‘Sometimes the meaning leaks out of things,’ Lucy Treloar
The meaning leaks out and we’re left in a swamp of incomprehension. Lots of good creatures and plants grow in swamps but we humans can’t get a foothold. Neither firm land nor swimmable water and we lose our grip.
This then is my state of mind on a humid morning close by year’s end when everything begins to coalesce and meaning flies out the window.
When Elizabeth Strout in her book Amy and Isabelle describes an episode of tongue kissing between two young folks as ‘swapping spit’, I’m left with a sense of awe and revulsion. The idea of swapping spit does not appeal.
Isn’t it one of the greatest insults imaginable when one person spits on another? A sign of contempt and a helplessness on the part of the spitter. This is all they can find in themselves with which to despoil the other.
When we urge children to eat with their mouths closed, to cover their mouths when they sneeze, to blow their noses gently into a tissue or hankie, are we not urging them to dispose of the contents of their internal bodies with a degree of decorum?
No one else wants to see what’s inside your mouth as you chew. Even as it’s vital to chew. To watch the food mashed into its swallowable shape before it begins its journey through your digestive system. And I have not yet mentioned what comes out the other end. The greatest taboo of all.
Don’t pay attention to me this morning. I am not in a great state of mind. I am distracted by events in my life that I am not at liberty to write about, at least not here and this creates a bubble of secrecy, one you can only guess at. I have many such bubbles tucked away in my mind but usually they stay buried or hidden even from my awareness and they do not trouble me.
I have been reading Donald Kalsched, a Jungian analyst, about this process which he names dissociation. He is a Jungian analyst by predisposition and religious iconography features in his work in a way I might once have found disconcerting. But now when I read his descriptions and his thoughts about a famous painting depicting two angels. The one Lucifer on one side of a helpless and naked baby and on the other the good angel, each fighting over the baby as if to pull the baby apart, I begin to understand things I had not before understood.
Kalsched uses an image from William Blake’s Innocence to describe the innocence of the infant torn into two by forces, one the cruel angel Lucifer, hell bent on destruction, and the other Michael, the idealising angel who promises the impossible.
I recognise something in my own leaning towards the good angel with my past impulses to idealise. Kalsched reckons when a child is violated again and again something of what he describes as their innocence, their divine spark is taken over by one or other of these angels. By the great ‘Dis’ the dissociative process that creates a self-care system within the person to protect them from feeling further pain.
The trouble is this system creates its own form of harm by cutting the child off from contact with others and turns the usually integrating human psyche which grows and develops under the nurturing influence of others into a cut off system, inaccessible to the benefit of help from others and it hardens into a false type of growth.
The person so controlled within their self-care system takes on a story about their lives which Kalsched describes as a trauma narrative. A victim/perpetrator trope then dominates their thinking, caught in a state either as victim or perpetrator and to use Sandor Ferenczi’s term they ‘identify with the aggressor’ and wall themselves off in cruelty from all human help.
We need to drop the story Kalsched argues. We need to allow ourselves to feel once again our original pain in the company of someone, other than the person or persons who inflicted it on you. When a child is violated, and Kalshed uses the example of a three-year-old girl whose father abuses her body when he is drunk and adds to the violence by insisting she stay silent.
When this child is so angry a huge rage develops inside and she gets angrier and angrier, but cannot release this rage on to the ones who hurt her, including her mother who stands by while the father abuses and so the rage is turned inwards to form the self-care system that keeps all others out.
I am scraping the surface of Kalsched’s ideas here. Only dancing on the edges of the lake of ideas he created. Ideas so dense and wonderful I am in awe of their complexity.
But they are new to me and whenever ideas are new but engaging I have trouble holding onto them.
I want to absorb them into my own ways of thinking but they slip away like so many birds released from my care. They are not homing pigeons. And lately I have been struggling with moments when my centre has not been able to hold the immensity of pain I witness in another.
How much it derails me when my job is to help. But I have never been good at negotiating with tyrants, or people whose rage is disguised as benevolence whether towards them or towards others.
I grew up under the care of black robed nuns at school. Their austerity frightened me. Their faces alone visible and their brows bunched under a thick band of white that slicked across their foreheads to hide their hair, under a veil of black in winter and white in summer. The only concession to comfort the nuns enjoyed from what I saw.
All year long those heavy robes. All year long weighed down by a uniform that tucked their bodies out of sight. Their hands too were visible at the end of long cover-all sleeves even in the flames of summer. And they were always there from the time I was tiny. Greeted with respect and deference by everyone. They travelled outside the school yard in pairs as if to protect one another and they nodded at you benignly when they passed on the footpath. Not the children though. We were invisible except as instruments under their care and instruction.
When Mother Mary John took us for English, and we opened our readers at the various pages she instructed us towards, we took it in turns to read aloud from Clancy of the Overflow or the Village Blacksmith. She told us then to take our books home and rote learn at least ten lines each night.
This then was the way to learn. Someone says something of significance in a book or classroom, you write it down in your best cursive handwriting, take it home and commit it to memory. You need not understand the words you write down. You need only remember the sound of those words and repeat them on demand.
It was not an efficient way to learn but I only realised this decades later when my children and grandchildren in turn loved to have the same books read to them, over and over along with explanations of what might be going on. They asked the question why?
Did I ask this question as a child? Surely I asked. But I cannot remember any answers to my questions why and sometimes I imagine the answers were deceptive. As when my mother put down my father’s violent erratic behaviour at night to his ill health.
I did not understand until I was in my final year of primary school that he was drunk. That he had consumed too much alcohol and the consumption of too much alcohol changed a person. Turned them from an otherwise quiet somewhat sensible person into an enraged and lawless individual who paid no attention to how things might be for another person. Other people inflamed them.
Drunk people were scarier than the nuns.
My childhood was populated by demons and saints. The devil and the archangel Gabriel.
And Kalsched tells the story again which I must once have rote learned as a child. When God went down to the earth in human form, Lucifer, who loved his numinous form along with that of all the angels, rebelled. He refused to cooperate in the formation of humankind through God.
As an adult, I watched my children learn to make sense of the world, not through rote learning but through understanding. I could never hold onto all the things I had learned by rote. Better to understand the why of things or how to look up answers to questions rather than simply rote learn. We cannot hold all this information in our small human computer brains. We need to understand more of the why of it before we can move on.
