Eloquent Body

by Dawn Garisch

  But the ego is too restrictive, too defended. It tends to aim for external goals for a sense of wellbeing, such as control, perfectionism, status, fame and fortune. When we fall short, which is inevitable, the ego brings in its buddy, the inner bully, to tell us we are not good enough and never will be.

  Psyche, however, is not interested in the concerns of the ego. Psyche is involved in story and symbol, and we all know that a good story needs highs and lows. Psyche's ally is the daimon, guiding us through the swamps and plateaus of the creative story of our lives.

  Paradoxically, paying attention to the demands of the daimon, or muse, does not solve the problem of self-care entirely. Creative urges can become all demanding, all consuming. The daimon wants attention, and she wants it immediately. She has the ability to do just about anything, but we are human. There are many artists who, in service to their craft, have burnt out, or drunk or drugged themselves to illness or death. As we need to humanise the internalised critic in order to live creatively, we also need to negotiate with the forceful, urgent nature of the daimon, and remind her that we have needs and limitations associated with staying alive. Unlike the muse, I need to eat, sleep and walk up the mountain. I need to go to the toilet, or chat with a friend. I need to potter about in my garden, and even sit and do nothing for a while. The daimon, however, rides on my shoulder, commanding, wheedling: Get back to your desk! Pay attention, or the gifts I am showering down on you will be lost! Just one more hour, just another. And another. It doesn't matter that it's three in the morning and that your back is aching. You are tracking treasure, keep going.

  Finding a track to follow, nose to the ground, making something out of nothing and keeping company with the charged dance is exhilarating. It is obsessive, a drug. I want more, and more, just a little more. Like a drug, the creative fire can burn one out and ruin one's health. It can, literally, lead to taking drugs to keep one going.

  ***

  At the moment, I feel electric, heightened, floating on top of my lovely life. For the past year, since starting this book, I have felt the gigantic pressure of wanting to drop everything else and sit down and write the whole book immediately. Right now. That is how it feels. Of course, that notion is crazy in that there has been an enormous amount of reading, research, talking things through and processing to develop the content and shape of the project. But my daimon knew exactly what he wanted, and he wanted it now. So for a year I have had to resist this continual pressure to get back to the desk, and the accompanying terror that I will forget whatever it was that I, or the book, was on about.

  So, to my daimon: thank you for a great morning. Right now, despite your protests, I am going to shut down my laptop. I will have a shower, then go off with some friends to an art gallery, for lunch and a walk.

  ***

  26. Of Creativity, Connections and Healing

  Philip Larkin said that a poem is a knife and fork partnership. The fork identifies an emotion: spears it, lands it on the poem's plate. The knife is analytical and technical, wants to ‘sort out the emotion, chop It up, arrange it and say either thank you or sod the universe for it. ’ The fork is what makes readers reach for poetry In a crisis.

  Ruth Padel115

  As I drove to work today, knowing that the complimentary copies of Trespass had been delivered to reception and that I would soon have the fruit of a couple of years of inner and outer work in my hand, I pondered the twists and inversions of the psyche. Trespass was not an easy book to write. It is in the form of a journal by a woman utterly different from me, yet who I might have been if I had been born into a different political and social time, and into different family dynamics and circumstances. I wrote my way into her character, and all the way back into boarding school.

  One of the difficult things about my experience of boarding school was that there was no privacy. My bed was in a shared dorm, and my access to my own small space, such as it was, was strictly controlled and limited. The authorities even tried to penetrate our minds. The head mistress of one school ‘caught’ me with money I was going to use to buy a book for a friend for his birthday, and forced me to tell her what I was doing with it. She called me into her study the following Sunday afternoon to tell me that the book was rubbish, written by a drug addict, and what was I doing reading such a book? She had gone out and bought and read it. It was Bob Dylan's Tarantula.

  The feeling of invasion and violation from eight institutional years during childhood and adolescence remains with me. Without it I could not have written Trespass. I have used my experience and that of others who went to boarding school to construct a fiction that contains a truth, and in doing so, I have a work in the public domain that invites readers into a private world. Reading Phyllis Wilds' personal journal is a trespass and a violation.

  My acts of creativity are acts of mental health. I am aware of the irony that, in order to remedy my sense of violation of privacy and integrity at boarding school, I write books which, once out in the public domain, will result in criticism both for and against the text. Critics and readers might well decide a book of mine is rubbish. A published work has a life of its own, and will be seen and interpreted by anyone who reads it through their own experience of the world, as well as being compared with other texts. When I write or create, I drop the barriers erected in defence of my privacy. For the work to be seen, the creator must risk something of herself, otherwise she is writing to a formula. Unlike in childhood, this time I choose to do it. Perhaps that is what heals.

  ***

  Trauma causes a split between the emotional and cognitive centres of the brain, disrupting the ability for meaning making or linear narrative. It leaves the brain at the mercy of powerful, distressing images and emotions. It's like a short circuit – normal connection between the two parts is damaged In some way.

  Poetry engages with emotions, the felt-sense of the body, images, metaphors and searches for a language thereby making a connection to the meaning making centres of the brain. It acts as a channel or bridge between them.

  Poetry like trauma has a deep connection with the body and the senses, but it also connects with the conscious mind as It grapples with language. So we could see poetry as providing the bridge between implicit and explicit memory in order to provide the vital connection necessary for recovery.

  Seni Senivaratne116

  We know from real-time scans of the brain that, when confronted by metaphor – the basic tool of poetry – more areas light up than during any other activity.117 Metaphor and symbol arise from association, and the majority of our brain tissue is devoted to associative tasks of meaning-making. These brain areas link up this with that so that we can make sense of the world and ourselves as we receive information from the inner and outer environments. Writing poetry stimulates the connections for meaning-making, and thereby helps trauma survivors integrate the horror of their experience and move on with their lives.

  With this finding in mind, the psychoanalyst Margaret Wilkinson proposed in a lecture I attended in Cape Town that therapists should perhaps make more use of metaphor when working with patients. She says that those patients whose connections within the occipito-frontal cortex did not develop well due to early childhood trauma might be helped through mobilising connections using symbol.

  The Journal of Poetry Therapy cites a case study entitled ‘Runaway with words: Teaching poetry to at-risk teens’. Through various exercises, oral recitations and conversations, troubled teens in Florida's runaway shelters learn basic writing skills that help them gain control over their emotions.118

  In a pilot study designed to evaluate the use of group poetry therapy interventions with cancer patients there was a significant decrease in suppression of emotions and in anxiety in those who wrote poetry. There was no change in the control group. The study concluded that a poetry therapy intervention may improve emotional resilience and anxiety levels in cancer patients, but recommended larger randomised control group trials to test this further.119 />
  ***

  Words have alternately been described as inadequate to the task of describing emotion, and also as deliverers, providing a means to put what you are feeling into a form that can be transmitted to another. Sometimes when we identify a background unease by naming it, we can access insight and relief.

  Words have limitations in that they can only act as an approximation for something else that is not composed of words. Despite this, words are able to connect us back to the images they stand in for – back to the poetic base of the mind.

  ***

  27. Image and Imagination

  Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

  Yeats120

  Watching children playing the game that my young sons called ‘jubbetend’ (just pretend), it is clear they use their versatile imaginations to experiment with ideas and feelings, to practise control over a situation, to expand their talents and social skills, to mimic, learn and just to have fun. The poet Ted Hughes notes that it is this gift of imagination, not the teaching of grammar, that determines the writer,121 or any artist. Yet he and Ken Robinson122 express concern that our school systems squash, rather than enhance, this skill.

  Mimicking or miming is one way we learn. Imagination allows us to expand beyond our own experience. It also allows us to dream into other lives – how we would feel and respond if we were in someone else's shoes. This function of the frontal lobes imparts the essential social capacity for empathy. Also, imagining a life different from the current one enables someone in trouble to initiate the steps necessary to change. It can increase our complexity, and our repertoire for living.

  ***

  Imagination can heal or harm us, assist or sabotage us.

  When we are confronted by a gun-toting robber in our home, or when we are told we have cancer, or when we have to speak in public, or when we are retrenched, we usually visualise the worst possible outcome: death or disability, humiliation or poverty.

  My patient who cannot sleep because he is afraid of dying, has an inflexible image of the future. His imagination has frozen into a single image which overrides the reality of his youth and health.

  Imagining ourselves as victims has physiological effects. We might have been subjected to the most appalling violence and misfortune, but not allowing any other re-imagining of the event or situation keeps us in a state of chronic stress. Ernest Hartmann,123 a psychiatrist and laboratory dream researcher, has found that dreams have a healing function in people who have suffered trauma. Dream images can slowly integrate the traumatic event by changing how the trauma is represented. Over time, the event is incorporated into the larger dynamics of dream life. However, in people suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), dream images associated with the trauma congeal into a repetitive stereotype.

  Robert Bosnak, a psychologist who works with dreaming states, does not wait for sleep and dreaming in order to engage with patients on modifying and integrating the trauma. He encourages them to induce a flashback of the event, and to describe it in as much detail as possible. The advantage is that, even though imagining a trauma will evoke it as if it was actually happening, his patients are at the same time aware of being in a room with the support of the therapist. In describing in vivid detail what they are seeing and experiencing, from the sensation of the floor, to the colour of the wall or sky, he asks them to note whether anything has changed since the initial event, which it often has. This can help people with PTSD to integrate the experience.124

  ***

  Image is psyche.

  C. G. Jung125

  The medical profession sees disease processes as malfunctions in the body that require treatment. We ignore the metaphoric motif. Doctors are trained to interpret symptoms, because we know they are associated with specific diseases. A burning sensation in the epigastrium that the patient reports as feeling like fire is usually a direct pointer to inflammation of the gastric mucosa. This is an elegant and practical approach to diagnosis and treatment, but it can only operate on the level of the fixed image. By treating the symptom with a proton pump inhibitor and altered diet, the symptom subsides, the gastric mucosa returns to normal, and we say that the patient is healed. But the symbol contained in the image of burning – which might lead off in many directions, from the consuming flames of desire to the lava of unspilt rage – is lost. Mindell126 suggests that this unprocessed, unconscious material shifts from disturbing the body to disturbing another aspect of our humanity, our relationships, for example.

  When a woman loses her breast to cancer, her response to the facts and flesh of the matter is likely to be fear and horror, but if she can connect to the myth, symbol and story evoked by the image, it might help her to locate the event in a metaphoric way within the rest of her life's motif, with some relief. The symbol of a woman without breasts is extremely powerful, and not only in a negative way. Myth has it that the Amazon women cut off one of their breasts to aid their use of a bow and arrow, an image which leads to others, and is therefore not fixed and lifeless.

  ***

  Advertisers know how powerfully we respond to images. We are assailed by a multitude of visual cues through television, billboards, mail drops and posters. They all jostle for our attention, using clever ploys.

  Advertisements nowadays have little to do with information. Their success lies in how well they can manipulate our attention, our associations and our pockets. The images are carefully chosen to stimulate anxiety or desire – linking our drive to be happy to an object or a way of life. They depict states we are encouraged to strive for, or those we are encouraged to fear – being lonely, uncool, exposed to germs, hungry, injured, dead or old. The image, losing connection with the depth and mystery of the symbolic, evokes a knee-jerk response. Reflexes, like symbols, bypass the analytic brain. But symbols, unlike reflexes, make meaning in the associative cortices.

  Commercial images lean heavily on us, trying to influence our behaviour towards handing over money. Dream images challenge us in a completely different way. They often present aspects of ourselves which we find incompatible with who we think we are. James Hollis comments that, as we know we did not consciously create those dream dramas, they remind us that some separate agency of awareness is observing and reporting in.127

  Dreams have also been called God's most unappreciated gift. Not everyone agrees. Some neuroscientists describe dreams as the attempts of the brain to cobble images together out of the random and excess neuronal discharge created by the lower midbrain as it attends to essential functions while we are asleep.

  Yet images arriving through dreams and daydreaming have on occasion assisted scientists and inventors to solve problems. Some famous examples of this include the snake image that gave Kekule the idea for the structure of benzene and Darwin's living tree metaphor for the evolutionary process. Seeing a spear with a hole in the blade while he slept gave Elias Howe the solution for inventing the sewing machine, and James Watson's dream of a spiral staircase helped solve the puzzle of the structure of DNA. These are famous examples, yet we all have dream images that might point towards solutions to the problems that preoccupy us.

  Using dream-related tools, Bosnak also assists those wanting to explore illness and creative blocks. A notice announcing his visit to South Africa arrived in my inbox at the time I was struggling with the many quandaries presented by the task of writing this book: finding the tone, form, content and language that would best convey what I wanted to set out on paper. I was feeling restless, distracted; I procrastinated, spending hours on emails and YouTube; I walked, read and pottered, avoiding the next step, waiting for help.

  I booked to go on his workshop to find out more about his approach, then made a few private appointments. I explained to him what I was trying to achieve in the book, and the problems I was having. Bosnak encouraged me to sit quietly and become sensorially aware of all the elements of the situation and the associated images. We then worked toward
s a point where I held these images simultaneously in my body, rather than chronologically.

  This method acts as a pressure cooker, increasing tension between all aspects of the situation. It is very difficult to juxtapose contradictory emotions, joy, fear and pain, for example, but this is the way of story. All parts must be represented, otherwise there is no completion. Then, out of the tension, the constellation of images begins to change and resolve in ways that are experiential and non-rational, and are therefore always unexpected.

  Entering a hypnogogic, or pre-dreaming, state, I saw that inside the darkness of my trunk – trunk, rather than abdomen, is the word that came to mind – there appeared a luminous and thin glass cylinder suspended diagonally, pointing towards my heart. On closer inspection, I noticed that the cylinder was both a wand and a test tube. My serious mood lightened immediately at the playfulness of the unconscious, and I became full of enthusiasm to follow that image of magic, creativity and science wherever it might lead me. I understood: I must bring these disciplines together by writing in a heartfelt way.

  Across cultures and religions, throughout the ages, human beings have consulted Psyche – or the gods, wellspring or oracle – using dreams and image. They would usually journey to a sacred place and sleep there, asking for a dream to assist them. Dreams were portents, omens, they were seen as the language of the gods. They were a place one could go for assistance. Dreams were a way of going back to the source or the wellspring of the life force.

  ***

  Imagination is not a single event. It is like finding the end of a piece of twine and following it. By its nature, it is engrossing. Tracking the thread occurs in varied ways in the landscape of a child's imagination: drawing, daydreaming, playing in sand or with an army of sticks or toys, building towers or dams, singing or visiting an imaginary world or person at the top of a tree or under a bed, exploring the contents of a workshop or a sewing room, draping sheets over furniture to create houses or constructing islands with mashed potato and gravy. Entering imagination is to enter another world, and another area of the brain. That immersion is usually why a child at play cannot hear his parent call, not because he is ‘naughty’.