Eloquent Body

by Dawn Garisch

  The stomach – the bag below the diaphragm – expands when we habitually overeat. It then takes even more food to trigger the feeling of fullness, which again we override when our fear of not getting enough, or some equivalent image, causes us to pile the plate with another helping. If we are overweight, training ourselves to eat less will help our natural correctives to re-establish themselves.

  A patient of mine describes herself as a chocaholic. Once she starts on a large bar, she cannot stop until it is finished. She has identified this drive as coming from a place of self-hatred. She imagines that when she has eaten her way into diabetes she will feel relief, as she will then have a good reason to hate herself.

  Checking in can give us some insight into how we feel and behave, and how that might not be in our best interests. But is insight sufficient for change? My chocaholic patient is still reaching compulsively for the relief of the cocoa bean, still gaining weight, and is still a candidate for developing diabetes. Self-knowledge is insufficient to motivate change where we have not engaged with the underlying image – in this case, one that involves self-hatred. When stressed, she sees herself as a pathetic crying child that must be silenced with food – which was her father's attitude to her. Paying attention to and fleshing out this image could help her to transform both the image and her relationship with chocolate.

  Checking out is asking for feedback from sources outside ourselves as to whether our perceptions are accurate. Both checking in and checking out require an attitude of genuine curiosity. They also require ego strength. Most of us don't want feedback. We have been too hurt, too abused. We are defended against hearing how we have made mistakes – also against how wonderful we are. We even have trouble looking in the mirror.

  ***

  Akin to the homeostasis found in our physiology, a kind of homeostasis also operates within the psyche in the form of the daimon, who tries to keep us on track by interrupting us when we wander. He will use anything to capture our attention, throwing things in our path to encourage or discourage: boredom, illness, accidents, disability, invitations in the post, books that fall into our hands, knocks at the door, meeting strangers who speak directly to our passion, unexpected calls to travel, overheard conversations.

  We step over many of the gifts offered by the psyche, and they go unnoticed. Staying on track requires developing particular attention to detail so as to pick up minimal cues and to follow them. We become detectives investigating our own lives, the difference being that we are not only trying to track what happened in the past, but trying to track what we might do and be in the future.

  This is an aspect of ‘living the question’, a preoccupation with the subtle, non-verbal conversation that occurs within and without us all the time. The metaphor of a conversation incorporates the idea that we are participants – not dictators, nor passive observers waiting for destiny to descend. Our side of the exchange involves trying out this and that, and then ‘listening’ for the reply, using all our senses. The reply is the feedback from Psyche, the opening up of fresh vistas, or of repeated blocks, the encouragement to proceed or to change course.

  The homeostasis of the psyche is different from the homeostasis of the body. The latter has evolved to keep us within the norm, to keep us normal, our pH at around 7.4, our oxygen saturation at about 98 per cent. The psyche, however, encourages us on the very specific track of what Jung calls individuation146 – discovering and developing our unique niche in the world.

  The guidance of the daimon is very different from the way we have been taught to process information in the rational, sensible world. Following our individual path might look very odd or problematic from the outside. And this is where the tool of checking out requires judicious application. Measuring our perceptions against those of others can be useful, but it can also constrict our lives, maintaining them in service to the cultural, religious and political demands of the time, and dissuading us from being in service to our own unique paths.

  As my son said recently, ‘I know that this is not a good time financially to make this decision, but it is my time’. The confidence with which he said this indicated to me that he was following a directive from his own soul self that knows better than anyone else what he needs, for better or for worse. Psyche, as we have noted, is not interested in outer indicators of success, but in the congruence and confluence of story.

  ***

  Checking in and checking out is a way of becoming aware of excess, and not only in the domain of food.

  I was invited to a friend's house to celebrate Pesach one year, something I had never participated in before. I am interested in ritual and ceremony, the ancient glue that binds cultures and religions. I liked the symbolism of the salt and the eggs, I liked the opening of the door to let the spirit of Elijah in, but most of all, I liked the song about enough.

  There are two aspects of ‘enough’ as embodied in the Jewish prayer. One is about an end to slavery, a sense of taking a stand against and escaping from abuse; the other is an acknowledgment of gratitude for having sufficient: I have food on my plate, it is enough; I have a roof over my head, it is enough.

  I felt very moved by this, living in a culture where the dominant message is: you do not have enough, you should have more, and more, and you should have it now – more money, more food, a bigger car, a bigger credit limit.

  How much is enough? How do we escape from slavery? If we do not heed the early feedback signs of abdominal discomfort or smog, our bodies and the world will speak even louder, through indigestion, rising blood sugar and blood pressure, and increased cancer rates from pollutants. When we consistently ignore these warnings, our bodies give up under the strain, and the protest of ‘enough’ manifests in disability and death. If we erode the foundation of life on this planet through our wasteful, acquisitive and warring ways, we could destroy the human race, taking other species with us.

  The earth will have had enough of us.

  ***

  34. Living in the Crocodile's Mouth

  I load my brain with all manner of Images this chamber and that

  the whole planet Is spinning this Is sharper than science

  Geoffrey Haresnape147

  Science confines itself to things that can be measured, yet our lives are shaped both consciously and unconsciously by powerful images. The power of the image or symbol, as anyone knows who has been profoundly affected by a painting, is that it speaks in many tongues. If we do not know something about the motifs that affect us, we will be manipulated and subverted by them. Also, we will have more difficulty in entering a conversation with the force that lives through us, the entity that communicates through images, not words.

  Noticing our impulses can put us in touch with this attribute of our psyche. A friend started doing collage after her husband's sudden death. She said later that she chose this medium because she thought it was not real art, but an inferior technique used by children. To her amazement and amusement, she learnt that great artists like Picasso, Matisse and Rego had created renowned and important works using collage. Undervaluing both the medium and her own efforts paradoxically freed her to make the most wonderful art.

  Some time afterwards she attended a workshop where the teacher used one of the earliest recorded stories to demonstrate aspects of the feminine. My friend identified with Inanna, who decided to make the difficult descent to the underworld in order to visit her sister, and was rewarded by being dismembered: torn apart into pieces of flesh, which were hung up on meat hooks.

  This led her to realise that a central image in her life is the feeling of being torn apart, both in the ongoing experience of physical pain, and in the sense of having difficulty with focus, or centring. Unconsciously she had chosen collage as a means of experiencing both the tearing and dismemberment, as well as the bringing together of the disparate pieces into the container of a new image. Collage, as she has used it, meant taking the old order constructed by others, and disrupting it, rendering it into a cha
os of meaningless fragments, out of which she created a new constellation. Here the artist becomes both the destroyer and the creator in equal measure; here the person is no longer a victim of the dynamic of her life; she is engaged in the full spectrum of her experience. She is developing the value of her life motif, working with it rather than against it. Although she is involved in the concrete – tearing and cutting up, and reconstituting images – she is at the same time deeply connected to the symbolic.

  Arnold Mindell148 says that your first childhood dream, as well as your chronic symptoms, are ways of accessing the pattern of your life. In the next chapter, I illustrate my own insights around this interesting idea. Another way is through recalling the fairy tales that spoke powerfully to you as a child. Those stories that charge the imagination and that a child never tires of hearing repeatedly, may stimulate and prefigure the non-rational shape of her life.

  The fairy tale that came to me in a workshop on the subject was Jack and the Beanstalk. I wished to be the boy my father had always wanted. To my shame, I was terrified of heights. I was the boy sitting at the bottom of the tree, wanting the riches that lay inaccessibly above me. In the story, Jack climbed up and stole them. He was poor, and he risked his life to get riches from the people-eating ogre. A bag of gold, a goose that laid golden eggs, and a harp that played beautiful music. The last one was a surprise to me. If you are starving, I wondered, what is the point of music?

  Jack's story for me was one of ambition. As I explored the drama and images, I could feel the fear of rising above my ‘station’, of poking my head above the clouds, of success. I was writing professionally at that point, wanting to write a great South African novel, at the same time terrified to put myself out there in the world, worried that I was writing drivel, that reviewers would crush me into the ground. Yet Jack innocently, with single-mindedness and the help of the ogre's wife, a good woman in-the-know, went and got what he wanted to help his own sceptical mother. And in the end it was the ogre who fell and died. I wanted to overcome the ogre that tyrannised my inner beanstalk.

  I came to understand that the theft of the harp that played exquisite music represented my need to engage in beauty for its own sake, not for riches, security, fame or status. Recognising this has helped me to disengage from the requirements and goals of our society when I need to, and affords me another way to measure how well I am doing.

  ***

  The image of the embryo cradled in the crocodile's mouth arose from my backache while using the tool of embodied imagination. For years I have pondered the nature of the unconscious, whether it is friend or foe, a helpful guide or a destroyer. It can be both. Jung described the psyche, like nature, as amoral. Psyche has no vested interest in good or bad. Yet, as in the body, there does seem to be a trend towards healing, or completeness. Our bodies mostly want to get better, and work hard to do this, despite the ways we live that are contrary to this drive. Psyche also presents opportunities for us to heal from past traumas and to seize our lives, but we often use our imaginations to give us reason to avoid seeking help.

  A crocodile is one of the fiercest and most formidable creatures on earth. It has survived and flourished in the same form for millennia. When I look at a crocodile, I read: Don't mess with me. At the same time, the crocodile can hold its young protectively in its mouth without killing them, carrying them from their hatching place on the bank to the safety of the river. I love this image. In contrast, those images espoused by most spiritual paradigms are of goodness and light. They don't speak to me. I need a guide that can turn ugly if necessary, that arises out of the wisdom of mud.

  I have often been described as fierce4 during my life. It is not something I have recognised in myself. Lately, though, I have come to appreciate this. I am becoming less shy to give off the vibe, Don't mess with me, and increasingly able to adopt an attitude of polite ice towards people whom I cannot trust or who have repeatedly wronged me. I am able to get tough, particularly when my young are threatened. My sons are grown now, and can largely look after themselves. The ongoing young in my care are new beginnings and inspirations – the sense of a flickering flame I protect with cupped hands.

  ***

  A journalist friend of mine was constructing a website, partly to promote her work, which includes two books of non-fiction, and partly to gather together in one place the many things that she has written during her life. She emailed me, conflicted about how to define herself in this public space. ‘Should I describe myself as a poet? ’ she worried. At that point she had not yet had any of her poetry published. Although she acknowledged that reading and writing poetry is central to her life, she felt it was arrogant, even fraudulent, to call herself a poet.

  Many of us are stopped in our tracks by the feeling that we dare not call ourselves artists. We are almost embarrassed to admit that we play guitar, or paint, or write. We have a notion that the ‘the real thing’ is ‘out there’, and we are reluctant to expose our efforts, fearing they would fail dismally if judged against the greatest artists, writers and composers of all time.

  This attitude is truly damaging to creativity in all of us. More importantly, it is insulting to the muse, who needs the attentive collaboration of humans to channel her expression into the physical world.

  I told my friend that the way to evaluate whether she was a poet or not was to answer the question: Do you see life as a poet? What I meant by that was: do invigorating phrases present themselves insistently to you? Are you sensitive to the underbelly inherent in situations? Do juxtapositions of objects or events ‘speak’ to you in such a way that you want to record them? Do you derive huge satisfaction – no, more than that, do you experience relief – from finding an exact combination of words that manage to evoke something that can barely be described? Are you frequently attempting to distil emotions and experience into a verbal elixir that directs you and others towards something valuable and true, spiralling towards the ineluctable centre, yet not pinning it down and rendering it lifeless? Are you reading the radical subtext embedded in the everyday? Are you busy with what Kafka calls the axe for the frozen sea within? Are you driven to solve the commotion within your chest by taking up a pen? Do you live life in the world while being rooted in the symbolic? Karin immediately understood what I meant, and went ahead to describe herself as a poet on her webpage.

  Seeing life as an artist means cultivating a certain kind of attention. Anyone can develop this way of being and seeing. We all have patterns to our lives, whether we notice them or not. To some, this noticing comes naturally. There are those who can track their creative passage back to their first memories and dreams.

  An example is the ceramicist Christina Bryer who grew up on a farm, and who loved to play in the mud and sand at the dam. One of her earliest pre-school recollections was of the linoleum on the floor of her bedroom. It was turquoise blue, and decorated with nursery rhymes. She recalls illustrations of men in a tub, and a girl being frightened by a spider, and a boy sitting in a corner, but these images did not impress her. When her mother read the rhymes out to her, she was even more puzzled. Why would three men want to be in a tub? What did ‘intsy wintsy’ mean? What on earth was a tuffet, and why would the boy want to sit in a corner?

  The rhymes made no sense to her, but what did intrigue her was the border pattern of a double helix – a rope twined again around itself – and decorative stars. There were five-pointed and six-pointed stars, and she soon worked out that when she traced the five-pointed stars with her finger, the pattern went on indefinitely, whereas, with the six-pointed stars, after three points you had to lift your finger or pencil to draw the other three points which went off in the opposite directions. When she asked adults whether they wanted her to draw a five- or six-pointed star, they said it didn't matter, which she knew was astonishing nonsense – it made all the difference in the world! When she first came across the sign for infinity, it made complete sense to her; it was the same principle as the five-pointed star, wher
e, once your finger started travelling, it could carry on forever.

  These early preoccupations have converged in later life into an artistic style where she incorporates geometric aperiodic patterns into the ceramic plates she makes. Aperiodic means that the pattern lacks any translational symmetry – a shifted copy will never match the original. Christina explains that geometry is a spiritual practice. ‘The discipline of the form gets the ego out of the way, ’ she says. ‘I am not one of those expressive artists who wakes up in the morning wondering what I am going to do today. Starting with the absolute of the grid frees you to work with infinite possibilities. If I'd had a different daimon, I would have noticed the pictures, or the writing on the linoleum, but it was the pattern that fascinated me. I work with the same principles of harmony and beauty that can be found in peasant music and craft all over the world. ’

  ***

  4 I realised the other day that the words fire and ice contain all the letters that comprise ‘fierce’.

  35. Recapturing the Original Plan

  Each day the lawn spits up bits of broken glass

  Colleen Higgs149

  The daimon, or a calling, or the idea that we are living symbolic, teleological lives implies a thread or plot that starts way back in childhood.

  I am going to compare living life to engaging with a story. E. M. Forster, in his book Aspects of the Novel, says that there are two ways of reading a book. One way only requires enough tension in the story to keep you curious, reading to find out what is going to happen next, right on until the end, whereupon you close the lid of the book and bury it back into the bookshelf.

  The other way of approaching story requires the reader to maintain two selves, one that is immersed in the text and what happens next, and the other to keep track of developments from a slight remove. This latter self is able to hold in his mind an overview of all the happenings, from which he can start to make connections and see patterns emerging. Whether or not a novel has a bigger picture with subtext is one of the elements that distinguish literature from pulp fiction.