The blowout from the Macondo well has created a terminal condition: denial. We don’t want to own, much less accept, the cost of our actions. We don’t want to see, much less feel, the results of our inactions. And so, as Americans, we continue to live as though these 5 million barrels of oil spilled in the Gulf have nothing to do with us. The only skill I know how to employ in the magnitude of this political, ecological, and spiritual crisis is to share the stories that were shared with me by the people who live here. I simply wish to bear witness to the places we traveled and the people we met, and give voice to the beauty and devastation of both.

To bear witness is not a passive act.

…

The system is breaking down not from one thing but everything.

–The Gulf Between Us: Stories of terror and beauty from the world’s largest accidental offshore oil disaster by Terry Tempest Williams

Finally subscribing to Orion, I think…

Randomly ran across a blog by one of those anonymous Internet somewhat kindred spirits. One of those things that reminds me that no, I am not alone in experiencing the world the way I do, which has the effect of reducing the existential trauma that often threatens to overwhelm me (see quote that rocked my understanding from the previous post…) Having that happen occasionally is why I continue to ever write anything on the Web—the thought that something I write might lighten someone else’s burden of alienation in some tiny way. See (post from aforementioned blog):

I have some cultural dysphoria. American culture seems abusive, needlessly controlling, morally debased, hopelessly cruel, shallow, and really just stupid.

“So when you look for guidance, direction, mentorship, we all look to institutions… but it’s really yourself that is the final arbiter. And if you keep yourself as the final arbiter you will be less susceptible to infection by cultural illusion. Now the problem with this is it makes you feel bad not to be infected by cultural illusion because its called alienation. But this is I can’t solve all problems. The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation.”
- Terrence McKenna (video link from last year)

–Hermetically Blonde

From a review of a book going on the to read at some point list:

But nature is humbling on both the largest and smallest of scales. You don’t have to be in the wilderness any more than you have to stay in bed to be awed, to be jolted or slowly prodded back into the world of the living, to feel connected. Look big enough or small enough, and all things start to take on a familiar geometry. Nebulas swirling in space, the tight twist of the double helix, the “marvelous spiral” of a snail’s perfectly curled shell. Size and distance become variable, unimportant. Bailey acknowledges that “Snails may seem like tiny, even insignificant things compared to the wars going on around the world,” but through her eyes we are reminded that nothing, no matter how small, is without significance.
–The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, reviewed by Kathleen Yale

Last night and this morning, I read The raven’s gift : a scientist, a shaman, and their remarkable journey through the Siberian wilderness by Jon Turk. I loved the part where, when Turk’s PhD advisor questioned him on why he had not been applying for any academic jobs, Turk basically said, “I can’t be in academia. I have to be able to smell the earth with my dog.” Also loved reading about Turk’s holding the tension between rational western mind and wonder mystery mind. I like that the latter gets the seat of honor at the table.

Finally, lynx are popping up everywhere. No, not literally, but it’s getting seriously a little spooky.

A sane person is someone who is tolerant of his own and others’ conflicting desires, ideas, foibles. One is reminded of the title of a book by Stuart Hampshire: Justice is Conflict. This is an important idea. Sanity or justice does not consist in striving after perfection. Sanity is a space where life in all its messiness can take place.
– Review – Going Sane: Maps of Happiness by Adam Phillips Fourth Estate, 2006 – Review by Sjoerd van Hoorn, MA, Mar 27th 2007

the problem is not that we too are cave dwellers, unaware of the illusionary and limited state in which we exist (although undoubtedly that is a problem too), but rather that we buy into distinction between inside the cave and outside the cave, i.e. we think that there is a place outside the cave. This worldview is what Lear calls the seduction fantasy. We want to believe there is an outside to the cave – that there is a place outside suffering, outside frustration, outside the tension life contains – but ultimately, this seductive idea (seductive because of its promise of a better place, a better life, of happiness) will only harm us by frustrating us with its unattainability.
– Review – Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life by Jonathan Lear, Harvard University Press, 2000 – Review by Havi Carel, Mar 6th 2001

The following just shifted my understanding of everything:

…it is not quite right to say that trauma occurs when the psyche becomes ‘flooded’ with an affect-state that it cannot inwardly regulate, but that trauma occurs when the we cannot find a relational home for such an affect. The feelings experienced by Stolorow at the conference were almost unendurable, because no one else could share them. Thus Stolorow:

Trauma is constituted in an intersubjective context in which severe emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held. In such a context, painful affect states become unendurable- that is, traumatic.

For Stolorow, the context in which an emotion is held is indivisibly linked with the way in which we experience it. In terms of developmental theory, a child met with misattuned responses to their pain may have a propensity to dissociate from or disavow affective reactions.
– Review – Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections by Robert D. Stolorow, Analytic Press, 2007 – Review by Laura Cook, Jun 24th 2008

It a is well known fact — therapists know it quite well — that it is almost absolutely impossible to think, write and talk about traumatizing causes and effect of trauma. There is something deeply mute, alogic and inhuman in the bottom of traumatic experience. There is something essentially atheoretic within the traumatic experience. There is no place for metaphor within the traumatized subjectivity. Traumatic core of traumatic experience is beyond any symbolization and ideation (or we could say mentalization). Trauma is something ontologically unmediated. One of its logical consequences is (just mentioned) trauma’s atheoretic essence. There is no place for any symbol within it. There is no functional ideation. The traumatized subject is deeply frozen in unbearable reality (reality that is not symbolized and not mentalized) of his primitive mental state.
– Review – Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and Beyond Psychoanalysis by Karyn Ball, Other Press, 2007 – Review by Petar Jevremovic, Jul 22nd 2008

It is this absence of being able to remember, describe, narrate, psychologize, symbolize, and mythologize those dreadful black spaces stored in my body’s implicit memory that is so disturbing to me—a person who is driven to map out, look at, and connect up everything. And there is just nothing to connect anything to.

Great googly moogly, I love reading Lia Purpura.

I told her I’d never had much luck with my own gardens, how they were always a mess, everything straying and overrunning the beds, getting out of hand and defiant, that it was not at all relaxing. She described the gardens she’d always kept. She spoke of her roses, zinnias, dahlias, the tangle of vines netting over, everything crammed in a too-small space. “You know,” she said in her thick accent, “I love them all. All the weeds and flowers. I keep even the dandelions in.” I remember thinking I recognize that. And I remember feeling shaken by the recognition, the neatness and the wildness unresolved. That she was not, could not be, discerning. I remember staring into the dirty gray weave of the seat in front of me. I remember thinking, uneasily, This is the only way anything will ever make sense to me.

–Being of Two Minds

Anni Albers was a weaver who fled Nazi Germany and became a professor of art at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Her “One Aspect of Art Work”¹ is an amazing piece and I wish I could paste the whole thing here. Instead, some favorite bits:

Our world goes to pieces, we have to rebuild our world. We investigate and worry and analyze and forget that the new comes about through exuberance and not through a defined deficiency. We have to find our strength rather than our weakness. Out of the chaos of collapse we can save the lasting: we still have our “right” or “wrong,” the absolute of our inner voice—we still know beauty, freedom, happiness… unexplained and unquestioned.

Intuition saves us examination.

——

Art work deals with the problem of a piece of art, but more, it teaches the process of all creating, the shaping out of the shapeless. We learn from it, that no picture exists before it is done, no form before it is shaped. The conception of a work gives only its temper, not its consistency. Things take shape in material and in the process of working it, and no imagination is great enough to know before they are done what they will be like.

We come to know in art work that we do not clearly know where we will arrive in our work, although we set the compass, our vision; that we are led, in going along, by material and work process. We have plans and blueprints, a shorthand of material and its treatment, but the finished work is still a surprise. We learn to listen to voices: to the yes or no of our material, our tools, our time. We come to know that only when we feel guided by them our work takes on form and meaning, that we are misled when we follow only our will. All great deeds have been achieved under a sense of guidance.

We learn courage from art work. We have to go where no one was before us. We are alone and we are responsible for our actions. Our solitariness takes on religious character. This is a matter of my conscience and me.

——

We learn to trust our intuition. No explaining and no analyzing can help us recognize an art problem or solve it, if thinking is our only relation to it. We have to rely on inner awareness. We can develop awareness, and clear thoughts may help us cultivate it, but the essence of understanding art is more immediate than any thinking about it.

1. published in Design 46, no. 4 (December 1944): 21–22 [↩]

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.

Nature teaches us simplicity and contentment, because in its presence we realize we need very little to be happy. Since we are part of the animal kingdom, our senses are naturally more alive in the outdoors. The rustle of leaves or the rapid flight of birds could indicate the presence of a mountain lion or bear. Hiking in places where we are not the only predator¹ helps us understand that all of life is intimately interwoven and that we are a part of that web.

— Mark Coleman, “A Breath of Fresh Air“

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

Then, the most amazing thing. There is a little fenced garden next to Manning Hall. A small hedge blooming with small white flowers pads the inside of the fence all the way around. This morning there were SO MANY Eastern Tiger Swallowtails² eating from these flowers. The hedge appeared decorated with living ornaments—yellow and black wings with luscious blue at the bottoms fluttering everywhere. If you looked deeper, past the butterflies—which was difficult—there were even more bumblebees moving around in there.

A plasma display window?—The shifting baseline problem in a technologically mediated natural world
Peter H. Kahn Jr., Batya Friedman, Brian Gill, Jennifer Hagman, Rachel L. Severson, Nathan G. Freier, Erika N. Feldman, Sybil Carrère and Anna Stolyar
Journal of Environmental Psychology, Volume 28, Issue 2, June 2008, Pages 192-199.

ABSTRACT: Humans will continue to adapt to an increasingly technological world. But are there costs to such adaptations in terms of human well being? Toward broaching this question, we investigated physiological effects of experiencing a HDTV quality real-time view of nature through a plasma display “window.” In an office setting, 90 participants (30 per group) were exposed either to (a) a glass window that afforded a view of a nature scene, (b) a plasma window that afforded a real-time HDTV view of essentially the same scene, or (c) a blank wall. Results showed that in terms of heart rate recovery from low-level stress the glass window was more restorative than a blank wall; in turn, a plasma window was no more restorative than a blank wall. Moreover, when participants spent more time looking at the glass window, their heart rate tended to decrease more rapidly; that was not the case with the plasma window. Discussion focuses on how the purported benefits of viewing nature may be attenuated by a digital medium.

Last night: I was not consciously nervous about today’s phone interview, but some part of my brain was because it would not let me get to sleep and stay asleep. When I was asleep I dreamed about scanning down a column of series headings in Excel. I got maybe 4 hours.

Today: Tired. Only needed to work 4.2 hours, but I went in at normal time to do other stuff while present in case of bibliographic emergency. As the interview time drew nearer my body started having full on anxiety symptoms. Nausea, heart rate up, lips numb, dizzy, feeling of floating above my own head going, “Oh come on body, you are going to talk to people you work with every day and impress on a regular basis. Just stop these shenanigans.” I did some sitting with my breath, but honestly, I don’t think that helps very much. It just heightens the physical sensations of anxiety for me. Or maybe I just don’t do it right. Anyway, the interview was not terrible, but I was frustrated with myself for feeling inarticulate and rambly, and for forgetting to make a couple of points I had down on my notes sheet. Was so jangled afterward, trying to shush the “you screwed that up” fear, that it took me the rest of the afternoon to copy catalog a website.

Read in McCorkle Place for a while, then had dinner with a friend at Pepper’s. He dropped me off at Forest Theater, where I was headed to see Paperhand Puppet Intervention’s Islands Unknown. Going in, I saw the most beautiful dog. It did not look like a Great Dane to me, but its nose probably would have hit the lower part of my chest. It was lanky and glossy black. It struck me such that I told the man walking it, “That’s the most beautiful dog I’ve ever seen.” Went in, immediately spied a friendly acquaintance from circulation, waved, sat down, and then was invited down to sit with him and my ophthalmologist and his family. Just as the show was starting another friend who has been out of town came in and sat right in front of us.

Favorite parts:

• a real butterfly at the edge of the stage when the books in the library became butterflies
• the book on the library shelf pushing itself out to get the girl’s attention
• the cat puppet
• shouting ENOUGH!
• bats flying around overhead
• the information overload puppet
• the movement of the ocean puppet
• the real moon rising up at the back of the theater, opposite the stage moon

Wednesday a friend and I were talking about how Paperhand’s message can be boiled down to “Nature good, Man bad.” That’s a view I can definitely get behind most days, when I witness and hear about humans being bad, bad animals all over the world. There is definitely a Paperhand formula. You know what to expect from one of their shows. But the execution is always different and wonderful. My sense of this show was that it was less “Nature good, Man bad” and more “Nature good, Man part of nature, Man who could be in more balance with nature but chooses not to move toward balance bad.”

On Wednesday, I noticed someone had scratched some moss off a rock. I got so angry. This hatred welled up for whoever thoughtlessly put their desire to make a mark on something ahead of the fact that a tiny plant was growing there, being alive and doing its thing. It billowed out to include the people who mulched over the tiny trees in April, and those who dumped the disgusting ugly mulch over the moss growing in my small front yard area in January and planted shrubs that are now dead. I got to a moment of wondering why we couldn’t just leave things alone and wishing I could avoid causing the demise of any living thing, before reminding myself that I don’t want to have to hack through dense vegetation to get into my house, that I do love McCorkle Place, which is an entirely groomed artificial “nature,” and that I cannot abide a mouse-sized spider running amok in my kitchen. As I said to my friend Wednesday, “It is so hard to avoid being a big hypocrite in this culture.”

I mean, how many carbon credits does the creation and run of a Paperhand show eat up, between hauling materials and puppets, people traveling to rehearsal and performances, lighting (that confuses night flying creatures) and sound amplification, etc.? Less than many less worthwhile things, I’m sure, but still.

1. When I hear a person claim to be “top of the food chain,” I want to transport them to the wilderness with nothing but their wits and see how superior they feel. [↩]
2. I identified the species tonight using my new favorite website: http://www.discoverlife.org/ [↩]

No one besides you has your God. He is always with you, yet you see him in others, and thus he is never with you. You strive to draw to yourself those who seem to possess your God. You will come to see that they do not possess him, and that you alone have him. Thus you are alone among men—in the crowd and yet alone. Solitude in multitude—ponder this.

…

My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you, therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you.

The touchstone is being alone with oneself.

This is the way.

–C.G. Jung, Liber Secundus, p. 329 & 330.

of course, one would never spout off about how being alone with yourself is a noble, evolved thing so they could feel better about habitually avoiding the utterly existential hell of les autres¹ since people have so often been hurtful—intentionally or not—that it is more comforting to be in solitude than engage in attempts at human connection which inevitably end in tears. cough. cough.

This video and the positive response to it give me an idea. If solitude is a skill that can be learned and people need to be encouraged to develop it, perhaps there is a niche for the Solitude Coach to provide intermediate steps and support. Like, the coach would arrange to show up at the same restaurant as you and pretend she doesn’t know you so that you know you will not be the only person there eating alone… get used to appearing to be alone before you actually go it alone. And so on.

Someone more entrepreneurial than me can do something with that one. Perhaps Death Bear needs a sidekick…

1. And in that little essay is a rich starting point for another essay on the oft-underestimated effect of emotional abuse on children, but I don’t have the time or energy for that today… [↩]

I read this soon after it was published and think of it often. When I was small I whined for the chicken heart when my mother made chicken and dumplings. I also got in trouble for poking at the dead iced fishes’ eyes in the grocery store. Perhaps I’m a buzzard come back as a human.

Excerpt from On Coming Back as a Buzzard (If you believe in coming back)
by Lia Purpura
Published in the September/October 2009 issue of Orion magazine

Yes, it looks like I hover, and the hovering, I know, suggests a discomfiting eagerness. Malevolence. Why is that? I haven’t killed a thing. If the waiting seems untoward, it may be confirming something too real, too true: all the parts that slip from sight, can’t be easily had, collapse in on themselves and require digging, all the parts that promise small, intense bursts of sweetness unnerve us—while the easily abundant, the spans, the expanses (thick haunch, round belly and shoulder), all that lifts easily to another’s lips, and retains its form till the end—seems pure. Right and deserved. Proper and lawful. Thus butchers have their neat diagrams. One knows to call for chop, loin, shank, rump.

I’d get to be one who, when passed the plate, seeks first the succulent eye. This would mark me: foreigner. Stubborn lover of scraps and dark meat. Base. Trained on want and come to love piecemeal offerings—the shreds and overlooked tendernesses too small for a meal, but carefully, singularly gathered—like brief moments that burst: isolate beams of sun in truck fumes, underside of wrist against wrist, sudden cool from a sewer grate rising. I incline toward the tucked and folded parts (the old country can’t be bred out of me), the internals with names that lack correspondence, the sweetbreads and umbles, bungs, hoods, liver-and-lights. If the road is a plate, then the outskirts of fields and settlements where piles are heaped are plates, too. And the gullies, the ditches, the alleys—all plates. I’d get to reorder your thoughts about troves, to prove the spilled and shoveled-aside to be treasure. To reconfer notions of milk and honey, and how to approach the unbidden.

Augustine included curiositas in his catalog of vices, identifying it as one of the three forms of lust (concupiscentia) that are the beginning of all sin (lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and ambition of the world). The overly curious mind exhibits a “lust to find out and know,” not for any practical purpose but merely for the sake of knowing. Thanks to the “disease of curiosity” people go to watch freaks in circuses and charlatans in the piazzas. Augustine saw no essential difference between such perverse entertainments and the “empty longing and curiosity [that is] dignified by the names of learning and science.”

via Morbid Anatomy.

* i.e. not much.

On my mantel, I have constructed what I refer to as the “Voices altar.”¹ It is a place to remember gratitude and connectedness, not to worship. I have arranged images of people whose voices have gotten me through, convinced me I was not the only one like me when I felt most alone, and essentially collectively saved my life. Call them part of the pantheon in my personal mythology.

I won’t go into who all is represented, but the crowd includes both Henry Miller and Fred Rogers, so it’s an interesting bunch.

D.H. Lawrence is included. In high school I read The Rainbow, Women in Love, and of course, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence’s books may have been the first place I got the message that sensuality and sexuality could be reveled in without shame, guilt, or fear. That they might be celebrated instead of denigrated. That they are part and parcel of spirituality, and that spirituality is a different beast than religion. That life itself is to be celebrated instead of tolerated or suffered until one gains entrance to “a better place.”

So, thank you D.H. Lawrence.

Holly Gray at Don’t Call Me Sibyl is also grateful and writes in An Open Letter to D.H. Lawrence:

But your bird inspires me and awakens the feral in me, reminding me of the wild thing I once was and can be again. The ropes that hold me down are merely the ghosts of ropes that dissolved long ago. My illusions are all that oppress me now.

I was grateful to run across that post while skimming over Dr. Kathleen Young’s July 2010 Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse. The theme was Independence.

What I have been wondering is how to gain independence from the tyrannical need to be “independent.” From the outside this “independence” easily appears strong, sure, and self-sufficient. From the inside, one can romanticize one’s life and identify with D.H. Lawrence’s Baby Tortoise²:

…

Voiceless little bird,
Resting your head half out of your wimple
In the slow dignity of your eternal pause.
Alone, with no sense of being alone,
And hence six times more solitary;
Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through
immemorial ages
Your little round house in the midst of chaos.

Over the garden earth,
Small bird,
Over the edge of all things.

Traveller,
With your tail tucked a little on one side
Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.

All life carried on your shoulder,
Invincible fore-runner.

If you look closer, however, you see the independence is brittle. It is brittle because it is fear, not independence. When one learns certain lessons early in life, one learns it is less painful just to turn inward and become an absolutely self-sustaining emotional unit. Like many coping mechanisms, this works brilliantly when needed, but later becomes unhelpful and extremely difficult to shake.

When I first heard about it, I thought Biosphere 2 was an inspiring, beautiful concept. But rather than succeed as a hermetically-sealed self-sufficient paradise, that project demonstrated how quickly such a system can poison itself and become infested.

The child who learns not to get attached to people and that emotions and needs get her into trouble becomes the woman who insists upon being dropped off at the emergency room by herself, calls no one to come when she learns she will have surgery, and recovers from the operation alone except for one friend bringing pajamas and books to the hospital, another fetching her home, and another bringing a load of groceries and drugs the first night.

Such habitual defenses are so difficult to shake precisely because they are rightly owed a spot on the Voices altar. Donald Kalsched writes of an inner Protector/Persecutor as part of what he calls the archetypal self-care system. The Protector aspect devises the defense strategies, and the Persecutor aspect attacks and blames the self when it goes beyond defenses and gets hurt:

It functions, if we can imagine its inner rationale, as a kind of inner “Jewish Defense League” (whose slogan, after the Holocaust, reads “never Again!”). “Never again,” says our tyrannical caretaker, will the traumatized personal spirit of this child suffer this badly! Never again will it be this helpless in the face of cruel reality….before this happens I will disperse it into fragments [dissociation], or encapsulate it and soothe it with fantasy [schizoid withdrawal], or numb it with intoxicating substances [addiction], or persecute it to keep it from hoping for life in this world [depression]….In this way I will preserve what is left of this prematurely amputated childhood — of an innocence that has suffered too much too soon!”

Despite the otherwise well-intentioned nature of our Protector/Persecutor, there is a tragedy lurking in these archetypal defenses. And here we come to the crux of the problem for the traumatized individual and simultaneously the crux of the problem for the psychotherapist trying to help. This incipient tragedy results from the fact that the Protector/Persecutor is not educable. The primitive defense does not learn anything about realistic danger as the child grows up. It functions on the magical level of consciousness with the same level of awareness it had when the original trauma or traumas occurred.

And so the question is: how does one convince an uneducable part of oneself that is about as trusting as a feral cat to open up and connect fully with people when the nature of the world and everything in it is impermanence? The trouble is finding the middle place of being with between grasping and rejecting³. With every loss, disappointment, or betrayal the Protector/Persecutor picks up another beam of evidence with which to beat you and then build walls.

Kalsched says the answer is grief.

Those in the know say blog posts should be brief.

1. I use the word altar, though it is probably more correctly called a shrine, but the word shrine calls up images of men in fezzes on tricycles, which is not what I’m going for here. [↩]
2. Remember, sometimes tortoises help tortoises, too. [↩]
3. i.e. grasping at not-grasping [↩]

Books on the way

I finally bought myself a copy of The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit by Donald Kalsched.

Also: The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting With the Body of the Earth by Joan Halifax. I’ve wanted this one since listening to this intense talk by the author.

If I had an instant transporter, I’d attend her Upaya Institute/Zen Center on a regular basis. The available podcasted talks are a mixture of Buddhism, neuroscience, shamanism, Jung, and other favorite topics. Joan Halifax has worked extensively with the dying and grieving, and the institute offers a professional training program in contemplative end of life care.

The quote on the home page right now is:

Spitting blood clears up reality and dream alike.

– Sunao, d. 1926