We never know what sorrows and demons live behind another person’s persona.
I try not to judge. Just to grieve.
What a brightly burning light Robin Williams had! Which means he had just as great a darkness within.
And didn’t know how to reconcile the two.
“Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them–or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.
Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn… If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life.” –from Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
“Lydgate did things in an episodic way, much as he gave orders to his tailor for every requisite of perfect dress, without any notion of being extravagant… it had never occurred to him that he should live in any other way than what he would have called an ordinary way… he walked by hereditary habit… –from Middlemarch, by George Eliot
I watched Twelve Years A Slave last night. Which I’d been putting off, because I knew it would throw me for a loop. And it did.
While there’s some comfort in being able to sob during a horribly upsetting movie in the privacy of my own home, it does bring up the fact that slaves had no privacy whatsoever to do their grieving in. And that refugees from war and abused people and homeless people and people who roam the streets because they just don’t have enough mental competency to hold a job still have no privacy whatsoever to do their grieving in.
Way back when he was in middle school my son Tim came home one day, threw himself into a chair, threw his back pack down onto the floor, and said, “I’m ashamed to be white.”
Yup. Got it. It’s hard to look squarely at our country’s history — at any imperialistic country’s history — and realize that the way of life one takes for granted is based on the pain and suffering of so many others, both past and present. [Books you need to read: A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, and Overthrow, America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, by Stephen Kinzer]
But we can’t stop looking. It’s absolutely necessary to look. It’s absolutely necessary if human consciousness is going to develop any further. The way the human shadow affects the ego, we can’t do anything about the evil around us until we begin to see the evil in our own hearts, until we can start making the connections between “out there” and “in here.”
I’ve heard holocaust survivors say that part of “survivor’s guilt” is living with what they had to do to survive. Maybe you helped get others ready for the ovens, or stole food, or turned someone else in. Maybe it’s just that you had to stand by while so many others perished. In Twelve Years A Slave, the principal character Northrup has to stand by and try to show no emotion while other slaves are beaten, sexually abused, lynched, and oppressed in every conceivable way, which probably ate into his soul even more than the horrors done to him personally. Nor can he take any of the other slaves with him when he’s finally released. He has to walk off and leave them to their fate, which he knows his release is going to worsen. Northrup dealt with his “survivor’s guilt” by writing a book, by becoming an instrumental part of the underground railway for runaway slaves, and by spending the rest of his life working toward the abolishment of slavery.
But how do I deal with my survivor’s guilt? There are so many things to feel guilty about now. How is one single soul supposed to cope? Human beings fuck up — and fuck one another up, and fuck their environments up — on such a regular basis that anything positive someone does manage to accomplish gets sucked down and completely buried in the general madness.
My son’s statement all those years ago no longer goes far enough for me.
These days, I’m not just ashamed to be white.
I’m ashamed to be human.
Me too. Everybody else too. Burned out and bad news-ed to death.
It’s one result of being alive during a tsunami of information and technological innovation and cutthroat profit making.
Each of our poor Psyches has to find its way every day through mountains of opinions disguised as facts; through vast deserts where every grain of sand is an advertisement for a new product while actual product satisfaction fades like a mirage on the horizon; where no sooner do we figure out how to arrange our facebook page than the proprietors change the whole format; where no matter how many hours we work we still worry about money, about whether or not we can afford to live. Now isn’t that a weird thought? Whether we can afford to live…?
Yet the basic equipment we have for filtering data and processing change is no better than the equipment our hunting/gathering ancestors had living in small, stable communities. The raw mechanics of a human being — the brain, the nervous system, the circulatory system, the digestive system, the muscles, the bones, the psychic relationship between conscious and unconscious knowledge — don’t change quickly. Can’t change quickly. The raw mechanics of being human take thousands of generations to change.
So while we think of ourselves as ultra modern — sporting the absolute latest and fastest sort of phone — we often find ourselves acting like cavemen.
Or, feeling completely exhausted and overwhelmed. Over-whelmed. Whelmed-over.
Perhaps it’s inevitable, as Robert Bly speculated one time during a lecture on the human shadow. Perhaps with each technological advance there’s a necessary and corresponding spiritual loss. Perhaps each conscious gain has to push out some older unconscious entity, like knowing which plants are poisonous, in order to gain a toehold.
Who knows? What we do know is that microwaves cook so fast we get impatient if it takes two minutes to boil water. We do know we can connect ourselves to the whole world via the internet, as long as we focus on the monitor and don’t look around the room we’re in. We do know we can walk down the street or drive a car while talking to someone miles away, but only if we ignore the people right there in front of us.
Ach… I fear that unless we’re very careful from here on out, each technological advance will only make us more impatient with each living breathing moment; will only take us farther away from the here and now which our instinctual human natures call home.
Just finished one of Wallace Stegner’s novels, The Big Rock Candy Mountain. My god that man could express the human condition.
“My dear, I have lied all my life. I never spoke for the sake of truth, only for my own sake, and although I always knew it, I only really see it now… Ah, and all the rest — savez-vous, it is possible that I’m lying even now; indeed, I’m quite sure I am. The main trouble is that I believe myself even while I’m lying. The most difficult thing in life is to live without lying and — and not to believe in one’s own lies.” — Stepan Verkhovensky speaking, in The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Sometimes I lie, and sometimes I tell the truth. I just don’t know which is which.” — Robert Bly, while lecturing on the human shadow
And ain’t it the truth about us all…
From The Years, by Virginia Woolf:
“… My people, he was saying… Her attention wandered. She had heard it all before.
I, I, I — he went on. It was like a vulture’s beak pecking, or a vacuum-cleaner sucking, or a telephone bell ringing. I, I, I. But he couldn’t help it, not with that nerve-drawn egotist’s face, she thought, glancing at him. He could not free himself, could not detach himself. He was bound on the wheel with tight iron hoops. He had to expose, had to exhibit. But why let him? she thought, as he went on talking. For what do I care about his “I, I, I”? Let me shake him off then, she said to herself, feeling like a person whose blood has been sucked, leaving all the nerve-centres pale. She paused. He noted her lack of sympathy. He thought her stupid, she supposed.
“I’m tired,” she apologized. “I’ve been up all night,” she explained. “I’m a doctor — ”
The fire went out of his face when she said “I.” That’s done it — now he’ll go, she thought. He can’t be “you” — he must be “I.”
And then she smiled. For up he got and off he went… ”
—The Years, Virginia Woolf, Harcourt paperback, 1965, p. 361.
This is James Hollis talking, in Why Good People Do Bad Things:
“All of us have stuck places in our contemporary life. We are well aware of some of them, and we mobilize New Year’s resolutions to overthrow them, albeit with mixed results. Others are less conscious and reassert themselves through our daily reflexive responses to ordinary life. These stuck places, if tracked, always reveal an invisible filament that leads back to some archaic fear that, overwhelming the child, still has the residual energy to intimidate, even shut down, the adult. Taking on this fear, however real or unreal it may prove to be, is the Shadow task that the psychopathology of everyday life brings to the surface and to challenge each of us.
An example of this archaic dilemma might be found in the preoccupation with dieting that forms so many of our resolutions. On the surface, all we have to do is eat less, but we slip into old patterns easily enough and the pounds return. What is the archaic fear that eating is surreptitiously “treating”? Such intimidating fear, if brought into consciousness, would ask: “If I do not eat this, what then will nourish me?” Rather than go unnourished emotionally, we will continue to transfer our psychological needs onto matter, and the pounds persist.
The paradox of healing our sundry pathologies is that only by a continuing attention to them, and a respect for what they are telling us, can we ever be free of them. In the end, we do not wish to believe that our life is governed by the agenda of others, or by fear, or by our defended response to both. We with to be here, as we are, as who we really are. In “the psychopathology of everyday life” we are invited to confront a great deal of personal Shadow material. Even if this summons asks us to revisit wounded places, we are progressively brought to larger life through a more differentiated relationship to our own psychological complexity. When we do not look within, something within is looking at us nonetheless, subtly making decisions for us. We wish to respect our pathos — our suffering — yet not be passive or pathetic.”
–James Hollis, Why Good People Do Bad Things, Understanding Our Darker Selves, Gotham Books, 2007, p 81-82.
…when we do not look within, something within is looking at us nonetheless, subtly making decisions for us…
…The paradox of healing our sundry pathologies is that only by a continuing attention to them, and a respect for what they are telling us, can we ever be free of them…
The following is from Owning Your Own Shadow, by Robert Johnson, whom I heartily recommend.
“The ego and the shadow come from the same source and exactly balance one another. To make light is to make shadow: one cannot exist without the other.
To own one’s shadow is to reach a holy place — an inner center — not attainable in any other way. To fail this is to fail one’s own sainthood and to miss the purpose of life.
India has three terms describing this place of sainthood: sat, chit, ananda. Sat is the existential stuff of life (mostly the left side of the balance); chit is the ideal capacity (mostly the right side of the balance); ananda is the bliss, joy, ecstasy of enlightenment — the fulcrum of the seesaw. What sat and chit are paired together, and sufficiently conscious, then ananda, the joy of life, is created. This is won by owning one’s own shadow.
If we act from the extreme right, we will knowingly or unknowingly have to balance this with some act from the left side. We do not even have to turn our head around to know that we have created an equally dark content. This is why so many artists are often so difficult in their private lives. There is, however, a broader kind of creativity that folds the darkness into the finished product and finds fulfillment in the shadow. This is pure genius. Its attributes are wholeness, health, and holiness. We are also talking about sainthood in the original meaning of the word — a full-blooded embracing of our own humanity, not a one-sided goodness that has no vitality or life.
A friend asked me recently why so many creative people have such a miserable time of it. History abounds with stories of shocking or eccentric behavior among the great. Narrow creativity always brings a narrow shadow with it, while broader talents call up a greater portion of the dark. Schumann, the composer, went mad; the world knows about the very dark side of Picasso’s life; and everyone hears stories about local geniuses with their unusual habits. While those with the largest talent seem to suffer most, we all must be aware of how we use our creativity — and of the dark side that accompanies our gifts. To make a work of art, to say something kind, to help others, to beautify the house, to protect the family — all these acts will have an equal weight on the opposite side of the scale and can lead us into error. We cannot refuse our creativity or stop expressing ourselves in this way; yet we can be aware of this dynamic and make some small but conscious gesture to compensate for it.
Marie-Louise von Franz and Barbara Hannah, who shared a household in Kusnacht, Switzerland, had the custom of requiring whoever had some especially good fortune to carry out the garbage for the week. This is a simple but powerful act. Symbolically speaking, they were playing out the shadow side of something positive. Carl Jung often greeted a friend by asking, “Had any terrible successes lately?” because he also was aware of the close proximity of light and darkness.
I remember a weekend when I put up with very difficult guests who stayed days beyond their invitation. I exercised herculean patience and courtesy and sighed in great relief when they left. I thought I had earned something nice by my virtue so went to the nursery to buy something beautiful for my garden. Before I knew what was happening, I picked a fight with the nurseryman and made a miserable spectacle of myself. Since I did not pick up my shadow consciously, I landed it on this poor stranger. Balance was served, but in a clumsy and stupid way…
…It is possible to live one’s ideals, do one’s best, be courteous, do well at work, and live a decent civilized life if we ritually acknowledge this other dimension of reality. The unconscious cannot tell the difference between a “real” act and a symbolic one. This means that we can aspire to beauty and goodness — and pay out the darkness in a symbolic way. This enables us to do the upkeep and keep the balance.”
— from Owning Your Own Shadow, Understanding The Dark Side of the Psyche, Robert Johnson, HarperSan Francisco paperback, 1991, p 17-21.
“It is better always to remain in an attitude of doubt toward one’s own behavior, which means to do the best one can, but always to be ready to assume that one has made a mistake.” — Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales
