Category Archives: madness

the weeping song.

I realized recently that I have become a person who weeps openly, fairly regularly, in front of other people, and even sometimes in public.

This realization requires significant reorganization of my idea of the kind of person I am.

See, I spent much of my life doing my best robot impression. I was convinced my emotions caused nothing but trouble for me and for others. I was convinced that not feeling anything spared me pain. I would cry, rarely, but only when alone or around very close and trusted people. And I resented them for seeing me cry.

I grew up with a mother who regularly cried in public—what seemed to me to be loud, dramatic sobbing. Over the years I have in many ways defined myself as the opposite of my mother. Not crying where people could see and comfort me was just one of the axes of this defining.

And now I regularly weep in front of people.

I tell myself it’s ok because weeping is different from sobbing. I realize this is mostly a bullshit distinction and it’s high time I stop feeling that I have to exert my differences to differentiate and un-enmesh myself from my mother, with whom I have not spoken in several years.

I see there is power in having the vulnerability to express authentic emotions as they arise, even if that includes weeping. Or sobbing.

This weeping thing began around the time that I was 1) spending a whole lot of time in solitude; 2) starting a meditation practice; and 3) just beginning to recognize the trauma work I had ahead of me. At this time I was hiding in my house most of the time, venturing out to the grocery store in the wee hours of the morning. I was avoiding public places because I felt largely mad, and didn’t want to run into people lest they recognize it and have me thrown in the Bin (again). But it was also because when I saw people—people I knew and complete strangers—I saw (or told myself I saw) so much suffering hanging on them that it literally brought tears to my eyes. And I wasn’t going to be caught crying in the grocery store.

The more I open my heart to self and others in connection, the more weeping. It comes from recognition of the depth of pain we all carry, and the preciousness and tenuousness of life and connection.

When the weeping is there, it needs nothing. It feels clean.

At an NVC workshop recently, a participant was describing something about our habitual ways of responding to others, especially others in pain: diagnosing, one-upping, it’s-all-for-a-reason-ing, diminishing, etc. I paraphrase, but she said something like: when you see a person you care about in their circle of pain, you want to do or say something to help pull them out of it. To leave them in their pain feels cold somehow.

The obvious answer to me was that you don’t try to pull anyone out of anything, or leave them alone; you step into their circle of pain with them. And then I saw how that wasn’t even an option in the minds of some people—either they didn’t think of it, or it was too scary of a proposition. I got then, at an unprecedented depth, that all of my life experience has given me a gift: I am unafraid of other people’s pain, and I am unafraid of stepping into it with them.

Catherine, one of the facilitators of the workshop, pointed out that the word compassion literally means “with pain/suffering.” It’s not about being sweet or nice, it’s about stepping into that circle of pain with someone.

I appreciated again the adage about our wounds becoming our gifts, our own traumas having the potential to expand our capacity for compassion.

Later I had a vision: Vertical axis is a large tree—the tree of life, energy circulating, cleansing air and water flowing through, roots and transpiration. Horizontal axis is a vulture sitting directly in front of the tree, wings outstretched as though sunning. The wings become exaggerated and can enfold a circular space before the tree. The vulture’s wise dark eyes are wet; it is weeping.

A crazy idea arises: what if weeping could be a gift? What if someone could sit before you and you could see them in their beauty and their suffering, see the wounded child they cradle within themselves, and weep at the sight? Maybe, like me not so long ago, they are not yet able to weep for themselves. Maybe, they are weeping for themselves, but for a moment are not so alone in their mourning. Maybe, at the very least, it could be a moment of deep connection.

What if this could be an offering? What if this is one thing I could do?

It’s so at odds with the way I’ve always expected myself to be that I might just be on to something real.

 

here it comes again.

Grief is not a feeling. Grief is a skill. And the twin of grief as a skill of life is the skill of being able to praise or love life, which means wherever you find one authentically done, the other is close at hand. Grief and the praise of life: side by side. — Stephen Jenkinson, Griefwalker

Roger Woolger made a chilling statement in his lecture about how much unresolved grief there is in our culture, how long it has been building, and what it will take to process it. I wish I’d written it down, but in a way I’m kind of glad I didn’t. It was daunting.

I get more tired of practicing the skill of grief than I ever did of practicing anything else. Wave after wave after wave. It’ll surprise you in the staff lounge. It’ll take over what you intended to be a perfectly pleasant evening. In Soviet Russia, grief practices you. And no one is ever going to applaud you at your grief recital or exhibit. You will not win a blue ribbon in a grief-back riding show. You will not earn an A+, a degree, or money for your griefwork.

Refusing to deny or disown your grief is one of the more courageous things you can do in this culture. This does not mean moping around all the time. It means rejecting numbness, practiced apathy, enforced cheer, and compulsive distraction from the ache in your chest—the ache that dwells in the same chamber as the soaring love of all that is beautiful and well, the ache that must be opened to allow the soaring sound to swell.

Orphans are not people who have no parents: they are people who don’t know their parents, who cannot go to them. Ours is a culture built upon the ruthless foundation of mass migration, but it is more so now a culture of people unable to say who their people are. In that way we are, relentlessly, orphans. Being an orphan culture does not mean that we have no wisdom. But wisdom is being confused in our time with information. Wisdom is an achievement, hard earned and faithfully paid for; it’s not a possession. — Stephen Jenkinson

In a culture like ours, so unsure of itself, so without a shared understanding of life for its people, there are subtle, enduring consequences that look like personal inadequacy, failure of will, inability or unwillingness to live deeply. But what I’ve seen over twenty five years of working with people convinces me that these problems or struggles are not bad psychology, worse parenting or lousy personality development.

What we suffer from most is culture failure, amnesia of ancestry and deep family story, phantom or sham rites of passage, no instruction on how to live with each other or with the world around us or with our dead or with our history.

Any counsel worthy of the name should have culture at its core. Any counsel worthy of the name should begin to make a place in personal life for the rumoured, scattered story of who you come from where, and why. Counsel well done and honest makes a home for the orphan wisdom of personal life in the life of the world. It tries to ask the questions that the Sufi poet Rumi asked of himself eight centuries ago, and it tries to answer them:

All day long I think about it, and at night I say it:
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
Who hears with my ear, and speaks with my tongue?
And what is the soul?

Stephen Jenkinson again

Aside: I want to make a drum. I think I may want Stephen Jenkinson to teach me how.

And so the question looming largest in my mind of late: (be patient… it builds) I am lucky to have a career that I enjoy and that I am good at. I support myself doing important work I feel good about that does not suck my soul. I believe I have contributions to make to the field of librarianship, or at the very least, to the library employing me.

However, over the past few years, I have been forced to recognize and own a deep calling to do work that witnesses others and supports them in feeding and healing their hearts and souls. According to Michael Winkelman’s cross-cultural studies of magico-religious practitioners, this sort of work has not historically been full time work at which people made their livings. Thus, I don’t see myself facing an either/or choice.

For a while, I thought that not making an either/or choice was a cop out for security and comfort, but recently things keep coming up all over the place reminding me that people who do the kind of work I’m being drawn to have always straddled worlds. That’s the core of the work, actually.

My question is: how do you move into doing this sort of work without deciding you will be a psychotherapist, a chaplain, a bodyworker, a facilitator, a personal coach, or whatever on a full time basis? Perhaps you just call yourself Death Bear and call it an art project… Death Bear does have a day job.

I am sure the answer will unfold itself at the appropriate time(s). That is how my life tends to go when I’m paying attention. I just write this to remind myself to keep paying attention, and to clarify my intent.

I’m just beginning, as always, but it’s hard not to squint and try to make out the entire route before reaching the next turn.

And now, the severe thunderstorm comes rolling in. That’s a literal statement and not a metaphor.

i fail at bus.

It takes 11-13 minutes to walk up the hill to downtown.

When I checked this morning, I saw that the next buses would be arriving up the hill downtown in 4 and 14 minutes. “Aha!,” I thought. “It takes three minutes to walk down the hill to the ‘at trailer park’ stop. I can just go there and it will be just perfect timing.”

If the bus stopped at the trailer park after it stopped downtown, it would have been perfect timing. But it is the other way around. It’s not as if this is news to me—the whole reason I like to walk up the hill to downtown is so that I spend less time in the over-heated, motion-sickness (not-helped-by-drunks-reeking-of-cigarettes-booze-filtered-out-the-skin-and-and-sometimes-also-urine)-inducing bus.

I arrived at the trailer park stop feeling quite satisfied with myself. And then I thought I’d check when the next bus was going to come so that I could inwardly gloat over my great timing. Then I received the text telling me the next bus was in 36 minutes. I went blank and confused for a couple of minutes as I tried to process this. It slowly dawned on me that the bus that would be downtown in 14 minutes stopped at the trailer park while I was traipsing down my driveway on the way to the trailer park stop.

Sigh.

I go through periods of obsessively tracking how much time everything takes. This is how I know it is 3 minutes to the trailer park stop from home, 11-13 minutes to the downtown stop from home, 9-10 minutes from the frat house stop to my desk at work, 12 minutes from the cheap parking deck to my desk, and so on. I always think that if I just know how long everything takes, my problems with time will be solved. I am always wrong.

Times just do not stay in my head in a meaningful way long enough for me to line them all up properly. This is why I have spreadsheets to calculate when to leave for the airport and what time to start baking bread if I want toast at 4.30pm.

Now, this morning I was super-fixated on getting to work at 9:30am because a) that’s what time I am supposed to be there; and b) I had a meeting at 10am and I needed to refresh my memory on the matters at hand. At least, I was pretty sure the meeting was at 10am, but I realized I needed to check just as I shut down my computer before leaving home for the day, and I hadn’t written it in my calendar—because for some reason I always think I will remember the time. Or that I will remember to check the time before I shut down or leave my computer.

Finally it sunk in that I was totally going to be late to my meeting if I took the bus, walked, or biked. I clambered back up the hill and jumped in my car, hoping I’d be able to get back up the hill after work (winter storm alert!).

When I hit my desk at work at 9.20am, I felt slightly heroic for being 10 minutes early. This gave me plenty of time to prepare for my meeting, because it didn’t start until 11.

Every time I have a time-fail like this, I resolve to get my act together and do better. I try, but it never works for long.

Perhaps this is what used to make my parents say “She’s book-smart but she has no common sense.” Which is not true. I have plenty of common sense. It’s just that, between the ADHD and the depersonalization, I happen to nearly lack the normally-functioning time-sense module of the common sense package.

At least I’ve long since given up beating up and berating myself for being an idiot and feeling ashamed when these things happen. Now I can usually laugh at myself and accept that I’m far from an idiot, but certain tangles of my brain just aren’t hooked up right. I do what I can. What I can’t be is perfect, and I’ve got no time for feeling bad about my humanity (except for when I’d rather be a cat).

Oh look, suddenly it’s an hour later than I thought it was and there’s a 9am all-staff meeting that is still on despite the weather being bad enough that the university canceled classes until 11am tomorrow.

spade, or, it gets better.

1. Am I just too cynical that I can’t really feel glad that all this gay teen suicide/bullying crap is getting a lot of attention right now because I expect the attention of the masses will hop on to the next media-hyped thing any day now?

2. One thing about it that annoys me is the use of the word “bullying.” Can we just be blunt and call it what it actually is: physical assault and emotional abuse?

If you are an adult and someone is following you around, tormenting you, leaving you evil notes, tricking you, physically hurting you, what would you do? I know what I’d do. I’d start the legal process of getting a restraining order and so on. If it were at work, I would report them to my supervisor and would fully expect it to be resolved (and not at my expense) because we have clear guidelines about what is and is not expected.

But if you are a child or early teenager, what are your options? You don’t really have any. If you are really lucky you have resources in your parents, but far, far too many children do not feel their parents are safe to open up to. Far too often those children are right.

You are required to go to school every day. You do not get a choice unless you choose to head toward failing out and being a delinquent ((Which is not going to help very much in providing a decent escape route from your situation of powerlessness)). Teachers and administrators all too often turn a blind eye to what is going on with kids. ((And not just with abuse by other children! Personal example that astounds and angers me when I think about it: Ninth grade. Study hall. I am cutting the tips of my fingers with a safety razor I keep in my purse and drawing in my notebook with the blood. I think another student said something to the teacher about it, because she called me up to her desk and asked me if I was cutting my fingers on purpose and why. I told her I thought the blood was a pretty color and had interesting properties as an ink and it didn’t hurt. She just kind of nodded at me and I went back to my desk. Did anyone from the school check on me? No. Did the teacher do something to get the school counselor to talk with me? No. Did anyone contact my parents about their daughter doing self-injury in the middle of a classroom? No.

Similar thing when my then-boyfriend’s foster mother freaked out when she noticed I was sitting in church, pulling out hairs. She recognized this as possible trichotillomania–a not uncommon coping mechanism for dealing with feelings you cannot face or are not allowed to have/express. She freaked out at my mother. When I was talked to about it, I made up some bullshit excuse and stopped pulling hairs when other people were around. I think I resorted to seeing how long and hard I could dig my nails into my arm in church instead. And the issue just went away… )) Sometimes the teachers even join in. ((Ah, the lovely day in middle school when, in front of my laughing classmates, the juvenile ass hired as a “coach” and our P.E. teacher took my shoes and put them up on a basketball goal, far too high for me to reach.)) It’s Lord of the Flies every day and kids don’t have a choice. No one protects them from their abusers. Instead, they are sent right back in to the lion’s den every day while others look on from the sidelines.

Then, too often they are blamed and belittled for their response. They are “too sensitive,” or are told that “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”—a blatant, harmful, invalidating lie that research proves; a number of studies have found verbal emotional and psychological abuse to have effects somewhat different from, but just as damaging, as physical or sexual abuse. Children are told to suck it up, expected to pull off extraordinary feats of maturity and inner strength at a time when they are children and still figuring out who they are and how they fit into the world. They are called “tattle-tales” when they complain about other children being cruel to them. They are asked to not have the feelings they are having: By 3rd or 4th grade, I already dreaded going to school because of abuse from other children, and would feel ill and sullen and angry every morning. And instead of being listened to, empathized with, or stuck up for, I was chided for being so negative, told that of course I’d have a bad day if I went into it expecting a bad day, and made to sing a stupid jaunty song about how “I’m gonna have a GREAT DAY!” before I was allowed to get out of the car at school. Which only stoked my rage and sense that no one cared about what I was experiencing.

3. There is another word we use to refer to people having no power being forced to remain in an abusive environment with few external options and no help from anyone around. When no one higher up demands accountability and sets clear, strong limits on behavior that will not be tolerated. When swift disciplinary repercussions for stepping out of bounds do not exist.

Hint: Stanford Prison Experiment. All involved were nice, normal college kids…

4. Here’s a good look at the inside of a child in this sort of torment: Single Dad Laughing: Memoirs of a Bullied Kid. I’d never read this blog until a friend linked to it tonight. His post “You just broke your child. Congratulations” also really touched a nerve in me.

5. I was shocked at the number of people who expressed shock that the Columbine shooting could happen. Frankly, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. That it doesn’t means that most of the hatred and rage felt by victims of this sort of abuse is largely turned inward on themselves. And so children hang themselves.

6. It’s all sad. It’s all horrifying. It’s all extremely angry-making. But it isn’t shocking.

7. Ok, well I guess what is shocking to me is the way children are allowed to treat other children. How their actions are defended. Children tormenting other children have their own problems, and it is not really their fault that they are so wounded they lash out like this, and/or have not be taught to behave decently toward their fellow humans. But that doesn’t mean they should be allowed to keep going.

8. It also is somewhat shocking to me that adults are far too willing to believe/convince themselves that everything is ok with children. It makes sense, though. It is inconvenient and it gets really uncomfortable for adults to acknowledge what may actually be going on with children. It is as if children are expected to have the lucidity of mental health practitioners—to be able to say, “Oh, yes. Thank you for asking. I’m feeling extremely depressed, anxious, angry, invisible, invalidated, and trapped in every part of my life and I’m resorting to these self-injurious behaviors as a coping mechanism. The only way I know how to drown out the inside pain for a little bit is to inflict some outside pain. Endorphins are great. Please get me therapy.” That’s just not going to happen very frequently, as a big reason people adopt these kinds of coping mechanisms is they do not know how to identify or regulate their feelings, they do not feel (or just are not) able to express their feelings, and/or they do not feel safe being open about themselves with the people who would observe and question them on these matters—usually because these people are a large part of the problem.

It’s National Coming Out day. As if it were not obvious, I’ll come out as a formerly very troubled young person. I don’t expect to ever be trouble-free, but at least now I have constructive ways to muddle through any trouble that should arise. Oh, and as an adult I have the power and agency to make decisions about my own life and what sort of treatment I will and will not abide from others.

9. That latter bit in bold is the part that makes me really ache for these young suicides. They will never know the utter brilliant joy I often do when I’m in my own house, doing my own thing, and I realize no one is going to berate, shame, or ridicule me, and no one is going to tell me I’m damned, and no one is going to scream “DYKE!” and throw things at my head. I may wake, sleep, eat, drink, read, work, and be in peace, and I’m not kidding when I say it often makes jump up and down and spin around, usually in my kitchen.

10. So my message to children and teens in the midst of ongoing abuse would be: Hold on, even if it means retreating into yourself in ways that may cause other problems later. Those problems are totally surmountable, once you get to them. ((Example of what I’m talking about here: I disassociated an awful lot in order to get through and get out. In my mind I was elsewhere. I observed what was happening to me from a corner of the room instead of letting myself really experience the pain/fear/anger/whatever at the time. Later, I have had to deal with (and am still dealing with, in some cases) issues of learning to stop doing this, identifying and feeling my feelings, and feeling unreal, disconnected, false, etc.)) Cling to the promise of escape. Life will likely never again reach the level of hellishness you are currently experiencing. It will suck at times, but it will also be full of love and wonder.

Hold on. If possible, get out into nature and/or get to know some animals. Unless you befriend a tiger or venomous snake, it’s probably safe to say that a connection with an animal is essentially safe, validating, and honest. Most animals will accept you as you are for the qualities you bring—kindness, presence, affection, and, of course, treats—and never hurt you on purpose. Nature and animals can be a good reminder that life can indeed be beautiful and wondrous.

Hold on. Stand really close to a mirror and look deeply in your own eyes until you forget they are yours and you can really see them clearly. Your eyes are amazing, intricate, multi-layered infinities, just like you. They are beautiful, and so are you. And someday you will surround yourself only with people who see that. Tell yourself: The people here are blind. One day I will find people who will really see me.

If it speaks to you, put this song on repeat. It’s why I say in all seriousness that Robert Smith saved my life. He was the person from which I heard this message over and over again, enough to soothe me so I could sleep: fight it (mentally). push it away. you do not have to give in. one day, you will fucking fill up the sky with your laughter and love and those who hurt you so badly now will seem like nothing in comparison.

musings on seeing rothko’s black-on-black paintings, informed more than expected by the hollis workshop.

On Monday, September 27, 2010, I went to the East Building of the National Gallery of Art to see an exhibition of Rothko’s black paintings.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1964

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1964

I peeked in, noted that there were seven looming black pieces on the walls, and for a fleeting moment felt what I imagine many people might feel when faced with this exhibition. Something within me recoiled. A wave of ennui rolled through. A sense of annoyance at perhaps being the butt of some joke about the definition of “Art.”

Most people who came in while I was there peeked in, maybe walked into the center of the room or once around its perimeter, and left. For me, a brief jolting desire to flee rose from some deep place inside, but a bigger part of me knew better and was committed to spending time with these works. I ended up staying with the paintings for over an hour. ((I would have stayed longer, but had a concert to get to later…)) In that time, one other person actually took time with the paintings.

Here is how I approach a room of Rothkos. It does take time. Go to the center of the room. Turn around slowly. Take in the effect of being surrounded by giant portals of color, or in this case, mostly lack thereof. Turn around so slowly that you see the different shapes and hues emerging from each.

Then, meet each painting individually. Begin at middle distance, normal gallery viewing range. Focus your eyes. Unfocus your eyes. In-between focus. Do this long enough that the painting shifts from being flat to having infinite depth as you start to perceive the layers and shapes in them. Notice how they disappear literally in the blink of an eye, and then re-emerge. Notice the feeling tone as the painting opens up.

Then, become intimate with the painting. I’m a rude weird ((I say it’s rude and weird because I see few other people doing it, and it means I’m obscuring the view for those people who maintain normal middle distance from the works.)) gallery attendee in that I always like to view the works as closely as possible. This is how you see the brush bristles, the cigarette butts, the finger prints, the technical details. This is how the artist first viewed the image as it emerged and when it was finished. When viewing Rothkos, this step is essential in order to experience being swallowed by the painting. With his larger paintings, your entire field of vision can be filled by color. This close encounter often magnifies or transforms the initial feeling tone of more distant viewing. This is how Rothko wanted us to view his works:

I paint very large pictures. I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them however – I think it applies to other painters I know – is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command.

I also hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture.

Rothko wanted people to experience his works as he did in their creation:

I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted.

It is only through this intimate, direct encounter with a Rothko that his genius can be felt. And it is felt, not conceptually, intellectually grasped or understood. Once you have experienced it and felt it, you know it: Rothko was somehow able to paint the spectrum of human psychology ((I use the term psychology in its literal meaning: knowledge or expression of the psyche, defined by Jung as “the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious” (Jung, C.G. (1971). Psychological Types, Collected Works, Volume 6, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, Def. 48 par. 797))—the conscious and the unconscious. No figures, no words, just the bare experience of psychological states.

The first time I came face-to-face with a Rothko, I was moved to tears. I got it. I experienced it. I knew what he had been up to. Later, this intuition was confirmed when I read the following: ((I also felt like less of a weirdo for crying in front of a painting of such surface simplicity and meaninglessness. Later, I read Pictures and tears: a history of people who have cried in front of paintings, which opens with a description of an art historian being moved to tears upon viewing one of Rothko’s black-on-black paintings and this quote, from page 3:

There is no survey to prove it, but it is likely that the majority of people who have wept over twentieth-century paintings have done so in front of Rothko’s paintings. And of all Rothko’s paintings, people have been moved most by the fourteen huge canvases he made for the chapel that now bears his name.

The seven large paintings in the exhibit currently at the National Gallery were precursors of the chapel paintings.))

I am not an abstractionist. … I am not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. … I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions. … The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!

As I said, I stayed for over an hour. Yes, there were tears. I felt as though I were ripping myself out of the room when I had to leave. The black canvases had become enormous magnets, or warm stones in a stark, cold place.

Amused aside: I just now realized I only went into the first room of the exhibit. There was another room with nine more paintings. An excuse to go back?

The first Rothkos I ever spent time with were the big red ones usually on display at the National Gallery. I was sucked toward them by just a distant glimpse. So why the moment of recoil at the black paintings this time? There is much in the psyche we do not want to own. All of this is referred to in Jungian psychology as the Shadow—that in the Self which people consciously disown or disassociate themselves from, but end up unconsciously dragging around in a “long black bag.” ((Robert Bly’s phrase)) Personal growth necessitates periods of suffering, or “swamplands of the soul,” ((as per James Hollis)) which no one looks forward to. The Shadow and the Swamplands are typically associated with blackness and negativity. It is our reflex to recoil from them, as I reflexively recoiled from the paintings.

Of course, the paradox is, in Jung’s words:

…that in the very darkness of nature a light is hidden, a little spark without which the darkness would not be darkness…the lumen naturae is the light of the darkness itself, which illuminates its own darkness, and this light the darkness comprehends

Paul Levy expands upon this:

In contrast to a light that, as the Bible says, “shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not,” the lumen naturae, the light of lights, is a light that the darkness intimately recognizes as its own nature. The lumen naturae is the luminosity within the darkness recognizing itself as it illumines its own darkness. This archetypal experience of the luminescence of the divine being found in the translucent darkness is referred to in various mystical traditions by names such as the luminous darkness and the black sun.

What Rothko achieved in these paintings is nothing less than representation and communication of the “archetypal experience of the luminescence of the divine being found in the translucent darkness.” He painted le soleil noir. Of course the paintings are initially repellent to the conscious ego. The work of individuation is that of spiritual alchemy and requires diving into the darkness to recover the light within. Individuation requires the death of the ego as it knew itself at the beginning of the journey. But once one has begun and seen a glimmer of the lumen naturae, one is inexorably drawn toward the darkness in which it may be found. Thus, the paintings became magnets after I truly experienced them.

I believe Rothko was working on The Opus. He called his art religious art, though he was not religious. He claimed to deal with the Spirit of Myth and was preoccupied with “finding a pictoral equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.” In a radio broadcast with Adolph Gottlieb:

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.. …(they) express something real and existing in ourselves.

One week ago today, I attended a workshop with James Hollis. He cited Jung as saying The Opus requires three things: insight, courage, and endurance. Psychology can help with insight. Courage seems like an intrinsic trait which one may or may not be able to uncover in oneself. Endurance, particularly in a feel-good, instant gratification culture so inimical to The Opus, seems to be the most difficult as it must be continuously maintained in the face of our being worn down. Hollis says that we wake up every morning with two demons at the foot of our bed: fear and lethargy. To triumph over these and get out of bed is an heroic act. I know I have insight. I have confidence in my ability to muster courage. But I am prone to overwhelm and sometimes worry about my capacity for endurance. Perhaps I am projecting…

In 1967, Rothko completed the black-on-blacks. In 1968, he reduced his palette to brown, gray, and black. In 1970, he slit his wrists in his studio, overdosed on antidepressants, and died.

I believe that getting stuck in and swallowed by the nigredo stage is one of the risks of setting out on The Opus. The immensity of the Abyss can sap endurance and stifle vision. Seeing your own life against the scale of the Abyss can change your perspective on your mortality. At the workshop, an attendee asked Hollis about suicidality. In his response, he said something about it sometimes being a case of the ego choosing bodily death rather than face ego death.

I have not studied Rothko’s life or body of work in depth, and no one can really know why a person chooses to commit suicide. I only wonder what we might have seen if he was indeed stuck in the nigredo and had chosen egocide over suicide. What might he have created had he re-become himSelf? Maybe nothing. Maybe something more glorious. Can’t know.

I do know that the black paintings currently on display are products of genius, and that simply thinking about them now evokes the same feelings of wonder, awe, grief, gratitude, despair, comfort, fear, courage, smallness, strength, of being a stranger, and of being at home that I felt in the room with the canvases. All simultaneously. That is the beauty of the lumen naturae.

don’t mean to bore you with the details of my story.

I had an exceedingly weird morning. I wish I could remember the exact phrase used, but it was an exceedingly weird morning, so I don’t. But in the course of it a person said something like: from what they could tell of me (or knew of me, or had heard about me), I was a person who was familiar with (or knowledgeable about, or not afraid of) extreme emotional (or psychological) states.

However the last two parts were put, they’re true. But I wasn’t aware that this is an obvious or well known fact. Two years ago the person’s statement would have made me anxious and terrified everyone thought I was crazy. But today I’m just going, “How exceedingly weird. Well, it’s true. Curious.”

A while back I picked up a little book by Arnold Mindell called Working on Yourself Alone because I had become interested in the idea of autopsychotherapy after reading Dabrowski. Because I accumulate books like a squirrel accumulates fleas, I put it on a shelf with the rest of my growing psychology/psychoanalytical collection, expecting it to push itself forward on the shelf at me one day.

Today was the day. In the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about bodywork and emotional release and I’ve run across several random references to Mindell and/or process-oriented psychotherapy. This morning I saw the book from my bed and remembered it has stuff about bodywork and somatic experience, so I sat down with it for breakfast.

A passage I marked:

The way awareness works in us is, I believe, by constantly and patiently chipping away at our lives in order to bring out our original form, visible in our childhood dream, in our personal myth. Jung found out years ago that what we call early childhood dreams and incidents are patterns governing our life-long process. If you dreamed as a child that gangsters were after you, then you may frequently feel like a good person constantly confronted by a gangster-like secondary process. Everything which happens makes you aware of the limitations of your goodness and sweetness and how it keeps out your own gangster-like drives.

Being aware, then, means being aware of not only the short-term situations in our lives, but also our personal myths, childhood dreams and memories, as well as of the observers in us who use our awareness.

Two things about this quote struck me:

1. “the observers in us who use our awareness”
I’ve always been keenly aware of the multiplicity of Is in my interior experience, including observers and commentators.

The chill up my young spine when I first heard the story of the Gerasenes demon, intoned dramatically during a sermon: And he answered, saying, “My name is Legion: for we are many.”

A very different sort of chill upon reading Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

For most of my life this was terrifying. At worst, I was afraid I was going crazy. Next worst, that I’d slip up and say things that would make others believe I was crazy. At best, this way of being is clearly unacceptable in this culture of ego building and boosting, where you are supposed to know—and clearly display through identity claims and consumer patterns—your Self and what you want, feel, and believe and what the one truth of each matter is, as if these are singular, clear, and well-defined.

In the past 18 months, I’ve finally learned not to be frightened of the way my mind works. Fear of going crazy indicates recognition that what one is internally experiencing does not align with what one would typically experience as the reality of the situation or the expected “normal” response to it. The ability to recognize a disconnect between one’s non-typical experience/perception and the expected, normal experience/perception of reality demonstrates intact reality testing and awareness of one’s mental state. Intact reality testing and awareness of one’s mental state are the opposite of mental illness.

Knowing this makes the difference between overwhelming anxiety and “But I’m not crazy, I’m just laughing at myself.”

Dabrowski, Jung, Mindell, and others see identifying the multiple levels or parts of the self, working with them, and establishing integration as the path to optimal mental health. Insistence upon singularity of self is seen as lack of development and/or the fast lane to neurosis and psychopathology.

It doesn’t take much reading about positive disintegration, spiritual emergencies, shamanism, trauma, peak experience, ego death, and non-ordinary states to understand that, by this culture’s definition, the following would all be crazy and should “talk to their doctors”: saints, mystics, visionaries, indigenous healers, the enlightened, and many highly creative and brilliant creators in the arts and sciences. Not that being “crazy” makes you any of these things… but a reminder that classification and definition is always embedded in something larger with its own priorities.

2. Jung found out years ago that what we call early childhood dreams and incidents are patterns governing our life-long process.

My most vivid recurring childhood dream: I am up in my treehouse. The house part is smaller than the platform it sits on, so I can walk all the way around the exterior of the house. I am doing so, carefully avoiding stepping on any shadows cast by the tree branches. I know that if I step in a shadow, something unthinkable will happen that involves being sucked into the shadow. All I know is that this is to be avoided at all costs. Then the sun starts moving faster across the sky. The shadows start sliding faster across the platform. I have to walk faster to avoid stepping the wrong way. And it all continues to accelerate until the sun is spinning around the sky and I’m running as fast as I can, getting dizzy from watching my feet and everything spinning. And then I wake up terrified.

Vivid childhood incident 1: My parents take me with them to their friends’ house. I am in kindergarten or first grade. I go outside to play with their son who was caught poking me with straight pins when I was younger. For some reason there was a deep hole dug in their back yard. The boy took me over to show it to me. I stepped closer to peer down into it and asked what the hole was for. “It’s where the Devil lives.” Sudden hard push between my shoulder blades and laughter. Tumbling headfirst in, sand in my eyes, sand and blood in my mouth from biting my tongue, breath knocked out, believing I must be dead.

Vivid childhood incident 2: For reasons I don’t recall now, I want my mother’s attention. I have a sense of urgency about something, and I’m holding something in my left hand. I am on the shore of the lake across the street from our house. My brother is still in diapers and toddling if walking at all, so I must be between four and five years old. I don’t know how to swim. My mother is out in the lake with a friend, hanging on a float so it looks like she’s standing up in the water. There are other people around and kids playing. Frustration and starting to walk out into the water, repulsive slimy muck from the floor of the shallows extruding between my toes. A little further and the lake floor feels cleaner. A swirl of cooler water brushes around my legs. A little further and the lake floor is suddenly absent. The image of the dark water scrolling up my field of vision like an upside-down window shade and the sensation of sinking like a stone.

It amuses me to imagine a bringing these to a first session with a Jungian analyst. I haven’t mentioned the burn and the fire, the tornadoes and hurricanes, the snakes and spiders, and all manner of other things that would make my autobiography read like a heavy-handed allegory of archetypes and symbols.

If these sorts of things are patterns governing my life-long process, it’s all about the descent and there is no use fighting it, fearing it, despairing over it, denying it, running from it, or trying to hide it. It’s the Abyss we’re talking about; people don’t usually refer to great happiness, contentment, love, gratitude, etc. as “extreme emotional states.” Yes, last summer I was writing about building a lake house on the shore of the Abyss. Since coming to terms with the fact that I’m never going to have a sunny beach house, I can see it is actually a pretty nice place. I’m just not used to random people having my address or popping round for a visit.