by Martin Shaw
If you find nothing now, You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death. If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
Kabir3
SKY WALKING AND THE RUPTURED MYSTIC
In the myth world, Apollo is an example of a young leader society could still just about swallow. Seen in Greece as the God of the Sun, he strides about, instructing us, “Nothing in excess.” His name carries associations of brightness, purity, the whiteness of swan’s wings, advancement of medicines and the laying down of laws. He also rides the approval of his father Zeus, as the favorite son. A player of the lyre, his music is perceived to calm the most ferocious beast, to transform wildness into a passive and benign state. Every botched business decision, ecological crisis, messy break-up he experiences is viewed from an enigmatic distance, where his feathers never catch in the tricky glue of emotion. He is corporate man, par excellence; lacking the terrifying swings of Zeus’s temperament, he remains in control: early to bed, early to rise. His love of logic and clarity are presented to us as soon as we enter nursery or primary education as a defining way of being in the world. Universities, media, and industry are fueled by a hundred million little versions of this energy field. When you imagine his face, what can you see? I see a kind of glowing and cheekbones.
When we think of Jung’s statement, “Man doesn’t become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious,”4 we become grateful that there are other gods in the Greek pantheon. The question is, has anyone told society at large? The characteristics of a person under the thrall of Hermes will almost always be perceived as muddy, unclear, and morally dubious next to the impersonal radiance of Apollo. Like a kind of mythic robocop, Apollo men are enforcers of a senatorial consciousness received from their fathers. Firmly in the Descartian camp (as much as a god can be), they can create conditions of ecological havoc. Some gods originate from beneath the soil, but not this one.
Sky men and women proliferate in leadership. Although they may possess the organizational skills, discipline, and logic to succeed, we sense something terribly thin in them. It’s as if their shoes are the only thing stopping them from floating several inches above the ground. They don’t engage the earth somehow. I recently gave a lecture to leaders from around the world on mythological thinking. As long as there were handouts and coffee, things went well. However, when we moved into the realm of grief and loss as part of the leader’s lot, the room fell oppressively silent. Five minutes before, all were offering very informed perspectives on the subject, but when it turned inward, to intimate material, nothing. I was practically hounded out of the venue.
For them to admit difficulty, or confusion, meant instant loss of status in the group. The branding power of potential shame was too intense to risk vulnerability. To speak openly would appear to be “confessing.” Interestingly, six stayed to talk after the end of the rather fraught lecture. Given a more secure space, they freely ranged into a conversation of great depth and feeling.
Culturally we like to assume our artists (from a distance) are disciples of a very different god, Dionysus. Dionysus is another son of Zeus, but one who canters through rain-washed valleys while Apollo flies overhead. At first glance, Dionysus appears almost diametrically opposed to Apollo. He is associated with the inebriation of wine, the rupture of mystical experience, the timelessness of lovemaking and spasmodic, crazed, passionate outbursts. We know that at the moment of his mother Semele’s death, Zeus tore Dionysus from her womb and sewed him into his own thigh, where he grew till birth. This strange, auspicious incubation points to a kind of unexpected nurture on the part of Zeus. A fascinating conjecture is that the name Dionysus may mean “Zeus Limp”—Zeus’s wounded aspect manifested in this particular son.
Dionysus leads a trail thick with both murder and ecstasy. He is dangerous, conflicted, sexy, and loose. While uninterested in the clear path of responsibility, he is allowed by his sheer strength of personality to access odd emotional pathways, to have a psychic life, to create music, ritual, art, to even break new ground in these mediums. His relationship to the muse sometimes offers fame as a side dish. We are thrilled/ horrified by Dionysian behavior, the lack of boundaries, the outlandish music, the one-fingered salute to convention. If his talent is recognized and success arrives, the Dionysian individual can incinerate quickly. We walk past an apartment party and see Joplin, Cobain, and Dean sharing margaritas as the block burns.
Then the wine men rise up
Wearing deep purple belts
And hats of defeated bees
And they bring goblets filled with dead eyes,
And terrible swords of brine,
And with raucous horns they greet one another
Singing songs of nuptial intent
Pablo Neruda5
Daniel Goleman talks about the necessity for “emotional intelligence” in the workplace; beyond the practical skills of your particular occupation, you need to be able to sense, handle, and articulate both your own and your colleague’s emotions. Goleman identifies the raw nerve endings in the desire for perfection, status, and success, and rather than suggesting you walk away completely and join an ashram, he proposes a palatable integration of both ends of the mythic spectrum. He writes: “The ancient brain centers for emotion also harbor the skills needed for managing ourselves effectively and for social adeptness.” Disturbingly, he also notes a decline in this kind of integration: among young people especially they are two horses pulling swiftly away from each other:
As children grow ever smarter in IQ, their emotional intelligence is on the decline. Perhaps the most disturbing single piece of data comes from a massive survey of parents and teachers that show the present generation of children to be more emotionally troubled than the last. On average, children are growing more lonely and depressed, more angry and unruly, more nervous and prone to worry, more impulsive and aggressive.6
Goleman is telling us that these poles appear to be growing farther apart than ever, that among a coming generation a perpetual dislocation is emerging between logic and feeling, with neither side handling or assisting the other.
CRAFTING A TEMPLE
This disturbing situation turns us back to our sources: the old stories. Hidden in the folds of Apollo’s wings we find a key. For three months a year, Apollo would turn his temple at Thebes over to the worship of Dionysus. Astoundingly, these two seemingly opposite, right brain/left brain forces were honored in the same vicinity. We know we aren’t gods, but could we be a temple?
James Hillman employs the phrase “Divine influxes” to describe the winged forces that sweep through us but are not purely contained by us. We need to identify our visiting gods and goddesses and build an appropriate container for their incursions. It is our very contemporary arrogance to think that we can pick and choose them. In the case of Apollo and Dionysus, each seems to mutually recognize the benefit of the other. In fact, in our discussion of age and leadership we see that to aspire to both longevity and creativity, we will have to have both present. Without Apollo’s focus and long-term direction, the purely Dionysian individual risks addiction and early death. Without Dionysus, one can feel distant from the pulsing heart of life, successful but dry.
Artists famed for their wild bursts of inspiration often served steady apprenticeships as draftsman or illustrators for years—Willem De Kooning and Franze Kline among them. To break from form, they first had to explicitly understand it. It feels fruitful for us to look at characters who have allowed Apollo’s discipline to sustain their vocation for decades, honing and amplifying it. They provide a very different model from the late twenties burn out.
Antoni Tapies and Cy Twombly, to name but two, are turning out the most vibrant work of their careers in their seventies and eighties. Their temples appear to have been built slowly, with both granite foundations and delicate little chambers ready to accommodate any peculiar bird song they may awake to. To brand
them purely as Dionysus’ children is too sweeping. The kind of wildness they present, the wildness of elders, is not the crazy sweep of a double-headed axe but the lyrical footwork of the capowera dancer.
TRUST AND LARGESSE
Don’t be smart at lying. Don’t be flunky to a thief.
Don’t be conflict’s chief.
King Cormac7
Classic virtues of Knighthood: prouesse, loyaute, largesse (generosity),
coutoisie, and franchise (the free and frank bearing that is visible
testimony to the combination of good birth with virtue).
Maurice Keen8
In both history and myth, we find that the requirements of leadership are rigorous. We think of Finn’s warriors leaping supernaturally great heights while under attack from all sides, Tibetan Lamas leading a monthly confession at the monastery. We see in leaders an emphasis on a kind of inner accountability to the community. “Don’t be smart at lying,” Cormac says. How would that be received in the world of contemporary politics? Can you imagine the shock waves if Tony Blair had looked into the camera and said, “Okay, this is what’s really going on in Iraq.” The leadership consultant John C. Maxwell says, “No leader can break trust with his people and expect to keep influencing them. Trust is the foundation of leadership. Violate the law of solid ground and you’re through as a leader.”9
Much as I appreciate the sentiment, I and many others have grown up as a generation for whom lack of trust in anyone in a position of political authority is a given. We are too informed, too cynical, and have seen too many Watergates to take seriously the word of any mainstream politician. That appears to have become an impossible posture to maintain with any transparency.
The dissolving of belief in leaders is part of a tangible Apathy. The higher layers of our national trees feel rotten, branches breaking off, the trunk being sawn through by disillusioned anarchists. In short, there appears to be nothing sound to look up to. The only arena deemed still safe in which to find role models is sport. Even this now wavers, awash with steroid and sex scandals. As long as your aspirations are focused on a running track or playing for your country, that’s fine. A radical and awake mind however can get awfully messy.
I’m suggesting now two roads towards this idea of leadership. They are not moderate or safe roads—they imply a kind of excess or appetite. They involve a love of oratory but also profound inwardness. We are finding ways between the tavern and the mountain and arguing for a state of being that includes both. Oratory does not belong only to the mouth of the sensualist and solitude does not belong only to the ascetic.
ROAD OF VOICE
The ability to inspire through language, to draw us into realms of excitement and wonder used to be a prerequisite of leadership. A growing distrust of this in the West, and desire for just the facts are noted and fought against in this passage by Thoreau:
I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough, may not wander beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of what I have been convinced. I am convinced I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression . . . why level downwards our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense. The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring . . . while England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will any not endeavour to cure the brain rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?10
Of course, “just the facts” or “get to the point” are an anathema to the myth teller. Owls drop dead from wet black branches with such a reckless perspective. It is as if we have been invited to an Arthurian feast and we choose a burger and fries. It can seem that we mistrust eloquence or see it as shadowy, artificial—a kind of spin. At least with a monosyllabic fact-repeater, we think we can take things at face value. It may not raise a reaction or even a pulse, but at least we got the company stats read out at the weekly meeting.
We can link fear of vital expression to a fear of nature, both of our own untapped depths and the earth itself. We know that with both, landslides, tornados, and lightning are possible, so we draw up a tense drawbridge, refusing to go “in” to feeling, or “out” into the wild and uncertain terrain of nature. I know through working with people in positions of leadership that public speaking is often their number-one fear, especially the anxiety of coming “off script” publicly. In this fear, speaking up is to risk being found out in some way, of not being worthy of the position they occupy. We know from history that voice is perceived to carry the resonance of your life experience, your medicine. This terror of flow, of letting your hands move in the air around you when you speak, of trusting animation, is to distrust the instinctive body.
METAPHOR: GOLDEN BEARS LEAP FROM THE JAWS OF CHILDREN
So how does metaphor assist this Road of Voice? Through approaching the old stories in this book it becomes clear just how crucial the role of metaphor is. Metaphor is the great leap, the generous offering of many possibilities contained in one image. So what is underneath metaphor in speech and writing?
Paul Ricouer claims that metaphor has a unique structure but two functions: it exists either in the realm of rhetoric—as an aide to persuasion, or tragedy—to establish a poetic sentiment. The poetic is not attempting to offer proof but representation, while metaphor in service to rhetoric becomes caught up in the configuration of rhetoric-proof-persuasion. When metaphor dwells in poetry the triad is poiesis-mimesis-catharsis.
Within this book it appears that the function of metaphor oscillates between the two—rhetoric as the voice of village, poetry as the voice of the forest. To place undue emphasis on either creates an unrealistic perception of the whole. Of course, an element of persuasion exists—if only to suggest that poetry can hold deeper reflections than just the literal. In that light, the two streams Ricouer offers are mutually supportive of one another.
The writer Hugo Ball regarded language as so entrenched in the rhetoric of politics and warfare he claimed that the binding force of syntax must be entirely broken so a poetry beyond words could be born. He says, “one relinquishes, lock, stock, and barrel the language which journalism has polluted and made impossible. You withdraw into the inmost alchemy of the word. Then let the word be sacrificed as well, so as to preserve for poetry its last and holiest domain.”11 While I admire the intensity of his position, Ball’s argument indicates too severe a break from “village” thought and mode of expression. The role of initiates as they wander into physical landscape or the obtuse terrain of poetry is to add and challenge the existing pantheon of village expression, not deny it completely.
George Steiner, in After Babel, makes an explicit link between language and the erotic: Eros and language mesh at every point … are there affinities between pathological erotic compulsions and the search, obsessive in certain poets and logicians, for a “private language,” for a linguistic system unique to the needs and perceptions of the user?12
I am not seeking a specifically private language. However, I would suggest that with the use of metaphor, especially utilizing Ricouer’s association (just illustrated) with poetry, I hope to encourage the imagination, and where can the erotic begin except with imagination? Words of bite, substance, and imagination have a tremendously erotic undertow wherever we are lucky enough to find them.
If we entertain the old idea that masculine and feminine characteristics dwell in both men and women, we then have to ask the question: which aspect is influencing this pursuit of metaphor?
Steiner suggests, “womens speech is richer than men’s in those shadings of desire and futurity known in Greek and Sanskrit as optiative; women seem to verbalise a wider range of qualified resolve and masked promise.”
The writer Meg Bogin, in her book, The Women Troubadours, claims that far from Steiner’s, “shadings of desire,” the women troubadours were far more direct and less disposed to symbology than that of their male counterparts. She adds, “the language is direct, unambigious, and
personal.… unlike the men who created a complex poetic vision, the women wrote about their own intimate feelings.”13
When shall I have you in my power?
If only I could lie beside you for an hour
And embrace you lovingly
Know this, that I’d give almost anything
To have you in my husband’s place,
but only under the condition
That you swear to do my bidding
The Countess of Dia 14
The Countess of Dia sounds clear. It is worth noting that all of the Trobairitz (female troubadours) came from aristocratic backgrounds and would have experienced ad infinitum the intricacies of their male counterparts’ verse, often having been the very object of their affections (within the restrictions of verse and courtly love, at least). We could speculate that the women, enjoying a far more respected role within the confines of court, would have felt freer to explore a more direct approach when surrounded by men constructing verse laden with mysticism and double-meaning. Steiner continues his associations of the feminine with loquacity: “The alleged outpourings of a woman’s speech, the rank flow of words, may be a symbolic restatement of men’s apprehensive, often ignorant awareness of the menstrual cycle.” So male resistance to the feminine in language could relate to a deeper fear of blood and the moon.
To think mythically around Steiner’s idea, we would now associate certain forms of eloquence with the passage of the Moon. The medieval phrase, “to drink down the moon” suddenly becomes the chant of all storytellers.