Too Much Stuff.

Part of the problem with the phenomena of hoarding, now deemed to affect one in five people, (the other four are collectors) is that we want to fix it before knowing what it is. Being righteousness about someone’s plastic Santa collection might seem like trying-to-help but it’s still like sinking in chocolate truffle, tasty and feeling good… but you’re not going anywhere.

“How often do we leap ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.” Thomas Moore.

Psychology Today recently ran an article on hoarding that identified some of the symptoms and causes. It was scary enough to send me scuttling off to check on my sweet wrapper collection because nowhere in the entire article was there any reference to meaning.

It’s certainly true that hoarding is an attempt to insulate oneself from stress, which leads to isolation and thence to even more stress. But such a vicious circle is not dissolved by willful efforts to de-clutter.

It is also true that…

‘trying to be happy by accumulating possessions is like trying to satisfy hunger by taping sandwiches all over your body,’ George Carlin

Yet this ‘neurotic solution’ still manages to keep the sandwiches within arms reach until such a time when the anxiety of being fed might be addressed. You’ll get some funny looks, more of the same judgement which makes progress impossible, but its important to leave the sandwiches where they are and take the time to ponder them, as would a naturalist observing some curious trait in the animal kingdom.

All this sandwich taping is way more common than you think. It is even promoted as a social value. We are taught from an early age to acquire and display. Success itself is measured by how much more you have than you need.

In the old days only the poor were mad. The wealthy were simply eccentric. Its still true. The little old lady with forty cats gets sneered at whilst the little old man with forty Bentleys is someone to emulate. You could say that the lower income hoarder is faithfully living out an ideal despite their lack of resources. They too are projecting their inner world onto matter which must then be painstakingly collected up and preserved.

When I was a kid I got sent to a boarding school in a war zone. There were grenade screens on the windows, terrorist drills and rifle practice after class, but the worst threat was from within, endemic sexual abuse, total loss of any privacy nor any scrap of protection from institutionalized bullying.

One day I found a lost cricket ball in some bushes. I grabbed it and ran around to the back of the house where I buried it in a sand bucket. I didn’t play cricket. I had no use for the cricket ball and never went back to dig it up. Yet somehow what I had done soothed me. When times were particularly tough I would comfort myself with the thought of the buried ball. Thinking about it could smooth a path to untroubled sleep.

It was only decades later that I understood the significance of these events. In ancient times warriors might ‘bury’ their hearts before battle as a way of both summoning courage and preserving themselves from impending onslaught. This ritual gesture meant some essential center was kept hidden and protected from the clang of conflict. Some crucial aspect of self got to transcend trauma and violence.

My own instincts for preservation had resorted to symbolic gesture and a form of magical thinking in order to manage an unmanageable situation. And it had worked, though making sense of it all afterwards involved fresh appreciation of just what I was going through at the time that made such dreamlike action necessary.

While we are shaking our heads at the bag lady piling up newspapers she does not need and will never read, most of aspire to the kind of wealth we likewise do not need and will never use, an ideal promoted by our government that has more bombs that it will ever need…. but may still use.

You may not have twenty five dinner sets, just in case, but still fantasize about having the wherewithal to do so, just in case.

The hoarder may not have the material resources to amass more wealth or power or property but still remains true to the ideals of consumerism pumped into them since childhood. You can pursue your used magazine collection with all the gusto of your fellow hungry ghosts on Wall st, back issues of Hello! working just as well to fill the bottomless pit as Stocks and Bonds i.e. not very well.

So, in order to avoid hypocrisy, it would be better to say that the spiritual emptiness and emotional hungering that prompt the hoarding reflex are the defining support struts of our consumer society. We find different ways to fill up emptiness depending on available resources and personal idiosyncrasy and these need exploring as you would a dream, so that the conflation of spirit and matter can be gently unpicked.

When the master says,’ Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’ he’s drawing our attention to how easy it is to confuse things you’d think were easy to tell apart. In fact the sacred and the profane are easily conflated, a process recognizable by the fascinations it produces. We get fixated upon stuff because it’s glowing with some value/worth in addition to what it is in-itself.

Sometimes what has to be projected is worthlessness. The strategy, however, remains the same; even if the focus has shifted to all the symbolic odds and ends no-one wants, or the yesterday’s news a person might secretly believe themselves to be.

The popular conception is that hoarders are just greedy and controlling. The common or garden expression of this is that they are tight arsed and obstinate. It’s expressed in Freud’s psychoanalytic literature as ‘anal fixation’. Either way the emphasis is on blaming the person concerned rather than the interactions in the family which might give rise to anxious loss of control.

Many post-Freudians follow this pattern of holding the child responsible for their difficulties. Some talk about primal fault or primal defects. Erikson shifts the emphasis a bit and talks about autonomy vs shame and doubt. He describes the controlling consequences of not-enough-interaction, but also winds up blaming the victim with the indirect yet additional shaming of their ‘failure to achieve play satiation.’

What gets forgotten is that the hoarding reflex originates at a time when discrepancies between disgust and praise are accompanied by the use of transitional objects to manage the growing gap between me and not-me. If there is excessive anxiety about being allowed to exist in one’s own right rather than as an extension of Mother then the need for transitional objects will assume some unusual contours.

This is bound to be further compounded by the collective consideration that we have no divine mother. If individuals respond to maternal uncertainty with frantic efforts to fill their emptiness with stuff, how shall an entire Culture respond to the utter loss of the Great Mother?

The Swedes have a saying, ‘he who buys what he does not need, steals from himself,’ which begs the question of how anyone might learn something so artful. The answer is, by example. They have already been robbed; of their connection to Nature, the sacred Temenos of the Great Mother’s lap, the shame free prospect of Unconditional Being.

I once saw a wounded baboon trying to pack his gaping belly with sticks and grass. Anything he could find was stuffed into the open laceration. When the goddess is cast out we all behave like wounded animals, stuffing our evisceration with dirt and leaves. You might shake your head at the futility of it all, but the instinctive efforts to stem terminal bleeding-out dies harder than logic and rational argument.

The Roots of Confidence.

Three brothers set out into the world to seek their fortune. The two older ones are arrogant and mean. They shame the youngest for not yet having a trade and try to make him stay home. The boy reasons to himself that there must be some luck in this venture, for where else is it to come from?

So he tags along,

‘and went forth as though the whole world was his.’ Grimm’s

In the neighboring country a Princess has announced she will marry any man who can answer her riddle.

‘I have two types of hair on my head, what color is it?’

The two older brothers with understandings so fine they could be threaded on a needle, decide to have a go.

err, black and white… like salt and pepper.

err, um, red and brown… like my Dad’s jacket….

You just know they are both wrong. Then the youngest steps boldly forward, announcing….

‘The Princess has a hair of silver and one of gold upon her head…’

for what else could grace a Princess, right?

At which the Princess nearly passes out because that is indeed her secret, though she recovers quickly saying he must spend a night in the dungeon with a ravenous bear before their wedding, hoping he’ll be promptly eaten up.

The boy is delighted.

‘Boldly ventured is half won,’ he says. The guards drag him down, down, down endless stone steps to the deepest dungeon and throw him in. The bear leaps to his feet slavering at the prospect of dinner but the boy sits quietly, speaking softly…

‘as if he had no anxiety in the world,’ ibid

He begins to crack some nuts he has in his pocket. The bear thinks some nuts might make a tasty hors d’ouvre and asks for a few. The boy craftily gives him pebbles and while the bear is trying in vain to open them he pulls out a fiddle from under his coat and begins to play something softly to himself.

The bear is so taken by the music he begins to dance. Then he asks if he might have a go himself though his claws are awful long for fiddling, so the boy kindly offers to put his paws in a vice so as to trim them but suddenly grew very tired and lay down to sleep since he had such a long day ahead of him tomorrow….

What is this boy’s secret? How does he make his way through the world so easily?

There is a clue at the beginning of the story. He doesn’t have a trade. Metaphorically, he is still open to life’s possibilities. He hasn’t boxed himself in with fine opinions. The older brothers have already decided who they are and what the world is made of so they cannot really think on their feet. Their amassed understandings have cost them their spontaneity, their authenticity and most of all their charity. And so their answers are wrong before they are even out of their mouths.

This anxious need to identify oneself without equivocation is endemic in our society. If you go out to dinner or to a party everyone asks each another, ‘what do you do?’ It’s sacrilege to hesitate despite the impact that identifying with this transient role has on Being, whose wisdom is then reduced to a pile of facts you might spend your life heaping up like autumn leaves.

The boy has yet to be seduced into trading in his soul for some flashy yet static persona, as fine and worthy as it might be. When he speaks, he still does so from the lap of the Great Mother and so his confidence and intuition remain intact.

The older lads feel that they, like Kipling, have had to put aside the archaic childlike things of life now that they are men and so have truncated psychic life. The younger one still has a sense of continuity with the world which informs his intuitive response to the Princess’ riddle.

Fortune favors the brave because the brave have placed their trust in something greater than themselves. They are sufficiently connected to the well springs of life to be guided by them. Our hero’s response to the riddle is as much in stepping-boldly-forth as it is in any verbal cleverness.

The answer to the Zen koan is in the meter, the tone, the cadence of the words rather than in the words themselves. When the master says, ‘those who have ears, let them hear!’ he’s not referring to the words involved but to the way in which they are uttered.

A Zen master has two pupils. He asks one, ‘what is the secret of life?’ ‘The flames in the fire,’ replies the novice. ‘Very good’, says the master turning to the second, ‘What is the secret of life?’ ‘The flames in the fire, master’, replies the second. ‘Dunderhead!’ responds the master.

Our hero’s unadorned tone rings like a bell. He has refrained from narrowing himself down and so he can bend with whatever the Universe presents him. With the Princess he is forward and bold. With the bear he is soft and quiet. His absent minded nibbling on the nuts and quietly playing music to himself creates sufficient space to safely engage this dangerous aspect of the unconscious.

Not having to be this or that means life can be entered into without conditions. It interrupts the compulsive heaping up of knowledge leaves which will keep blowing around the garden at the slightest breeze.

Like the older brothers we Westerners have become excessively sophisticated. We know everything about nothing and so cannot respond to the riddles of life. Sophistication always has an axe to grind, a point to prove. It rests too much upon others as guarantors of existence which makes life conditional. It’s like driving around in the same gear without reference to the road. This creates isolation, drains authenticity, stymies joy and meaning…

and fucks up your engine.

I met an acquaintance in the woods at dusk. He is a man who shakes sophistication from his sleeves, always keen to impress upon others the great bunch of things he is certain about. The moon was rising, huge and pendulous through winter’s trees. I exclaimed out loud how beautiful it was to which he replied, ‘You are so lucky to live on the hill, not like me in the stupid village.’

It took me a while to digest what he had said. Apart from the obvious, which was that we were in neither his home nor mine, what he seemed to be communicating was that he simply couldn’t connect with the moment and had to thrust forward any excuse he could find, even a ridiculous one, to justify it. Though, by implication, I could see the moon from where I was housed, but he could not. His sophistication had alienated him from life’s simple joys and left him feeling like a victim.

Here was a man so decided in his convictions, so certain of being gobbled up by the bear that it had obliged him without delay. Despite his sophistication he was neurotic and miserable, unable to entertain simple pleasures or see the beauty of life, even when it rose up on its hind legs in front of him.

Much of our rapacious consumption has to do with the bottomless pit we open up in ourselves when we identify with the topmost levels of the psyche. When our own primal depths remain unacknowledged, they swallow us up.

What constitutes confidence needs to be re-imagined. It cannot be in either our accomplishments or our noble intentions, in the amassing of things or the heaping up of information. Its not about ‘more’ of anything, but about reconnecting with something we mostly see fit to disdain, what connects us to one another, to the planet, to the Ground of Being.

Gestures of Becoming.

In Africa, where I was raised, it can be a bit awkward bumping into folk you don’t know in the middle of the bush. Spirits frequent such lonely places and people can be affected by them, so you’d do well giving everyone a wide berth. Just in case. Who knows what medicine they might be concocting?

Which is just quaint superstition, right?

‘Every civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.’ CG Jung

There’s a lonely country lane I take between isolated villages in rural Devon where I now live. Along the way is a farm complex converted into holiday lets. Within striding distance of these buildings, I encounter this archaic man on a regular basis, not as an individual but as a species; members of which doubtless lived in very different parts of the country and have no knowledge of one another, yet behave as if enacting the secret rites of some esoteric society.

Had you simply been driving by, you’d hardly notice the sight of a lone man taking an early morning stroll in the country. It wouldn’t be in the least bit remarkable. People go for walks all the time, especially holiday makers for whom the country stroll is obligatory fare.

But if you saw a thousand men, a different one every day, all along the same ecological niche, wearing the same anxious yet expectant faces, you’d begin to notice the patterns and subtleties, just as you would variants of Raven’s call if you hang out with him long enough.

Each man could have no inkling of the one preceding him, nor of the one who would be trudging the same route next week as farm guests came and went. Yet they were like peas in a pod, these men-of-a-certain-age, straddling that uncomfortable hiatus between keeping fit and staying active.

Wordsworth said of his endless questing across the Yorkshire moors that no man does such a thing without being in search of something. These men seemed to have come to this lonesome spot for the same reason. They were intently looking for something, even if it could not be articulated, searching for some quality of spirit to inform and give meaning to anemic lives bled dry of communion with Nature.

To that end special new trainers were required, preferably bright enough to rival Hermes’ winged sandals, all violent oranges and powder blue, but with traditional Barbours and flat caps or shooting hats to present their country credentials, done without swagger, competence having lost its novelty, omnipotence renounced, the socket still raw from bloody extraction.

These were men who had thrown out their old gods, to quote Nietzsche, but ‘had no new ones in swaddling clothes’, men all making the same primal gesture, embracing some measure of life’s solitude so as to cross one of her more obscure thresholds.

Each one had stolen from their bed at daybreak, bid their other half a muffled something and slipped out into the dawn with all the quiet excitement of being upon the trail of some sacred treasure.

And so, to a man, there was no roadside bonhomie. They were all in ritual space, shielded from the world by some invisible veil, acknowledgement limited to a raised hand without eye contact intruding into sacred precepts.

The gestural significance of such an existential mile is easy to dismiss. It’s just a walk down the lane, right? But when you see there is a particular contemplative gait that goes with it, a whole bunch of guidelines for dress code, special rules for interaction and the pervasive aura of rapt attention with each and every one, you begin to understand something words can scarcely approach; they were no less marvelous in their display than birds of paradise, no less mysterious than the cracking of chrysalis.

For some reason such gestures are like Heineken, they refresh the parts words cannot reach. We think of gesture as being a kind of adjunct to language but actually it’s the other way around. Words are garnish. You can have a whole plate full and still feel hungry. You can spend half a lifetime trying to figure it all out with words before discovering that the transformation is in the tone, the gesture, the lonesome yet heartfelt unknowing of an existential mile.

When I first came to Devon I would joke that the locals might accept you on the face of it but would ship your bones to the border once you died. Then I realized I was just as prejudiced myself. I regarded them as uneducated peasants compared to whom I was infinitely superior. So I felt stuck for years because my direction lay not in becoming more refined but in accepting my own unvarnished, salty self.

Of course, words matter. The truth of this is currently being tested with the question of whether Trump’s admission to NBC’s Lester Holt, that he fired Comey over the Russia investigation, will have political consequences for him.

But where being together really gets tested is in our actual demeanor to one another, who you are before you open your mouth, shown to me recently by my mechanic who I’d asked about somewhere to get a hot cup of something whilst I waited for him to fix my truck.

Oh yes, he nodded, and while his accent was so thick I couldn’t get a word of it, he indicated with his circled hands, thumbs and fingertips barely able to touch one another in their efforts to contain the sumptuous pudding cake I was sure to find down in the village, even tipping his hands towards me to better admire the imagined feast that would surely be mine before long.

If you ask an indigenous African for directions and he likes the look of you, your destination will always be gestured as close by, just around the corner or over the hill, a symbolic equation being made between his regard for you and the subsequent ease of passage evoked on your behalf with a laconic wave of the hand. If he doesn’t like you, it will be ‘kutchana‘, far away, hand and arm arching waaay over the horizon, even if your goal is within plain sight.

My mechanic and I were no different, the delicious treat I would soon enjoy was his own warm regard; and it was not simply that pretense can be dropped without tragic consequences but that the space then be filled with something more fundamental, something which just wells up by itself once you’ve gotten sufficiently out of the way. Strangely, it seems you have not to know what you are looking for to find it and stranger still, learn how to be with others by treading your own existential mile.

Beyond Conflict.

One of the best ways of getting to sleep is to ask yourself a really profound question. The deeper the better. Dropping such a stone into the Well of Night is a torment to already reluctant Goblins who down tools in protest at all this pre-frontal cortex overtime which is a great help in nodding off. Turn your profundity over in your hand as if it were The Precious, next thing you know it’s morning and you need to pee.

Last night’s was the charm. ‘What is the most significant thing anyone ever said to me?’ A few pretenders threw their hats into the ring but I was suddenly way too tired to pay them any mind.

To have the desired effect you need fresh questions on a regular basis, otherwise the Goblins keep working and you’ll be up all night. Sometimes you can’t think of a good one, a nice juicy one to provoke the Goblin’s strike, but these musings work just as well and many a peaceful night’s sleep may be entered into on the magic carpet of wondering hard about what to wonder hard about.

Next morning though, it came to me. The most significant thing that any one ever said to me was after a session with my analyst, Chuck, who was also a gifted potter. He was seeing me to the door. In the hallway there was a magnificent example of his work. I asked him quite casually how he managed the inevitable desires to become rich and famous which must ride in on the back of such craftsmanship. His answer rang in me like a bell. ‘I tip my hat to them.’

The Zen quality of Chuck’s attitude towards the shadowy, grasping aspect of human nature seems to me the encapsulation of enlightened action. He really had found a mid way between the extremes, being neither enamored nor repelled by wealth and fame.

Non-attachment isn’t about separating yourself from the world, about getting rid of or overcoming anything. Unfortunately much popular psychology is steeped in the notion that people have to be fixed, made better, panel beaten back into normality. Ironically, inner conflict is bound to result from such partisan affiliation, from identifying with some narrow band of the psyche at the expense of all the others.

”You can have it any color you like so long as its black.” H. Ford.

When life’s other hues are relegated to the Underworld out of the need to present a particular face to Others, you visit a world of hurt upon yourself. The consistent view, the tried and true, the default position; none of these chime well with immediate life, the fresh possibility striving to outgrow yesterday’s mold.

”There is as much suffering derived from our resistance to circumstance as from the circumstances themselves.” M. Israel.

Though we are largely free from the tyrannical hold Church had over the hearts and minds of it’s Flock in times past, we still seem to be in the business of trying to divide Good from Evil and fighting the good fight. Today’s demons are Anxiety and Depression which we combat no less than Knights of Old, wielding Prosac and Chlorpromazine in place of sword and lance.

But change never occurs on the back of such a combative attitude. In fact it makes it worse, entrenching inner conflict for which some new medication will soon become necessary….

‘What you resist, persists.’ S. Freud.

If you want to grow, you have to lower your weapon. People tend to think of their demons as the problem, but its the desire to be rid of them which actually causes the greater part of suffering because their strategy is rooted in rejection of experience and internal division. This then lends said demons with sharper horns and pointier tails.

The fears we have about entertaining our own alienated self is poetically expressed by the issues surrounding the US southern border wall. There is a strong feeling that unless there is an impenetrable barrier then there will simply be chaos, civilization as we know it will end, overrun by murderers and rapists.

The reality on the ground is very different as is often the case when the axe you are busy grinding can be put aside for a moment.

In the apocryphal Essene Gospel of Peace the Master says to the afflicted,

‘ Satan torments you thus because you do not pay to him his tribute. You torment him with hunger and so in his agony he torments you.’

What this means is that resolving inner conflict entails having a position slightly outside it, one that refrains from overly taking sides so that identity is not entirely wrapped up in it, just as a child may develop a relationship with Daddy without it having to cost him his relationship with Mummy.

‘The greatest and most important problems of life can never be solved, but only outgrown.” C. G. Jung

‘Trying-to-resolve’ is actually a form of throwing yourself back in the fray. It’s the wish to fix so that the issue will go away. It’s wanting to grow whilst sedimenting self construct and most destructively, identifying with the conflict itself.

But you are curious, you want answers; yet if the quest for knowledge is tinged with wanting dominion over it, wanting to feel secure, wanting to be free of the tension, then the spirituality used to counter materialism becomes yet another form of obsessive nut-gathering and covert inner warfare.

‘To solve a problem is to kill it.’ E.F. Schumacher

An old Jewish fable attributed to Rabbi Haim of Romshishok tells the story of the difference between Heaven and Hell. They are actually the same place but in Hell the long spoons at the dining table mean that no-one can get the food to their mouths and so all are wailing and moaning. In Heaven the people are feeding Each Other.

The difference is Relatedness, which seems to be in such short supply these days that the British even have a Minister of Loneliness, Tracey Crouch, who has given teary eyed speeches vowing ‘to tackle the scourge of isolation’, using the same vanquishing language of conflict that creates isolation in the first place, rather than examining the ways in which we refuse to feed one another.

Generally this must involve a confession of some kind. Not the pill box variety, just the heart felt ‘bloody hell’ of realizing just how much you with-hold from yourself and others which then exacerbates conflict and its symptom, isolation.

Of course it takes a long time to get so poised that you can tip your hat to the devil with the confidence that such a gesture immunizes you from the worst of his effects. There are bound to be more clumsy efforts. But you have to start somewhere.

So next time you find something lurking in the lower corridors of the Psyche, refrain from running it through with your mighty weapon. Try tipping your hat and introduce yourself nicely. Ask after its name. Make it a cup of tea. Find out where it comes from and where it is headed. Swop baby pictures, take some selfies. You’ll part on better terms.

The Miraculous Mouse.

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.

From Eden to Overwork Death.

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.

Toxins and Riddles.

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.

The Secret Masochist.


An arrogant young man gets on a train and sits opposite a little old lady. He begins to regal the carriage with his opinions, takes up everyone’s personal space, endless showing off. He gets off at the next stop but as the doors close the old lady opens a window and shouts out, ‘you left something behind!”. By now he’s running next to the carriage with his arms out, perplexity written across his face. ‘what is it, what did I leave?”

” A very poor impression…” she retorts, just as he runs out of platform.

There is really no such thing as a sadist or a masochist. Search and you can’t find one. Sado-masochism is a polarized continuum, like manic-depression, a kind of sliding between extreme states in order to know who you are, necessitated by narcissistic fragility and emptiness.

Narcissists tend to hide their unconscious masochism behind a front of cruel superiority. Sometimes this masochism has covert expression. Like toadying to Russians, or the ‘look what they done to us’ behind MAGA. Sometimes its done inadvertently by creating the conditions for perpetual investigation; and sometimes it just pops right out like the compulsive laying claim to government shut down. ‘I will take the blame, give me the mantle.”

The Sado-masochistic enactment unfolding on Pennsylvania avenue seems to be getting to the short strokes. Aided by the prophylactic restraint of seventeen strapping investigations…

Donald is finally going to cum.

Former US federal prosecutor Paul Butler recently described Trump as being ‘double teamed’ by the Mueller probe and the SDNY investigations. This image, now indelibly lodged in imagination, brought not a single blush to the cheeks of assembled MSNBC pundits whose blithe acceptance of such a metaphor suggests something a lot stranger than Russian collusion or Fraud is going on in the White House…

the unfolding sado-masochistic component of Narcissism.

Trump has the trade mark ‘big ego’ of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The irony is it’s lack of a healthy ego that’s the problem. The ego is full of gaps. There are sections of it you can drive sheep through. Its like having a claim that’s only marked off by corner posts, one of which has been eaten by a bear.

One solution is to identify with the bear. Your personal space is immediately cubed. Nothing can take you down. Bear is untroubled by life’s contradictions. Berries and Elk are all the same. You can just shamble on regardless.

Unfortunately, you might then need the world’s greatest ever shafting to be restored to more appropriately human proportions, a process that initially unfolds as the sado-masochistic tryst of Me and Not-me, the hell of Other People, the horror of realizing you are not the only one in the room.

You’d hope such developmental needs get resolved with incremental frustration of the toddler concerned. If not, the need for containment will find a more problematic expression. Whilst it may be colorful there is a small problem with this arrangement. Someone always has to get shamed.

Even when you are being praised.

Trump couldn’t help himself on his recent visit to troops in Iraq. The only way he could find to honor their service was, ‘you are no longer the suckers of the world.’ You try to be happy about that but somehow can’t quite summon the strength.

Words matter because they create consciousness. Abracadabra. That which I speak, becomes. If you ask an eight year old on Christmas Eve if they still believe in Santa you are sadistically calling her world into doubt.

If you lack the basic internal cohesion required not to blow a Christmas media event for kids by casting aspersions on the existence of the main event, then the sadism is not just gratuitous, it states your values. Its like wearing a ‘blame it on the badger’ t-shirt to an animal rights meet.

Such behavior would not be tolerated round the household dinner table let alone by the leader of the free world and the reason is that kids and impressionable folk take their example from you, Donny.

In fact the bench mark of Democracy is not just that your job is the highest in the land but that every kid that ever there was secretly aspires to be you, to have power and authority..

and to use it for good..

but how the fuck can they when every example they are given entails someone being screwed over? I pummel the Other into the ground therefor I am. WTF?

What on earth must you be compensating for to want to put kids in cages? What ghosts must haunt you to justify it with the paranoid delusion that they ‘harbor’ disease? Not that some are sick and need your help but that they sneak in armed with it, all sheltered and weaponized.

When an innocent child, fleeing for his life from situations others cannot even acknowledge, let alone survive, is then so failed by the hero he hoped would save him that he dies from sadistic neglect, you send a message. It is not a message of deterrence. Numbers are up. But it is a message of How-to-Be, delivered into the living rooms of every family in the Nation and around the world.

And finally, mounted on top of the heinous betrayal of that poor boy’s faith, a faith he held for hundreds of miles of weary trudging towards the fabled arms of safety, is the cowardly insinuation from Nielsen’s report making this not only his own fault but on account of his malign ‘harbouring’, as though he was some kind of gook whose evil plan backfired.

as though their not giving a shit constituted counterintelligence.

When a person in high office stoops to such gaslighting the moral being created is way beyond giving permission to hold office without embodying it in any way shape or form. It’s not simply the absence of something, a lack of care, or the failure of empathy.

Nor should we limit ourselves to Adam Serwer’s excellent u-tube blog that cruelty is something Trump has elevated to political virtue.

This boy’s death sets the bar of what it means to be human at a new low. Suddenly, all our lives are cheaper; contaminated, not by diseased migrants but by the malignant use of an Office to which the Nation looks for guidance, finding at bottom only the secret puerile need to be sent to the naughty corner so that he can get through another day without medication.


Despair and the Wall of Cheese.

In a world increasingly characterized by communications technology it might seem counter intuitive to question the centrality of language to dialogue. They seem synonymous.

But language is not necessarily the main factor or even a central factor in meaningful conversation. Whilst we are listening to the words we are paying even more attention to gesture, expression, tone, disposition.

When a gap opens up between what people say and how they behave its uncomfortable because the words no longer feel real, which means you in turn are not quite real. What we think of as ‘respect’ largely has to do with this consistency between word and deed.

If not, then what’s lost is way more than integrity or trust. Everyone touched by it has to split themselves to accommodate the unreality.

When I was a kid I once saw my father place his hand on my mother’s shoulder during an apparently innocuous conversation. Her involuntary response was a shudder of disgust, a gesture more impactful than a beating. What I thought was real was not. What shall one do, other than silently embark on a career of unreality?.

Years later I was stood in the queue at the library wanting a copy of the Writers and Artists’ Yearbook. The Librarian was a very attractive woman I was doing my best not to notice, especially on account of a gaggle of old ladies nearby that seemed to evoke my punitive mother complex, preserved from growing a full set of horns by the single strand of virtue that I was at least a clean boy.

So I got to the desk and blurted, ‘ah yes, can I have a copy of the Writers and Arse tits yearbook?….

It’s even more embarrassing and unreal when the split between persona and shadow happens at a collective level. Yesterday, two hours before the American government was shut down by a White House tantrum, a Senate Committee was called to an emergency meeting..

To avert the crisis..?

To take remedial measures?

No, to pass into law ‘The Curd Act’, which will tell you, or actually, stop telling you what is and is not in cheese. I curd you not.

”I’ve seen some surreal things around Capitol Hill, but this is really something. Vital parts of our government are about to shut down and the Republicans have called an emergency meeting on cheese.. Has anyone considered how ridiculous this is?’, Sen Jim McGovern (D)

Merry Cheesemess.

In part of the discussion that then followed, chair Pete Sessions (R) reassured the anxious committee that he was not talking about a wall of cheese. This was an important matter.. He read it in a newspaper.

‘I have the awesome responsibility to pass this important legislation… I’m not talking about a wall of cheese. It’s important. This committee handles important things.’ Sen Pete Sessions.

And yes, its laughable.. if it were not so tragic. The problem is that it doesn’t stop at being mad. It is maddening. You can’t witness such shit without going a bit crazy yourself. It’s contagious.

The fallout from Narcissism’s failure to tie up words and deeds goes beyond private embarrassment or collective absurdity. Everyone in the mix gets depersonalized.

This is why keeping your word is synonymous with honour. The congruence of word and deed, doing what you say, is about more than reliability.. It gives the other a sense of their own substance.

Your congruence places ground beneath the feet of others.

When society places a premium on image and takes its PR efforts for reality, rewarding Narcissism, success at any price, is going to have ramifications for the mental health of the next generation.

Normally we think of child abuse as being about concrete stuff that happens in real time, traumatic happenings you can at least still point to. What of Life’s non events, the trauma of things that fail to occur? What of the silent schism that opens up in a child when she is not allowed to inform herself of what she already knows, that Mother is depressed but pretends otherwise and so she has to join her, so as not to know what she knows..

As Narcissism succeeds in its project to make real that which is not, it has the effect of denying the autonomous reality of everyone in the frame which is so witholding it can rob you of the will to live.

US mental health experts determine that one in five children suffer from a diagnosable mental, emotional or behavioural disorder. Only one in five of those will be helped. Suicide rates among teens are at a forty year high and for the first time greater than homicide stats. Rural areas worst affected have the highest populations of Indigenous people among whom teen suicides have exploded.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/kids-health/generation-risk-america-s-youngest-facing-mental-health-crisis-n827836?icid=related&fbclid=IwAR0w1MahcEZGF6RN-mrF2470cnS-U54v5QOASr-885ZEPRyttIoDPETcDUo

You might cite economic hardship but the principle factor is shame, shame at being marginalized but also the shame of being repeatedly deceived, of word and deed not adding up and the liquifaction of the ground beneath your feet this then creates… We white folks broke every single treaty we ever made with the Indigenous world and in so doing broke trust with the natural world wherein childhood also lives. Such speaking with forked tongue does more than steal the land, it also steals the soul and contaminates legacy.

Maybe it seems like it’s not such a big deal when words no longer matter, when the rules arbitrarily apply, when sincerity is optional. The end justifies the means and anyway I’m doing all this for you, baby..

But what we do to Others we do to ourselves and to our Own.

If the world you want to create costs you your integrity how shall your children live there?


How we Heal.

Whether or not suffering may be redeemed largely depends on how you think it’s supposed to happen.

The traditional idea of a cure seems to have been bent out of shape. It carries connotations of illness and disease, plus the idea that it can be fixed, a notion only a step away from driving out demons. More liberal notions of healing still tend to conjure the idea that it is something that can be dispensed, the starched white coat or the ecclesiastical frock simply traded in for a mystical cape and just the right incantation.

I feel your pain…

All of which begs the question of how therapy might work and why it’s worth you spending a small fortune on someone you never met in lieu of bread and beer..

How would it be if we considered what ails you, not as sickness, or as a source of shame and failing, or the irredeemable horrors of the past, as a kind of cramp? The kind of cramp anyone is bound to get when you go adventuring. One that need not necessarily require either medication, holy cures or making better?

If we think of syndromes and disorders in terms of particular kinds of cramp then we might approach therapy with less toolkit and more wintergreen.

Physical cramp wants massage, time, hydration and electrolytic supplementation. Metaphorical cramps need the same, in a suitably symbolic way.

First your psychic cramp needs the massage of sympathetic warmth and genuine interest. The cramp wants being paid attention to and taken seriously. It hurts like hell. You have to give the cramp time and space whilst safely hydrating it with the waters of the Unconscious, dreams, fantasies, and imagination that seeks out the sacred in ordinary life.

‘The main problem with life’s conundrums is that we do not bring to them enough imagination.’ T. Moore.

Jung observes that when the cramp is particularly severe..

”often only the hands are capable of fantasy, they model or draw figures that are sometimes quite foreign to the conscious mind.”

The need for electrolytes is a delicious metaphor.

Electrolytes are chemicals that form electrically charged particles (ions) in body fluids. These ions carry the electrical energy necessary for many functions, including muscle contractions and transmission of nerve impulses.

So what they do is facilitate our capacity to respond. They allow information to flow. If information does not flow in the psyche it gets cramp. I wonder if paranoia, besides having historical roots in a childhood and something to be paranoid about, is not also exacerbated by a restricted flow of information, like an inner disjointed and stilted dinner conversation of folk who don’t get on and won’t share what they know.

If something unknown is doing I don’t know what, then you will have plenty to be paranoid about…

Electrolytes are like pathfinders, connecting up disparate parts of ourselves so they can begin to speak to each other, creating the kind of internal dialogue needed for reflection between I and me. I once asked a colleague who specialized in working with manic-depression how he went about it. He replied, ‘When they are depressed I remind them of their energy and enthusiasm. When they are delirious and excitable I remind them of how shitty life can be.’

In the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece, as the initiates were reaching the ecstatic climax of their initiation, a dark cloaked figure would walk among the participants whispering quietly, ‘you’re going to die…’

Electrolytes prevent cramp by virtue of both positive and negative ions being present. There has to be a charge, some psychic tension, some sense of the interplay between different and even opposing forces in order for different parts of the whole to share their stories. Being ‘positive’ is a recipe for disaster. Half the soul gets cut away in the name of what’s best for you.

There’s no better recipe for depression than homogenization, presenting the same groundhog face to the world day after day where blended conformity becomes bland sustenance and finally, blunt instrument.

Thomas Szasz reminds us that the mind is not a noun but a verb, more of an activity than an actor. Without lubrication this activity cramps and has to resort to ‘proto-language’, ie symptoms, in order to catch our attention. Proto-language is cramped communication, having to rely on early modes of interaction that seem like madness but are actually de-contextualized pre-verbal gesture.

Szasz makes the further point that much of what we call madness is rooted in being deceived. When children are lied to the real self is cramped by the contrary injunctions to stand by one’s own experience vs the instinct to swallow parental directives as gospel..

In his ‘Etiology of Hysteria’, Freud the younger, yet to renounce his unpopular views of 1896 in favor of the later drive conflict theory in 1905, says that the damaging seal set on abuse, particularly sexual abuse, is by virtue of its subsequent denial and having to invalidate one’s own experience.

The child has to twist herself out of shape in order to amend her own reality.  Restricted access to the truth means the pathways it follows become shut down and overgrown. Opening that traffic back up means truth telling and entertaining the dawning distress of trauma over the masking discomfiture of psychic cramp.

When external constraint has to be internalized as self-restriction, cramp ensues. Our movements are suddenly no longer our own. Borders have to be either narcissisticaly walled off or indiscriminately thrown open, leading to either blockage or invasive borderline chaos in the psyche’s body politic.

What this means for therapy is that specialized cleverness and mantles of office are really quite secondary to paying attention, creating space and being respectfully patient.

”If attention is directed to the unconscious, it will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water.” CG Jung

Cures are contingent on curiosity, healing upon the restoration of untended inner pathways and vocation upon the agonized calling out to the Other that draws attention to the fact you’re running on empty.