The Spirit in Matter.

Animism, the belief that Nature is sentient and that material things contains spirits, is mostly considered a quaint footnote of Anthropology by Church and Science alike. Something our foolish ancestors and merely primitive people believe in. Little might any inter galactic tourist imagine the extent to which such beliefs pervade modern life and among the very people who consider themselves to have evolved beyond such apparent nonsense.

As a student I was invited not to return to lectures by a Great Professor whose scoffing at the Hunter-gather’s totemic world drew my attention to the Gucci suit he was wearing and the Mercedes key fob in clear view atop his mighty desk. I made the grievous error of asking if these were not also totems whose meaning, unlike our ancestors, we fail to recognize or have simply forgotten…

Despite pretensions to the contrary, modernity contains just the same degree of magical thinking as it ever did. Evolution builds on what went before. Previous adaptations are the basement of Being. You can’t discard them any more than you could tear out the foundations of a building or heroically leave your childhood behind.

One of the defining characteristics of our age, difficult as it is to see the wood for the trees, is a disdaining identification with the top most levels of the Psyche. We’ve made a cult of Veneer. Which means that the innate propensity for magical thinking, the conflation of spirit and matter, slips its leash and happens without you noticing, making a deity of Bling instead.

The hold that money has over our imaginations is perhaps the most generic and pervasive example of the way in which we create symbolic equations between spirit and matter. We do more than expect money to make us happy. We stake our worth and meaning on it, pursuing it as if it were a holy Grail containing the promise of redemption and do so with all the anxiety of one who has indeed just lodged their essence in something beyond influence.

The deBeers Diamond Company made a fortune out of our hidden but all to human animistic soul. Some bright spark in marketing came up with the idea that if diamonds could be symbolically equated with eternal love and made a fixture of a sacred marital vow then everyone would have to buy their stuff.

Prior to the 1930’s diamonds were a strictly luxury item whose inflated price could only be maintained by holding back reserves that might otherwise flood the market. Ad men N.W. Ayer and Son found a market for the stones de Beers couldn’t sell. Their aggressive campaign took advantage of the one thing designed to put a diamond into every household whilst maintaining its mystery and the myth of its rarity, they equated it with Eternity, wherein all anxiety of separation and death is laid to rest.

Stuff as Symbol is an important part of growing up. The transitional objects of bear and doll in early childhood are necessary to manage separation anxiety and signals the development of symbol formation, part of whose function is to manage change whilst preserving a sense of object constancy..

Thereafter the capacity of things to embody and represent other things helps us to cross life’s thresholds. When my son was making the transition into his teens he spent hours whittling precious lumps of wood with which he decorated the hearth. He spent hours carving and smoothing. These sacred bits of wood were deeply significant to him, like aboriginal soul stones, which gave him belonging, gravitas, space.

The equation between spirit and matter is not only common, it can assume some very specific and intricate meanings. My favorite example is the mythology surrounding pirate ear-rings, which, to those in the know, signified much more than ornament.

The tradition was that the gold ring in your ear would pay the price of your funeral. The fact that this so rarely occurred, pirates generally dying either at sea or upon the gallows, invites closer inspection.

What the gold hoop says is that I have mates who I can trust and will do right by me. Its a mark of Belonging, of collective identity, which also serves not just as payment in the event of death but as a defense against death itself, useful in the piratical business. The ring is a statement of confidence that you will not be lost at sea and that you’ll die sufficiently in one piece to be buried at all; that it will somehow be quiet and dignified with both the wood and the time for coffin making, that you will be neither sluiced from the quater-deck nor tossed over the side..

a sentiment somewhat betrayed by the brief eulogy traditionally afforded piratical demise..

‘One and the body, the body I say. Two, shall be cast, shall be cast away. Three.. and into the sea, the sea, into the sea goes he..’

Such projections into matter are not merely defensive. The psyche often  discovers the incipient stirrings of nascent consciousness in the worldly garb of either fascination or disgust, which, with time, may be realized as having more to do with oneself than circumstance suggests.

This is the meaning behind alchemical gold. The old alchemists understood that the ancient Sanskrit maxim, ‘Tat twam Asi, (‘thou art that’) meant the outer physical events they were exploring were reflections of inner processes. The base elements they sought to transform were elements of their own psyche. They knew their work was symbolic and in pursuit of inner treasure.

‘Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi.’ (Our gold is not the ordinary kind.)

 Often this confusion of inner and outer is most keenly felt in relationships. We confuse lovers with angels, spouses with parents, opponents with the devil, migrants with inner impoverishment. We attribute public figures with the power to redeem our lives. Irvin Yalom even gave that one a name.. ‘the fantasy of the ultimate rescuer’. Someone, somewhere has the power to save me from my situation.

Such projections are useful despite the mess they can get us into because they afford us a glimpse into the inner world otherwise hidden from view. Nature abhors a vacuum..

‘ It is as if the investigator’s own psychic background were mirrored in the darkness. What he sees in matter are qualities and potential meanings which are chiefly the data of his own unconscious.’ C. G. Jung.

Modern psychotherapy makes use of this phenomenon, taking the raw elements of experience and fantasy, the ‘massa confusa’ and giving them  context so that transformation can take place. My analyst used to describe paranoia, of which I had plenty, as a feeling searching for its home.

So projection doesn’t deserve such poor press. It can be useful. Sometimes it’s the way ‘in’. Marie Louise von Franz went so far as to say that the projection of ‘healer’ onto another can often yield results even whilst the projection is in place. You know from your own experience how everything in life feels resolved when you are in love, that you suddenly have more vitality and drive. You ‘glow’ with life, even though the beloved is condensed into a flawed and all too human vessel which can only temporarily contain it..

We encounter ourselves in the world, in other people, in concrete situations and sometimes just in concrete. We do this as a prelude to the disruptive experience of ushering emergent aspects of Self across the threshold of our inner caucus where they can be more consciously at home. Far from being an aspect of a bygone era we would do well to re-discover the conflation of spirit and matter in our own experience so they may be sources of meaning rather than the drivers of  a cruel fate.




The Sado-Masochistic Self.

Sado-Masochism has much in common with the elusive, lesser spotted Venus Fly Trap Warbler. They both have fancy names and are so well camouflaged that even the ardent enthusiast rarely gets a peek. Danish philosopher and leading contender for the Worst-luck-in-love Competition, Soren Kierkegaard, who also had a fancy name, tells the following cautionary tale ….

There was once a poor peasant who was so down on his luck he did not even have a pair of shoes to wear.

One day, he miraculously came into some money.  He walked all the way into town and bought the finest pair of shoes he could find. There was even some money left over. So he bought a jug of wine and drank it on the way home.

Before he could return, the wine got the better of him. He fell into a ditch where he passed out. In the small hours of the morning a coach came by. The coachman sees the peasant’s legs dangling out of the ditch across the road and he calls out loudly lest they be run over. The peasant raises a bleary eye, looks carefully at his newly shod feet and shouts back, ‘they’re not my legs, drive on!’

Since S/M is about what happens between people it would be better to say that it is a perversion of the Principle of Relatedness, of which sexual relatedness is only a part. The flamboyant/erotic end of the spectrum may well catch our attention but many S/M enactments are  of the common or garden varieties and don’t make for interesting TV.

Nor is it enough to then say that S/M is rooted in dominance and subordination. These are expressions of and adaptations to something more fundamental which is still worth naming.

The child of any epoch or culture instinctively maintains the conditions in which it has learned to be at home. If disconnection and split realities are the world we are born into then even these…

”will be maintained indiscriminately as part of development.” Jean Liedloff

This relational dysfunction is much bigger than the sexual issues they might later encompass.

Narcissistic sadism has, as its prime objective, the eradication of the other’s subjective reality. Its means to that end is depersonalization, humiliation, witholding and the refusal to value or accommodate. His doing-unto-others denies and projects a fragile core. I wound therefore I am…

not my wound.

Empathic masochism dovetails this with low self worth, poor boundaries and subliminal victim mentality that colludes with and allows the sadist’s  ‘bad behavior’. Power and responsibility are abdicated so Identity can take root in being done to.

”They are not my legs, ride on!”

The problem for the poor peasant is that if his poverty constitutes a nucleus of identity, a core self-construct, then the resolution of it will precipitate existential crisis. He won’t know who he is anymore. Resolving ‘the problem’, is therefor out of the frying pan…

and into the fire.

”Once you have identified with some form of negativity you do not want to let it go and on a deeply unconscious level, do not want positive change. It would threaten your identity as a depressed, angry or hard done-by person. Eckhart Tolle.

So we resist what we want most because it costs us what we know of ourselves to have it.

”For someone who’s natural habitat is the brink of disaster, a giant step into security is as intolerable as the realization of all he fears most.” Jean Liedloff.

Our peasant’s new shoes threaten his whole view of life. He cannot afford to identify with his own good fortune. Having his legs run over would reacquaint him with his familiar bad luck upon which identity has long been constructed.

Moreover, the miracle of his wild adventure into town has the quality of a hero’s quest, part of which is invariably death/rebirth. If this is not realized in the inner world it will be enacted in the outer.

”Creativity… expresses itself in the ambivalent experience of rebirth through death (or) in sado-masochistic fantasies.” Erich Neumann.

The process of self-realization involves some painful  processes over and above the unearthing of childhood trauma because it involves an end to the notion that we are masters of our own houses. This tends to lead either to a positive inflation in which ego identifies with the Self and becomes cruel, inconsiderate and puffed up with power, or a negative inflation in which we feel lower than a worm and deserving of nothing.

Its easier to act this out in our relationships than it is to contain the violent forces that can swing us back and forth between such extremes.

The alchemical tradition, which offers us a metaphor  for the process of individuation, is full of grisly symbolism. The ‘mortificatio’ and ‘putrefacto’ are stages of the journey in which the old sense of identity dies and rots as a result of the encounter with the Self. These ‘torments’ are described as…

”cutting up the limbs, dividing them into smaller and smaller pieces and mortifying the parts.” Rosarium.

This painful process is amplified in Solomon’s ‘Song of Songs’, in which the difficult encounter between bride and bridegroom represent the clash of opposites often described between ego and Self.

”The coniunctio is both desired and dreaded. From a distance it is the source of all yearning, but knocking at our door it is an object of terror.” E. Edinger.

In Solomon’s Song the bridegroom is wounded..

”You ravish my heart with a single one of your glances…”

This acknowledgement between self and ego….

”has a wounding or violating effect.” Edinger.

In Christian iconography this is represented by Jesus on the cross.

‘thou didst wound my heart with one of thine eyes when, hanging upon the cross, I was wounded for love of thee that I might make thee my bride.” ibid

In the Bahavad Gita, Arjuna asks to see Krishna’s true form and quickly regrets it.

”when I see you touching the sky, blazing with many colours, with mouths open wide, with large fiery eyes, my heart trembles in fear and I find neither courage nor peace. Devouring all the worlds on every side, you lick your lips. I implore you, as a lover to the beloved, show me a gentler form.”

The wish for mother confounded by the need to separate from her and the feeling of being  torn apart that this can constitute in early life, is a motif that can attend spiritual awakening in later years. They share the common experience of an encounter with Other.

A favorite delusion is that one’s own destiny is simply something to yearn for. But somehow circumstances entangle from the true path… from where you are supposed to be.. forgetting that the path we seek is the one we are on and for good reason. The creatures that used to hide in the closet and under the bed along with all those that come in through the cracks from Elsewhere along the way, have taken up lodging in your outer world and become life’s spiky situations instead.

Deprivation and Deadly Sin


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. 

Fear of Freedom.

People are weird.

We’re not just self destructive. We also party to the precipice.

We amass more than we need but care more about how it’s packaged than the slice of time it’s supposed to save, as though time itself were ripe for consumption.

And then….

having worked so hard to gather more nuts than you can eat, be persuaded to part with it all at the drop of a hat and marched into a hail of gunfire on the strength of some brocaded phantom you can be sure is elsewhere at the time..

So, though we might destroy ourselves in all kinds of colorful and flamboyant ways, the silent running by which folk give away what they say they most want is stranger still…..

which is why the very different revolutions of modern times all seem to have a strange something in common. Within a generation the level playing field so dearly fought for is given back into the hands of tyranny.

Within fifteen years after the storming of the Bastille and the biggest hate fest since Nebuchadnezzer, Napoleon was crowned Emperor.

Tsar Nicholas 11 of Russia was finally toppled in 1917, yet these brave revolutionaries also struggle to bear their liberty for any longer than the French, managing to replace him with Stalin who’s Great Purge of 1934-39 made the Russians all sentimental about the good ol’ days of brutal serfdom under Bloody Nicholas.

The Chinese revolution shortly after that has the same odd twist. In 1949 political equality for all was ensconced in law along with equal rights for women. Land reallocation produced massive shared wealth among the poor and yet, by 1964, just fifteen years later, the Great leap Forward had succeeded in starving 30 million of them to death.

‘After eating the grass roots and the tree bark, they ate the earth.’ Lin Chun.

In each of these historic upheavals you see the same thing. With the gates to real equality and prosperity for all thrown open, the victorious people then turn on one another, sending their own to the guillotine or the death camp. In China this was expressed in it’s most bizarre form by the civil war between the Red Guards in 1968. You’d think the two sides had different leaders and objectives but they were both loyal to Mao and went into battle with one another both bearing his image, waving his little red book and chanting the same party slogans.

What gives?

There must be factors involved other than those we might normally consider to be a priority. Psychology 101, Maslow’s  hierarchy of needs, says that people’s primary motivation is to first find shelter, food, security; and only thereafter does the hairless ape need belonging, intimacy or creative expression.

Subsequent explorations, particularly out of the Existential and Jungian schools of psychology show that meaning is sometimes more important than bread and that people will readily sacrifice comfort for cause.

Some state it even more boldly..

‘If you take care of the body at the expense of the soul you will lose them both.” Weatherall

Generally the kind of cause that makes people sacrifice their primary needs is all too clear. A call to arms, the beloved in peril. But sometimes the details of even a common cause are not that obvious and folk can wind up sabotaging their own best efforts, goals achieved somehow allowed to slip between proverbial fingers.

The work of Wilfred Bion might assist us. He suggests that within any group there is invariably a gap between the stated assumptions of the group and the way it actually operates.

”Groups have aims far different from the overt task… [These aims] have the characteristics of defensive reactions to psychotic anxiety. In fact I consider this the ultimate source of all group behavior.” W. Bion (p. 476).

In Bion’s view, what matters in group behavior is way more primitive than Freud’s conviction, that despite pretensions to self determination we still need powerful others to determine our fate and relieve us of the fear of being punished for daring to stand unaided. Bion says we have to go deeper, the ultimate sources of our distress are psychotic anxieties, and much of what happens in groups is as a result of defenses against them, so that they need not  be consciously endured.

What could these primal anxieties be?

Dark terrors are invariably to do with what is most ancient in us, both in the early life of the individual and in the ancestral memory of the collective. The deepest of these, for both individual life and cultural roots is loss of Mother.We know full well what happens when individual children are deprived of their mothers. What of Nations? What millenial impact the shaming, the humiliation and demise of the sacred feminine, on the darker hallways of the collective psyche? What shadows will they throw?

There are layers of our collective psyche that are traumatised. Culturally we are the kids of divorced parents who aren’t allowed to see Mummy anymore, can only recall her indirectly from the time worn assumption that tomorrow must be as depleted as today, as a vague feeling of loss and emptiness. Where she used to be is Weber’s alienation, Durkheim’s ennui, Freud’s melancholia, Jung’s loss of soul. The Divine Mother who has suckled the Earth for longer than memory has been cast into the sea.

”Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth;
Let her, if she would owe me,
Drop yon blue bosom-veil of sky, and show me
The breasts o’ her tenderness:
Never did any milk of hers once bless
My thirsting mouth.” Francis Thompson.

Fortunately this desperate state can be mediated by several big guns in the paranoid arsenal. Firstly the feeling of lack can be palmed off onto inferior others to be purged in a colourful variety of nights of the long knives. Secondly, you can have some Glorious Other seem to embody everything you lack and then identify with them in a ‘participation mystique’, a fusing of being, to the point that your own destiny with all its trials and even your own safety are of little consequence.

It’s not simply that power or wealth may become one’s own possibility, just a dice throw of chance or opportunity away, but that even if you are trodden into the mud you can still be one with the Miraculous Other despite your empty belly and freezing feet.

so long as you have someone else to blame…

Sartre gives the example of the coach driver waiting for his feasting master in the winter sleet, their differences swept aside once he emerges, taut from his soiree, not by meat and drink but by an anti-semitic joke which gives the miserable coach driver a momentary warm glow of being in one mind with his oppressor.

To live in greater abundance brings perspective with it, asks how you have been living, breaks co-dependence, contradicts basic assumptions of scarcity rooted in a half forgotten story of violent loss.

If..

“Groups approximate to very primitive phantasies about the contents of the mother’s body, the elements of their emotional situations so closely allied to phantasies of the earliest anxieties that the group is compelled, whenever the pressure of anxiety becomes too great, to take defensive action (Bion, 1955, p. 456).”

then what do you think is going to happen when habituated oppression is suddenly lifted, when associations to the Great Mother’s body are ones of evisceration and dismemberment?

The new utopia cannot be entered into. Opportunity has to be passed up, conflict created, even if it is absurd and ridiculous…

rather than face…that Mother is gone.

The Curse of Creativity.

I once had the dubious honor of being locked up in a third world jail for an irregularity in my passport. I was thrown into a stinking cell in absolute darkness. The stench could have stripped paint. Bodies shuffled in the acrid void. A match was lit and held up to my face, one of three brothers who then shared their single blanket and the newspaper sheets that served for a bed.

As dawn broke I noticed another man sitting apart from us. He was curled into an upright fetal ball, sleeping on his feet to avoid the cold floor, arms wrapped around himself protectively. It was a posture that had the stamp of long practice. I asked the brothers about him. One of them explained that he had been here fro many years. He tapped his temple meaningfully.

Each morning some benefactor would drop off some peanuts and an orange for this poor prisoner. He received no visitors. No-one spoke to him. Not even the brothers. He was utterly alone. Over the several days it took to secure my freedom I watched him closely. Initially I was afraid. Then I got curious.

He said nothing, barely moved except to sun himself in the open corridor for the few hours in the day we were allowed out of our cell. He’d perch himself in a corner, trouser legs rolled up, his legs dangling out of the bars that ran down one side of the walk-way. There he would slowly unpack his treasure, meticulously shelling his peanuts and building an artistic cone with the husks. He attended to this in great detail, balancing each shell with delicate precision. Should any shell tumble down he would painstakingly replace it with quiet urgency until the project was complete.

Then he  would peel his orange. Each rind was used to decorate the cone. Every last scrap of white pith was removed with infinite delicacy and used to crown his totem. Then he would break open the orange with all the seriousness and ceremony of communion. Each segment was savored as if it were ambrosia. Deep contentment seemed to flood through him as he lingered over every last morsel.

When he was finished he leaned his entire body against the bars as if exhausted with gratitude before extracting a remarkably clean handkerchief from the inner recesses of otherwise filthy clothes and carefully wiped the corners of his mouth. His sacrament was complete for another day.

Folk tend to assume that creativity is about talent and end products. We confuse it with technical ability. It suits us to do this. You can tell yourself that you have not been blessed with such gifts, that unmanifest creativity is not your fault.

Much tougher is the consideration that creativity is a kind of attitude towards life which is precisely our responsibility to cultivate regardless of circumstance. This can be done under the most abject conditions. Creativity in not the same as making things. It is not even a precondition for it. So what stops us from living so unconditionally when there is such freedom to be had?

The reason is that the creative attitude is iconoclastic, it breaks the mold of self construct, prods life’s holy cows, stirs up all the mud from pond’s bottom. Certainty and the confidence that goes with it has to be renounced. Introducing yourself gets complicated.

One of the struts in my own identity was always that I hadn’t an artistic bone in my body. I said so loud and long, enough to begin to get suspicious…. One day, just as a way of getting out of the house, I thought I would make a mosaic in my garden. Not art you understand. But the mosaic had other ideas and became art whether I liked it or not.

Now I had a problem on my hands. People were coming to see it. Someone ratted on me to the local newspaper. Strangers pulled their cars over in the lane to ask how I was getting on. Some little girl in the Post office said ,”look mummy, its the mosaic man.”

It was all too much. I covered it over and went back to being a writer. I was pleased with my new commitment. Then I got depressed. Then I got sick. A spell in hospital under the watchful eye of specialist consultants produced only raised eyebrows. Then I had a dream,  a howling banshee screaming at me like a jilted lover, raging abandonment and retribution. Next morning I uncovered the mosaic and resumed my work. Within a few days my illness had disappeared. I wasn’t sick any more… but I was in crisis.

The birth of anything is a brush with death. Creativity’s handmaidens are Chaos and Bewilderment. An end to the log jam comes at a price. Much as it is uncomfortable, the inner blockage can feel like the lesser of two evils compared to the disorientation that attends a deliberate step into an unknown self. And so you stay put, reaching for the comfortable props that in a short while will be cursed as boredom.

The problem is not lack of courage but that the source of the fear is not sufficiently named and is therefor difficult to face. Rilke said it best…

”Every angel is terrible and so I suppress myself and swallow the call note of depth dark sobbing.”

Which brings us to the knife cut of our final undoing, compelled to ask from whence as well as to what end. Something other than ego consciousness is at play and demanding to be taken seriously. Not only will your creation create you back, it will depose you too. To be inspired is literally to breath something in, something unknown, doing I don’t know what…. questioning your place in the grand scheme of things with the eternal reminder that you are not the master of your own house.

The Uninvited Guest.

On the one hand addiction is a matter of chemical dependence. On the other it’s a need to feel the oceanic bliss of Mother flood long standing aridity just one more time… On the third hand, because these things are always complicated, its good business.

The British East India Company managed to ship 2 million kilos of opium into China in 1833, making loads of cash and disabling their coastal cities, a ploy repeated in America with the proliferation of crack among African American neighborhoods in the nineties and latterly with the more recent Xanax and Opiate epidemics which effectively disrupt community spirit sufficiently to prevent them organizing and then quiet the people whilst bleeding them dry.. Been shut up and had your account cleaned out? It’s okay ….

“..there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon…” Aldous Huxley. Brave New World.

Nothing has to be done. Everything is meant to be and perfect as it is. Until it is not. But then preoccupation with your next score serves just as well to narrow focus, the impinging niggles of real life once more cast off.

“Too awful,” she kept repeating, and all Bernard’s consolations were in vain. “Too awful! That blood!” She shuddered. “Oh, I wish I had my soma.”ibid.

So addiction works whether you are loaded or not.

How considerate…

and yet addiction is one of those things we are most likely to vilify, to construe as something simply to be got rid of, something that can only be thought about in negative terms. Its like the curse of the uninvited fairy you find in Sleeping Beauty, or the impossible task visited on Paris by Neris who he foolishly left off the guest list to his wedding. She revenged herself by tossing a golden apple into the midst of the proceedings with a note.. , ‘to the most beautiful’.. Of course every Goddess present but one was in a strop by the end of the day and expressed their pique all through the disasters and devastation of the Trojan  wars.

But if Addiction is simply cast as a bad tempered witch and the rest of the story just given over to fixing the terrible situation by heroic action, it glosses over how things got that way and, unlikely as it seems, how the curse might also hold any meaning.

Despite its debilitation, addiction persists because the fact that the world may be made to stand still for a very long time means disturbing realities which cannot be managed without way more safety can still be held at arm’s length. Sometimes these are the traumas of childhood but they are also the dangers of our own unique destinies that invite adventuring but re-invent you on the way.

If your world feels a bit rocky then the last thing you need is the destabilization of fresh challenges.

In Sleeping Beauty the curse of the wicked fairy seems spiteful, but earlier versions than Grimm’s reveal details that put this curse into greater perspective and help an understanding of the mythology of compulsive behavior.

According to the older version by Perrault the dark fairy has been banged up in a tower for so long that people no longer recognize her, believing her to be dead. Her curse is way more than the paranoia of being unintentionally slighted. Its justified fury at the betrayal of the Principle of Relatedness that lies at the heart of natural law and the inclusive protection sacrosanct to it that gives everyone the sense of having a place at the table, a place which might then relieve anxiety sufficiently for the fresh adventures of individuation.

The Dark Fairy is not vanquished by the heroic blade. She has to be redeemed, met half way. This begins with the poetic justice of being made to take sufficient time out to integrate what has been going on in the kingdom behind all the velvet and brocade.

Its why teens past playing happy families sleep in till noon.

and are likely to find other means if denied it.

By sleeping on something you give it fair consideration, the fallow time it takes for new prospects or forgotten facts to be identified with sympathetically, without forcing or fancy swordsmanship.

In Perrault’s version the Princess is not woken by rehabilitation’s kiss. She wakes because it’s time. The hundred years are up.

”Her embarrassment was less than his, and that is not to be wondered at, since she had had time to think of what she would say to him.” ibid

Her long slumber had been beguiled with reflective dreams through which she reconnected with the Principle of Relatedness enough to be scarcely able to speak half of what she wanted to say on waking…

The curse is a compromise between the dark fairy’s honor and the Princess’ efforts to try and process how this grandmother could be forgotten, what it means to remember Her, the Ground from which the kingdom sprang.

Marie Louise von Franz said of a dream that made her first take the demands of the unconscious seriously, ‘I put my knees under my chin and stayed in bed all day.’

When this incubation is allowed by the defensive hedge of thorns raised by the ‘good’ fairy to prevent SB from being disturbed, the Princess wakes up by herself. In some versions she has already given birth to twins Dawn and Day, symbols of nascent consciousness. We speak of dawning awareness and seeing things in the light of day, indicating a new development that now superceeds the old pattern.

”The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.. which consists in some wider or higher interest and through this the insoluble problem lost it’s urgency, fading out when confronted by a new and stronger life tendency.” CG Jung.

In 2001 Portugal became the first country to decriminalise the possession and consumption of all illicit substances.

The opioid crisis soon stabilised, and the ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates. HIV infection plummeted from an all-time high in 2000 of 104.2 new cases per million to 4.2 cases per million in 2015.” The Guardian 5/12/2017

What helped the problem was to stop seeing it as a problem. The language around addiction changed as well as the law. This then created huge shifts in collective behavior. Not by enforcement  but simply because the powers that be had taken the time to include the troubled with compassion, afford them a place at the table and slept sympathetically on the issue.

 

The Poor and the Paranoid.

Many years ago I was best man at a friend’s wedding. Thereafter things got difficult for the couple and my friend would come over and unburden himself whilst I filled up on all his indignation. Eventually, much calmer now, he’d leave while I paced and fumed at what I assumed were my own feelings.

After a while he broke off our friendship on account of the ‘negative attitude’ I had towards his missus. Years later we met by chance. In a bid to repair things whilst naming what had happened we found a quiet spot to talk and I made the joke that as best man I had had to carry way more than the ring on the day of the wedding…

He agreed and yes we’re mates again..

The human psyche is like Plasticine. The individual colours can get rolled into each other. People can be made to participate in other’s lives as if they were their own. We have this weird capacity to both disown and re-home difficult aspects of self in order to avoid the dissonance of inner conflicts or the troubles of which real life is made.

In the trade it’s called ‘projective identification’, stuff you’re sold as though it were simply being returned…

If only it were no more than uncomfortable feelings being made homeless. In fact entire sets of attitudes can be made to migrate from one demographic group to another. Sometimes whole continents are needed to shoulder these projections, e.g. the ‘shit-holes of Africa’.

President Obama made a joke recently, asking, ‘Why are the Republicans so angry? They have the Senate, the Supreme court, the Presidency… yet still their angry.. how come?’.

The answer is that if you identify with an ever narrowing band width of piety you have to work all the harder to get ordinary folks to buy your narrative and shovel your shit.

Having foisted their bad conscience on you, Great Power then heaps up all the angry recriminations against bad conscience that you would expect..

which is quite a lot…

given that the bad conscience of White America is rooted in a history of lynching and genocide… The moral tirade bound to follow, once the attribution of all this murder and rape to third parties has safely taken place, is of a proportionate scale…

i.e. off the chart.

This splitting off from everything that contests the utopian dream of Benevolent White Capital, dark shards of the Collective Self which strive for inclusion with all the instincts of roosting rooks, is currently symbolized as the dangerous and contagious Caravan threatening to breach the inadequate defenses of nationalist fragility.

And so the desperate huddled masses, hungry, barefoot and tired, are magically transformed by the toxic alchemy of shadow projection into chunky Isis members, very bad guys, who somehow got lost in Honduras on their way from Saudi Arabia to Syria but not before traipsing through the thirteenth century where they picked up diseases officially declared eradicated by UNESCO.

No doubt they will stop in Sodom and Gomorrah to recruit further leprosy ridden Jihadi bum-boys before assaulting the five times greater force of professional soldiers sent to meet them with their flip flops.

If a private individual suggested to his friendly neighborhood psychiatrist that a force greater than that deployed in Afghanistan should be set in readiness against unarmed refugees still 900 miles away because they somehow threatened his way of life with their hollow frames, he’d have a prescription for Mogodon written out before you could say ‘paranoid delusion.’ Yet somehow this elite white tribe of supremacists hope for their electoral endorsement on the strength of it.

In the process Mr Trump has declared a symbolic equivalence between rocks and rifles in order to circumvent the noisome reality that this shuffling mass of human misery is somehow a worthy adversary and perpetuates the delusion that the caravan is a secret deployment of ninja warriors who can take over the pre-eminent nuclear country in the world with no more than their wily kung fu..

This old testament fantasy might have been better thought through. After all, last time an impoverished peasant went up against a trained warrior five times his size with no more than the pebbles at his feet it ended badly for the pollsters.

 

The Pursuit of Happiness.

There is an old Jewish story about a poor man who complained to his Rabbi that his cottage was so cramped and small he could only take it as a sign of God’s judgement. The Rabbi pondered and then asked, ‘Do you own any animals?’

‘Yes’, said the man, a cow, a goat and some chickens.”

”Take them into the house with you.” The Rabbi’s advice seemed strange but he did as he was told.  So the next time they met the Rabbi asked how things were going. ”Terrible,” he replied, ‘The cow’s tail is in everything, the goat stinks and the chickens crap everywhere! What shall I do?”

The Rabbi strokes his beard, ‘Now, get rid of the cow.’ The man is entirely perplexed and goes home muttering at the Rabbi’s contradictory advice but the next time the Rabbi asks how things are he has perked up a bit,..

‘Well, some improvement, but the goat is eating everything it can and the chickens roost in every available spot. My wife and children are going mad. What shall I do?’

‘Kick the goat out,” replies the Rabbi.

The next time they meet the man seems more relieved but the chickens are dusty and loud….

‘Now put them back in their coop,’ suggests the Rabbi. The following day he rushes over to the Rabbi saying, ‘thank you, thank you, my house feels like a palace, my family are so happy and I’ve never slept so well.., oh joy!”

On the face of it this story is a moral admonishment to be happy with what you have because life can always get worse.

‘I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.’ Helen Keller.

It teaches the importance of gratitude but more to the point it demonstrates that gratitude’s transformation, it’s capacity to suffuse life with meaning and excitement, has little or nothing to do with circumstance.

In everyday life the bad tempered person will find any number of reasons out there in the world to be as grouchy today as he was yesterday. The bountiful personality will find the same number of reasons, from the same data, to have yet another great day.

How you feel about events depends on what shoes you happen to be wearing at the time. Whatever you are unconsciously identified with is going to run your ship and determine how you think and feel regardless of what is going on at the time. We feel gripped from without when we are enslaved from within.

‘The way out is by the door, why do people not use this method?’ Confucius.

People often say of therapy that you can’t change the past, as though it was something fixed in stone. But ‘remembering’ is not as obvious as it looks, largely because children easily abdicate their own point of view to keep in step with others and so remember things from other people’s perspective, like having a single window in a house that doesn’t even belong to you looking out over landscape that looks alien but isn’t…

Recalling life events from your own point of view can be a quest all of its own, let alone from what inner vantage point you might then face the world in the here and now.

The Japanese have a folk tale of a man who comes across three stone cutters. He asks the first what he is doing,..

”Just eating shit’, says the poor man, ‘having to chisel away at this fucking stone all day. It’s humiliating, I might as well be a prisoner doing hard labour.”

He asks the second man what he is doing…

”I’m earning enough to feed my family and clothe my kids. I’m learning skills and working together with this crew of masons.”

He asks the third man what he is doing..

‘I am building a cathedral…’

If you didn’t check in with the other workers you might be tempted to feel sorry for the cruel fate of the first stone cutter, to identify with his feeling of being so constrained and done to…. He doesn’t see that the shittyness of life is something he carries around inside him. He projects it onto whatever the world offers him, devaluing so as not to feel devalued,  identifying with a compensatory function for whom nothing is ever good enough. And so it isn’t. You could crown him king and it would still be shit.

”We do not see things they way they are. We see them the way we are.” Torah

All too often our freedoms are pinned on the outcome of events, what happens on the outside. It’s a version of passively waiting around for someone to rescue you dressed up as virtue. You want the suffering caused-by-the-outside to stop.

I was once involved with an unfeeling woman who ’caused’ me no end of suffering and unrequited love. Then I dreamed that I was trying to explain something so that she would finally-understand-me, when all of a sudden the perspective pulled back so that I was now looking on and could see that I was dressed as Robin from Batman…

I was boy wonder..

rescuing the damsel in distress.

My suffering was not because of anything she had said or done. It was because I was inflated and believed myself capable of saving her from herself, when in fact I was quite out of my depth and had woefully overestimated myself. The dream was chiding me, ‘get out of your super-hero garb and you’ll feel a lot better.’

So I did,

and I did.

”Our suffering is as much created by railing against the circumstances at hand as by those circumstances themselves.’ L. van der Post.

When you find yourself suffering in an apparently needless way it’s difficult to ask the question, ‘what in me feels this way?’ You’re too close to it for perspective. After a while the answer comes out that you’re identified with some corner of the psyche that is not getting it’s way and that the many other mansions of your inner world aren’t getting lived in.

Perhaps it’s easier to ask, in a quieter moment, ‘On what does happiness depend?’  Any concrete answer, much as you might want to nail it down, is identical with suffering. Why? Because it makes aliveness conditional, narrows options, refuses the unscripted and prejudges meaning. It’s the beginning of fending life off rather than adapting and growing.

What this means is that the pursuit of happiness, given the status of constitutional right for many and collectively synonymous with freedom, is at the root of much human misery. It’s not just that your happiness might be at the expense of someone else but that the wish for life to be other than it is actually prescribes joy. It narrows the band width for engagement with life and so has the opposite of its intentions..

This is not to say that you shouldn’t strive for anything. Wanting nice things is not the problem. It’s having to have them and feeling failed if you don’t that will put a crimp in your day.

The Seven Ravens.

Once there was a man who had seven sons though none of them pleased him entirely. His secret frustrated wish was for a daughter.  Eventually a girl was born and there was much celebration though she was so weak that she had to be baptised immediately for the fear she might not live until the priest could be fetched. The father sent one of the lads, he couldn’t recall which, to get water from the well. All the others followed and an argument broke out between them as to who would carry the jug such that it is accidentally broken.

The boys are too afraid to go home.

Their father becomes ever more impatient..

‘They have evidently gone off on some game and forgotten about it,’ he thought, becoming even more agitated. He paced and fretted and muttered. Eventually he lost his rag and let out a great curse,

”Wicked boys! May you all be turned into ravens!” No sooner had the words left his lips when there was a great fluttering up of black wings around him. The boys had returned in just that moment, hunger having driven them home.

This cautionary tale has a great deal hidden in it: not only what happens to neglected sons, but it also details the role that the feminine then plays in redeeming the brothers from the depersonalising and debilitating effects of the Patriarchy.

The Princess is raised without the knowledge of her brothers, a secret kept carefully by her parents. Eventually she overhears some loose conversation between courtiers and the truth comes out. She becomes determined to free her brothers come what may and sets off to find them even though she has no idea where to begin.

She walks to the end of the world.

But cannot find them.

She goes to the boiling sun,

But cannot find them.

She goes to the freezing moon.

But cannot find them.

Eventually she goes to the Stars who comfort her and give her a magical drumstick of chicken which is a key to the Glass Mountain within which the Raven brothers are held.

When she gets there she discovers that the drumstick is lost, so she cuts off one of her fingers and uses that to open the mountain. Inside she is greeted by a dwarf who says that the masters will be home shortly and invites her through to a lavish dining hall with a groaning table and fancy cutlery.

The Princess takes her royal signet ring off and pops it into one of the Ravens glasses before ducking out of sight, uncertain about how she will be received. When the ring is discovered and its meaning discerned, a great shout of joy goes up, ‘Our sister is here to save us!’  When she shows herself the boys are restored to their human form..

and there’s loads of hugging and leaping up and down.

The generally accepted moral of the story, that harsh words should be avoided, misses the psychological significance of this shortest Grimm’s tale. It details an aspect of patriarchal legacy not generally considered…

besides the daughter being raised on a lie..

the sons become a mob.

Part of the problem with belonging to an exclusive club is that its members are generally required to forgo the temperament that might enjoy anything beyond the club, anything that might be a part of a more personal destiny and so despite their privilege so too are they held back in the pell mell of life’s schoolyard, imprisoned in collective identity. Instead of thoughts or feelings he might call his own he has a manifesto. This is fervently trotted out as if it were the beliefs themselves that mattered but you soon find that they are mere soundbites of collective opinion..

Caaaaw!

This kind of authoritarian father winds up cursing all his sons. Not just the one, he forgets which, to whom the task and the responsibility was given. He fails to distinguish between them and thus fails to relate to any of his sons as a person in his own right, regardless of their guilt or innocent. He treats them as members of a flock before cursing them to remain so.

So these sons can never reach maturity. They are trapped in the Glass Mountain, a fancy prison with a dwarf  butler instead of a jailer and every finest thing instead of bread and water but detainees nevertheless. The father’s curse that lies insidiously behind the idealization of their royal blood means his son’s are barred from finding their own way in life and have to remain tied to family expectations even if these are that you fail or that you succeed but only by having to betray the fundamental impulse to your own self discovery.

By contrast, the Princess really knows what she’s about and makes the unpopular decision to take matters into her own hands.

She’s been witness to her father fretting over procedure and decorum, preferring priests to doctors: worried, not that she might die, but that she may do so improperly.. and so she has something concrete to kick against.

She sets off with determination and suffers all kinds of extremes before she is at last assisted by the Stars, the deep archetypal reservoirs of the Psyche which so often nurture and guide when a personal quest is courageously embraced.

The story suggests that the inner feminine plays a much greater part in his passage to manhood than he might be willing to let on. The more popular myth, that valiant George defeats the devouring mother with all kinds of super charged macho warrior items..

is perhaps a later story, since a knight must already have a lady on whose behalf he quests, whose colors he wears, who is curious about the face behind the visor,  who wants to know what he personally thinks and feels, what ground he stands on..

before the slightest prospect of being roasted alive should be even vaguely  entered into..

 

 

Fury.

In ancient Greece, Orestes is driven mad by vengeful Furies, dark Goddesses hell bent on the application of Divine Law.

He has been forced to kill his mother by Apollo, who insists that the murder of her husband Agamemnon, whom she stabbed in the bath for killing their daughter Iphigenia, be avenged.

Yes, its complicated.

Son kills mother, for killing father, for killing daughter…. you can see how this might end. Orestes fulfillment of Apollo’s law is punishable by death..

not very fair, but there’s no reasoning with Furies….

Eventually Athena intervenes, ruling that twelve judges, she amongst them, will determine Orestes’ fate. The judges are evenly decided but because Athena votes for his acquittal, and its her gig, he gets let off without being torn to shreds.

There is a Chinese saying, ‘One bucket of water thrown, travels ten thousand miles.’ It means that intention, the beginning of things, is of supreme importance. Athena’s judgement is based on Orestes’ intention to do the right thing by Apollo which mitigates the actions for which he is then bought to judgement.

In other words guilt and innocence are not to be found in works or actions but in motivations and intentions.

Without Athena, Orestes would be ripped apart by the Furies. At the Gates of Death he would have to betray his own incomprehension of events, accept his guilt despite the impossibility of his situation in order to find something that made sense of final moments, to shrug off his rage and indignation at capricious and contradictory gods.

Ronald Fairbairn’s great contribution to psychology is an understanding of how and why people blame and punish themselves for things that are scarcely their fault. It’s because self blame/punishment beats impotence/despair. If you are guilty you remain a vigorous party to events, even if it’s the last one you get to attend.

So, if you fancy being in charge, all you need is a religion with guilt at it’s core and people will endure anything…

oh wait..

The story of Orestes is important because it begins with his father sacrificing his sister Iphigenia to Artemis in exchange for favorable winds to Troy, and shows what then happens to sons of the Patriarchy once their sisters have been sold out.

They go crazy with inner conflict….

Finished with my woman, ’cause she couldn’t help me
With my mind
People think I’m insane because I am frownin’
All the time
All day long, I think of things, but nothin’ seems
To satisfy
Think I’ll lose my mind if I don’t find something
To pacify.   Black Sabbath. ‘Paranoia.’
.
If you are poised on the edge of the nest, being judged for your works, which can’t be many, rather than the spirit in your heart at the time, it’s difficult to spread your wings. Orestes joins the lost boys who feel they have to kill off their mothers to appease their fathers and so can never be nurtured sufficiently to find strength in their own efforts.
.
Happiness, I cannot feel an’ love, to me
Is so unreal
An’ so, as you hear these words tellin’ you now
Of my state
I tell you to enjoy life, I wish I could
But it’s too late.

Can you help me
Occupy my brain? ibid

Athena might then ask, ‘Who, having killed his mother for killing his father for killing his sister will now kill Orestes?’… cutting through neurotic compulsion to the feeling of loss and emptiness under-pining it.

I need someone to show me the things in life
That I can’t find
I can’t see the things that make true happiness
I must be blind

And so chronic emptiness is papered over by the vague sense of having to pay for some unseen crime. Perhaps, the heinous wish to follow one’s own star,  a sin to be expedited through debilitating drugs and alcohol or having to scrub the pelmets with Jik and a toothbrush at 4am, endless repetition of apparently meaningless tasks until the comparison is finally made to the feeling of being in a chain gang…

which is at least community.

It’s said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions but you have to wonder what kind of axe the Church had to grind…. threatening meek parishioners with eternal damnation like that, simply for having a bright idea that hadn’t been properly thought through… well, it seems a bit harsh.

Until you take up the context…

which is that the big bosses wanted piety to be about works rather than intentions because it meant you could do as you pleased provided it was in God’s name and you still appeared to pay your taxes. From the 5th C onward, the end justifies the means.

The original saying is, ‘Hell is full of good meanings. Heaven is full of good works,’  which reveals the full extent of the ecclesiastical hand in the proverbial glove. The important thing is what is achieved. Your motivations and hence your own personal values are of no consequence to the greater good….  your wish to see what lies beyond the horizon will therefor be traded off for an invitation to regress and indulge all your worst instincts provided you remember your place and tell yourself it’s all for a good cause.

In an interior way it means that compulsive neurosis and addictive predispositions begin with the gagging and sacrifice of the feminine principle, of feeling connected, all of which then manifests like fissures in a glacial psyche; large chunks calve from the Self, dissociated and dangerous.

Which brings us to Kavanaugh and the sacrifice of the feminine soul that has just taken place on Capitol Hill. Iphigenia has been slaughtered like a goat to invoke favorable winds for the sails of flagship Corporate America.

It didn’t work out for Agamemnon. He hadn’t bargained on Clytemnestra’s blade. Like many a malignant narcissist his abrupt fate only intruded after the moment of triumph, once his goal had been achieved, the dust of battle washed away..

and basking in victory…,

his legacy yet to unfold.