Hope in memoir writing and in living

 

 

March in New England, despite its temperatures that drop into the teens, heralds hope. The spring equinox packaged in light, not just in lengthened days but in a palpable brightening, reminds us that nothing stays the same. On this cusp of a season, not a day or a week or a month but of a pregnant trimester, we enter the throes and sacrifice of awakening. Little wonder that both the Christian mystery of crucifixion and resurrection, and Persephone’s rape and return are set in spring.

Writes Mary Oliver in her poem “On Winter’s Margin”
 

         “and what I dream of are the patient deer

         Who stand on legs like reeds to drink the wind;—

         They are what saves the world: who choose to grow
         thin to a starting point beyond this squalor.”

Writing memoir, in the thaw of memory, we revisit and revision our tracks. The prefix re indicates repetition. Again and again we reclaim our stories translating then to now. And out of that raw mix of image and emotion springs hope. Each memoir carries its own desire. A wish to be seen, to connect, to share personal truths in the service of something greater may inspire the memoirist, consciously or not.

Hope’s twin, despair, lurks in shadow. The vital rains of spring run like tears down the windowpane. And in the chaos of a trashing wind deadwood comes loose.

In writing and in living, hope may be faint, fragile, deep, resolute or profound. It may falter in the face of repudiation. Singular or all embracing, from health to peace on earth, our hope gives us courage to grow thin to a starting point beyond squalor.

Windows on Suffering

 

 

Writes Jung, “the principal aim of psychotherapy is not to transport the patient to an impossible state of happiness, but to help him acquire steadfastness and philosophic patience in face of suffering. Life demands for its completion and fulfillment a balance between joy and sorrow. But because suffering is positively disagreeable, people naturally prefer not to ponder how much fear and sorrow fall to the lot of man. So they speak soothingly about progress and the greatest possible happiness, forgetting that happiness is itself poisoned if the measure of suffering has not been fulfilled. Behind a neurosis there is so often concealed all the natural and necessary suffering the patient has been unwilling to bear.” Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life

To bear or to heal? What can be healed? What must be borne? Steadfastly with philosophic patience, or not. Which brings to mind Paul’s words in Corinthians 13. “Love bears all things.... Love is patient…”. One might say the religious function emanates out of our human grappling with sorrow and love.

 

The relief of psychic suffering is the cornerstone of psychological theory. Words on diagnosis, prognosis, and interpretations and interventions of every imaginable hue fill volume after volume in the literature of psychology.

Say all you want about attachment. Separation, trauma and sorrow are ubiquitous.

In Donald Kalsched’s book Trauma and the Soul, where he differentiates between neurotic versus authentic suffering, he refers us to this quote from Jung about a patient’s lack of willingness to bear the natural, necessary sufferings of life.  A quote that leaves the taste of the heroic. As does, for me, Kalsched’s analysis of Dante’s descent into the underworld.

Kalsched calls for a witnessing consciousness, something provided initially by the psychotherapist, he says. But what of the majority of people on this earth not willing, able, or interested in engaging in psychotherapy, let alone cognizant of its existence? Perhaps they bear witness to the sufferings in their lives through their interactions with the people whom they love—or through nature, music, poetry, or prayer.

In the ancient women's mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, suffering is a portal into the land of the dead. Of this, the poet Louise Gluck writes in her book Averno,

          “I think I can remember

           being dead. Many times, in winter,

           I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him,
           How can I endure the earth?

And he would say,

           In a short time you will be here again.
           And in the time between

 You will forget everything:

            Those fields of ice will be
            The meadows of Elysium.”


This is a different window from the one where the hero stands with his pipe and his book.                                         

Mystery or Theory: Book Review of Trauma and the Soul, by Donald Kalsched

As I read Donald Kalsched’s book Trauma and the Soul there were times I felt a deep resonance with my own recently published memoir. Kalsched’s analysis of dissociation with its need to save the split-off soul-child, his decisive stand around the spiritual core of what psychology names the unconscious, and his call which echoes that of C.G. Jung’s for a third world between the worlds of matter and spirit, a transcendent space, are masterfully delivered in this book.

From a theoretical perspective this author has left no stone unturned. His bibliography speaks volumes. Expounding upon the salient developments in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Kalsched’s analysis includes the thinking of William James, Freud, Jung, Klein, Winnicott, Kohut, Grotstein, and Schore; a list that does not begin to do justice to his interpretations of innumerable contributors to this ever-changing theoretical landscape.

A man of intelligence, compassion, and depth, Kalsched writes, “the soul needs a story, a resonant image that is adequate to its own biography.” In his book he tells stories, he tells his patients’ stories (and for the most part they are women), the story of The Little Prince and of Dante’s journey into the Inferno.

Though I highly recommend this book, particularly for those in the field of depth psychology, but also for victims of trauma in search of recovery, I would add that to my mind Trauma and the Soul offers “a psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interruption” that reflects the profoundly rational masculine influence of Western thought on psychology.

The cover leaves us with an image. “Blake’s good and evil angels struggling for the possession of a child.” The evil angel is black. The good angel and child are white. All are male.

Madonna of the Pomegranates

 

 

Growing up, the way I understood all that was numinous came through the Christian lens of our New England Congregational church. Christ and God, Father and Son, were the central players. Mary appeared in passing, the way women often did.

I do not remember my mother ever saying a word about Mary, though every Christmas she brought out a blue ceramic statue of the Mother and Child and set it beside an arrangement of greens. She embroidered that image, blues on blue with low lights of purple, an embroidery that I still hang with the season.

Two weeks ago, fortuitously I thought, I discovered deep in a drawer of the dining room hutch a small plaque of Mary and Jesus with an inscription on the back that read, “Rafael. Madonna of the Pomegranates.”

Symbolically pomegranates are known to represent fertility, abundance, sweetness, and ‘the womb’. Pomegranates are the fruit of the underworld. Its sweet seeds seal Persephone’s fate.

In Rafael’s rendition Mary’s left hand rests on a book, while in her right hand she and her infant Son together hold a pomegranate. Could this be eros and logos in the hands of the Mother?

My friend says the dead have a way of communicating with us. In an imaginal world, in a world between worlds, I find a gift from my mother that speaks to all that was unsaid between us.

But more than that. As I meditate on this image morning after morning I take solace in some essential feminine mystery that like the hero’s journey of separation, initiation, and return, speaks to change and transformation in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. So much more is written from the standpoint of masculine psychology and myth. And while the masculine and feminine do and must contain each other, what I see in this body of this Mother with the darkened heart is the unbearable wisdom of loss. Suffering through and fighting through are not mutually exclusive options, nor does or should any discussion of the masculine and the feminine principles necessarily refer to anyone’s gender. And yet, when I let this image into my heart what I feel is the knowledge of sorrow that every mother holds.

The divine speaks to us through the filter of our projections colored by our personal needs and sufferings. The Madonna of the Pomegranates I imagine is a feminine Christian image of the contemplation of the pomegranate—of unspoken sexuality, of the dark days of Demeter’s rage, of the Pieta’s eternal grief. In this study of textures and light, fingers and ineffable expressions Raphael has given us the mirror that all great art gives, a taste of eternity.

Heart

 

It is Valentine’s Day. A cold morning. I sit at the window and look out at the rooftops and the car covered in snow. The bare trees stand motionless against the flat grey sky. Silence, stillness, shelter are among winter’s lessons.

The holiday evokes Eros, and I ponder Russell Lockhart’s words “Eros means telling,” which leads, he says, to the suffering of relationship. Eros is bittersweet, writes Anne Carson; or even, rather, the “sweetbitter” of Shappo’s poem that Carson quotes, noting how here the bitter follows the sweet. Eros as the god of love, as the principle of relatedness, unmasks us and makes us vulnerable. As a counterpart to logos it balances reason with feeling.

From Russell Lockhart I learn of the relation between “courage” and the Latin word “cor” meaning heart. Both can be broken.

From where I sit the naked branches intersect to form an imperfect mandala through which I watch the swell of light.

“My story is my truth,” wrote Jung.

My memoir is a written testament of my life, no longer mine and always mine.  “The endless transformations of the individuation process include the way we meet and endure the unbearable,” I wrote.

I defend my love for my husband and his love for me and the ethics of that love and of its beginning as the truth of my heart and soul.

What do you defend? And why?

The courage of memoir, I believe, is the courage to suffer the judgments and projections of one’s readers, sometimes in silence. Sometimes not.

The Courage of Memoir

 

 

Many of the people who have reviewed my book have mentioned my courage — the courage to reveal, the courage to break rules, the courage to tell the truth.

In his February 3, 2014 Amazon review, Paul D. Sanderson Ph.D., a Jungian colleague of mine, writes “It was a powerful and sad memoir. Unfortunately, the author's attempt to heal her early childhood wounds resulted more in pattern replication and violation of the Code of Ethics of her profession than it was a deeper grasp of the ethics of love. A good read, but not a good role model to follow for anyone entering the healing professions who has to deal with sexualized transference and counter-transference dynamics or with the emergence of love within the therapeutic relationship.”

Sanderson is correct in so far as he identifies the replication of the sweet to bitter patterns of my experience that weave the opposites into that third inextricable meshing of what Jung called individuation. I perceive this as a spiraling toward the center.

Jung referred to the torment of ethical decision. As I wrote in my memoir, “he had found the essence of ethics not in the morality of collective opinion, but in the deepest tension held by the opposites within the Self. ‘Ethics are based on the phenomenon of conscience, which derives from a relationship between man and God.’...”

Sanderson’s judgment call has been predicted and anticipated. And his delivery leaves me both sad and mindful of how difficult it is to have a conversation between two people whose relationship with God, whose highest deepest truths are so very different.

I would like to believe that the intention to do no harm, as flawed as that proves to be in human interaction, is a common denominator between us.

I am reminded again of Russell Lockhart's quote, “Trusting the psyche is not an isolated or isolating act. It tends to bring us to the center and to that well at the bottom of the world. Bringing up water from there, each in his own way, with his own effort, is an eros act, not only for ourselves but also for others and for the world. It is this bringing up of psyche from the well and telling it to others that will bring us together.” Would that were true.

Spaces

In the predawn I am sitting in the cushioned wicker chair next to the window in the dining room, my new spot to watch the light rise in the sky. I look over at the doorway that opens to the front hall with the wall sconce by the stairs, at the patterns of pearly light and steely shadows against the white stucco walls, and I am captivated by the space. The wide angles of the doorframe open to the dark living room, a slice of stairway ascending to the right. I draw it, photograph it and describe it in my journal.

I move into it. Not physically. But the way one moves into a timeless moment that is numinous. And those moments, I believe, surround us.

I am reading Donald Kalsched’s book Trauma and the Soul; A psycho-spiritual approach to human development and its interpretation. Kalsched, a Jungian analyst, describes an “intermediate space between the worlds in which we are all most alive.” The “worlds” that he writes of are the worlds of consciousness and the unconscious. He refers to them in many contexts—as the inner world of imagination and the outer material world of facts, as the sacred and the profane. Kalsched acknowledges that there are many doorways that can lead us into mysterious interior spiritual realms and posits that we can evolve into both worlds, concluding “If we are going to ‘individuate’ in the true meaning Jung gave to that term, then we must let ourselves grow from these two roots.” 

In many respects this book offers a theoretical amplification of my memoir. It mirrors my final dream of a mother/child, Demeter/Persephone dream figure who “embodies the mysteries of abundance and poverty, of attachment and separation, of the reds, and the blues,” and who “carries my soul.”

Kalsched’s focus is on trauma, and on dissociation as a soul-saving defense which keeps “an innocent core of the self out of further suffering in reality by keeping it safe in another world.” In my first chapter I write about an experience that I remembered from the age of four.

 “My guess is, it was soon after we moved into the house when I began to disappear in the windowless hall between my bedroom, my parents’ bedroom, the bathroom, and the entrance into our living room; since I still needed to stand on my stool to see into the medicine cabinet mirror.

…All I can say is, in that hallway I left my body.

 …What I am trying to describe is what I believe to be my earliest reportable experiences of dissociation, a splitting off of consciousness. A vacant self.”

I go on to describe other altered states that I experienced as a child, transcendent states as well as the dark terrors of the night.

The tracks of the unseen (In the Tracks of the Unseen) are the tracks of my soul. My memoirs are stories of trauma and the healing that comes from holding the tension of the opposites, part human, part divine, in a third space, a liminal space from where looking into the front hall with the wall sconce by the stairs in the predawn can be transcendent.