by Dawn Garisch
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Journalists keep us up to date with current news, and our culture pays attention to what they report. Artists are also reporting back, but they reflect on the Zeitgeist – the themes, symbols and motifs of our time. Yet most of us do not make the effort to connect with the important ideas they impart. If we do, we often whizz through a gallery in our lunch hour, and say that we saw the exhibition.
The poet and writer, Ruth Padel, compares poetry to a tiny and stubborn David standing up to the violent Goliath of injustice and repression. She points out that one of the first things tyrannical regimes do is to ban poems and literature, and imprison poets and writers.135
Art is fertilizing. Being alert to what artists are saying and thinking through engaging with verbal, visual, and sound symbols can help stimulate our own creativity, and can wake us up to what is going on in our world.
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Desire is a motive force, and heroes are propelled by necessity. When one withholds a toy the child wants, making him wait for his birthday, the child has time to experience an amplification of what he so desperately desires, and thereby to form an imaginal relationship with it. As Hyde suggests, consciousness awakes when we manage to restrain our appetites and develop mastery over our impulses.136
Desire is on a continuum with libido, love, sexuality and creativity. They are all motivating and charged forces that seek connection. They do not have much to do with logic, nor with choice. One does not choose to be drawn to a person, a painting, or a way of life. Desire has a trajectory, it shows us the way forward. Like envy, it informs us as to what we want. We imagine into that which we don't yet have, and develop ideas of how to get it.
The choices in the face of desire are to step towards it, to observe it without acting on it, or to turn away. But there is nothing we can do about the calling itself. If we respond to the call, we find ourselves drawn on still further. The seeking that emanates from the psyche, or the muse, is not the same as wanting a BMW sports car; once you have it, you have it. Nor is it like the cyclical obsessive-compulsive craving of addiction that can never be quenched – one is too many, a thousand is never enough.
Setting out on the imaginal journey of a creative task, which leads simultaneously out into the world and inward towards yourself, is like following a Braille trail. You cannot see where you are going, and you can only imagine beyond the point you have attained. Reaching each stepping stone satisfies desire sufficiently to encourage the curiosity and drive required to continue to the next one.
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30. Image and the Body
Appointment137
The waiting room contains several people, waiting. Those who can read flip through magazines; others stare at the wall Inside their faces, their white sticks tucked at their sides. They come, like me, waiting In their skins, waiting for hope, cure and light.
The world is fading. Inside my eye I embark on a trampoline parabola, grappling weightlessness against gravity. Up here, I can see beyond the wall, I can see through catches In conversation, past the Incomplete gesture, I catch the bat-flit across a face. I look for an answer.
The receptionist calls. I stare bereft at the ophthalmologist's stab of light, consumed by the need to puncture night. He leans back, head erased by blur. On the wall behind him hangs a box of lit letters that have nothing to do with love or story.
After-images bloom In darkness; film burns open, fades to black thumbs press prints down hard inside my tired eyes.
The doctor says, sincerely: The important difference is between dark and light.
Images fall through holes, through blanks In absence.
I leave clutching another Important appointment. I can barely see through tears as I walk away, fettered by images of flight.
This is what doctors have to say about my condition: it is an autoimmune disorder that affects my connective tissues. Medical science has not yet been able to discover the cause of this, nor of other related diseases, including systemic lupus erythematosis, rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn's disease and ankylosing spondilitis.
In my case, the connective tissues of the joints of my spine and the membrane over the muscles in my back are affected. The illness has also appeared on and off in my right shoulder joint and my Achilles tendons. It used to flare in the pigmented layer in the back of my eyes, and has left me with damaged vision.
Evidence-based medicine deals with the objective body, which can be measured, dissected, looked at under the microscope and subjected to chemical and radiological tests. It can be acted on by medical chemicals or operated on to excise, incise, and to otherwise fix what is broken or faulty. The objective body can also be compared to other bodies to see whether and how it has strayed from the norm. Mainstream medicine describes illness and injury from a perspective outside the body under deliberation.
Many complementary and psychological therapies focus on the subjective body – the precise and sensory way we experience our symptoms. Process work, embodied imagination and my friend Dea's process approach to homeopathy, to name a few, have encouraged me to pay attention to the images or symbols that arise out of my experience of the illness. This has helped me to get to know myself better and to decrease my stress levels.
When trying to describe physical sensations and disabilities, patients must translate diffuse and nebulous visceral, visual, sound and movement information arising from the body into words. This can be difficult, although people usually become energised when attempting this. Patients will spontaneously offer similes and metaphors when they describe symptoms: ‘it is as though someone is sitting on my chest’, or ‘it sounds as though a mosquito is stuck in my ear’, or ‘the feeling in my back is like ice dropping down it’. One six-year-old boy told me that his cough is like a car trying to start in the morning.
We know there is no-one on the chest, no mosquito, no car and no ice. Yet we experience these sensations vividly as though they are actually happening, or as one might feel them in a dream. We tend to dismiss these experiences as quaint imaginings and move swiftly on to proven methods of diagnosis and treatment. However, I have found two approaches to the symbols thrown up by illness that have contributed to my wellbeing.
A psychoanalyst working with cancer patients noted that their subjective experience of illness contained similar images to those appearing in their dreams. Arnold Mindell138 suggests that we dream continually and that symbolic life passes untrammelled and autonomously from sleeping to waking states. He has developed a methodology to work with dream and body signals by encouraging the participant to deepen attention. He uses the idea of the beginner's mind, or what social anthropologists call ‘making strange’, by suspending the ego's tendency to interpret based on what it already knows. Mindell suggests that our cultural tendency to dissect, analyse and pronounce upon the meaning of an event, illness or dream is comparable to colonisation. The ego attempts to dominate and control, subjugating any strange or incomprehensible elements to its dictums, and presuming to understand material from the unconscious even though it is foreign in its essence.
Like the early European colonisers, we will never understand the outlandish and exotic inhabitants of the psyche if we rush in to assign meaning to them. Interpretation can shut down observation, and box in experience. Logic and reason have important roles to play, but they are overvalued in the world. They are our default mode and must therefore be purposefully restrained so that other equally valuable forms of intelligence can emerge.
Mindell encourages the person to follow the image of the illness, problem or dream into movement, drawing, sound and voice work. When we amplify or inhibit an unconscious impulse, associations can break through into consciousness.
Bosnak also uses amplification, but he attempts to recreate the dream space as closely as possible. This means sitting quietly and going inward to visit the dream, event or symptom as a flashback. He discourages any acting out of the experience. When we experience the sensation of moving in a dr
eam, we are not moving at all.
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Keeping open to unconscious information presenting as physical disturbances might be more important than being healed of a chronic, intransigent illness. If the condition resolves as a result of paying attention to symptom motifs, well and good. But focusing on healing can shut down curiosity and override meaning.
Is there a meaning in illness? There are join-the-dot interpretations of disease, for example a heart attack can point directly to poor lifestyle choices. These associations clearly should not be ignored. However, there is strong, albeit anecdotal, evidence that symptoms also contain non-causal meanings which are individual in nature. But how to access them?
Some practitioners have published interpretations of symptoms. For example, Louise Hay correlates symptoms with specific character traits and psychological tendencies. These interpretations might help loosen up the enquirer to consider aspects of herself that she would normally resist. However, there is a problem with didactic association: it strips the image of its power. The cluster of associations is reduced to a one-liner.
When we interpret our illness or dreams, we might be right most of the time, but we will be wrong some of the time. As we won't know whether we are wrong or right in any particular individual, it is imperative rather to keep an open, or beginner's, mind. This strategy is also essential because interpretation is linked to the ego, and the ego might well bring in the critic. It used to be commonplace for disease to be seen as divine punishment, and we are still apt to fall into the blame trap, as cancer survivors well know. Telling someone that his cancer is caused by repressed anger, or that he will get better if he thinks more positively is glib, insulting, and is loading someone who already has too much to bear. Just as we do not reproach ourselves for our nightmares, it is counterproductive to infer that we have brought our physical difficulties upon ourselves because of weaknesses of character.
If we refrain from methods that close down possibilities, and instead train ourselves to stay with the image, we will allow it to reveal itself on its own terms and in its own language. The rational workings of the mind must take a back seat while we process symbolic, poetic manifestations through our senses. This requires us to resist the impulse to rush off into our heads and intellects, and to stay in the moment and in our bodies and with the broad searchlight of perception. No quick cut of the incisive mind can help here, only a patient attending to and tending the kaleidoscope of dream and image evolving.
The damage to my eyes has left me with swirling debris and an incomplete ring of central blindness called a scotoma. This development, worsening on and off over many years, used to leave me feeling panicked at the prospect that my vision might deteriorate to the point of not being able to write, or drive. I was shocked by and resistant to the tragedy that was befalling me. Panic is visceral. It clamped my body. I felt suffused with all the physiological chemistry that goes with grief and dread.
Yet, when a trainee of Mindell's helped me approach the visual disturbances of my disease as symptom-symbol-metaphor, I had a completely different response. I am not a traditionally religious person, but when I concentrated on the scotomas, they appeared one moment as haloes, and the next as the biblical account of the burning bush: the mystery of the bush on fire that nevertheless was not being consumed. I was suffused with awe. I felt held, radiant, and completely at one with what was happening to me. I felt I was standing before a great mystery. Reverence and comfort flooded me as a whole body sensation.
The transformation from fear to a sense of wonder, at-one-ness and acceptance, both derived from exactly the same source, is fascinating to me. My life has been enriched by experiencing illness metaphorically. My eyes have not deteriorated in the past nine years, and my ophthalmologist has encouraged me to consider my eye condition as ‘burnt out’. My partially damaged sight and the burning bush image remain, however. The impairment to my vision cannot improve.
The healthy plant that is nevertheless on fire and the fire burning on ice are images that will accompany me until I die.
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While working with Robert Bosnak, using the technique he calls embodied imagination, I described the pain in my back. It feels as though a dog has gripped the right side of my thoracic back muscles in its teeth. Its jaws are locked. It will never let go. I feel despair. I have lived with this tenacious and obdurate canine for years. Robert got me to focus very clearly on the sensation of the clench in my back, then he asked me to describe what it is like inside the mouth of the dog.
With this switch, it suddenly felt as though I was a tiny embryo, held gently in the pink, warm mouth of a crocodile. It was very safe; womb-like. I could relax in there, knowing that I was contained inside the fierce mother. The image of the clamped dog that I have carried all these years changed into that of a crocodile carrying its young in its mouth in order to protect them.
This is particularly apt as I am dealing with the normal loss and grief a mother feels as her children become independent and leave home. I am missing them very much, yet I also know that the art of mothering changes continually as one's child grows up. My task is to restrain my desire to detain them, so as to help my sons enter the world without me. The powerful image of the young crocs inside the mother's mouth brings up the terrible mythical potential that parents have – to swallow their children, keeping them from going forth to seek their fortunes. In the Greek myth, the Titan Cronus was told that he would be overthrown by one of his own sons, just as he himself had overthrown his father by castrating him. Psychologically, this is what needs to happen: the young bull takes on the old bull, and there is usually a terrible struggle until the new order is established.
Cronus could not contemplate such a thing. Terrified, wanting to maintain his power, he ate his children one by one as they were born, an image memorably depicted by Goya.
The crocodile taking her young into her mouth is an image of the knife edge between protection and destruction. One moment of going unconscious, and she could swallow and destroy them, incorporating them into her own flesh and image.
The embryo in my back feels safe, however, and she can relax in that fierce embrace. She incubates still, not yet ready to show herself. As I write this, I realise that that is not altogether true. This book itself reveals something of the fearsome tough crocodile and the tender naïve young.
While working with my homeopath friend Dea on symptoms arising from pain in my shoulder joint, I noticed it felt like an injured wing preventing me from flying. I came to a point where I wanted to cry, and experienced a tight, constricting band around my throat. Imagining into the ring which prevented me from swallowing, what came up clearly was a cormorant. I became identified with the banded bird who lives in service to the fisherman, unable to swallow the food she catches.
On returning home, I happened to mention this to a friend who told me that she had recently given away all her videos except for one. It was called Cormorant Man, and concerned a Chinese fisherman and his relationship with his birds. On watching it, I was deeply moved. What I had assumed to be an abusive, sterile situation, in this case, was not. There was a patient tending and a symbiosis between a human being and birds that we do not often encounter.
To my delight, one of the ways the Chinese man communicated with the birds while they fished was by dancing on his raft.
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31. Working with Image
What is the knocking at the door in the night? Is it somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels. Admit them, admit them.
D.H. Lawrence139
A woman came in for a blood pressure check. She is on treatment for hypertension, but isn't taking her medication correctly. She talked to me about all the difficulties in her life. I asked her whether she was inclined to worry and she announced with some satisfaction that she was ‘the worst worrier in the world’. I commented that that was quite an extreme image to have of herself, and that it most probably wasn
't true. There are likely to be many people in the world who worry more than she does. I suggested that she change this image, because it was affecting her health.
The images we have of ourselves and which underlie every aspect of the way we see the world – from money to food – are there whether we notice them or not. We live out of them and in reaction to them continually and largely unconsciously.
I am aware that this is a bold statement. Some people assert that they do not experience this and that they live through feelings, words or thoughts, not images. Yet it is worth examining whether underlying these feelings, words and thoughts are images that arise out of our associations. They are often partial or even distorted. In extreme cases this is blatantly obvious as when an anorexic experiences herself as fat, even as she is dying of starvation. An employer may have an image of himself as a good leader yet comes across as an unfeeling tyrant to his employees, or a pensioner may see himself as worthless, but his grandchildren look forward to visiting him.
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Marion Milner notes that there is something in her mind that is actively concerned with the truth of experience, yet not through conscious reasoning. This ‘something’ seems to express itself in terms of images, not arguments.140
When we get stuck in our lives or in our art, we might well be using the wrong tool to find what we need. The light of reason can only reveal reasonable answers. Creativity is not sensible.
When we are confronted with a problem or creative task, rather than employing logic to solve the dilemma, we can try to stay with the image it evokes. This demands skills not encouraged in our culture. It requires us to live the question that the image presents without trying to fix, solve, or resolve it, trusting that it will speak to us in its own language, in its own time and on its own terms. We need to be sensate to perceive the image, to tune in with all our senses in order to receive as much information as possible.