Anyway, I was reading this evening from Lee’s book and found this wondrous poem. Exactly, I want to tell him. Exactly.

On Turning Up a Fossil in My Garden

Natural extinction need not connote
a forced or meaningless fall into oblivion:
instead, one of the simple facts of life, the ultimate
fate of all species, not tainted by a stigma
of failure: like breath, frequent in occurrence
but unworthy of inordinate praise, not
especially provocative as conversation. As
when two lovers cease their heavy breathing, and part,
and the moonlight seeps into a darkened room:
seem clearly with no apprehension, animosity, fear.

From Lee’s So Quietly the Earth

I needed a rest day for my foot and knee since I rather stressed them in the last 2 days. I followed this trail, for example, and the first 3/4 mile was a climb of about 500ft. That wasn’t bad really but it was the coming down – an empty, cobbled river bed with slick stones and slippery wet clay mud. I was red and muddy from the knees down by the time I got back to the car. Wonderful view from the top between trees that haven’t been cut since the 30s and so the need for an easy day was worth it. But still, I’m going up, up, up and having to chant to myself, remember you have to go down too, in order to make myself stop.

Obsessive.

When I did get down I went to the closest beach and found a patch of sun in which to sit. I climbed over the logs to get down to the rocky beach and found a dead, headless, sea lion.

What remains of the head is turned under its body. Only some remaining bone peeks out of the torn skin.

Curiously beautiful the corpse—following a walk of which 6 months ago I would not have been capable—it made me appreciate again what remains of my life. I’ve spent a huge amount of my years taking care of others, rescuing children, helping those so far from society’s margins that they are largely invisible. Not unhappy about that, but these last years are mine.

Mine.

Selfish.

And of course much has started to lift up from the soil. The buddleia has produced little clusters of grey-green ovoid leaves at its joint. It won’t blossom for some months, but its new leaves feel like little projectors; I glimpse things in them as I go by that remind me that work is not the same thing as life.

And there’s the winter jasmine, all windy little flowers, red-tipped markers of a world completely unconcerned with 9-5. Probably, tomorrow, when I am at my desk, I’ll only sort of remember this afternoon and the jasmine floret ready to disclose, but there will be something left in my head, regardless of how fuzzy. That’s good.

I suppose partly this is because these essays seem so familiar. Her writing style is loose and deeply metaphorical; her essays suggest that she has a “pointed” view on some things; she is happy rolling around in the shadows, with ambivalence and impermanence. Dude! I approve!

OK, so that manifestation of adoration over, here is one of the niggly, wiggly ants stirred up out of the nest by one of her essays. (The deal is that each and every essay has booted the ant nest so I expect more of these “responses” will make it to tailfeather.)

In this case I am referring to the essay “The archetype of the victim.” The purpose of the essay is to distinguish between the social (outer) and psychological (inner) aspects of the victim archetype. She does this with great success and shows how North American culture has, to a large extent, lost contact with the inner aspects—the divine sacrifice—of the victim archetype.

Once you have been stomped, this latter aspect is the way to re-establish some sense of purpose, meaning and a sense of control over the outcome of one’s inner life. One returns to a sense of  personal control by accepting the sacrifice, and thereby, accepting the vulnerability and limitations of being human. There are things that happen to us over which we have no control. When those things are really bad they constellate this inner victim, which demands attention, and we suffer, and our society suffers, if we do not give it.

I can go with much of this although I would use different metaphorical ways of thinking about the process. What niggled at me was this sentence on the second page of the essay at the end of the sixth paragraph:

And since the victim is, by definition, powerless, the primal emotion that always accompanies victimization is fear.

I’ve been the victim of a number of nasties and for the most part I would agree that fear has been a common response—along with rage. But the odd thing is that the two worst things in my life did not include fear although the sense of powerlessness was literally overwhelming.

In the one case I’ll tell you about, my infant son died only 2 days after his birth. He was born with a heart defect that could not be repaired and his natural growth processes meant that he would die, slowly, of a lack of oxygen to his brain. Once I got him back from the specialist with that news, I just held him until he died.

So there you go. Overwhelming, fall down on the floor, grief. Total powerlessness to protect my child. But not an once of fear, neither for myself nor for him. No rage either. Perhaps it is the case that I am not a victim here and so my quibble isn’t justified.  I agree that  the sense of powerlessness is the gift of victimization, one that is terrible and horrifying to bear, but one that is a glimpse of our impermanence, of the truth of our condition. But I’m not sure that pain and powerlessness are sufficient conditions for  the constellation of the victim archetype.

I think perhaps that rage and its cousin fear are also necessary. Rage and fear are almost certainly shadows of each other. That is, if you are enraged, your shadow is fear. If you are terrified, your shadow is rage. My question is whether victimization is only about being powerless as the quote suggests. I actually think that the archetype is constellated in the marriage of powerlessness and rage. When my son died, there was no rage and, therefore, no fear. So whether I can be considered a victim with regard to the death of my baby, depends upon whether the victim archetype is really about powerlessness alone, or whether it is about the pairing of powerlessness and rage.

One of the things at stake here is the realization that powerlessness need not necessarily be “storied” as enraging or terrifying. Having said that, rage and fear are natural responses. I like rage. It feels healing, clean. Yet rage assumes the possibility of justice. It demands an equalization of position, a return to a social balance. So if one’s vulnerability is forcibly enacted and made public by another person or by a human institution, our history as a social species tells us to demand justice because by doing this we can restore the power balance and help ensure our continued life within the human community.

It is also completely understandable that we should fall back on our inbuilt remedy in non-human cases. Like the times when cows were tried for murder when they killed their humans, we want to read our social system onto the world so we can redress our evident vulnerabilities. But that is fundamentally silly. We can make cows honorary humans (I wonder if the executioner and his family ate the “honorary human” after the execution), we can make up divines to enact postmortem justice, but that doesn’t make it so.  When a child is born without an aorta, there is no fault to find. There is no way to redress the balance and so fear and rage are not necessary responses. Death and grief like that just is.

So, either I am not a victim with regard to my son’s death and powerlessness is not a sufficient condition for the constellation of the victim archetype, or I am, and fear is not a necessary reaction to utter vulnerability.

I don’t know. What do you think?

Although now that I think about it, in her profession (money lender), in her neighbourhood (East End London, Whitechapel Road) it is possible.

This, by the way, is all Lilian’s fault. I’m reading her book The River Midnight and apparently it is raising old specters. So that’s today. I will take the book, and go drink a blackberry mocha in old Polly’s honour. Why blackberry mocha? Polly was a Guinness drinker and this is as close as I can get. Mocha looks a bit the same and I warrant tastes a whole lot better, and I do so love blackberry. So if you can bear Guinness, say sholem-aleykhem to Polly today over a glass or two. Not that she will hear us, she’s dead you know. But it does us no harm to honour our mortality by remembering our dead.

And I met Thanatos in one of the dreams. He’s a really nice guy and he likes washing dishes, white tea cups in particular. He thinks it’s delightful that my hair is green.

The connection to the god Aker is the liminality of that. The way von Franz talks about Aker, he seems to me to be very much like “arising only,” although von Franz never mentions the phrase. Aker is really more like a verb than a noun, or perhaps a sense of the pre-linguistic world—prior to the separation of a unified reality into categories like action and object, which is how “arising only” should probably be conceived. This god is fluid. It is the underworld itself, the prime matter that always underlies life and consciousness, but also the god of the underworld; Aker is the dead and the re-memberment of the corpse that is necessary for Osiris (and the rest of us) to arise from the dead. So in effect, at the moment between being dead (dismembered) and arising (being re-membered) one is in Aker, is Aker, is impermanence, is “arising only.” There is no separation between place and time, life and death. And the interesting thing from the alchemical point of view is that although Aker is often associated with the rebirth of the sun at the winter solstice, the time when the sun is liminal, just before it breaches the horizon (another representation of Aker), the sun is Aker and therefore both masculine and feminine in the Jungian sense since Aker is associated with prima materia – is prima materia, the alchemical lead. But more of that in the next post on the role of the feminine in the alchemical practice.

Isn’t the link between Aker and Zen cool!

Mid-morning feels like a tidal point in the day for me. I suppose it is the work-day coffee-break association but I do get this strong sense of expansion, relaxation and comfort when I take time around 10 just to watch the day unfold: Night terrors are past and the light is still growing, unfurling its green leaf to the sky.

Not sure what to make of the unconscious mix-up of compline and terce, apart from learning to experience sleep as the unfurling of the dark blossom of impermanence and the fluttering of its gentle ambergis shadow.

For a strong palate cleanser you might want to watch Marc Levin’s movie about The Protocols and the people who believe it to be true (such as Glenn Beck.) You might also want to look here and here.

I sometimes wonder what my relations in England thought in the build up to WWII about the likelihood of any nation or group of people believing that another war like The Great War could do anything but bring even more devastation, or that mass murder had any chance of producing more than massive death. Despite the evidence of  The Great War, it was, apparently, still incredibly hard to believe that people would really spill their vitriol in such self destructive ways when the results of the last conflagration were still in evidence. It still is hard to believe. Yet history says that we will do it again.

I can’t help but think that people like Beck, the tea party dudes and dudettes, the believers in the Protocols, and other such persons, are like a blood clot in the cultural brain and as such will be the cause of the next episode of cultural apoplexy.  Some of them will make out like bandits in the mess that they cause, but I do take some comfort that when the dying is done, some of them will be counted amongst the dead, and even some will pay the price as did they of the Nuremberg trials.  We will revile them then. What I find a pity is that we can’t just revile them now and save the ensuing horror.