The myth that there is any such thing as a negative feeling is responsible for way more than the petty tyrannies of political correctness. The corresponding puritanical injunction to ‘let go’ of the past disregards the question of whether or not it will let go of you and assumes leverage in the psyche it just doesn’t have. Such a monotheism of consciousness is bound to create alternative facts and to speak with forked tongue, clamoring at the now highly circumscribed and polished persona as if it were the holy grail itself, a form of madness touted as salvation.
How does this happen?
Well, if you take a child away from its mother it copes by regressing into a space where separation cannot reach it, splitting itself off from the traumatic event. In the process it becomes divided against the world and against itself but at least the castle keep of the soul has not been over run and still shelters the scattered remnants of the abandoned child.
What is true for the individual is true for the collective. Ontology capitulates phylogeny as they say down the Saracen’s Head during philosopher’s hour. So if you rob humanity at large of it’s connection to the Great Mother, culture as a whole will regress and begin to live the institutionalized split reality of us and them, good and evil, the chosen and the damned. Over centuries social structures become imbued with racism and prejudice culminating in shit hole countries, border walls, mass shootings and misogyny.
Pundits deplore the orange leader as an anomaly, yet he is the most logical outcome of a culture itself plagued by image and ostentation, deeply split between conservation and consumption, between democratic ideals at home and imperialistic policies abroad.
If we imagine we are evolved whilst laying waste to our environment like a three year old shitting on its own doorstep then we must expect the virtuous suppression of common sense which might forbid the victims of massacres being comforted by those who orchestrate them, rock stars amid the carnage and horror.
What’s needed is not the euphemistic pushing away of ‘letting go’ which exacerbates division, but rather a ‘letting in’, letting in of at least some of the emptiness and disenchantment which underpins our collective hungering so that for the small price of our polished veneer some sense of underlying moral solidity may be had, even if its uncomfortable, even if its painful, even if it costs us the illusion of first and only.
Perhaps if we could refrain from labeling authentic if difficult feelings as ‘negative’ and having to split ourselves off from them, we might tolerate divisive leaders a little less and regain some of the healthy reality testing which can tell con-dolence from con-artist and comfort from snake oil.
The toppling of foul leaders, like charity, has to begin at home. If we wish to be rid of the horrible spectacle then we must take its oxygen, our own feelings of supremacy and entitlement, our own projections of inferiority onto others, our own holier than thou. All this letting go is denial. We must let in, communicate, empathize, find value in the other. Ultimately this is about remembering something we already know, something which now demands we acknowledge the shared wound of the un-mothered twisting its way through the judeo christian tradition for longer than memory. We’ll never be rid of tyrants or their cohorts until we can look at them and say, ‘of course..’
The Magic Hat is a story so ancient it’s roots can be traced to one of four proto-stories described by the Aaron/Thompson index of fairy tales as originating from a time older than the division of the Indo-European languages, which is why you find variants of it in both Europe and Asia.
The story concerns a young simpleton who goes out fishing in bad weather and wrecks his boat. He crawls out of the lashing brine half drowned and staggers home to his wife.
‘Oh, I have lost the boat… It’s such a disaster..’
‘No it’s not’, she says, ‘you just have to go into the forest and chop down a suitable tree for a new one.’
So the fisherman disappears back into the stormy night, full of the same kind of enthusiasm which so unwisely took him out to sea only hours before. Soon he’s lost. He doubles down, wandering deeper and deeper into the forest while the lighting cracks and thunder rolls.
After hours of stumbling about he comes across a cottage at the edge of a clearing and bangs on the door, begging for somewhere to sleep and a bite to eat. The wise old couple who live there let him in and show him to a small room saying they will bring him some supper shortly. The fisherman cannot resist peeking at their preparations in the next room where he is astonished to see them taking little hats from a secret chest which immediately transport his hosts to some unknown place.
The fisherman is curious to find out what has happened so he puts on one of the little hats himself. Instantly, he finds himself in a grand hall at the centre of which is a mighty table groaning with food. The old couple have taken a few morsels from here and there and are already about to leave just as the fisherman seats himself down to feast.
‘Oh, you mustn’t take too much,’ they warn, ‘just a few morsels.’ But the fisherman won’t listen and throws himself at the feast much as he threw himself first at the sea and then at the forest. Once the maelstrom of his passion has passed he falls asleep and dreams of being king of the place, only to be woken by armed guards who drag him off before the real king and tie him to a tree for summary execution. The king asks if he has any last requests..
‘Er, yes, if I might die with my hat on…?’ asks the fisherman, who wishes himself back home in a trice… with the tree to which he had been bound. It was just the right shape to carve a brand new boat….
The fisherman is a simpleton to begin with, not because he has no brains, but because he is not quite connected to what is happening around him. He doesn’t take the growing storm into consideration when he sets out to sea. Nor does he learn from his unlikely deliverance, expecting to fare differently in the forest.
Fortunately for our hero, the unconscious is more than a maelstrom of chaos. Within it is the organizing principle of the Self represented by the wise old couple who live in the forest, a source of rest and nourishment for nascent consciousness so recently spat from the sea. The difference in their status within the psyche is indicated by their magical hats which gives them mind bending elbow room in the great forest.
Fledgling consciousness deals with it’s perils in a unique way. Though trauma and it’s suppression can induce defensive and regressive split realities, (I hate you, don’t leave me), so too can the tricky business of fielding opposites, particularly mine and thine, me and not-me. Having been one with mother for ever, its a tad unnerving to realize you are being renounced for bingo or supplanted by a sibling. Such a dangerous transition, in both the development of the individual and the early collective psyche of humanity itself goes through a stage, ‘the chief characteristic of which is the splitting of both self and object into good and bad, with at first little or no integration between them.’ M Klein.
This stormy expansion of consciousness is first felt both as being helplessly at sea and yet also as omnipotently marching into the forest in dead of night, arrogating the powers of the wise old couple to himself. The resulting inflation dismisses the few morsels which magical hats can safely introduce into a split reality, a fabulous third possibility between the opposites of all or nothing.
The way the hat is used by the wise old couple can symbolize the way transition into a more cohesive sense of self might be made. Learning to take just a small pouch is a developmental triumph. It’s like being able to spit the nipple out in the sure confidence it will still be there at dinner time. The fisherman isn’t quite there yet. First, he has to eat the entire feast and get himself into trouble for his inflation.
This ‘binary splitting’, ‘is essential for healthy development as it enables the infant to take in and hold on to sufficient good experience to provide a central core around which to begin to integrate the contrasting aspects of the self.’ ibid
When the fisherman is arrested and taken before the king he doesn’t protest. Its a fair cop, guv’nor. He’s not king after all. He accepts deflating guilt and renounces omnipotence, which then seems to create a sufficient link between emerging extremities of himself for him to be magical within the king’s constraints, to be both persecuted victim and trixter hero in the same breath and thus to have something other than all or nothing – just enough wood to make a new and more buoyant vessel.
The theft of the magical hat brings consciousness by way of misadventure. It can also be used as a defense against crossing the next developmental threshold into what Klein calls ‘the depressed position’, which accepts and is content with the few morsels. It isn’t quite as much fun as being boss of everything, or as impressive as drowning at sea but you do get to take them home and stay in one piece.
Sometimes magical hats are used to split groups as well as individuals, think of the way in which a crown magically turns egalitarian citizens into a hierarchy of subjects. Sometimes group magic is employed to merge people into a state of ‘participation mystique’ with the divisive leader, like Stalin’s blue caps, or Trump’s MAGA hat.
It’s as if the fisherman needs to be arrested so his development is not. Being told ‘no’ and having to face consequences are part of becoming big, which means every narcissistic autocrat has a secret yearning to be constrained since that way lies psychological growth, even if it is at the expense of his stated agenda. At the end of the day a boat of your own beats any number of millions you’re not emotionally connected to, which is why tyrants are often the authors of their own demise.
The pundits were incredulous when disgraced US Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, released damning evidence of his complicity in the Epstein sex trafficking cover up at the very same press conference he gave to try and clear his name. How could he make such a stupid ‘mistake’ as to offer up, in writing, proof of his own corruption? Because the split reality of ‘us and them’ only feels special some of the time. The rest of the time it’s like being at sea in a storm or being hopelessly lost in the forest, which is why silence has the power to suck out the truth and why those who persist in their folly will become wise.
Apologies to Melanie Klein, Bob Woodward and William Blake.
Once upon a time there was a King who looked just like a pig. His skin was rough and thick like a pig. He smelled like a pig, he grunted like a pig and he ate like a pig.
When the time came for the Pig King to marry it wasn’t easy to find suitable brides. Eventually a mother of three girls came forward and suggested a match with her eldest. The king was ecstatic and when his bride arrived he leapt up and down and nuzzled her and got some really good swill on her expensive dress. She was so offended she shoved him off and that night the Pig King overheard her plotting to get rid of him..
‘What am to do with this foul beast? This very night, when he lies in his first sleep, I will kill him’…
and so the Pig King did her in with his sharp trotters.
The second daughter fares the same. The third daughter is different. When the king approaches her and makes her clothes all dirty she responds with affection and humor. In fact she spreads her robe on the ground inviting the Pig King to lie on it. She doesn’t care about the mud and so she is still alive by morning.
The new Queen continues to tolerate the Pig King’s behavior, even inquiring into his majesty’s health and wanting to have conversation. One night, once the Pig King trusts her, he tells her that he has a secret. When she asks him what it is, the pigskin suddenly falls to the floor and a handsome man steps out…
The transformative power of sympathy is something you find over and again in fairy tales. Sympathy is from the Greek, meaning literally ‘feeling-with’, succinctly put by the Buddhist expression, ‘we are all alone, together,’ a paradox of me and not-me which evokes new possibilities and unforseen transitions.
Sympathy is different from empathy. Empathy is a willingness to see the world from someone else’s point of view without taking on their feelings. Sympathy throws itself in, participating in the experience like the alchemist who knows he is part of his own experiment. This shared reality of allowing oneself to be affected by another is a prerequisite of transformation. The Queen has to value the Pig King for what he is and when she does so he recovers his humanity.
In ‘Beauty and the Beast’, the Beast is transformed when Beauty mourns the prospect of his death. In ‘The Frog Prince’, the frog wants a kiss from the Princess in exchange for returning her golden ball. At first she is reluctant, until she hears his story. She is so moved that she sheds a tear and gives him a spontaneous kiss which removes the spell. In ‘The Twelve Swans’, the princess must weave stinging nettles by hand to make jackets which will restore her swan brothers to their human form. The affliction is redeemed by the willingness of another to suffer with their situation.
In his commentary on ‘Inner Truth’, hexagram 61 of the ‘I Ching’, or ‘Book of Changes’, Wilhelm writes..
”In dealing with persons as intractable as a pig or a fish the whole secret of success depends on finding the right way of approach. One must first rid oneself of all prejudice and, so to speak, let the psyche of the other person act upon you without restraint. Then you will succeed.” R. Wilhelm.
Sympathy is something we normally think of as happening between people but sympathy for others is predicated on the capacity to be comfortable with your own foibles, which is why we feel reassured by people who can laugh at themselves and give face to their own shortcomings. They are bound to be as lenient with you too.
Outwardly, transformation of intractable relationships occurs by proactively being willing to walk a mile in an other’s shoes and suffering not only the blisters involved but also the deprivation of your own comforting prejudices. Inwardly, sympathy for shadow aspects of oneself, willingness to listen and be affected, transforms these contents into allies. Without sympathy for them, there is no growth. The third bride of the Pig King transforms her situation by accepting her husband’s eternal breaches of etiquette, which is just a fancy word for ways-of-doing-things-I-take-for-granted. She allows herself to be invaded, dirtied and muzzled. She can do this without being shamed because she knows being a pig is what pigs do. She has the generosity of spirit to let him be what he is. Perhaps the best love you can have is to be accepted warts and all.
‘If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. ” ~C.G. Jung, CW 10, p. 163
We all have difficult and clumsy aspects of ourselves. How we address them will determine whether they develop, like the Pig King’s growing trust for his third bride, or whether they will undermine and attack the ego in retaliation for being rejected. The Pig King’s two former wives are both killed for trying to get rid of him. When we combat ‘negativity,’ it has this same quality of plotting against the Pig King with similar consequences, blood on the carpet by morning.
The wish to be free of the problem is the problem. Being angry at the Pig King for his gauche behavior constitutes a conditional way of relating to the world and justifies the provisional life you are bound to lead whilst waiting for the Universe to get its act together and furnish you with the life you feel you are supposed to have.
This refusal to co-exist with the dark and clumsy reflects a regressive conviction that some mistake must have been made with the life you were issued, all of which will be rectified as soon as God pulls his finger out and double checks His paper work.
Such a belief is rooted in narcissistic omnipotence. It entrenches inner conflict. Maybe anxiety is what you get when a gap opens up between what you are and the ideal you are trying to panel beat yourself into, the kind of anxiety anyone might feel in the presence of someone who wants company but fakes what they are bringing to the encounter.
Much New Age political correctness is run through with this anxiety. People are trying so hard to be nice their shadows get thick as ink. Often their niceness feels layered on or synthetic, the spiritual values espoused are like a tinkling brook which may slake your thirst for a bit but doesn’t comfort the soul.
Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.” ― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
If you are to address the fascist menace in politics, the growing collective movement towards autocracy defined by it’s intolerance of others, then you’d do well to begin at home with the prejudices held against the undeveloped or shamed figures of your inner world, which show their faces when you show them yours.
Its not an easy process. The Queen has to endure a great deal of being discomfited by the Pig King who effectively robs her of all her usual points of reference and compels her from the ease of how-life-aught-to-be into the chaotic moment. She accepts this and reaps its rewards by having the right attitude. When the Queen mother asks her how she manages to cope with the Pig King she replies, ‘with three wisdoms. One, it is folly to search for what cannot be found. Two, discover from your own experience and not what you have been told. Three, hold fast to enduring value.’
Western culture is run through with searching for what cannot be found. It cannot be found because it is not out there. What we are all secretly searching for is ‘in-between’, a certain quality of ‘I-Thou’ relatedness which facilitates change and growth by finding value in people and situations as they are. This involves sacrificing the privilege of knowing what to think from turning to your neighbor, symbolized by the new Queen offering up her expensive cape to be muddied. She relies on her own instincts and finds meaning in the antics of the uncouth Pig King, like a zen master coaxing potential from others by valuing what is authentic over what is supposedly proper or ‘good’.
In ancient Lydia there lived an inspired weaver, Arachne, whose tapestries were so beautiful and lifelike that people came to see them from miles around. Arachne soon became as boastful as she was talented and let it be known she considered herself even more skilled than Athena herself. Athena got wind of this and showed up one day in the guise of an old woman. When Arachne repeated her claim Athena revealed herself and challenged the puffed up mortal to a contest.
Athena’s tapestry was a marvel but Arachne’s work was more miraculous still. Her compromising depictions of Zeus and Poseidon embarrassing themselves in their extra-marital shenanigins seemed quite alive. The goddess flew into a rage, ripped up Arachne’s work and magically turned her great pride into an equally inflated guilt so all consuming that Arachne despairs and kills herself. Athena realizes she’s over done it a bit and turns Arachne into a spider, forever after weaving her wondrous web.
The moral Ovid deduces is, ‘don’t think you are better than the gods’, though this seems like an interpretation mostly suited to ruling a pliant population. The fact is that Arachne won the competition. She was the better weaver. Her error was in failing to show gratitude to the gods for her gift which then leads to her mental imbalance, depression and suicide.
People mostly divvy up into those who believe in God and those who don’t. There are a few quibblers who feel they might have confused spiritual experience with indigestion but by far the most under represented are those who are in no doubt about God but still think that religion is a bad idea, mostly given the fact that international terrorism is rooted precisely in people having ‘special’ relationships with bad tempered deities.
Unfortunately, heinous acts against others for the temerity of being different are only the thin, visible, end of this wedge. Monotheism of any kind, including state sponsored atheism and the monotheism of consciousness it breeds, attacks its own people in greater though less obvious numbers.
One of the most insidious ways it does this is via the erosion of gratitude inevitable in any belief system rooted in the cosy entitlement which goes with being ‘chosen’.
The certainty of self this generates goes way beyond suddenly having great swathes of the planet pegged as second class citizens, children of lesser and laughable gods. It seems your neighbors at home haven’t quite got it right either. World Christian Encyclopedia (David A. Barrett; Oxford University Press, 1982) estimates almost 21,000 denominations of Christianity worldwide, each one convinced that some how they were the ones to get the details right.
Only those in my valley have any true knowledge of the world. It’s like claiming to be a gourmand without ever having strayed beyond the borders of your own allotment.
‘Our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatical denial that there are parts of the psyche which are autonomous’. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower
Back in the day, when there were a sensible number of gods, you might sacrifice at a different altar than your neighbor whilst feeling that you were still going about the same thing. Having a grumble at Hermes one day and offering Hera a gift the next allows life to be complex and contradictory. You are loved but not special and so when the gods show you their favor its cause for the kind of celebration and thankfullness that makes living worthwhile and puts your troubles behind you..
Arachne has to forgo this redemption for the arrogant conviction she is mistress of her own house. Even though she bests the goddess’ challenge, this cannot of itself give meaning to life. In fact she despairs entirely without the healing gratitude of valuing others and being given a gift that came free of conditions.
So, the belief that there is nothing new in the world and that you have a hotline to ultimate truth leads quickly to Promethean-like guilt and deadening attacks on the self.
Despite Arachne’s brilliance it all comes to nothing. The tapestry gets ripped up and her life destroyed, for want of a seemingly impossible ‘thankyou’.
Which makes you wonder about her relationship with her mother….
So I googled it, ‘Arachne’s mother was a common woman who is not named by Ovid’, which was disappointing for a moment, until you ask, ”how can specialness be renounced and symbiotic development take place with someone so marginalized as to be nameless?
The disenfranchisement of women ultimately leads, by torturous paths, to emotionally absent yet ravenous mothers who cannot help but incur destruction of creativity and loss of the will to live in their kids.
Arachne wonders why the fuck she should be grateful. For what? She’s had to pull herself up by her own bootstraps all her life and still managed to beat a goddess at her own game…
all of which is true..
Yet it is also true that adversity yields its own fruit. Perhaps Arachne’s great skill is not in spite of her past but because of it. Compelled to find the means to creatively transcend her suffering, she made tapestries of loss and injustice, symbolically weaving the threads of herself back together, making a great name for herself to compensate for a mother whose name none remember.
The naive spiritual doctrine of embracing good and eschewing evil is developmentally about four years old, when kids want to know who is the goody and who is the baddy in the movie you’re watching.
This does not mean masochistically inviting suffering into our lives. It nevertheless remains that adversity compels us to grow in ways that soft living may never produce. Who you have become is invariably by way of pain and adversity as well as nurture. If you look back on the toughest times in your life they are usually the ones in which you grew most.
Sometimes people say about therapy, ‘oh, what’s the point? You can’t change your past..’ which is true, though you can change your relationship with it which makes redemption and healing possible. This paradoxical process requires gratitude, not as a way of denying or minimizing suffering, but in so far as adversity breaks the kernel of our understanding, provides new frames of reference, questions values you might have swallowed whole, and throws you back on as yet unmanifest self.
The Gods, despite their weighty preoccupations, are not averse to a little domestic moonlighting…..
Eris, the Goddess of Strife, also called Discordia, is particularly easy to persuade to the table. But what is it that catches her attention sufficiently for it to feel like an invitation to join the party?
The clue is at the foot of the painting…
Two small children are playing the grand game of saving-what-you-love-most-about-dinner on the side of the plate until last; so the final mouthful is the most delicious. Mother puts a stop to all this nonsense by confiscating the treasured morsels. So the children begin to leave what they suddenly dislike about dinner on the side of their plate and have that confiscated instead..
The kids come out feeling on top and yet something really horrible is happening. Mother’s shaming is the insidious yet soul destroying expression of envy at their autonomous game, their shared delight. The shaming is dressed up as ‘discipline’ but actually says…How dare you have any imagination? Who are you to exercise any jurisdiction over your plate? You shall not savor, nor anticipate the delicious morsel.
Moreover, you are under scrutiny. Whatever you put in your mouth from one spoonful to the next will have penetrating and intrusive attention. All of which begins to make you feel that even though the food travels from pan to plate it never quite becomes yours. And if the food is not quite yours what about your place at the table?
This is all way too much to consider at the time. You mustn’t make sense of it or use your mind. It has to be packed away by the compensatory glee of beating Mother at her own game, having agreed to trade in delight for deception. You are left with the message, do not win, do not feast on the delicious morsel. Play the game of life but don’t get up on your hind legs and try to be a part of it.
In the process the delicious morsel is lost. In fact, to continue to identify with a mother who-knows-what’s-best the child must excise, confiscate and bin the shameful treasure wherever she finds it.
Children then grow up with the split reality of eat but don’t enjoy and win but don’t play. Their sense of self splits to accommodate all this. Different aspects of the self must forgo knowledge of one another. The jungle pathways between them become overgrown in order to remain unconflicted.
This is a problem. It means that your strategy for self preservation is to stem inner dialogue and renounce autonomy. What to do? The psyche attempts to cover it’s bets with a twofold cunning plan. Firstly, the endless repetition of ordinary pleasures denied, banging at the gate so that one day they can perhaps become conscious, like seeds in hope of fertile soil.
Secondly, the original feelings, though disconnected from their context, still serve somewhat to glue the fragments of self together whilst railroading the voice of authentic experience,..
”resorting to behaviors which evoke strong affects which can be identified with, thereby maintaining a sense of self.” Woods and Woods.
This means practicing the art of creating chaos out of whatever you can find to hand and upping the ante at every opportunity.
”Eris is only a little thing at the first, but thereafter grows until she strides on the earth with her head striking heaven.” Homer.
Curiously 20thC chaos theory echoes the metaphor with what is called ‘the butterfly effect’..
”Tiny errors in the measurement of the current weather do not stay tiny, but relentlessly increase in size each time they are fed back into the computer until they completely swamp predictions”. J Borwein.
Eris makes mountains out of mole hills.
This means life has to be lived with roller coaster intensity in order to be lived at all. Without the secure happiness of a pleasurable connection to the delicious morsel, you have to have wild rides, splintered experience and conflict instead.
Freud said..
”People tend to lose their neuroses in times of war”.
Conflict will evoke intense feelings to identify with as a matter of immediate survival. Nothing resolves separation anxiety better than sharing a trench with someone. Your feud with your neighbor will be eclipsed by something even more guaranteed to focus attention. Self preservation infers a self to preserve. Which means, unfortunately, that conflict may become necessary for the shamed child to feel alive.
I love the smell of Napalm in the morning.
In order for children to grow there has to be some ‘temenos’ or sacred space within which there can be the safe feeling of symbiotic attachment, where the enjoyment of imagination can be un-selfconsciously shared and made real, where the soul is refreshed and temporarily protected from the chaos beyond the enclosure.
This space..
”reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided.” T Moore.
In any such temenos there has to be the equivalent of a garden gate which both opens and closes, allowing traffic back and forth. If the gate is compromised or subject to shaming (here’s the key but you’re not entitled to it) then the child has to find her way over the hedge to get in and out.
This is bound to be a bit tricky…. though the puncture wounds endured in the process can become a way of knowing oneself in place of play and imagination, a rather specialized kind of survival strategy.
Greek philosopher Epicurus said that everyday pleasure is the greatest value. His was the spirituality of ordinary life. He called it ‘hedonism’, which originally meant to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world, and to limit one’s desires. Unfortunately, his ideas have suffered the same fate as the child whose simple joys got usurped by the substitute intensity of deception and revenge.
For Epicurus, the most pleasant life is one where you can achieve an inner tranquility (ataraxia) by finding meaning in simple things, the delicious morsel of ordinary pleasure.
Hedonism today has come to mean the proxy pursuit of Intensity whose unconscious intention it is to plug the very gap where simple pleasures used to be. For the want of depth and sacredness in everyday life, moderate traffic through the garden gate, you are compelled to try and approximate it by going through the garden hedge instead.
In lieu of simple shared pleasures, playful imagination and the enchanted encounter of yours and mine, you have the intensity of being stretched between split realities, fending off blackthorn and bramble, like the drunk who drinks to drown the shame of being a drunk, the addict who lurches from hell to heaven and back again. The spouses whose make up sex needs a vicious fight to kick off with. So long as it’s intense the content doesn’t seem to matter too much, anything to relieve the anxiety of living in a divided world.
Being swung from one extreme to another by the need for opposition is home territory for Eris and her brother Ares, Greek God of War, who don’t really care whether they win their battles or not, so long as some dust is being raised at the time.
Ares relationship with his father, Zeus, was rooted in shame. When he comes home wounded from the Trojan war…..
Zeus, who gathers the clouds, spoke to him: “Do not sit beside me and whine, you double-faced liar. To me you are the most hateful of all gods who hold Olympus.
But were you born of some other god and proved so ruinous long since you would have been dropped beneath the gods of the bright sky.”[22]Homer’s Iliad.
The only redeeming thing about you is that you are my product. You do not belong to yourself. Nor do I love you for your own sake. We have no gated temenos. The threshold of simple shared pleasures that bind a soul to itself will never be yours.
Ares deteriorates, begins to hang out with some unsavory types. He’s difficult enough to be around on his own, but his borderline crew read like a check list from DSM-5 .
Besides Eris (Discord), impairment of interpersonal functioning, there is Deimos (Fear) with his unstable self image; Phobos, (Panic) with his frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment; Famine, chronic feelings of emptiness; and finally, Oblivion, poor impulse control.
This fractured crew symbolize the dissociative tendencies of autonomous defenses in the psyche when faced with parental shaming.
One thing you can be sure of…..
between them they will make short work of the delicious morsel.
It might seem like a bad idea to keep such company. There’s so much suffering involved and no sustenance to be had. But nobody said defense contractors have to be pretty, they just have to do their job, fending off the resurgent feelings of humiliation that surface with every bid for autonomy.
Such a life makes you resourceful, as Paris found out to his cost when Eris turns up to a wedding feast uninvited with a golden apple labelled ‘for the fairest’, compelling Paris to decide which one of three goddesses it should go to and hence what values he stood for.
”Borderlines are extraordinarily persistent and tenacious..” Woods and Woods.
So, all is not lost. There is more to the Eris/Ares gang than meets the eye. If they can be honored for the role they play in defense of the realm, despite the carnage left in their wake, then they begin to demonstrate different aspects of themselves. Hesiod says of Eris, once she’s been put in a better mood…,
‘‘She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbor, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbor vies with his neighbor. This Strife is wholesome for men.” Hesiod
Strife is also striving, making things happen, putting your shoulder to the wheel, doing what you must, gladly. Eris can impel soul searching and break molds like no other. She turns up on page one of many an heroic journey.
”I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free.” Principia Discordia
Appreciating why you might need to lurch from one crisis to another or sabotage intimacy at every turn is a form of compassion for oneself which can change the way Eris operates. When the feelings of being intruded upon can be anchored back to the circumstances that spawned them, shaming attacks demanding capitulation of autonomy, then Eris will manifest some mysterious morsels of her own..
‘‘the delicious contradiction – with orderly effects emerging out of turbulent and chaotic causes. J Borwein.
Below, a martial Cecilia Bartoli, gives voice to Eris’ redemption as an advocate for the shamed child and relief from unconscious tempests.
I went to a posh white supremacist public school. Its main lesson was in power and how to abuse it. This began with your own abuse and debasement, ‘in order to build you up and create character’.
The new boys had the great honor of being ‘fags’, tending the eighteen year old prefects, warming toilet seats on a winter’s morning, sucking dick as needed, hanging off the hook at the back of his door for an hour..
Of course, you could rat. But then your life would go from being a living hell to something far worse. There was a suspicious death, a few slit wrists, several disappearances….
and so we swore on our mother’s graves that we would never be like that when we were seniors. We would be different. And yet, and yet, the overwhelming feeling upon passing between the great school gates on the first day of my senior year, raising my straw boater as required, was a rush of power and pleasure… Now it was my turn.
I had become one of them.
People tend to think of corruption in material terms. It is the financial shenanigans or the sexual scandal which catch our attention. But there are some very specific ways in which excessive amounts of executive power do a great deal more than make you drunk. Drunkenness passes. More dangerous is the clinical condition bound to overtake even the most rounded personality when it begins to feel appointed by God…
along with the urgent need to project vulnerability and torment on some third party.
To that end both History and Tabloid are littered with mad kings, and not a few mad queens. The salutary tale of Empress Messalina, auntie of Roman emperor Nero, will tell what curious shapes such inflation can take.
Messalina was true to the homicidal traditions of the Julian family, bumping off several nieces and a good few senators along the way, with failed attempts against her sister-in-law Agrippina who eventually did her in before being taken out by Nero. So, nothing too out of the ordinary.
But Messalina had a double life. She might have been Empress by day but she spent her nights in the whore house. According to the Roman scribe Suetonius, she had a sex competition with the top prostitute of the city, which she apparently won with twenty five men in a day. The detail which concerns us is Suetonius’ throw away line that she then went home unsatisfied….
Messalina’s story is not simply one of privileged immorality, though it’s the salacious details which are bound to grab attention. Here is someone who must have been experiencing profound emptiness to go to such extraordinary lengths .. and still fail in her endeavors.
Meantime her husband Claudius is trying to fill his emptiness by gorging on stuffed hummingbirds. Nephew Nero is gorging on young boys he likes to have fucked to death which I suppose he thought was a shade more wicked than great-grandfather Tiberius who only threw the children he’d raped over a cliff.
What’s the point of that? How can you have fun without blood?
Rubbing shoulders with the Gods leads to all kinds of trouble. Not least of these is Paranoid Anxiety. You’d think that the inflation and omnipotence of being a Majesty would be an ample shield against anything as petty as unnamed fears or delusions of persecution and yet Messalina’s privileged life was seeped in subterfuge and plot.
Freud associates paranoia with suppressed aggression, Klein with unconscious envy; but you have to wonder, in addition to the torturous childhoods many a tyrant endures, just what the fallout of being divinely appointed might be…
For Narcissistic Entitlement to work you have to be at odds with those who are not. More to the point, you have to sell out your own common clay in the process, the ordinary self which identifies with others and with the land while still having its own point of view, which is able to keep company and share togetherness whilst still forging a unique path through the jungle.
When you are Divinely Appointed you have to trade in Belonging for the privilege. The problem with this is that you can own the castle and even the ground its built on but if you don’t belong, none of it can be enjoyed.
which is going to feel like someone is out to get you… or that some hidden hand has taken what is rightfully yours….enough to induce homicidal fury..
Meantime the organic unfolding of the Self must be derailed for the feeling of entitlement to be maintained. So, not only your redeeming ordinariness but also your unique potential has to be projected out into the world where it comes at you, if not as destiny, then as fate.
For Messalina and her exalted family, the paranoia inducing projection is eventually so great that a shooting star is taken as an oracle to mean that an assassination of some mighty person is about to take place. Of course, all the mighty persons want to make damn sure the prophecy is not about them so they become agents of prophecy instead, the right hand of the Gods. Everyone winds up dead except Nero, who will soon turn his blade on himself…
having run out of family.
”People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.’ C G Jung
Facing your own soul has a prerequisite, ordinariness. For want of this workaday humility, being one amongst many, what Klein calls ‘the depressed position’ there is no sense of a vessel to contain the Self, now compelled into the role of a vengeful fiend visiting humiliation on you instead.
Both Nero and Messalina are compelled to act out their common clay in lieu of its integration. Nero tops his auntie’s whore house sexploits by publicly getting some strapping lads to have their way with him as if he were a common slave. He would give performances dressed as a lowly bard… make sure you applaud just right if you feel brave enough to go and watch… you might wind up becoming the entertainment.
Be careful what you ask for. To ‘have everything’ can constitute a loss of soul, the becoming of a hungry ghost, paranoid and insatiable, poor in apparent wealth, a victim behind the safety of castle walls.
Isn’t it curious.. the first thing agents of law enforcement do upon your arrest is to remind you of the human tendency to blurt out a confession. It is as though, against all the combined forces of your better judgment, including the instinct for survival, you harbored a traitor hell bent on dobbing you in.
And you do…
Conscience.
Having your Miranda rights read to you stems from the case of one Ernesto Miranda who confessed to kidnapping and rape charges while in custody. His lawyers sought to overturn his conviction after they learned during a cross-examination that Miranda wasn’t told he had the right to be protected from self incrimination.
In fact the halls of jurisprudence are filled with examples of people being their own worst enemies. An episode of Judge Judy has the defendant angrily condemn himself while the plaintiff tallies the contents of her stolen purse.
‘Keys, ten dollars, a driver’s license..’
‘There was no driver’s license in the purse!’ he yells out. But… how could he know that unless he had taken the purse? The whole case lasts under a minute.
More serious is the example of Robert Durst, subject of the documentary, ‘The Jinx’, who pleaded not guilty to two counts of murder and looked as though he might be headed for acquittal until he took a bathroom break and forgot his mike was still on,
‘There you are. You are caught. What the hell did I do? Why, killed them all of course.’
He tried to wriggle out of it.. if only he had not also kindly supplied the police with a sample of his handwriting at the scene of the crime he might have gotten clean away…
Throughout the debacle of the Russia Collusion you see one conspirator after another inadvertently putting his foot in it, all the way from Trump calmly admitting on live TV that he fired James Comey to obstruct his investigation, through Rudy Giuliani saying, ‘I never said there was no collusion., ‘ to Roger Stone giving the Nixon salute on the courthouse steps after his indictment, a gesture which means the opposite of the plea he had just submitted to the judge.
Literature has a number of famous examples, the best of which is Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘Tell Tale Heart’. A man commits a murder and has gotten away with it.. The police are walking away….
‘‘ Suddenly I could bear it no longer. I pointed at the boards and cried, “Yes! Yes, I killed him. Pull up the boards and you shall see! I killed him. But why does his heart not stop beating?! Why does it not stop!?”
In ancient times we have the story of King Midas who was cursed with ass’s ears. He tried to keep it a secret. Nobody knew but his barber who whispered the secret into the ground and buried it there, but reeds grew up and as the wind blew between them the secret was teased into the breeze…..
How does this happen? Shakespeare explains..
” An oven that is stopp’d, or river stay’d, burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage: So of concealed sorrow may be said; Free vent of words love’s fire doth assuage: But when the heart’s attorney once is mute, the client breaks, as desperate in his suit.” Venus and Adonis.
Something in us defies our own best efforts to lead an easier life. In mythology this is embodied by the dreadful Furies, three dark goddesses in the service of Hades who met out justice and rectify any imbalance in it’s scales.
What this means is that Conscience is not a part of you. It is an autonomous complex with its own agenda. It cares not a hoot for conscious intention or self preservation. Given space and time they have their way and find some form of expression, perhaps in moments of crisis or moral jeopardy.
‘‘All men are liars, certainly. I just let them sit there and lie…. then they begin to tell the truth.” Jung (quoted by Elizabeth Sargeant)
A curious detail to do with the Furies is that the three goddesses have four collective names (Furies, Erinyes, Eumenides, Semnai). They are representatives of what the Alchemists call ‘the problem of three and four’. Three into four won’t go and so the problem of three and four is an expression of the difficulty of bringing the opposites of consciousness and the Unconscious together. They could equally have called it the problem of oil and water, how to find common ground or some kind of bridge between worlds.
Conscience is one such bridge because the Furies are messengers as well as dispensers of justice. They answer directly to Hades and so if they turn up on your doorstep it’s because Hades wants a word. Their retribution is also a form of communication.
Fortunately, the Furies also take orders from Persephone who has a tad more bedside manner and so their justice tends to be of the poetic variety, something you might learn from as well as being left to dangle.
Dying of a heart attack, James Washington of Tennessee told police that he had “to get something off my conscience”. He revealed that he had killed a woman 17 years earlier. The Furies arranged for his miraculous recovery to full health, just in time for his new 51-year jail sentence for murder.
In ancient Greece, Orestes was driven mad by the Furies for killing his mother Clytemnestra, something he was required to do by ancient law since she killed his father Agamemnon who then had to be avenged. Orestes appeals to Athena who eventually acquits him but she asks the Furies to stay on and be patrons of the city.
The goddess of Wisdom understands humanity needs its sense of guilt because it has within it the power to transform omnipotence into a sense of human proportion. Guilt is necessary for the integration of the personality. It makes us aware of limitation, of the possibility of being and doing wrong without which self awareness is impossible. In fact guilt can protect us from….
“a disturbing form of narcissistic personality where grandiosity is built around aggression and the destructive aspects of the self become idealized” H Rosenfeld.
As for Ernesto Miranda, though his case was set aside by the Supreme Court ruling, he was retried and sent to jail. After being released, he was fatally stabbed in a bar fight. His suspected killer was read his Miranda rights and didn’t answer questions from police. He was never convicted.
‘Spornosexuality’, the cut and shut love child of Sport and Porno, is the latest fad in male beauty. It is Narcissism on steroids, but the bodies beautiful are strangely asexual; more metro than macho and absorbed with themselves rather than each other or the opposite sex.
‘‘Capitalism has transformed our bodies into accessories. By toning and perfuming and recording every ripple with Facebook selfies, they’ve converted their bodies into their own masturbatory aids.’, Tim Stanley.
The Spornosexual icon is Adonis; gorgeous, hench and aloof. Different versions of the Greek myth, from Ovid to Shakespeare, agree that his relationship with Venus was characterized by indifference.
She does her best to point out, as politely as possible, that he has an issue with his mother..
‘‘Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel, Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth? Art thou a woman’s son, and canst not feel what ’tis to love? How want of love tormenteth? ‘ W. Shakespeare
Of course it was his perfect right to refuse her but he does so on the basis of boredom rather than the healthy fear of divine retaliation for so bold an aspiration or making an informed choice.
So Venus gets aggrieved ..
‘Fie, lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone, well-painted idol, image dun and dead, statue contenting but the eye alone..ibid
and withdraws her protection from him.
Adonis then comes to a swift death. Supposedly, he dies from an injury to the ‘knee’, gored by a boar while hunting. My guess, given that no-one ever died of a mortal knee wound, is it’s a euphemism for having his groin torn out. Even the usually bawdy Shakespeare demurs, referring to the wound in his ‘soft thigh’.
This polite double entendre is the least complicated aspect of Adonis’ death, a demise well worth a bit of detective work given the prevalence of this archetype in the Collective Psyche and its shortlisting among Hansard’s top ten gruesome ways to die.
Adonis’ death is not an accident. In fact, the more the story unfolds the more it seems like an episode from the Sopranos. The boar has been sent by Artemis, Goddess of the Forest and the Hunt in revenge for the killing of one Hippolytus, a faithful and chaste devotee.
Artemis holds Venus responsible for Hippolytus’ death since it was the madness of love and lust that led to his murder. So she takes Venus’ favorite down in vengeful retaliation. Poor Hippolytus had certainly not deserved his fate. His step-mother Phaedra tried to seduce him and when he refused her advances she accused him of rape, persuading her husband Theseus to use a wish given him by Poseidon to destroy the boy. When Hippolytus is next out riding his chariot on the beach, Poseidon sends sea monsters to terrify the horses which then drag him to his death.
Adonis is killed because of what happened to Hippolytus. Their fates are linked. So are their pasts. Both are sons of incest and have their destinies came at them in violent, monstrous forms.
The symbolism of incest has to do with having your destiny hijacked by someone else. Adonis’ parents are father and daughter, Theias and Myrrha. He comes from a world where people’s stars are inappropriately mingled, so he can’t tell his feelings from other people’s, which makes it way too scary to have any at all. They have to be packed away, along with the carefree uncomplicated spontaneity and belonging-in-Nature personified by Hippolytus, whose wish to have his own destiny gets him killed.
Hippoltus’ fate represents..
‘the terror of dissolution which a baby experiences when, for lack of good enough maternal care, he cannot separate out from the mother and feel that he exists in his own right.” R Ledermann.
Psychoanalyst Masud Kahn’s concept of Symbiotic Omnipotence further amplifies why it is that increasing numbers of lads feel emasculated and attacked by the world, swallowed up by Poseidon’s monsters, or dragged to their death by their own instincts.
Symbiotic Omnipotence is a scenario whereby a frustrated and suppressed mother lives out her unmet needs and unexpressed passions through her child, compensating for absent preoccupation with shared specialness that kills off the boy’s instinctual life. Any efforts to escape this otherwise pristine arrangement are exemplified by Hippolytus’ terrible end, psychopathic gaslighting , the paranoia of being swallowed up or pulled apart.
On the surface everything is ideal. The pair are awash in mutual admiration and overstated affection, exaggerated gestures and shared secrets..
Gradually it emerges just how exclusive this ideal situation is..
”It excluded other phase adequate relationships and actively discouraged, through collusion and indulgence, cathexis of other objects as valuable or nourishing.” M Khan.
Google translate..”The child is deliberately isolated, then forced to collude with such deprivation by joining mother in her scorn of the world.”
Her own destiny having been denied, mother’s unfulfilled potential spills over into the unwitting child who then takes it for his own….
This has severe consequences for the boy. He can never live up to the archetypal expectations placed on his young shoulders. Moreover, the secret shame of wanting to lead his own life, the suppressed desire for love and affection, the feeling of having betrayed some sacred pact by daring to become his own man, all this can then make intimacy seem overwhelming.
‘I know not love,’ quoth Adonis, ‘nor will not know it, unless it be a boar, and then I chase it. ‘Tis much to borrow, and I will not owe it;My love to love is love but to disgrace it; ibid
In other words..
“I don’t know anything about love,” he said, “and I never want to. All I care about is hunting boars. Love sounds like a lot of work that I’m not willing to put in. All I can say about love is that I love to reject it.”https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations/venus-and-adonis
Venus points out this checks all the boxes in the DSM5 under Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
‘‘Is thine own heart to thine own face affected? Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left?Then woo thyself, be of thyself rejected, Steal thine own freedom and complain on theft.”
But Adonis is impervious to the last. It has all been too much. He strolls off in contempt, oblivious of the fate about to overtake him. He says to himself that he just didn’t fancy her but if truth be told he couldn’t cope. It felt too much like mother’s..
”over cathexis of the child (being in his face, which leads to..) an early bias that they are special and cannot be understood, so communication is futile.” M Khan.
This leads to the blanket objectification of others and ultimately, of himself. His secret porn addiction is not about misdirected lust or desire, nor even the objectification of women. Its the ‘booby’ prize, given the pointlessness of actual relationships.
This capacity to despair over relationships whilst contemptuously dismissing them is a fancy piece of dissociation which carries quite a price tag. It costs him the healthy aggression which wants to make its own way in the world. He has had to split it off in order to maintain the omnipotence promised to him in the symbiotic small print of his contract with mother…
….split off aggression that has now grown tusks and wants nothing more than to tear into his ‘knee’.. for want of an autonomous life.
Its easy to judge Adonis for being a self destructive jerk, but he hasn’t been able to separate from a mother who was never ‘there’ enough to separate from. Myrrha was depersonalized by the Patriarchy to begin with and turned into a tree just before Adonis was born, so not a lot of ante-natal care for him, except as a fruit that must not fall too far from the bough..
The secretly feared consequences of becoming his own man, exemplified by Hippolytus’ dreadful betrayal and summary assault by maternally invoked sea monsters, seems way too great a price to pay. He’s better off taking his chances with the boar, locked in eternal conflict with that which would feed him, if only he would feed it.
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.
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.
