Tag: rilke

The Jealous King.

There was once a king who would not allow his daughter to marry. He kept her shut up in his castle and turned all her suitors away. One fine day she asked him pretty please and since it was indeed such a fine day, if she could not walk briefly in the meadow below the castle walls? Eventually the King agreed but warned her not to go too far… lest some harm come to her.

The Princess walks out into the meadow and there she finds a young man who is sooo handsome she immediately falls in love. He is, of course, a Prince from a neighboring kingdom. Each return to their respective fathers saying they want to get married. The Jealous King flies into a rage, closes the castle gates and challenges the young Prince to lay siege to his walls if he wishes.. which is just what he does. After a while the Prince realizes the castle is empty, everyone has escaped through underground passages. Only the King and Princess remain. The King implores his daughter’s obedience but she refuses and in a fury he casts a terrible spell upon her which turns her into three animals; a rabbit, a lion and a dragon.

The Prince searches high and low for the Princess but to no avail. Nothing but pesky and somewhat dangerous creatures. In despair he sends his troops home, continuing to search alone. In a nearby wood he comes across an Ancient Crone who tells him the secret of the King’s curse. He must return to the castle and find the animals, kissing each one three times.

At their wedding feast the Old King is included on the guest list, though further down the table than he might have liked.

This subversion of the Princess by the Jealous King can be looked at a number of different ways. One way to view this story is at face value, as an allegory for current events, a good example being the recent claim of harassment, false imprisonment and illegal gagging orders made against American virologist Dr Mikovits at the bequest of King Fauci who had other ideas about what should become of her HIV research, all of which then escalated into spell casting tsunamis of propaganda against her, millions spent on silencing something…

which could not possibly be.

Er, I thought Fauci was the good guy?

It depends on who your standing next to on the podium, can we continue?

of course..

Another way of looking at this story is to imagine that all the characters and interactions are parts of oneself. Fairy tales and myths are public dreams which, like dreams, can be seen as both describing outer events in an allegorical way but also as an emerging outcrop of consciousness from within. The problem with approaching either dream or fairy story from this subjective point of view, where all the characters and events are given the slant of an entirely inner pageant, is that you are then denied the luxury of projection upon which so much interaction and internal cohesion depend. The symbols involved can no longer be regarded as some quaint matter simply for other folk’s consideration. They not only have to do with us but act upon us.

‘The individual is then faced with the task of putting down to his own account all the iniquity, devilry, etc. which he has blandly attributed to others and about which he has been indignant all his life.” CG Jung

Given the understandable resistances involved, what might it mean that the inner king has imprisoned fair maid and cast this divisive spell? Could the metaphors involved refer to some crucial psychological dynamic within the individuation process? If so, what might that be?

The problem with growth and change is that it shakes previously sturdy self-constructs and leaves behind the familiarity of old ways of being. You have to suck at something new, trade in your old strategies and values for others as yet untested. This is why initiatory thresholds and transformations of any kind are generally difficult and unpleasant, necessitating much merrymaking to compensate the dread. They often require ritual, observance and loads of relatives to contain the transition which involves a process dubbed ‘de-integration’ by analyst Michael Fordham; you get pulled apart but not to pieces.

Not everything in the psyche is going to be happy about this. The instinct for self preservation wants to prop up the old structure, even if it does not serve the impulse to growth with which it is then bound to clash. This is why support for Trump increased at the beginning of the Corona virus outbreak in America despite his utterly incompetent handling of the situation. The Devil you know is safer than the angel you do not.

..’and so I keep down my heart and swallow the call-note of depth dark sobbing.’ R.M Rilke

The Jealous King is the ‘old outmoded dispensation’ in the psyche, the dominant function for a particular stage of life which has served its part and become redundant as a way forward, the alchemical calcinatio where the soul feels dried out and dusty, where no more marrow can be sucked from your situation.

Such circumstances provoke crisis. The wheel of life has turned but not found new expression, the tools and strategies of yesteryear no longer adequate for today’s challenges. And yet despite this we all tend to drag our feet and hang on to old structures, sabotaging potential and silencing emerging consciousness.

‘Instinctive forces does not reason. They assume from the immense experience of Nature’s ways that it will serve best to be stabilized according to initial experience, most commonly [among] those whose strong need for a maternal figure has followed them into middle age.’ J Liedloff

Fortunately, love and life find a way. The new shoot eventually manages to squeeze past the psyche’s defenses, often by virtue of a chance encounter or some seemingly insignificant event which then catalyses change, though not without bitter conflict and feeling besieged by the very flood of energy you have been hoping for.

Finally, the threatened dominant function, walled in but without the usual resources at its disposal, resorts to dissociative tactics, a spell which divides and incapacitates. For a while the new form of life seems desperately imperiled or at least at sixes and sevens.

‘The integration of contents that were unconscious and projected involves a serious lesion of the ego… a decomposition of the elements indicating dissociation and collapse of existing ego structures,.. closely analogous to schizophrenia.’ C G Jung.

Not much fun. Our story seems to be suggesting that the process of becoming more conscious involves considerable inner conflict and suffering which can decommission ‘normal’ functioning.

‘The energies and attention of the individual are often so engrossed that the power of coping with normal life may be impaired.’ R. Assagioli.

There is a real risk that emerging consciousness cannot be integrated. Fortunately, the Ancient Crone makes an appearance just at the moment of despair and tells the Prince what to do. She is Old Mother Earth, the Principle of Co-operation and Relatedness, a power deeper and more potent than that of the King. She understands not only the malady but also the cure, the fragmented potential has to be loved back to wholeness, the scary lion and the terrifying dragon along with the sweet bunny. If the Princess can be loved in her totality, warts and all, there will be transformation. The Jealous King doesn’t have to be killed, just deposed. He can even go to the wedding feast so long as he accepts a lesser place at the table.

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.