaged by it or can have a good belly laugh at events seems to depend on where you are in the room at the time. When the dissonance is on stage and declaring itself, it’s hilarious. When its hidden in the wings, it’s poison.

Little did our heroes realize that this tavern was a secret den of a dozen cut-throats who then capture them and steal their dinner whilst dreaming up fancy deaths for the unfortunate pair. Luckily, the poisoned horse poisoned the bird, which now poisones the thieves and all twelve keel over before ever even getting around to pudding.

When dissonance is named it’s fun. When it’s hidden, it’s a killer. When someone is visible with their idiosyncrasies it’s disarming, when they act them out it’s dismembering.

Comedian Rodney Dangerfield made his career out of juxtaposing mafioso hard man with eternal anxious tie smoothing. Ronnie Corbet made his out of being a small man in a big chair. Sarah Bernhardt exploits the mismatch of being utterly vulnerable yet totally street wise. Homer Simpson is the confident fool.

Though the dissonance is unexpected it’s upfront and happening to someone else. There are several degrees of protection. When the dissonance is concealed or denied it becomes poison because you must forgo the integrity of your own vantage point and bend yourself out of shape to accommodate it. This destroys our connection to the natural world and our instinctual selves represented by the poisoned horse.

In the next town the motif of the Evil Witch has evolved somewhat into Wicked Queen, thanks to the Prince and his servant managing to stay alive, even if only by a happy fault. This Queen is still pretty toxic but she is at least willing to negotiate and offers her hand in marriage to anyone who has a riddle she cannot solve. If she can answer it you get to be boiled alive and eaten. At least there are rules.

The Prince asks, ‘What killed none yet killed twelve?”

She can’t get the answer, so she steals into his room at night hoping he will betray himself in his sleep. The Prince is waiting for her and tells her the secret whilst quietly hiding her cloak. She is too excited to notice the loss and next day claims to have discovered the answer. The Prince responds by telling everyone what happened, producing the cloak as proof, and so her game is up.

Deception loses its power as soon as it is shown the light of day.

A riddle is a puzzle that has to be solved not by cleverness or guile but by insight, not by additional information but by shifting your mind set. Riddle and poison come together in our world with the perplexing dissonance of why it is that we pollute the air we breath, the food we eat, the water we drink. Like a riddle, it doesn’t seem to make sense. It seems impossible to get your head around the murky dissonance of planetary destruction in the name of progress.

As with the Queen’s secret deceit, there is something still unstated in the mix which stops us collectively acting upon what we know.

The clue is in the kind of reality created by toxic dissonance, the double message of, ‘make yourself comfy while I brew up a nice cup of venom’. The mind set of a split reality does more than live happily with contradiction. The world itself is split. There is the world in which I am a gracious host and then another in which I want to kill you; and never the twain shall meet.

We escape feelings of dissonance…

“by splitting the contradictory feelings so that one person is only loved, another one only hated … the good mother and the wicked stepmother in fairy tales”. Melanie Klien

A two tier society pretending to be democracy is a terrible toxic riddle. When we split humanity into Us and Them, we also split the world into ‘our world’ and ‘their world’. If the toxins we create pollute the earth, it doesn’t matter, so long as it’s not my bit of it. As soon as it is a l’autre cote de la riviere, it ceases to exist.

This attitude mirrors the individual defenses of early childhood in which baby has had to lodge its unwanted toxins in another, from which it may then be split off so as never to have to deal with them. It becomes someone else’s problem despite sharing the same roof.

This defensive capacity to split reality so that discordant truths can continue to co-exist but without jarring entails toxins from my world being exported into yours.

The riddle, ‘what is it that destroys its nest in the name of self interest?’ has, as its answer, not Homo Imbecelicus, who is too dumb not to shit on his own doorstep but Homo Discordus who is under the delusion he’s crapping on someone else’s.

The petrochemical chief exec is not polluting his rivers. He is polluting yours. You might think your river and his river are the same thing. You could draw attention to the fact they are named the same and run through the same country… but split reality chews logic for breakfast. Its your river and your problem.

So we’ll put the pipe line through the Indian reservation because that’s not God’s Green Earth. It’s in the alternate reality of alternate facts. And therefor not my problem.

When the fragile narcissist gets super insecure it’s not enough to be designating shithole countries, whole nations to dissociate from, as if they exists in some faraway nebula. The weakest leadership requires more than scapegoating to cohere. One’s own members must be attacked and made Other.

Whilst its comforting to be able to export plastic recycling to Bangladesh for child slaves to pick through, it’s less effort to identify the Them within and just go dump it on their block, even if their block is in your town. Splitting is like that, you feel safe on a sinking ship just because your bit of it is still dry.

The fracking debacle at Flint has left that town without water. Stokes County in North Carolina reports cancer clusters in proximity to coal ash ponds. Residents of Vicente Rivera in California have recently been exposed to Pyrifos after a mandarin grove was sprayed with the insecticide. The skies over north Dakota are black with natural gas flares that no longer require regulation.

What do all these places have in common? They are home to Them. They are Hispanic, Black, Indigenous communities. Sixty eight percent of African Americans live within thirty miles of a power station. The pipeline at Standing Rock was pushed ahead not because of sovereign right but precisely because of the tacit understanding that the land is Indian and can therefor be polluted with impunity in what can only be described as environmental racism.

Of course there is some splash back. White kids drink Aspartame just as much as black kids and Fukushima salmon aren’t fussy about whose table they land on. But that doesn’t matter either because the next generation are also Them.

At one time our world was also theirs. One day son, all this will be yours. It doesn’t seem to work like that anymore. The alienation required to make dust bowls of other lands has made deserts within our own just as the disaffection necessary to starve children half a world away has consequences for the emotional nourishment of those you tuck in at night.

”You say you love your children above all else yet you are stealing their future. Our biosphere is being destroyed so that rich people can live in luxury. If the solutions are so impossible to find maybe we should change the system itself.” Greta Thunberg (16)

We are used to individual instances of parents ‘dumping’ emotional toxins on their kids. This is increasingly assuming collective expression and is being acted out on a grand scale. After all, what are we destroying if not their legacy?

What makes us turn on our own? Why would we trash our own garden and grain store? It is the fact of our children that makes us custodians of the land. If we behave to the contrary what does that imply about our commitment to future generations?

So there is some toxic contract in these collective family dynamics. The clue to unpicking the riddle is in what’s shared between the next generation and the minority or indigenous group; which is that they are close to Nature, a world of primal unity against which consumer culture has not only set Itself apart, having put aside childish things, but also secretly envies and yearns for, enough to want to spoil everyone else’s tomorrow.

When I was first in therapy I was telling my analyst about my father’s recent marriage to his third wife. He stopped me in mid sentence…

‘your father’s what?’

…marriage..

‘you said ‘funeral’,….’

a slip of the tongue, the tail end of murderous rage I was quite unaware of until it found its own way into our conversation.

‘I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.’  F. O’Connor.

The ‘talking cure’ is rooted in this intimate relationship between self-expression and consciousness. This is true even more so for the expression of feelings… which is why personal breakthroughs are invariably associated with the catharsis of some forbidden emotion.

For consciousness to amount to anything it has to be shared.

‘I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.’  Black Elk.

The best way to shut people up and prevent awareness is to make sharing a sin. Most obvious is sexual sharing. But the embargo on freedom of expression runs through Western Civilization way deeper than who you can or cannot fuck..Sin is generally perceived as being about morality and being good but in fact its about daring to be conscious. Even God’s casting of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the land of blissful ignorance, is not for disobeying but for having the courage to be awake..

‘Behold, man is become one of us, to know good and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand and….eat, and live forever, therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden.’ Genesis 3;22.

Given that this is true, could it be that the so called Deadly Sins have to do with consciousness rather than morality? And if so, consciousness of what?.When we look at these sins….Wrath; Greed; Gluttony; Sloth; Lust; Pride; Envy… they seem ‘bad’, and yet if you look at them with an unjaundiced eye, as symptoms of something, you can’t help but notice the similarity that these symptoms have with something all too familiar to the consulting room of psychotherapists everywhere..

the post traumatic effect of Maternal Deprivation..

and not of your personal mother but of the Great Mother, the Principle of Relatedness, the Divine Feminine….whose influence the church is a great deal more concerned about than any of your idiocyncratic shenanigins. Which is why Sloth only latterly booted out Sadness from its millenial place on the List, just in time for the Industrial revolution..

Being good members of the flock means suppressing not just the memory of the Great Mother but more importantly the feelings of loss that accompany Her banishment..It’s not enough to eradicate Her from memory…

DON’T SPEAK HER NAME…….

neither must we collectively name the emotional wounds we are left with generations later, much as an individual child might make her vulnerability and loss at mother’s absence into ‘bad’ emotions and demonized longing, acting out the wish to be filled up and held in-arms with a substitute paradise of drug addiction, materialism or narcissistic entitlement..To ensure that the feelings of abandonment and loss are not discussed and thereby bought more firmly into consciousness, they are made into taboos which entrench repression.. 

John Bowlby ( Attachment and Loss. 1950) observes that the first stage of maternal deprivation gives rise to protest…WRATH… .and the assumption that someone else must have mummy….ENVY….prolonged absence creates terrible inner hungering….GREED….which the child tries to remedy itself…GLUTTONY… .or symbolizes the connection back to mother with sexual longing…LUST…Eventually the child begins to despair but tries to cover it over with a compensatory superiority….PRIDE….and finally falls into detachment and affectionless psychopathy…SLOTH…..

‘The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.’  J. Jaynes.

The great irony of the Age of Communication is that we have stopped talking to one another. Collectively we are in the stage of maternal deprivation that Bowlby calls, ‘detachment’. We are detached from one another, from ourselves, from the world, from our dreams and inner life..

”When we are cut off from the fulfillment of our basic needs we seek out substitutes to temporarily ease the longing. Bereft of connection to nature, connection to community, intimacy, meaningful self-expression, ensouled dwellings and built environment, spiritual connection, and the feeling of belonging, lots of us over-consume, overeat, over-shop, and over-accumulate.” Charles Eisenstein.

Even our vaunted sciences are rooted in separation and division..Newton saw the Universe as a machine… not a living organism. Darwin developed the notion of constant competition, a vision of Nature red in tooth and claw. Freud declared that we are without soul, as much a bundle of conflicts and strife on the inside as the natural world was assumed to be on the outside..

What science ‘discovered’ was the underbelly of its own belief system projected into the world that then allowed us all to rest easy with our loss but at the price of being forever plagued by the spectre of ‘deadly sin’, a price that has left Western Civilization apathetic and depressed..

“Young children, who for whatever reason are deprived of the continuous care and attention of a mother or a substitute-mother, are not only temporarily disturbed by such deprivation, but may in some cases suffer long-term effectsJ. Bowlby.

2,000 years worth of long term effects……

‘From the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.’ N. Chomsky..

Like orphans who assume they must have sinned terribly for mummy to have gone away without actually having to feel Her absence…..and so we are compelled to take in Mother Earth by way of enactment, by the plunder and rape of the Planet, by the ravaging consumption of the Self, rather than by conscious acts of devotion known to those from whom we have descended in more ways than one..

“Our Savior is our True Mother, in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.” Julian of Norwich 

The danger for us all in the era of Trump is not confined to his actions. It is that once he’s gone we’ll all be too busy dancing in the streets to  understand that he was not some aberration but the inevitable outcome of any culture rooted in collective deprivation. Never has it been so blatant that what the leader of the free world needs is a good Momming, without which everyone else’s life continues to hang in the balance.