Psychology

Walking the walk – honouring melancholy

This is a piece about melancholy. These days we call so much psychological suffering depression, losing subtlety and even accuracy. Melancholy deserves to be restored as something of importance. But this culture holds sadness in contempt.

For perspective, some time back I wrote a piece about depression (you can read it here). In it, I suggested that by being in nature we can honour our depression rather than attacking it. This isn’t about ‘cure’, or a moral injunction (“go and have a good walk, that’ll do you good”), it’s about valuing oneself in different ways. Once again James Hillman is our reliable psychopomp:

Depression tends to make you focus on yourself. The very focus on oneself that we do in therapy is, per se, a depressive move. Therapy could be causing depression as much as curing it, because the classic symptoms of depression are remorse, a concentration on oneself, repetition – “What’s wrong with me? How did it get this way? I shouldn’t have done that.”

Feeling broke and poor and without energy – in other words, a withdrawal of libido from the world. The moment you’re focusing back on the world as dysfunctional, you’re drawing attention to the world. That’s not depressing.

James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse, 1993

Hillman suggests focusing on small tasks, just as a volunteer will clean the foreshore of plastic rubbish. The story of the forest fire and the hummingbird told by Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Muta Maathai is a great illustration of this.

Social media is full of highly defended advice for the depressed to get out and get active, go running or kayaking or whatever. Even going for a walk is sometimes impossible. But I believe the first step back from melancholy is to recognise that Saturn’s perspective (“What’s wrong with me? How did it get this way? I shouldn’t have done that.”) is just one of many. Here are Hillman and Ventura in dialogue from the same wonderful book I quoted from above:

Ventura: […] all this dysfunction doesn’t personally depress me because it gives me a lot of room to maneuver in, an awful lot of room to maneuver in.

Hillman: Right. It says, off the bat, “I’m not neurotic.” That’s a huge relief.

Ventura: “I’m not neurotic, this is not my fault, and it’s not my family’s fault either.”

Hillman: “the world-soul’s sickness is announcing its despair through me.”

Ventura: “But I’m not a victim, because this is the sweep of history and I’m a participant.”

Hillman: Which also means, “I’m also not the healer.”

Ventura: “Putting it all right is not my job” – which is another lightening of the weight, more room to maneuver in.

James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse, 1993

So it’s possible to put down much of the weight of the dysfunction, but without giving up. That leaves us with the personal. Sometimes you can’t do anything for yourself, nothing works. The key is acceptance, to allow the weight to almost crush. Go to bed, cover up, whatever feels safe, but hold in your heart the idea of the world-soul, that it’s there and waiting for you, and even if we have made it sick it is still powerful. What follows is a moment, an expression, of honouring melancholy. It is not a recipe or a template.

A melancholy meander through Battersea Park

Today I took a walk because the sun invited me. At other times I might refuse the invitation: I might be busy or unwell or just not feel like it. Today I accepted: it felt right. The place is Battersea Park by the Thames in London, a mid-Victorian amenity, once quite famous, now rather shabby at the edges. It used to host a supervised adventure playground that was demolished by Wandsworth council, but not before it was occupied and became, briefly, famous once more.

My purpose today though was political in the broader sense, to connect with the world-soul, and here I invite you to keep me company.

I don’t want to walk down a main road so I take the bus for a few stops and enter through the north western gate. On the lawn of the gatekeeper’s cottage there are yellow crocuses. They don’t look too bad – normally I don’t care for them much, they are so prone to damage from rain/wind/dogs, but these shine in the sun.

Crocus - Battersea Park
Crocus – Battersea Park

The vegetable garden

I’m in the vegetable garden now, Thrive run it. There’s a robin singing on a tree as I enter, an announcement and a warning. This is its tree, and its call is echoed by another robin nearby. I won’t see many species this morning because there are other people here. A few days back I stood very still by the decking area, and watched as birds darted back and forth to feed on seeds that had been left under the walnut tree. Long-tailed tits perched above my head. A nuthatch, sleek and slate grey elegant, decided that my presence was an acceptable risk. That’s pretty much all one has the right to expect of other animals.

The vegetable beds are prepared for the Spring. They are composted, mostly bare except for some onions, but dug beautifully and pregnant with purpose. I want to grab a big double handful of that good earth and press my face into it. I examine the asparagus bed, decorated with a few spindly brown fronds from last year. The first spears won’t start to poke up their heads until April, but it gives me such pleasure to see the dormant mound, a reminder of the ‘Battersea Bunches’ that were grown when market gardens were here, on land ‘reclaimed’ from the Thames. Wait, there’s something new here, a new space penetrates the bed of plants for women’s health. Is the ‘path’ a figure? A keyhole? A vagina? Now I’ll be able to see the plants more clearly. A wren appears, flicks its tail, disappears into cracks in the fence, hunting for spiders.

The ‘Old English’ garden

A short walk takes me to the Old English Garden. The pond has been emptied for cleaning and the isolated water lily pots look vulnerable and forlorn. A mound of green blanket weed has been heaped to the side. I look at the wisteria and notice the trunk for the first time. It seems to writhe and twist around a youth carrying a bundle of rushes, and I think of how we stand in the field of each other’s projections, rarely connecting with the other. I see the heads of monsters and damned souls, but when do I see the plant, its age, its struggle to the light?

Wisteria - Battersea Park
Wisteria – Battersea Park

A rustle, a darting shape, jittery, pecking – it’s a hedge sparrow. It is generally described in bird books as ‘promiscuous’ in its mating habits. It is as if the authors were entirely unconscious of ascribing their own values to a different species. This little brown and grey bird is so beautiful. Because of its colouring, it is rarely seen – but the vegetative cover that conceals it for most of the year has not yet grown. And the song is a delight, the rapid modulation impossible to follow.

The homeless

I stand and listen, half-awake, conscious of two homeless people who have slept here. I see many of the homeless in Battersea with suitcases now, as if they are stopping for a rest after getting the train back from Gatwick. Perhaps that is sometimes true, the last fifty quid spent on an Easyjet break. Things might seem better outside the trattoria, a glass of water with the coffee, sipping Cynar, feeling as if good things might happen. Then the return, the locks changed, the hope gone. The suitcase suggests a temporary homelessness. The surroundings an embarrassment, as if we should understand that the sleeper is really at work. “Just off for the corporate bonding weekend in Bergamo.” How transient our pleasures are these days. I have been to this park and walked for an hour and in that time I have seen not one person walking for the sake of it, but dozens either with dogs or running (sometimes running with dogs).

Delighted by the hedge sparrows (also called dunnocks), I start to think of house sparrows (the dunnock is an Accentor). Twenty years ago, the sparrows seemed to disappear from London almost overnight. About ten years later I went to Guernsey and found two trees in St. Peter Port full of sparrows. It seemed as if every squabbling sparrow in London had fled to these two magical trees, and there they stayed in conference until quite recently, safe by the sea. And I am reminded of how sparrows are connected to Aphrodite, because of their supposedly lascivious nature, and how we continue to split mind and instinct, to deny the erotic in nature.

The dog walkers

I walk towards the strange relics of the Festival of Britain, surprised as always that they are still there and not blown away. At the coffee kiosk, women and dogs sit together, humans and canines about as different in their respective physiologies as possible. I get the feeling that none of the dogs looks happy, nor do their owners. Dolorous hounds sit next to twitching chihuahuas. A neurotic Pomeranian scratches a flea bite with a bony hind leg like a chicken wing. Does its silly dainty face dream of loping through the snow with the wolf pack, nostrils full of the smell of fat and warm fur?

A miniature pug has escaped and is in hiding. A large woman calls for it, but it stands there trembling slightly, its red lead trailing behind it like blood. “There you are. You little tinker,” she says indulgently as she gathers up the trail of blood. The pug snuffles: I wonder what it feels as it looks up at her with its black eyes, perhaps the half-formed desire to run and hunt mixed with fear of the giant world, and the pull of the warm carpet and this comfortable woman shaking the packet of dog biscuits, teasing, holding the power. I buy coffee and sit in the sun with it, away from the scratching bickering dogs, my face held back, feeling the warmth, wrapped in my comfortable fleece, dreaming of my own running and the fears that keep me enslaved.

New growth - Battersea Park
New growth – Battersea Park

The melancholy of abandoned clothes

A family arrive. Mum, dad, two girls and a boy. They’re looking for something, talking in a language I don’t recognise, one of the Baltic languages perhaps. The girls sound bored and whiny. The father doesn’t smile I notice, though the mother does, nervously. Someone has impaled a woolly hat on the railings and this appears to be one of the lost items. One of the girls takes it and holds it to her as if it is a thing immeasurably soft and comforting. They look for a few minutes unsuccessfully and the father asks at the coffee kiosk if anything has been handed in. Disappointed, they sit down to coffee and drinks, with much argument and the grating of metal chair legs.

The peace is broken, I finish my coffee and leave. But didn’t I see some clothing by the fountain lake? I walk back and sure enough, there is a child’s coat on the ground. Returning to the family I ask them if they have lost a child’s coat, dark blue I tell them, puffy. “With silver?” the father asks. I tell him I didn’t see any silver but offer to show him. “We come yesterday, have coffee, forget clothes”, he explains. “Easily done”, I reply. I suppose it is, the warmth of the sun after many weeks of winter, taking off the layers that we habitually wear, casting them aside, taking risks. Have coffee, forget clothes. Then the guilty remembrance of the protection that we’ll need, the abandoned parts of ourselves, stolen or sodden with rain. Not looked after.

Jasmine - Battersea Park
Jasmine – Battersea Park

No wonder the girl held the woolly hat so close: when she pulled it over her ears she felt warmer, and the screams of the sirens were muted.

I point out the abandoned coat, lying by the pond like a small twisted corpse, and wondering how it had moved so far. The father grunts thanks and walks towards it with purpose. He still hasn’t smiled. I take a different direction but, looking back, I see him holding the coat as if it might get angry and bite him. Was it the lost garment? Or did it just look to be a good enough replacement? I will never know, but writing about it now it seems important. Would the girl put on the coat with relief and the sigh of contentment that betrays the habitual, the comforting? Or would she reject it, disown it? Would the unsmiling Daddy demand that she take it, the comfort of another? All this I consider as I walk towards the bandstand.

Preparing the beds

A heap of manure stands in the path. Council workmen are carting it into smaller piles on the flower beds. I remember spreading compost, my back aching, the wheelbarrow handles becoming heavier to lift. I also recall the pleasure as the big mound shrinks and how good the beds look with their brown blankets, the pleasure of spreading the compost, the warm mushroom smell of it. “At least we don’t have to walk so far today,” says one of the workers. In a moment I would have traded places with him. By the end of each day I would be tired, my back stiff and painful, but I could walk away, a job done and the earth nurtured, back to my own nourishment and bed, a gestalt.

Past the bowling green (‘flat shoes only’ a sign says, and for a moment I imagine a group of glam rockers in platform boots, arguing over the rules) and there is the Pump House, now a gallery. I note that there is a new exhibition and as always I hope for something I can relate to. And here is a tree that often seems to be a natural depiction of pain and melancholy. This is the tree I thought of when I wrote this haiku:

Because we’re so fast
We can’t see how a tree writhes.
We think we’re alone.  

The writhing tree - Battersea Park - a natiural depiction of melancholy.
The Writhing Tree – Battersea Park

At the ornamental lake the warmth of the late winter sun surrounds me, I’m enveloped in a faint glow and the branches are gilded. I see pochard and tufted duck. There are the resident pair of swans. Not long ago I watched one of their nine almost full-grown cygnets fly up as if it had a fancy to roost in a tree, like one of the rose-ringed parakeets that live here now. At the top of its ascent, it lost control and fell out of the sky like a sack of cement, hitting the concrete path with a horrible slap. It was bruised and clearly shocked, but nothing seemed broken. I remember how hard it was to walk away.

I pass the big hybrid Arbutus and admire the chestnut colour of its bark, and later I see two chestnut spaniels sparring. They lunge and feint at each other, and I am overjoyed to see dogs that are alive, playful and shining. To feel that joy does not mean that my melancholy is ‘cured’. It means that by staying with my felt sense I have allowed other responses, and this is one of them. I hope the importance of allowing melancholy rather than attacking it is clear.

Crocus - Battersea Park
Crocus – Battersea Park

I walk back, passing more crocuses, and these for once are perfect. Leaving the park, my senses heightened, I spot campanula dribbling down the crack in a brick wall.

Campanula growing near Battersea Park
Campanula growing near Battersea Park

And here is ornamental quince, the white variety, in delicious bud. This walk was blessed. I was able to see beyond the managed urban space to the life beneath, to carry this out with me for a while, to recognise that the world of our creation is more melancholy than I am, and to feel energised for another day.

Ornamental Quince
Ornamental Quince

The inner fire

Wandsworth ‘council’ had approved an application for Formula E racing in the park. This is how we are sinking, we cannot keep a space in any way sacred. No one walks, and it’s OK to race cars around a park where birds are feeding their young. We are unable to repair the split between Eros and Psyche, our cultural contempt and fear of instinct has caused rupture and disturbance in our behaviour. Let us resolve to change this. As I write these words it is not surprising that I recall Rilke’s unequivocal demand, and just as he saw change to be the purpose of Art, so I see the need to change is here around us in the soul of the world. I close this piece with words more beautiful and immediate than any of mine.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark centre where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

Love in the Ruins – why service heals guilt

He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.

Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins, 1971

The more I think about love, the more I think about service and devotion. Here in the West, we have nothing left to believe in with any passion. In this piece, I briefly explore the meaning and origins of love, and I suggest that love be re-visioned or re-imagined so that it can include the world again as it once did in the distant past.

Throw it in the world-bin

It seems like only yesterday that I first learned of the terrifying prospect of a mass bleaching event of the world’s corals and the wholesale loss of species that would accompany such an event. This news is just another of the many awful consequences of our failure to love ourselves as human beings, as animals in the larger world. It’s difficult to find any one image to illustrate this, I’m sure you will have your own, but let this picture suffice for now.

A tide of destruction - flotsam
A tide of destruction

It’s not a dramatic picture, there is no overt terror, no screaming or blood. It shows a tiny part of the world, a fractional space between the Thames embankment at Battersea and a houseboat, and yet (to me at least) it shows vividly the absolute misery of our human condition. Here, mingled with the organic refuse – the branches and timber we might expect to see in a river – are discarded coffee cups, burger cartons, aerosols and a general swill of plastic waste. It says, ‘I don’t care, someone else can clean it up. I don’t even care much about myself.’

People do clean up the foreshore here, occasionally, in their free time. A day later and the flotsam is back, the toxic aggregate of what is described as ‘thoughtless behaviour’, against which we are urged, as if by our parents, to be ‘mindful’. But I see in this the consequence of two thousand years of dualist indoctrination. There is a barely acknowledged part of us that believes this earth is bad and that a better world awaits us. It doesn’t matter we are atheist, Buddhist or pagan: in the West we are Christianists whether we like it or not.

The origins of Romance

Saint Dominic presiding over an auto-da-fé, (Pedro Berruguete ca. 1495)
Saint Dominic presiding over an auto-da-fé, (Pedro Berruguete ca. 1495)

So let’s talk about love. But first religion – because love and religion are deeply linked. Most of the religious people of the world believe in salvation or transcendence from life on earth, with or without reincarnation. According to the Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson, our modern Western infatuation with romance sprang from chivalric love, the medieval courtly love in which a knight would project his feminine self, his anima, on to a woman. In his book We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love, Johnson traces the origins of this behaviour to the 13th century cult of Catharism, the ‘Albigensian heresy’, in which the so-called Good Men eschewed the corruption of the Catholic Church and its priesthood.

Catharism was dualist, adherents believed that God created the spiritual realm but that all matter and flesh were creations of Satan. They believed that human spirits were trapped angels who would be eternally reincarnated until the spirit had achieved salvation. The similarity to Buddhism is striking: for more information, these pages delve further into the history and legacy of this extraordinary movement.1

Unable to reform the teaching of the Cathars, and terrified with their growing popularity, the established church began to exterminate them in the Albigensian Crusade that began in 1208. The leader of the crusade, Arnaud Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux, was responsible for the massacre at Béziers, and also infamous for the words “Kill them all. God will know his own”, a thought that has been unconsciously perpetuated in politics ever since. Subsequent to the crusade, an Inquisition was set up to find the remaining adherents and to torture and burn them. But Johnson contends that the sect was so popular that it went underground to emerge later as chivalric love.

To outsiders it looked like a new and elegant way to make love, to woo and flatter pretty damsels, but for the insider who knew the “code”, it was an allegorical practice of Catharist ideals.

Robert A. Johnson, We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love, 1983

The need for transcendent experience

Courtly love - Codex Manesse
Courtly love – Codex Manesse

Johnson elaborates with his analysis of the story of Tristan and Iseult that I alluded to in my piece about depression. He suggests that men unconsciously project their spiritual feminine on to women just as the Cathars were doing eight hundred years ago. This prevents both men and women from relating as human beings. It splits men’s spirituality and sentences women to fail to live up to the projection.

It is perhaps surprising that there is still academic controversy over whether or not courtly love actually existed. To me, the question seems redundant given that we are still so enmeshed in the projection. How many of our relationships begin with a rose, followed shortly with by the sprinkling of rose petals, real or otherwise? A few short years later the roses are withered and the blissful feelings are replaced with anger and resentment. Johnson points out that the incomplete number is always three, ceaselessly searching for the fourth.

This is not just a male problem, a woman too can project her inner masculine, her animus, so that the man in the relationship never has a sense of being good enough. He can work 18 hour days, look after the children round the clock, never forget anniversaries. But he will never be able to do enough until the woman withdraws her projection. The power of these unconscious impulses is profound: Johnson argues that they spring from our need for religious experience, the transcendent, the numinous.

The Cathars, as with many other religious movements, wanted to perfect spirituality (their adepts were called parfaits/parfaites). They looked around at the corruption of the established church and reacted against it, seeking purity and simplicity. The shadow of such a reaction, the inevitable consequence, is fundamentalism and fanaticism.

Established Catholic doctrine was that God created everything, including the earth, but the Church was forced to accommodate some of the most popular Cathar beliefs, for example to create orders that looked as poor as the Cathars they helped to exterminate (the Dominicans and Franciscans). However, duality has been bound up in Christianity from its origins. Here’s an example from the Gospel of John:

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.
And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

John 2:15–17

And another from the Gospel of James:

Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him shew out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom. But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy. And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace.

James 3:13-18

For many years we in the UK have writhed under the rule of various vile political elites that have been busy dismantling the welfare state that took such courage and determination to build. The opposition to these policies feels ‘corrective’, a flip-flop reversal. I have this myself, a wave of anger bordering on hatred that feels fanatical.

To avoid the obsessive it might be useful just to say ‘no’. James Hillman reminds us of the Hindu meditation neti, neti, meaning ‘not this, not that’, and the Christian concept of kenosis, Christ’s emptying out of his divine power, his unity with God, in order to be on the earth as a man. Above all else, we need to say ‘no’ to the acts that continue to create inequality, that ravage the earth. Here’s Hillman writing about politics in the United States over twenty years ago, since when everything has indeed got worse:

Kenosis puts the emptiness in a new light. It values the emptiness. It says “empty protest” is a via negativa, a non-positivist way of entering the political arena. You take your outrage seriously, but you don’t force yourself to have answers. Trust your nose. You know what stinks. Don’t try to replace the helpless frustration you feel, the powerless victimization, by working out a rational answer. The answers will come, to you, to others, but don’t fill in the emptiness of the protest with positive suggestions before their time. First, protest! I don’t know what should be done about most of the political dilemmas, but my gut (my soul, my heart, my skin, my eyes) sinks, creeps, crawls, weeps, cringes, shakes. It’s wrong, simply wrong, what’s going on here.

We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world’s getting worse, James Hillman and Michael Ventura, 1993

Service as a way to love the world

Our failure to attend to our actions has brought us to this place: the end times (whether of twenty or a hundred years is scarcely important except to the very greedy). The rest of us try to forget or become angry with each other. Finding and apportioning blame becomes the defence against guilt and grief. The terrible pain of keeping one’s eyes open to the destruction that we have wrought in the world cannot, and should not, be masked in positivism.

Dualism in Christianity has altered our thinking (the same can be said of Islam), and this binary behaviour became far worse in the seventeenth century with the mind-body dualism of René Descartes. We are now thoroughly split, our bodies machines, our heads computers (I wrote something about this here). We project our desire for religious transcendence on to our human relationships. These are the death agonies of our own destruction. But this can change.


Perhaps Hillman’s kenosis leaves the vacuum of the emptiness unaddressed, and my suggestion for something to fill that void is service. Service to the earth and service to each other. Service is about community; about the neighbour you don’t know; about asking yourself what will really help your partner. That might be doing the shopping or it might be about space or silence. It might even be leaving your current relationship. Service is about protecting endangered species; it is taking responsibility for pollution; building new homes on brownfield sites; stopping your car before the crossing, not halfway into it.

Service satisfies the need to feel of value, the need for transcendent expression, but it does not seek to give answers. To be of service is to stay out of depression (see Jung’s letter about this here). I can say, with a fair degree of certainty, that most of the people I worked with as a therapist expressed a wish to be of service, but were unable to carry this out because of external conditions. The politics of austerity create only despair and greed.

For having been born elsewhere.
For having been born elsewhere, (Francisco Goya ca. 1814-1823)

As always, there is something hidden that needs to be made conscious. The psychoanalyst Robert D. Stolorow has something valuable to say here, and I quote:

In some accommodative patterns, serving or performing becomes a way of substituting for a missing sense of inherent value and thereby maintaining a connection with a viewing other.

Robert D. Stolorow

There is a root in ‘service’ that means slavery. To be of service is not to be a slave, nor is it to seek to address feelings of inferiority. Feeling enslaved makes service impossible, therefore it is imperative that we are able to acknowledge shame and loosen its grip on our hearts. As Stolorow writes in a spirited defence of the piece I linked to above:

True repentance belongs to guilt, not to shame. Repenting out of shame is inauthentic repentance. To repent for being vulnerable, for example, is absurd. We should be much more alarmed by people who are guiltless than by those who are shameless.

Robert D. Stolorow

Whether shame is public or private, it crushes the spirit that is needed to create change. To feel guilty is to recognise a mistake, to own it, to acknowledge one’s inherent imperfection without being annihilated. It is so difficult to see: I struggle enormously with my own guilt, yet when I heard one of my visitors2 express guilt, my heart opened like a door of leaves. In an article about trauma and empathy Stolorow has this to say:

A new form of human solidarity would also become possible rooted not in shared resurrective grandiosity but in shared recognition and respect for our common human finiteness. If we can help one another bear the darkness rather than evade it, perhaps one day we will be able to see the light.

Robert D. Stolorow

Perhaps I could offer an alternative version that avoids the duality.

A new form of solidarity (that includes the human and the other than human) would become possible rooted not in projected shame and religious feeling, but in an understanding and praxis of service that acknowledges our shared vulnerability. If we can help one another, perhaps we will, at last, be able to love the colours of the night.

A little piece about depression

What tyranny still surrounds depression, the ‘illness’ generally considered to be endemic to Western culture. And what fear and loathing.

How quickly we defend against our trips into the cold reaches of Saturn, with manic entertainments (Saturnalia) and the ritual consumption of pills. At work a sad demeanour is treated with suspicious sympathy at best, sliding quickly into judgement and advice. We hear the dread exhortation, ‘Cheer up, it might never happen’. Then the meeting with management: ‘We’ve noticed you’re not really yourself at the moment.’ But this is the time when we are most true to ourselves. What management should really be saying is: ‘We’ve noticed that you’re not able to commit to the expression of well-being that we require from you.’

Depression

I’m broken, please fix me…

When I was still working as a therapist, one of my visitors mentioned that to help with his depression he had been using David Burns’ self-help book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, the book that popularised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) in 1980. I had a look to remind myself of its style and came across the BDC, the Burns Depression Checklist. Of course, I did what so many of us do, I rushed to score myself, and I was entertained to find that my result of 63 out of 100 categorised me as suffering from ‘severe depression’ and that I should seek professional intervention forthwith.

A severely depressed therapist? Oh yes, and one of a great many ‘wounded healers’. Burns writes, ‘The negative thoughts that flood your mind are the actual cause of your self-defeating emotions […] These cognitions contain the key to relief and are therefore your most important symptoms’.

Depression

The state of my psyche then, and now, is not news to me. There are good reasons for my depression and I felt a stab of anger that not only should the life-changing events of people’s complex lives be regarded in such a baleful and intolerant light, however well-meaning, but that sufferers should also be blamed as the unconscious authors of their own distress. Even more alarming was Burns’ suggestion that a score of 6-10 could do with some attention and that 0-5 was the target because ‘most people with scores this low feel pretty happily contented’.

The far-darter

Burns’ work, as with other cognitive and behavioural models, is Apollonian. When we are in the mode of Apollo, we value order and harmony. An Apollonian method prefers to examine what presents rather than what might lie beneath, and it is assessed objectively (e.g. through scoring) rather than subjectively. It is accountable, which is both a value and a problem. As soon as something is deemed to be accountable it needs to be tracked, measured and assessed. But with therapy, the effects may take years to come to fruition. Seeds are sown, sometimes they take time to germinate.

Examined on its own merits CBT looks attractive, promising fast results and offering a ‘tool kit’. We have become accustomed to viewing our minds and bodies as mechanisms that can be engineered, tuned and generally spannered into well-being. Most people enter therapy with an intellectual understanding that it will take time. But there is a hunger for the scalpel that will cut out the faulty part. We want to see the forceps retrieve it, and drop it with a clatter into a kidney dish for grossed out inspection. There are alternatives.

The consort of destruction

To see Saturn as a metaphor for depression is to reach back into tradition and give depth to a state of being that often feels overwhelming.

The long trip to Saturn and back, often repeated, is an invitation not just towards melancholy or detachment, but also to creativity. The Roman god himself was a deity of agriculture, a figure who was credited for raising the Romans from barbarism to civilisation and social order, though one wonders what might have been lost in this transition (see my piece on Zombies in popular culture and the Neolithic bargain). In the ancient Assyrian language of Akkadian, the planet we still call Saturn (long thought to be the most remote) was called kaiamanu, literally “constant, enduring”. In Sanskrit, Saturn is called Shani, the Lord of Saturday (Saturn’s Day), literally ‘the one who moves slowly’ and who figuratively represents longevity and learning things the hard way. But Shani is also associated with the crow, a bird of ill-omen in many cultures, so there’s a darkness there and negativity.

Saturn Devouring His Son
Saturn Devouring His Son (Francisco Goya, 1819–1823)

In Greece he was known as Cronus (sometimes also identified with Chronos, and there’s the theme of time again), and in both the Roman and Greek myths Saturn/Cronus ate his children. This is Saturn as devouring monster. Depression slows us and devours us, we slow down and digest life’s events. This is the importance of the negative against which we continue to defend ourselves.

It is interesting to note that while Saturn was paired with the Goddess Ops in later Roman times (a figure related to wealth and abundance), his original consort was Lua, a goddess associated with destruction, dissolution and loosening.

The importance of being earnest

David Burns correctly identifies ‘negative thought’ as important, but he proceeds to attack it rather than ‘keeping faith’, and being a ‘consistent, chronic companion’ as James Hillman has it. You may argue that the book was written twenty-five years ago, but let us not forget that CBT is the therapy most commonly delivered in the NHS, and for every warm and capable practitioner who struggles to deliver meaning in six sessions, and for every proponent of CBT who uses a modified form with wit and intelligence, I suspect there will be a dozen who are compiling a spreadsheet of ‘scores’ and working against the depression rather than with it.

Shortly after my experience with the Burns book I came across this interesting piece by SE Smith in the Guardian. She writes of having to ‘perform’ her sadness so that others will understand that she is depressed and that unless she ‘acts out’ she won’t be taken seriously.

Oxford Circus
Oxford Circus tube station entrance

I liked the piece, it made sense to me. But in a way, I wondered if SE Smith was partly describing a valid way of ‘being’, a response to the world, rather than depression. If we take a look around, and we’re honest, what is there to be happy about? Climate change, globalisation, inequality, fundamentalism, pollution, abuse, poverty – only by being in denial of these things can we say that we are content. And don’t forget the natural world. Ecopsychology holds that we are all suffering at some level for the loss of the other than human, the sixth great extinction event that is a consequence of human agency.

In to the woods

By happy chance (or more likely synchronicity), I had a third discovery. It was the first line of Mary Oliver’s prose poem ‘How I go to the woods’ quoted on Twitter. Here’s the full piece.

How I go to the woods

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
unsuitable.

I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can
sit
on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
unhearable sound of the roses singing.

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
you very much.

Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

See how uncompromising she is? I understand her completely. There are very few people I would really want to go into ‘the woods’ with. Those very few who understand reverence and stillness. Most of us defend ourselves against the contact of the natural world, the discomfort that it brings to our Apollonian need for order. Going into ‘the woods’ alone, or with someone you love very much, is not surly misanthropy or an anchorite reclusivity. It is careful observance. It is the paying of attention that puts us at the level of what we witness, not above it. I believe that it needs to be taught in our schools with considerable urgency.

Jung’s remedy for depression

Carl Jung wrote a chatty and only partly gnomic letter to a person known only as ‘N’. His advice, clearly not for everyone as he is careful to say, is a remedy for depression that works. It works because it helps to take the patient out of himself or herself, out of the cold orbit of Saturn. It is a method that has sustained me and countless others.

Dear N.,

I am sorry you are so miserable. “Depression” means literally “being forced
downwards.” This can happen even when you don’t consciously have any feeling at all of being “on top”! So I wouldn’t dismiss this hypothesis out of hand.

If I had to live in a foreign country, I would seek out one or two people
who seemed amiable and would make myself useful to them, so that libido
came to me from outside, even though in a somewhat primitive form, say of
a dog wagging its tail.

I would raise animals and plants and find joy in their thriving. I would
surround myself with beauty – no matter how primitive and artless – objects,
colours, sounds. I would eat and drink well.

When the darkness grows denser, I would penetrate to its very core and
ground, and would not rest until amid the pain a light appeared to me,
for in excessu affectus [in an excess of affect or passion] Nature reverses
herself.

I would turn in rage against myself and with the heat of my rage I would
melt my lead. I would renounce everything and engage in the lowest
activities should my depression drive me to violence. I would wrestle with
the dark angel until he dislocated my hip. For he is also the light and the
blue sky which he withholds from me.

Anyway that is what I would do. What others would do is another question,
which I cannot answer. But for you too there is an instinct either to back
out of it or to go down to the depths. But no half-measures or
half-heartedness.

With cordial wishes,

As ever,

C. G. Jung

Letter by C. G. Jung written on 9 March 1959,
C. G. Jung, Letters, p. 492-493.

Simple advice, grow plants, raise chickens if you can, get a cat, help a couple of people who will appreciate it. You will feel valued, you will value yourself. This advice, like any other, will not always work.

Melting the lead

Alchemical symbol for Saturn
Alchemical symbol for Saturn

But what did Jung mean by ‘with the heat of my rage I would melt my lead’? He spent many years in the study of Alchemy, seeing it as a bridge between ancient thought and his modern theories of individuation and the unconscious. Alchemists used this symbol to denote both Saturn and Lead:

It denotes Matter (the cross) taking precedence over Mind or human spirit (the crescent sickle of Saturn). This is an exact illustration of depression, the state of being in which mind and spirit cease to function and are displaced by heaviness and stuckness. We feel as if we are wearing boots of lead stuck with gobbets of freezing mud as we trudge through the literal or figurative urban wasteland. Jung says that he will melt his lead, his Saturnine depression, through anger, and depression is often described as anger turned inwards, so to make that anger conscious, to allow oneself to be propelled by it, is another way out of the orbit of Saturn. And to renounce everything, to give up manic consumerism, all the little complexities of life, and go to dig a hole, or walk twenty miles in ‘the woods’ is called for.

There’s something else, particularly for men. The mythological day of Blanchefleur’s death, when she left her son Tristan alone to become a knight amongst men, also marked the death of the feminine principle in the West. The tragedy that followed, and the outcome of our corrupted patriarchy, could not have happened in a balanced culture. Instead of relating to each other as human beings, Tristan and Iseult drank of the Queen’s enchanted potion and fell in love with impossible romantic ideals. Men’s projection of the feminine principle in themselves onto women and the figurative worship of Apollo by both genders have had a calamitous effect on the collective psyche.

The psychologist Ginette Paris alerts us to the absence of the goddess Aphrodite:

As far back as the ninth and tenth centuries, the Arabs understood that flower gardens, poets, musicians, and an attractive table were essential to a hospital. In such a culture as ours, which gives precedence to the civilizing quality of Apollo, most of the hospitals, and too often the habitations, in spite of their functional sophistication completely lack an Aphrodisiacal quality.

Ginette Paris, Pagan Meditations (trans. Gwendolyn Moore)

Our return from Saturn can never be a return to the world we knew before. A shift is required, Aphrodite must appear, we must listen for the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.

Think

If you read this and you are depressed, please take a moment. It can get better. You will see the light and the blue sky. You are loved, right now, this minute, you are loved. While I wrote this piece a young person who I worked with about a year earlier took her own life. She was a wonderfully warm, spirited, affectionate and caring human being – and she suffered from depression. For some reason she wasn’t able to see the person that I could see, she couldn’t locate her power, she couldn’t believe that she was loved. Dear Anna, this is for you.

pink rose

Zombies, Neoliberalism and Nature

The dreadful sound of shuffling feet, and the hideous rattling groans, announce the arrival of the cultural phenomenon of zombie films and games, rich hunting grounds for psychological discovery. In this piece, with my crossbow to hand, I attempt to explore some of the possible figurative responses to the epidemic of zombies in Western culture.

To deprive a gregarious creature of companionship is to maim it, to outrage its nature. The prisoner and the cenobite are aware that the herd exists beyond their exile; they are an aspect of it. But when the herd no longer exists, there is, for the herd creature, no longer entity, a part of no whole; a freak without a place. If he cannot hold on to his reason, then he is lost indeed; most utterly, most fearfully lost, so that he becomes no more than the twitch in the limb of a corpse.

John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
Black Friday zombiew
Black Friday

At the simplest level, the zombie infestation of popular media deals with two main implicit themes, dissociation and consumerism.

The Neolithic bargain

Humans are a gregarious species that came together because it was easier and safer to hunt and live as a group. By so doing, we began to lose our freedom and wildness. The body psychotherapist Nick Totton called this the neolithic bargain. In dissociative behaviour, we witness the loss of this group connection. We lose the small signs of acceptance that bind us together, our language, our desire, our compassion. The consumerist theme is political, it is a reflection on the plague of mindless consumers that is a response to late capitalism (witness the UK rioting of 2011). Watching media coverage of looting, legal or otherwise, we are reminded of zombie attacks. “Look at them, they’re not human,” we say, watching the flat-screen TV that we have looted more respectably.

By iterating the principle features of zombie-related films and games, as represented in this instance by the first three seasons of AMC’s enormously popular television series The Walking Dead, other aspects appear. But first a warning: if you have any intention of watching the series you might want to stop now: there are spoilers ahead!

Key features of The Walking Dead

  • There is a very sudden and highly contagious infection after which ‘normal’ life quickly breaks down.
  • The characters regularly evidence symptoms of grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These stages are correctly shown as non-linear. There are also symptoms of trauma and dissociation.
  • The zombies are ubiquitous and relentless in their need to devour the flesh of the living.
  • The explicit narrative is the need for water, food and safety. These are the physiological building blocks of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
    • Sometimes the living dead compromise these needs. Sometimes it is the living who are to blame.
    • There is an implicit need for salvation, the hope for which is also regularly dashed.
    • There is considerable tension between the competing requirements of safety on the one hand, and retaining the human capacity to love and belong on the other.
    • Choices in opposition abound. Take this or that? Include these people or exclude them? Trust her or not? Save her life or abandon him?
  • Moments of extremely graphic violence featuring dismemberment, decapitation and disembowelment punctuate each episode.

Let’s look at these features in the light of contemporary events.

The destruction of ‘Normal’ life: ideology and managed care

It is clear that life, as experienced by current adult generations, has changed dramatically in the last seventy years. This change is mostly a consequence of the development of computing power. In the last thirty years, there has also been a shift towards what is described as neoliberalism. This means deregulation of markets, an increase in privatisation and a reduction in government oversight. These changes have effectively polarised global cultures.

Polarisation

C. G. Jung developed Heraclitus’ concept of enantiodromia (literally, counter running) to explain the tendency in us to manifest the undesirable ‘shadow’ aspects of our parents. So out of a desire for peace and equality comes a surge of aggression, inequality and slavery. The American therapist Cliff Bostock described the physical loss of voice that attended his attempt to lecture from an entrenched position, signalling an urgent need to recognise the compensatory opposite.

Anima mundi
Anima mundi – the soul of the world

Bostock referenced James Hillman, as do I in these pages, because Hillman recognised that the path we are on excludes the anima mundi, the soul of the world. Hillman argued that psychotherapy has protected sensitive adults from taking action in the world, that their fears and fantasies have become ‘managed’ rather than given expression through action and protest. Moreover, dissent is now effectively psychopathologised and ‘education’ teaches compliance (more on this at a later date).

Crisis? What crisis?

In the absence of care for the outer world, it has become toxic with crisis. There is financial crisis, economic crisis, crisis in education, housing crisis, fuel crisis and environmental crisis. Myopically, we have climate ‘change’. Small wonder then that the rapacious, tyrannical power of the few has created a world that feels broken and desperate, and that existence has become precarious. In the West, this is the world of the Food Bank, the last resort before begging. It is close to the anarchy of doing a ‘run’ to the abandoned convenience store for supplies. Much as survivors risk the bite of the zombie, the impoverished urban dweller will dash to the supermarket, ever wary of the bailiff.

It must be, I thought, one of the race’s most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that “it can’t happen here” — that one’s own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

‘Disorder’ as Symptom

And what of our minds? The psychiatrists’ bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) describes lived experience as disorder. The volume has generated much criticism: first, ‘disorders’ are not diseases as this article makes clear; second (as this piece explains) the ‘treatment of’ so-called disorders makes money. The sale of antipsychotic drugs alone is worth billions. Telling isn’t it?

The opposite of ‘Disorder’ is ‘Order’ but, as Bostock points out, trying to create balance opens the door to chaos. On the churning sea, desperate to survive, we run to one end of the lifeboat to prevent it capsizing. In doing so we start an opposite disaster. We run to the middle, but balance is too difficult to achieve, we never seem to get it right. Perhaps only by dancing between the peaks and trouighs can we keep from capsizing.

Dis-ease

Our ‘dis-orders’ and ‘dis-eases’ are also symptomatic of the toxicity prevailing in the culture. We project blame onto those of us who are merely displaying the symptoms of the true malaise. This leads to a further paucity of imagination and monolithic, monomaniac behaviour.

In my work as a therapist, I saw a rising incidence of difficulty with anger, anxiety and ‘depression’. Many visitors were in denial of those feelings. Peopled believe that they choose their mechanical lifestyles – or else that there are no options. This is the absence of imagination again. But it is not of the trapped individual so much as the larger society. There is a terrible cost. Anxiety and depression are medicated, anger is managed. Zombies only want living flesh, they are driven to it, they have no options, not even binary options.

Zombies as a symbol of greed and loss

It has been almost 50 years since Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed her five stages of grieving. She worked with people dying of a terminal illness rather than the bereaved. Subsequent researchers have taken a more expansive view of grieving. Others have denied the five stages entirely, preferring a model of stoic resilience, and setting these two states in opposition. In this piece, the psychiatrist Steven Schlozman writes of the trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder in The Walking Dead. He writes that the phenotype is different between characters, but his examples strike me as rather literal. And here it is argued that the series is a critique of individualism. But I see the tendency of troubled characters to go out alone as a dramatic staple of the horror genre (no, don’t go down into the cellar with just a candle and a scared look!).

The dominator culture

Nick Totton references the anthropologist Richard Sorenson:

[His] work suggests that once dominator culture arises it spreads like a plague: cooperative, liminal, wild humans are profoundly vulnerable to humans who are closed and aggressive. They literally cannot bear to be around them.

Nick Totton, Wild Therapy, 2011

Another pair of opposites perhaps, but one that is well illustrated by the competing camps of The Walking Dead. There is one notable difference: the cooperative humans are prevented from being in the wild. How similar to current society. There are so few ways to escape from the dominator culture, and it is this that we desperately need.

Loss of land

If I am right in my opinion about the prevalence of anxiety, depression and anger in Western culture, we can relate these symptoms to the oppression of the dominator class. We can also connect them to loss. So what might be lost? According to Jay Griffiths in her book Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape the loss is environmental. She writes that since the enclosures, peasants were funnelled into industry away from the land. The idea that this rescued a brutish rural population from the miseries of subsistence farming is a myth created by landowners and industrialists. Griffiths too sometimes inhabits the land of opposites. She compares the evils of the modern world to an Arcadian fantasy. But her Romantic passion lights up the heart. One wants to be in the cool streams and secret dens of her imagination.

Remains of the last wild passenger pigeon at Cincinnati Zoo
Remains of the last wild passenger pigeon at Cincinnati Zoo

The Sixth Great Extinction

Ecopsychologists suggest that we are all grieving for the other than human, the countless species and the sheer numbers lost. We face the sixth extinction, a wiping out of life on a massive scale. Impossible? Remember the fate of the Passenger Pigeon? Billions of birds were made extinct in 40 years through hunting and deforestation. More recently, the Pyrenean Ibex: extinct in 2000. The Saint Helena olive: extinct in 2003. The Bramble Cay melomys: extinct in 2016. And not just species, but unimaginable numbers of individuals wiped out through human agency. Now scientists are talking of  ‘de-extinction’, of reanimating these species from their DNA.

I think that we carry the knowledge of what we have done as a terrible shame. The zombie herds of The Walking Dead reflect our continuing predations on the natural world. They push their way through everything in their need for the flesh of the living, just as we bulldoze our way through the Earth in our need for its resources.

Et in Arcadia ego

In the first two series of the Walking Dead, the farms and lush countryside of Georgia shimmer in the heat of high Summer. Sweat drips sadly from the noses of protagonists. Winter is mentioned but avoided, and soon we are back in a verdant Spring – but here there is still danger. Behind every tree, a zombie may lurk. Down at the stream zombies are stuck in the mud. A child’s den is a place to hide in terror from the awful groaning outside.

Does a zombie wait behind the next tree?
Does a zombie wait behind the next tree?

In the third season, the irony is signposted in block capitals. Our heroes set up home in a bleak grey prison that has to be regularly cleared of the undead. Outside, zombies congregate at the prison fences, groping for a way through. The group struggles between the ‘freedom’ of the prison and the ‘safety’ of a ‘community’ run autocratically by the ‘Governor’. To what extent do these set pieces reflect our lives? Here we are in opposites again. The fearful grey fortresses of the heart stand in for Independence, while the phoney veneer of the Governor’s colony is Dependence. Neither option is attractive and the ground between them, the beautiful forest, is rendered toxic and uninhabitable.

John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids is the prototype here in so many ways, from the hospitalised hero waking to a world turned insane, to the competing camps of survivors. But instead of what Brian Aldiss described as ‘cosy catastrophe’ (the barely conscious wish for the slate to be wiped clean so that we might create Arcadia) there is next to no comfort, or the comfort is soon violently removed.

Zombies as political metaphor

Analysis of the rise of the Zombie motif
Analysis of the rise of the Zombie motif

In the years since George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), the number of films and video games that feature zombies in one form or another has increased in a way that suggests something has been touched in the collective unconscious.

Night of the Living Dead
Night of the Living Dead – this image shocked audiences in 1968

While certainly not the first film to feature the shuffling horrors, Night of the Living Dead was perhaps the first to capture the popular imagination, hinting at a social commentary of the Vietnam War and of racism in America. In the chart above I have brought together Wikipedia’s lists of zombie-themed films and video games, including the television episodes of The Walking Dead to date (2014 is incomplete).

Fundamentals

One might have expected to see zombies make an appearance in the eighties, the time of the Thatcher/Reagan axis. But the scale of the infestation twenty years later is surely not accidental, as the consequence of their policies wreaks havoc across the world. We are fascinated with our power, appalled and awed at our ability to destroy without remorse, sickened with our own unconscious mania. Fundamentalism can never be far from our minds, whether of the East or West, whether of the vile massacre of schoolchildren in Peshawar by the Taliban or the institutionalised shooting of black people by the police in America.

Zombies as religious projection

In the narrative of The Walking Dead, there is a significant issue (massive spoiler ahead), the philosophical implications of which seem to have gone largely unexplored. The infection (cause unknown, but initially believed to be communicated by being bitten by a zombie) is, in fact, present in the living, so all those who die become reanimated. This is hugely suggestive of the concept of Original Sin. Much of the zombie oeuvre can be seen as the visitation of a biblical plague on to the sinning masses (the word ‘plague’ is used often in the series). This underpins the tension between pragmatism and idealism. In another sense, the knowledge of infection keeps the living and the undead connected – all opposites need to be similar so that they can be compared.

Depth and Light

Religious anxiety also hides within the explicit narrative (none too well). In the second season, the Christian farmer Hershel tells Rick, our heroic ego, that the plague is a ‘correction’, but attributes it to nature, unwilling to task his god with responsibility. He keeps his undead family members and erstwhile employees in a hay barn, triggering a particularly violent denouement in which Shane (apparently Rick’s shadow self) opens the barn door and, with assistance, destroys the emerging zombies in a hail of gunfire. The last zombie to emerge is Sophia, the girl who the group has been trying to find in the forest for almost the entire season, suggesting that corrupted innocence has been in their hearts all along, just as the infection has been in their living bodies.

Sophia is the ‘Light of God’ of Gnosticism, the final phase of Jung’s anima development, the name that means Wisdom. I wonder if this is unconscious synchronicity or deliberate choice. The zombies, particularly the undead children, represent our fear of the devil, the resurrection of the dead as damnation, hell on earth, the apocalypse, in the form of Satan’s daemons. As Hillman remarks, Christianity removed the depth of the Underworld from our psyche, and the possibility of descent and return. Is the character going down alone to the cellar (or the prison basement in this case) a faint remnant of this?

Hatred of the flesh

Zombies invariably look diseased and rotten. Limbs can be wrenched from the undead (otherwise shown as very strong) with mystifying ease. Penetration of zombies with bullets or melee weapons results in a fragmentation of flesh and bone that is invariably accompanied with a vile spurt of dark ichor. In particular, we note that the only way to end a zombie’s undead existence is by destroying the brain. Zombies are shot in the head with bullets, bolts and arrows. They are impaled through eye sockets with steel pipes; skewered with knives and swords, up into the throat and through the soft palate. Zombies on the ground have their heads stomped in violent outbursts of disgust, hatred and grief.

A zombie from The Walking Dead
A zombie from The Walking Dead

The resurrection defiled

The rotten flesh of zombies is reviled: a lucky living human who has been bitten may have the infected limb severed so as to prevent ‘turning’. Other humans regularly fight with each other, suffering physical trauma, bruising and wounding, even if they are not killed outright. The flesh of the living is almost as tormented as that of the undead. Surely this says more than just a love of the ‘gross’, more than a schoolboy’s delighted disgust at the cartoon popping of an eyeball? For me, it represents a hatred of the flesh that is fully consistent with the idea of a corrupt resurrection, the acknowledgement that (as Jung suggested) resurrection is a fantasy, a defence against death. But this is confused with the idea in Christianity of the corruption of the flesh, the blood that is left behind as we resurrect, and that souls become spirit.

Hearts and minds

Additionally, there is the destruction of the brain, the part of us confused with thinking, as if we think only with our brains, not our hearts or stomachs. Does this sublime organ have to carry the can for all our mistakes? Psychotherapy insists that we feel everything, placing our sensory perceptions into opposition with our thinking. If we think at all it is supposed to be with our Right Brain, not the sinister Leftie (another opposition and a false one at that, as neuroscience has emphatically proven). Therapists are often trained like this, in the good-natured but mistaken belief that if only their ‘clients’ stopped thinking then everything would be well with them. Some therapists work with Mind/Body/Spirit, and despite a possible fantasy of holism, this feels more like dancing.

Western puritanism

There is another very important piece of evidence. Here’s author Robert Kirkman talking to Entertainment Weekly about the absence of a sex scene: “That’s more of a comment on America as a whole and television’s standards and practices than it is on us. It is kind of absurd that in an episode where you see the inside of a bloated, water-logged corpse, you can’t see so much as a butt cheek. That’s the world we’re living in.” This show, that so revels in the realistic depiction of blood and viscera, can only imply human sexual relationships.

Perhaps America fears that sex in the apocalypse would be so primal, so aggressive, that we would see something too uncomfortable for us to bear. We can cheerfully witness the dismemberment of our shadow selves, the rapacious zombie hordes, but we might faint at the first sniff of our own musky animal sexuality. This is surely a reflection on the spiritual transformation so dear to the fundamentalist West. We want to change so badly – it makes us hate the earth. We despise the fleshy and ‘corruptible’: Not so long ago these are things that would be celebrated, not abhorred.

The End of Days

This is where we find ourselves in the twenty-first century. Our comforts are temporary and often delusional, moments of respite in the bleak struggle for survival. Must we destroy the brains of the zombies – the bankers, politicians and oligarchs – when they pose a threat? Or are we too busy fighting each other?  It’s just TV you say. Look again at the chart, and perhaps watch the series. Sitting in a café the other day I overheard two women in earnest conversation. One was telling the other about her business selling ‘critical and strategic thinking skills’. She mentioned a colleague, saying, “Her cognitive processing is somewhat impaired… she is very controlling of her environment.”

Breaking out of the zombie prison

We are all in Rick’s crew now, bunkered in our prison anticipating nothing better than either the next attack of the zombies, or the wrath of the ‘Governor’. We live in a superficially ordered community that is ruled by fear. It is a society without imagination, without choice. I would like to believe that through ritual and a new pantheism we will find better ways to hold our need for control and power. Will we eventually see through our need to consume at all costs? Perhaps it is too late.

And we danced, on the brink of an unknown future, to an echo from a vanished past.

John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids

Sark and the Barclays – a psychological perspective

Introduction

I began this piece as a psychological perspective on the political situation in the Channel Island of Sark, but something happened to divert me into the lyrical and the ecstatic. Because the lyricism that came to me felt authentic I have let the piece stand as I wrote it, though it may appear disjointed.

Famously, Sark was the last feudal state in Europe until its first democratic elections were held in 2008, considerably reducing the powers of the hereditary Lord of the Manor, the ‘Seigneur’, Michael Beaumont. I do not wish to spend too much time on the background, but for those unaware of the history, it may be useful to visit journalist John Sweeney’s Panorama programme investigating the tax affairs of the Barclay brothers (who own the neighbouring island of Brecqhou and many businesses in Sark on top of their businesses in the UK and elsewhere).

Background

An article in The Independent from January 2014 recounts the events following those first elections. Apparently angered by their lack of success in the elections, the Barclays closed their businesses on Sark, throwing around 140 people (of a total population of around 600) out of work. This decision was reversed a few weeks later. More recently the brothers announced that they would close their four hotels on Sark for 2015 for the foreseeable future. It is believed that this tactic was a response to the island parliament’s refusal to set up a customs post on Sark, thus permitting direct travel from France.

The brothers conduct their businesses on Sark through the company Sark Estate Management. This Guardian article from November 2014 relates something of the toxicity of events and, in particular, the behaviour of the CEO of Sark Estate Management, Kevin Delaney, as evidenced in the pages of his Sark Newspaper.

I write here as an occasional visitor to Sark. Sometimes I manage a couple of day trips a year. Sometimes I get to stay a few nights. I claim no in-depth knowledge of the island economy or its infrastructure. However, I know a little of island life. I have family who have been living on Alderney (a little larger than Sark, with more facilities) for 43 years, and I have been visiting the islands almost annually for 61 years. I know that island life is sometimes hard. It is often necessary to take on several jobs. Work is frequently impossible because of adverse weather conditions. Often families keep feuds alive for generations, with the original causes of the enmity often long forgotten.

Fortress mentality

To live on an island one might perhaps be expected to develop an insular way of being, a fortress mentality. One might be stubborn, defended and anachronistic. It is easy to lose sight of the ‘bigger picture’ and cling on to outdated values. To some extent that has been true in Sark. There was considerable justification for democratic elections, particularly in relation to the practice of primogeniture. But island life can also foster a psychologically healthy state of inter-dependence. Residents of a small community such as Sark can ill afford division (they rely on each other more than on the mainland) – much less the kind of deep division that has been generated by the events of recent years.

A psychological perspective

Rather than focus on the division itself, I want to turn my attention to the psychology of the Barclay brothers. Once the brothers had bought their island, Brecqhou, they spent millions of pounds on transforming the rugged beauty of the island (which they described as an ‘eyesore’ before the alterations). They poured thousands of tons of topsoil onto the rocks, planted on a massive scale, and created a fairy-tale retreat. There is a mock gothic castle, a harbour, a lake with fountains, a village complete with a local pub, and two heliports. The image below shows the beginning of the terraforming process. The following image shows it nearly complete.

Early Development phase of Brecqhou
Early Development phase of Brecqhou – the harbour and castle look relatively complete.

And this more recent image, shot from a different direction, shows the design close to completion.

The late development phase of Brecqhou
The late development phase of Brecqhou – we are looking from the other side of the island to the previous picture.

Let’s consider the fantasy here. I think of the term ‘fairy-tale’ frequently in relation to these events. The brothers are secretive: access to their island gardens by the public was allowed briefly while their Sark hotels were open. Guests had to be security cleared, whatever that entailed, and photography of the buildings was forbidden. The creation of the castle itself was shrouded in secrecy (as once indicated here by the sadly discontinued satirical website Guernsey Futu) prompting John Sweeney’s first investigative report. Clearly something more is going on here than ‘just’ the building of an expensive house and grounds.

The sandpit

Notwithstanding the conspiracy theories, the tales of an underground nuclear bunker or a casino, the brothers have bought themselves a sandpit, and in it, they have built a fantasy castle in the same way that a child might build a castle out of Lego. It is secret. It is on an island. We can see it above all as a romantic move. But like children, the brothers want more, a bigger island, more bits and bobs for the fantasy kingdom, as a child decorates every empty space with shells and trinkets. The Barclays want a funicular railway from Sark harbour up to the village, in other words, a train set. They have planted hectares of vines on both islands, both the vines and wine redolent of myth, of romance. And also, again much like children, they get uncontrollably upset when they don’t get their own way. They break their toys (the hotels, the businesses), throwing them away and only grudgingly taking them back. They make demands and expect them to be met.

Sark Newsletter 17092014
Sark Newsletter accusing the Chief Pleas of fascism (27/09/2014)

Community feeling

The brothers gave Sark £200,000 for a new community centre. Then they demanded the money back, jointly and severally suing the trustees (unsuccessfully). They had given a present and then, finding that the conditions of giving were not met, they tried to withdraw it. The Barclays dearly want to play with the other children, but the other children don’t like them, and the brothers, rejected and hurt, are left to withdraw to their castle to plot their revenge.

Hearts and minds

In an article in the Telegraph (the Barclays’ own newspaper) the President of the Chief Pleas (Sark’s parliament), Lt. Col. Reg Guille says, “We are a very independent breed. We live and work by our own hand and long may it continue”. This is what the Barclays have not understood, that they must win hearts and minds, and do the work of understanding the culture of Sark if they want to be invited to play. Instead, their agent, Kevin Delaney, has resorted to a propaganda war against what he describes as the Sark establishment. The scale of the attack (Delaney compares the ‘establishment’ to Nazi Germany in the 1930s) has left some residents feeling bullied and traumatised.

Ironically, The Sark Newspaper’s tone (accusatory, angry, hectoring, blaming) is not a little reminiscent of the infamous Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer (‘The Attacker’), the Wikipedia entry for which reads, “[It] was known for its use of simple themes that took little thought”. Carl Jung had this to say about the abuse of power:

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow sufferer.

C.G. Jung, CW 11, Psychology and Religion: West and East, Chapter V, “Psychotherapy or the Clergy,” § 519-520

Shadow

Nothing is without shadow. Delaney’s accusations of dictatorial behaviour, of criminality and wrongdoing amongst Sark residents, may or may not have a basis in truth. But the psychologist has to wonder to what extent these allegations are a projection, an identification in others of behaviour that is unacceptable in oneself. In any community, there will be some who are either actively breaking laws or who are operating at the margins of what is legal. So Delaney’s sustained attacks on the ‘octogenarian’ Seigneur, Michael Beaumont (now deceased – his son Christopher is the current Seigneur), describing him as a tyrant, might be Delaney’s projection – and by extension that of the Barclays. The psychologist James Hillman wrote this:

We adhere to what works for us. What works becomes a privileged way of doing things, soon the only way of doing things. As we get older, and more blind, this tyranny of habitual consciousness becomes more and more visible to others.

James Hillman, Kinds of Power: a guide to its intelligent uses. 1995

In other words, the habitual way of doing things, to bully, to oppress, becomes the only way. The oppressor has become blind, an enraged child, unable to find other ways of influencing.

The mirror of Sark

But why care about this tiny island and its affairs? Because the tragedy in Sark is a mirror for events playing out in the rest of the world. In the UK, and across the globe, rich and influential oligarchs are taking control of land and businesses, stifling competition, and creating a new soviet of rentiers. The Guernsey Press, fearful of a ‘blight’ on the island’s economy, the spectre of closed hotels ‘left to gather dust’, asked for mediation. But a mediator would have an unenviable task and would need to understand the tensions on both sides. Perhaps the Guernsey Press fell into the trap of believing in the perennial modern fantasy of constant growth, a fantasy that has led to the present state of titanism in the ‘global economy’.

A walk through Sark

“With great power comes great responsibility,” said Voltaire, words that went unheeded by the French aristocracy. But eleven years after Voltaire’s death, the Bastille was stormed. While Sark is not pre-revolutionary Paris, nor is the castle on Brecqhou the Bastille, history is replete with examples of the powerful ignoring the weak until it is too late. So my request to Sir David and Sir Frederick, their son Aidan Barclay and their agent Kevin Delaney (and perhaps to some of the population of Sark as well) is this: consider how your wealth and power can be used to benefit Sark, not to harm it further. To help you in stepping out of the drama triangle of Persecutor/Victim/Rescuer in which you are so enmeshed, I take an imaginative walk through Sark from the harbour to the La Sablonnerie tea gardens, from memory. I invite you to join me:

The harbour to Dixcart bay

I walk up the slippery harbour steps from the ferry. Every time I have done this, without exception, I have seen the happy faces of people waiting to greet friends or family. I see many familiar faces, though I don’t know their names. Going through the short tunnel, rejoicing in the light and the sweet air,  I pass by the ‘toast rack’ conveyances because I prefer to walk. Up the hill, a few paces take me to the path that runs parallel to the road up to the village. I take it as I always do, and the flowers are like jewels. At the top of the hill, I nod and smile at the carriage drivers. I need to walk, but I’m glad they’re standing ready, the horses bobbing their heads. Turning left at the crossroads, there’s the house with the cats and the garden with the apple tree. Another path runs past a water trough where goldfinches are bickering. Soon I’m in a bluebell wood, young green leaves filtering the sun.

Bluebell wood
Sark – bluebell wood

I turn left down a path, a stream beside me, and I emerge into glorious light. Ahead there is a wide beach, the stream splashing on to pebbles and the sea stretched out before me. Done exploring, I walk back up the path and a young woman greets me, smiling. “How is the sea this morning?” she asks. “Glittering,” I tell her. We pass our different ways, conscious of something that happened between us of no importance, which also matters more than anything else, a meeting charged with love.

The Convanche chasm

Now I’m back in the wood, darker here, more mysterious. The trees are young, slender and strangely tall, but the sunken valley feels old, and the stream keeps me company. Then past two hotels, through some of the vineyards (and I wonder what they’re sprayed with), over a stile and on through the cliff path. Blackthorn is all around me in a froth, warblers are singing, the sea distant as I rise higher on to the back of the island. I want to stroke it, smooth its fur, and I do, running my hand through grass and leaves. Almost before I’m ready, there is that awful chasm, not quite separating the two islands. It is the waist of the wasp, and I’m on it, looking apprehensively at the frost cracks in the concrete. My stomach clenching as I look down into the depths.

La Coupée
Sark – La Coupée
Grande Grève
Sark – Grande Grève

But I take my time, savouring the moment, the unparalleled view, the sea so turquoise-blue it seems impossible. No sea can be this colour. There should be mermaids at least or Aphrodite herself might spring forth from the waters of Grand Grève.

Little Sark

Down the dusty road I tramp, each opening, left or right, offering a new possibility. There’s a field of corn marigolds, there an old mill turbaned with ivy.

Corn marigolds
Sark – corn marigolds
Sark - Old mill
Sark – Old mill

I resist refreshment, I turn and weave, through a gate, down past the crumbling ruins of the old silver mines, and I think about greed and growth. Look at that ivy growing there, the stems so gnarled and thick, did you stand here too Mervyn? Did you see Titus and Steerpike here, fighting for their lives?.

Sark - Ivy
Sark – Ivy

I reach the sea again, it boils here and I think I’d like to set a conger line. But I just sit and hear the current roiling in the crevices. I feel the power of it as it thuds against the rocks, and let the salt spray moisten my skin. I sniff that iodine tang, the rich rot of the ocean.

Port Gorey
Sark – Port Gorey

I go back, the cries of gulls echoing around the cliffs, and this time I give in to hunger. Walking through this lovely garden (where even the outside toilets have fresh flowers), I sit where I always sit. I order the seafood chowder (I always do). Then I look around and think about stealing the prints of Alderney on the wall, but don’t. Outside Jersey Tigers flash orange under-wings as they dart between the blooms.

Jersey Tiger
Sark – Jersey Tiger

Let’s stay here for now. Another time, we might take a different path, and watch sea mist roll in over the northern headlands.

Other paths

Eperquerie
Sark – Eperquerie

Or we might visit the rocks and bays from a boat, and wonder at what fire and molten minerals finally cooled to form these fantastic shapes.

Sark- rocks
Sark- rocks
Madonna rock
Madonna rock

We might visit the harbour and fish for longnose and pollack. We might watch curious mullet nose around the piles of the jetty. Then, spotting a pod of dolphins in fast pursuit of a shoal of fish, arching and leaping through the water, we are awed beyond speech, and can only point mutely in their wake.

Grey Mullet swimming in Maseline Harbour, Sark
Grey Mullet swimming in Maseline Harbour

Another time. For now, I wonder if we could sit here and draw up some tables, I’m sure they won’t mind. Let’s drink some tea, eat some cake and turn our faces to the sun. And now, may I ask you this? Can you Men of Power see beyond your influence and the sphere of your control? Will you sit with me here, simply, frugally, and consider the ecstatic beauty of what surrounds you, the absolute privilege that we share in being here? Can I persuade you to recognise that it is not just profit that you seek? To play together only one thing is needed: a shared delight in play.

If you are interested in paintings you might like my view of Grande Grève or my view of Sark from Herm.

A memory

We ignore how memory brings not just an event of the past but all the senses that went with it too.

Walking past a greengrocer I saw him line a box with cabbage leaves. Something different about the leaves caught my eye, the dark crisp pungent green of them, the lighter veins, strong and juicy, the green looking almost knitted. I was eight years old and cleaning, probably under protest, my guinea pig’s hutch. I remembered the moist sawdust, the perfume of resinous shavings, a sharp tang of urine, the darker note of the droppings. I remembered the light scratching of his claws as I held him in my hands, the feel of his ribs beneath his silky coat, the brightness of his eyes.

Guinea Pig


Because I walked on a sunny morning in October, because the greengrocer cared enough to line his displays with cabbage leaves (not plastic bowls), because I was open, I received the gift of this memory. I felt sad that I had not looked after my pet as well as I could, but moved to have his scent in my nostrils after so many years and, at that moment, happy.

The epidemic of running

Running where? And from what?

Running has become an epidemic. For city dwellers, it is now fast becoming impossible to enjoy a weekend walk. The internet is awash with articles extolling the benefits of running. There is precious little material that works with physical danger, much less the psychological risks.  It is deeply ironic that the constant injunction to perform day to day tasks ‘mindfully’ is often rendered impossible by noise and stress. This piece examines the psychology behind running and suggests that there are better ways to be.

Not long ago I took a Sunday afternoon walk on the Thames towpath. It used to be a pleasure. The first ominous sign was an ‘event warden’ standing guard, in high visibility jacket, over hundreds of plastic water bottles. Not long after, the leaders of the marathon started to appear. Before long the towpath was heaving with runners – numbered, deadly serious and panting. To my distress, I had forgotten that the towpath is now off-limits to walkers at the weekend.

Even without these competitive runners, the walk has become overtaken by joggers. Participants wear identical figure-hugging Lycra. Some wore their phones strapped to one bicep like a medical gadget. Others proffered the phone in front of them as if making a votive offering. I was assailed with runners from both directions, the shouts of rowing coaches from the river and the roar of aircraft overhead. How can we stay sane in the midst of this madness? It appears to have become law that all adults should run regularly.

Running as a coping strategy

Artificial and Human hearts
By treating our heart as a pump, a sentimental symbol of love, or even as courage, we have lost its true meaning

So what does it mean? As a coping strategy, running produces increased energy and concentration, improves cardiovascular health, combats ageing and reduces the risk of cancer. There is a concomitant increase in energy and concentration. This helps at work (or most probably helps someone else make a profit). In the runner’s mindset ageing has to be ‘fought’ against. The ‘risk’ of living needs to be managed. The epidemic nature of running suggests that people are finding their lives bearable only through the chemical advantages of exercise.

For the runner, motivational music is often important. The theme to ‘Rocky’ (between bouts of cramp and intense nausea) is popular, suggesting a strong element of triumphalism. We can see the same thing at work in other outdoor pursuits, most obviously cycling and hiking. An outdoor retailers will not sell you a book on foraging, or a collection of poetry by Mary Oliver. Instead there is a confusing selection of quasi-military kit racked against images of bleak treeless terrain that needs to be ‘conquered’ and ‘overcome’. I cannot speak against this attitude strongly enough. This is the modern disease of individualism. It is an indoctrinated requirement to get to the top of the mountain at all costs. Yet workers are told to be ‘team players, expected to engage with the vile neologism ‘coopetition’. This is a double bind.

What is the heart?

Most significantly, we are told that running defends against depression. Perhaps, by not running, we might discover the possibility of engaging with what is being defended against. The late psychologist James Hillman, delivering an Eranos lecture in 1979, described our view of the heart in three ways:

  1. Courage to live, humanity. The heart of the lion: Coeur de Lion.
  2. An organ of the body, secret holder of one’s death, a muscle or pump. The heart of Harvey.
  3. Love, feelings, sense of soul and person. The heart of Augustine.

What did he mean by these ‘disguises’ and what are they disguising?

Hillman quotes the American poet Wallace Stephens: ‘The lion roars at the enraging desert’ ( from ‘It must be abstract’) and says:

What is passive, immobile, asleep in the heart creates a desert which can only be cured by its own parenting principle that shows its awakening care by roaring.”

Hillman, James. ‘The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World’. New York, 1993. Spring Publications

With typical fire, Hillman goes on to say:

The heart of Harvey, already dead, “fitness” replacing vitality, creates the desolation it jogs through, mufflers over the ears, blinded in the sweat of extending its life-expectancy, zombies creating the desert by running and running with nowhere to go. If beauty arrests motion, motion eradicates beauty.”

ibid.

Secret fear

The reference to zombies is prescient (and the subject of another post), but in case we miss the meaning:

We fear that rage. We dare not roar. With Auschwitz behind us and the bomb over the horizon, we let the little lions sleep in front of the television, the heart, stuffed full of its own coagulated sulphur, now become a beast in a lair, readying its attack, the infarct.”

ibid.

And again:

To keep my ticker running, I jog it. The heart must be lean, trim, erect, so I watch for extremes of intensity, like idle leisure, and abuse, like passionate excitement. Now the heart is no longer the animal of love and heat, the place of himma, throbbing out its imaginative forms. Now its signals are decoded into little messages about life expectancy. For my heart can insult me, attack me. I must propitiate it: I take this for my heart, do that for my heart, watch out for my heart, I turn it in regularly for a checkup.”

ibid.

Where is our roar?

The Harvey referenced in the second definition of heart is William Harvey. He was physician to James 1 and Charles 1, and in 1616 was the first observer to scientifically describe the workings of the heart as a pump. The consequence of his work was far-reaching. It led to a mechanisation of the heart that has gone further than even Hillman saw just over thirty years ago. Who roars now? Perhaps only the likes of Russell Brand (now stifled it seems) and the anarcho-capitalist Max Keiser. The rest of us sleep, allowing Brand and Keiser to do our roaring for us.

Ashamed of our passivity we rush quickly to criticise and belittle. It is like wishing for the collapse of the Shard but at the same time admiring its priapic mastery. What then is the heart that is the animal of love and heat, the place of himma? Hillman references the philosopher and scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, who writes that the himma is the ‘vital force, soul, heart, intention, thought [and] desire’. Hillman clarifies:

Our hearts cannot comprehend that they are imaginatively thinking hearts, because we have so long been told that the mind thinks and the heart feels and that imagination leads us astray from both.”

ibid.

The imagining heart

This concept of the imagining heart represents the essence of what I wish to communicate. Hillman’s essay is a stepping off point for imaginal thinking. It is a call for a recovery of soul.

Runners, stop! Allow the depression, experience what you are defending yourself against, and then act accordingly. When you run, do so for the feel of the wind in your hair. Run for the feel of tall grasses brushing against your skin. Run for a rush of youthful delight in your body and its power. Please do not imprison and silence the roar of your heart.