A Clue To Desire
A Declaration
Soul makes meaning possible
Turns events into experiences
Then deepens that experience
Through communication in love
Because awareness of Soul is
Always about a relationship with death.
As James Hillman says somewhere ‘the true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his (her) depression’. Arguments about the degree of romanticising of psychopathology aside, is this not self-evident? (And doesn’t the Romantic inform our western mind’s eye anyway, both in the dualism of unresolved tensions between nature/culture, transcendence/immanence and a million other more-or-less post-neo-Platonist rungs on Jacob’s Ladder? It remains a valid form of phenomenological discourse, set against the cold reductive flow of Reason and its techno-fixated apostles in man-science and especially, that wannabe lead discipline, economics – to say nothing of what is now allowed to pass as mainstream psychology and psychotherapy).
I for one am hungering for a Therapeutics of Rubedo, one that speaks and is silent in the Soul’s own tongue – where the verbs kneel on the earth and feel the rain soak through their rags, where nouns are humble and holy holders of space, and adjectives present ceremonious music to accompany the beingness of every moment – and all this simultaneously. A truly therapeutic rubedo, where the therapae evoke dreams, not to exploit their raw-meaning as fuel for a process of cleverness (and drying up), but to magnify the moment and the place of dream as symbol, as image, as vision, as poetry, as multiplicity unfixed against the face of a stern sky-father with a Trident in each (too)-butch fist. Stop being right, goddamn it, and just be.
In this paradoxical and dynamic process-place, if we are still enough, we are moved ‘to recognise the difference in ourselves as the condition of our being with others’, as Kelly Oliver put it. Think-feel about that – ‘the difference in ourselves’, all that is adrift and underprivileged, excluded and shamed, banished and disowned, all that is pathological – that is the very retinue of subpersonalities, fractal distillations and simple complexes that endlessly produce the conditions (and perhaps the causes) of our ‘being with others’. Human beings are a priori ‘being with others’. The ego/self’s relationship to the Soul is one of being with others (plural, not Other, the reified categorised pseudo-rational bringer of the Object – and usually the ‘phailed’ phallic object at that). So a therapy that is red (in tooth and claw, as well as in language and connection) is a therapy striving and surrendering to the emergence of two subjects, (not the role-dominated prison-space of the Cartesian cogito subject/object) from whom many more subjects may gestate.
As the World, the very Earth we are made from and her biosphere, image-sphere and poeisis-sphere are wilfully degraded in a million inner and outer ways, and as our 200 year feeding frenzy of oil-fuelled patriarchal Self Self Self leaps Icarus-like off the last ledge of hope into cartoon moments of running in space, we six billion odd human beings are truly faced with ‘others’ the like of which we never stopped to imagine. Other futures than the sci-fi nightmare of humans (men) ‘seeding’ new planets; other companions than our now too-traumatised to move ego/selves; other priorities than those of ‘success’, ‘power’, ‘wealth’, ‘fame’ and a leonine fantasy of ‘kingship’. We are mindless, but also bodiless – plastic will not feed us, surgery will not cure us, war will not make us safe. No insurance policies extend to this place, and the bearer will not receive on demand the sum of X. Perhaps the radical act is to participate in acts of mutual self-esteem, all the while aware of the empty, slippery nature of the selves in that dance? Perhaps my plea for motion towards a therapy of rubedo is premature – aren’t we after all still locked into the thanatos-drive so characteristic of the Nigredo? Am I flogging you a dead horse or yet another false whitening false dawn of lashed together false hope? No. I don’t believe that is so. Rubedo depends upon Albedo, as Albedo arises from Nigredo, the process is not completed, just as your breathing is not yet done. Ask instead, what is the rubedo of this moment? What is the narrative of rubedo in this heartbeat – what is it asking? There will always be other narratives, comedic, tragic, pornographic, fatalistic, despised, lovely – let them be and become in ‘difference with’.
Entropy is only possible when a system is closed to further inputs. Your ideas, my blood, these words, that birdsong, his smile, her power, their silly giggling, and all our impossible, beautiful and preposterous deaths are, when it comes down to it, signs of an open system – a system so radically open, in fact, that we constantly impose closure upon it in order to save (literally) our ego/selves. Break that and we have rubedo, and we will indeed have a clue to desire.
KH, 22/06/2006
IMAGES: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Peter Breughel the Elder (c.1588), Making a Sand Mandala lifted from UWCSEA.
Soul makes meaning possible
Turns events into experiences
Then deepens that experience
Through communication in love
Because awareness of Soul is
Always about a relationship with death.
As James Hillman says somewhere ‘the true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his (her) depression’. Arguments about the degree of romanticising of psychopathology aside, is this not self-evident? (And doesn’t the Romantic inform our western mind’s eye anyway, both in the dualism of unresolved tensions between nature/culture, transcendence/immanence and a million other more-or-less post-neo-Platonist rungs on Jacob’s Ladder? It remains a valid form of phenomenological discourse, set against the cold reductive flow of Reason and its techno-fixated apostles in man-science and especially, that wannabe lead discipline, economics – to say nothing of what is now allowed to pass as mainstream psychology and psychotherapy).
I for one am hungering for a Therapeutics of Rubedo, one that speaks and is silent in the Soul’s own tongue – where the verbs kneel on the earth and feel the rain soak through their rags, where nouns are humble and holy holders of space, and adjectives present ceremonious music to accompany the beingness of every moment – and all this simultaneously. A truly therapeutic rubedo, where the therapae evoke dreams, not to exploit their raw-meaning as fuel for a process of cleverness (and drying up), but to magnify the moment and the place of dream as symbol, as image, as vision, as poetry, as multiplicity unfixed against the face of a stern sky-father with a Trident in each (too)-butch fist. Stop being right, goddamn it, and just be.
In this paradoxical and dynamic process-place, if we are still enough, we are moved ‘to recognise the difference in ourselves as the condition of our being with others’, as Kelly Oliver put it. Think-feel about that – ‘the difference in ourselves’, all that is adrift and underprivileged, excluded and shamed, banished and disowned, all that is pathological – that is the very retinue of subpersonalities, fractal distillations and simple complexes that endlessly produce the conditions (and perhaps the causes) of our ‘being with others’. Human beings are a priori ‘being with others’. The ego/self’s relationship to the Soul is one of being with others (plural, not Other, the reified categorised pseudo-rational bringer of the Object – and usually the ‘phailed’ phallic object at that). So a therapy that is red (in tooth and claw, as well as in language and connection) is a therapy striving and surrendering to the emergence of two subjects, (not the role-dominated prison-space of the Cartesian cogito subject/object) from whom many more subjects may gestate.
As the World, the very Earth we are made from and her biosphere, image-sphere and poeisis-sphere are wilfully degraded in a million inner and outer ways, and as our 200 year feeding frenzy of oil-fuelled patriarchal Self Self Self leaps Icarus-like off the last ledge of hope into cartoon moments of running in space, we six billion odd human beings are truly faced with ‘others’ the like of which we never stopped to imagine. Other futures than the sci-fi nightmare of humans (men) ‘seeding’ new planets; other companions than our now too-traumatised to move ego/selves; other priorities than those of ‘success’, ‘power’, ‘wealth’, ‘fame’ and a leonine fantasy of ‘kingship’. We are mindless, but also bodiless – plastic will not feed us, surgery will not cure us, war will not make us safe. No insurance policies extend to this place, and the bearer will not receive on demand the sum of X. Perhaps the radical act is to participate in acts of mutual self-esteem, all the while aware of the empty, slippery nature of the selves in that dance? Perhaps my plea for motion towards a therapy of rubedo is premature – aren’t we after all still locked into the thanatos-drive so characteristic of the Nigredo? Am I flogging you a dead horse or yet another false whitening false dawn of lashed together false hope? No. I don’t believe that is so. Rubedo depends upon Albedo, as Albedo arises from Nigredo, the process is not completed, just as your breathing is not yet done. Ask instead, what is the rubedo of this moment? What is the narrative of rubedo in this heartbeat – what is it asking? There will always be other narratives, comedic, tragic, pornographic, fatalistic, despised, lovely – let them be and become in ‘difference with’.
Entropy is only possible when a system is closed to further inputs. Your ideas, my blood, these words, that birdsong, his smile, her power, their silly giggling, and all our impossible, beautiful and preposterous deaths are, when it comes down to it, signs of an open system – a system so radically open, in fact, that we constantly impose closure upon it in order to save (literally) our ego/selves. Break that and we have rubedo, and we will indeed have a clue to desire.
KH, 22/06/2006
IMAGES: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Peter Breughel the Elder (c.1588), Making a Sand Mandala lifted from UWCSEA.
posted by Keith at Thursday, June 22, 2006
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