by Dawn Garisch
Science is a valuable tool for approaching these problems. Logos, or logic, is the cutter, objectively dissecting out information and being incisive. Yet we also need Eros, or libido – the glue159 of relatedness and of the symbolic – to make good choices.
***
Science and technology have only recently come to dominate; previously, in Western history, the arts reigned supreme. Theology and the Greek and Roman Classics were the subjects deemed worthy of study at university. When scientific method first poked its head out of the primordial soup, it was looked on askance. It was not considered a worthy subject for the sons and daughters of the elite to sign on for.
Science has subsequently taken its revenge. Now the Humanities and the Arts are the poor cousins, hanging on to the coat-tails of those disciplines that experiment and measure by reformulating themselves. Social sciences, psychology as science, the human sciences have adopted the name and methodology in an attempt to be taken seriously.
Yet, as any scholar of literature knows, there are other kinds of evidence. A text can provide the mesh through which we glimpse something about ourselves that we recognise. A friend in academia pointed out that literary criticism and translation train the mind in evaluating evidence. As one can misdiagnose a condition by misreading the symptoms, signs, and even the results, one can also misread a text.
***
We are starting to appreciate better the symbolic aspect of life, and find ways of working with it – conversing with the rich, diverse and shifting populace of images. We will come to recognise, once again, as our cave-dwelling ancestors axiomatically did, that the dream/stories that thread our nights, our symptoms, our relationships, our conflicts, our songs and our dances are the stuff our lives are made on.
***
38. Endings
And this above all: to thine own self be true, and It shall follow, as the day the night, thou can'st not then be false to any man.
Shakespeare160
My mother died a few months ago. At ninety-three, she got the ending she wanted: a sudden death in her own home. I have a strange sense of being severed, or uprooted – my fine root hairs naked and vulnerable on the air. The story of her life has ended; the lid of the coffin has closed on her like the back cover of a book. Her body is turned to ash, scattered back into the landscape. I can never again return to that home.
My mother's voice was the main critic in my head while I wrote. I would worry whenever something sexual turned up on the page. I would warn her: ‘I suggest you don't read this, Ma. You are not going to like it.’
‘Why ever not? ’ she would object.
‘Because one of the things it deals with is sexuality, Ma. You know you don't like books about that. ’
She would harrumph, and look anxious.
I would try to explain: ‘We cannot leave subjects as important as sex to the pornographers and the advertisers. Look, and you'll see. Sex is everywhere, trivialised and commodified. Serious writers have to take this on. ’
She always read what I wrote, and she coped much better with her errant daughter's outpourings than I gave her credit for. Except for one piece. I decided she would never find out about the short story in an anthology of women's erotica.
Writing with my mother in mind, with trepidation, was my growing edge. It was my opportunity to get real with her. This is who your daughter is, my books announced. This is what preoccupies her, and how she thinks. This is her experiment. It was also my opportunity to get real with myself, and to find out what I am capable of. If I had let the inner mother's voice stop me, I would not have done my life's work.
She was looking forward to reading this book.
Now she's gone.
My body/ my home/ strange planet I inhabit/ old friend/ tough teacher / worn blanket of flesh. Please can you tell me / how much story I have left?
I want to live a good tale. I want to live deeply, keeping track of the unfolding plot of my life. I want to keep a conversation going with the force that lives through me, to be true to my own story. It is the well from which I drink. Looking back, I see how my life has been threaded through with several motifs, themes that have shaped both me and my writing.
My early dream of fire and ice set one of my patterns going. It has evolved into a fierce presence; also into a small flame kept alive between cupped hands in the frozen wastes of boarding school. My autoimmune disease creates a burning pain in my back and inflammation in my eyes; the damage in my eyes creates an image of a burning bush that is never consumed. Becoming a creative and sexual woman ignited the fire of desire which conflicted uncomfortably with the ice of being a nice girl. My unexpected trip to Antarctica plotted an external journey into ice, into which I carried the small flame of my healing.
I look back with compassion on the woman who has taken these and other themes and images, and penned them to paper, trying to divine who she is and track where she is going. A woman who has found a home in Psyche, which provides nourishment and holding in times of plenty, and offers a reliable lifeline when life feels overwhelming.
Psyche, working through me, reveals me to myself. She connects me to my life plots through image-making – dance, drawing and writing – thus showing me the way back to myself, and stimulating my brain to heal my thinking.
This book is nearly finished. Once I have let the kind and strict critics in, once I have done rewrites and edits, once it is sent off to agents and publishers and I have spent a period gardening, listening to music, resting and feeling mildly depressed – which I remind myself is natural at the end of a big work – what then?
I have a folder full of ideas, but none of them is speaking to me, none holds the essential energy. It is too early. One thing I know is that life will show me. The phone will ring, or I'll have a dream, or I'll overhear a conversation, and I'll be off, my fingers working the Braille trail, trying to decipher what life and books want of me.
Living the question. Creating the days and pages of my life as a conversation with a force that lives through me, until the very last full stop at the end of my final chapter.
THE END
End notes
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2. W. H. Murray 1951, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (London: Dent).
3. Piet Hein, Danish mathematician, physicist, philosopher, writer and creator of puzzles and games. Courtesy Piet Hein's son.
4. Turner et al, 2008, ‘Selective Publication of Antidepressant Trails and Its Influence on Apparent Efficacy’, New England Journal, Vol. 358:252-260
5. Jerome Groopman, 2006, The Anatomy of Hope (Pocket Books).
6. Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, 2010, from ‘The Quiet Conversation’, The Everyday Wife (Modjaji Books): 76. Courtesy the poet.
7. Carl Sagan, ‘The Burden of Skepticism’, The Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 87.
8. W. B. Yeats, 1996, excerpt from ‘A Prayer for Old Age’, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Scribner): 282.
9. Carl Gustav Jung, C. G. Zarathrustra Seminar, Princeton University.
10. John Mack, ‘In the Mind's Eye’, The Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures (London: British Museum Press): 25.
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18. Helen Luke, 2000, Such Stuff as Dreams are Made On (Parabola Books).
19. Marion Milner, 1986, An Experiment in Leisure (Virago Press Ltd.): ix.
> 20. Werner Herzog (wikiquote).
21. Dawn Garisch, 2011, Difficult Gifts (Cape Town: Modjaji Books): 8.
22. Ivan Vladislavic, 2006, Portrait With Keys (Umuzi): 108. Courtesy the author.
23. Carl Gustav Jung, 1981, Collected Works, Vol. 13:37 (Routledge & Kegan Paul).
24. A. J. Twerski, 1997, Addictive Thinking: Understanding Self-Deception (Hazeldon): 102-3.
25. James Joyce, 1926, referring to Finnegans Wake in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver.
26. William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, sc vii.
27. Ken Barris, 1993, Advertisement for Air (Snailpress): 8. Courtesy the poet.
28. Arnold Mindell, 1986, Working With The Dreaming Body (Routledge & Kegan Paul): 7-9.
29. Siddiq Khan, from ‘Blues for the Maid of New Orleans’, New Contrast 155:14. Courtesy the poet.
30. May Swenson, 1994, ‘Question’, Nature: Poems Old and New (Houghton Mifflin): 45. Reprinted with permission of The Literary Estate of May Swenson. All rights reserved.
31. James Joyce, 1991, Dubliners (Signet Classic): 108.
32. Lewis Hyde, 1999, The Trickster Makes This World (North Point Press). 27.
33. M. Scott Peck, 2003, The Road Less Travelled (Touchstone): 15.
34. Michael Cope, YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO10bs-JHUU). Courtesy the poet.
35. James Hollis, 2007, Why Good People Do Bad Things (Gotham Books/Penguin): 67-68.
36. J. Z. Young, 1987, Philosophy and the Brain (New York: Oxford University Press): 28.
37. Jonas Salk, quoted in Ken Robinson, 2009, The Element (Allen Lane, Penguin Books): 259.
38. Julian David, 2003, ‘The Problem of the Feminine in a Patriarchal Culture, ’ Mantis 15:20-21.
39. Ingrid De Kock, 2002, from ‘Inner Note, ’ Transfer (Cape Town: Snailpress): 50. Courtesy the publisher.
40. Seitlhamo Motsapi, 2002, from ‘River Robert, ’ It All Begins: Poems from Post-liberation South Africa, edited by R. Berold (Gecko Press): 209. Courtesy the publisher.
41. Jean-Pierre Changeux, 2004, The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge (Harvard University Press).
42. Joan Metelerkamp, 2000, from ‘Song of marriage’, Into the day breaking, Gecko Poetry: 101-2. Courtesy the poet.
43. Antonio Damasio, 1999, The Feeling Of What Happens: The Body And Emotions In The Making Of Consciousness (Harcourt, Bruce and Company): 41.
44. Antonio Damasio, 1999, The Feeling Of What Happens: The Body And Emotions In The Making Of Consciousness (Harcourt, Bruce and Company): 31.
45. M. Solms and O. Turnbull, 2002, The Brain and the Inner World (New York: Other Press).
46. M. Teicher, ‘Wounds that time won't heal: the neurobiology of child abuse, ’ in Cerebrum (2) 4:50-67.
47. Megan Gunnar, quoted in ‘The Bond Between Mother and Child, ’ by Beth Azar, (http://mothersoflostchildren.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/the-bond-between-mother-and-child/).
48. Damasio, The Feeling: 24.
49. Alan Finlay 2010, Pushing from the Riverbank (Dye Hard Press): 41-42. Courtesy the poet.
50. J. M. Burns and R. H. Swerdlow, 2003, ‘Right Orbitofrontal Tumor With Pedophilia Symptom and Constructional Apraxia Sign, ’ in Archives of Neurology, 60:437-40.
51. Candace Pert, 1997, Molecules of Emotion (New York: Scribner): 139.
52. Pert, Molecules: 270.
53. Kai Lossgott, from ‘gentlemenagerie’, http://www.kailossgott.com/poetry.html. Courtesy the poet.
54. Hollis, Bad Things: 199-200.
55. Garisch, Difficult Gifts: 24.
56. Antonio Machado, from ‘Fourteen poems chosen from “Moral Proverbs and Folk Songs’”, Times alone: Selected poems of Antonio Machado © Antonio Machado, translation © 1983 by Robert Bly Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press (www.wesleyan.edu/wespress).
57. Extracts published in The Sunday Independent, 17 July 2005.
58. James Hillman, 1964, The Guild of Pastoral Psychology: Lecture No. 128: 66-8.
59. Harold Pinter, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html
60. Noam Chomsky, 2005, Doctrines and Visions (Pocket Penguin 42): 11.
61. James Hillman, 1988, ‘And Huge is Ugly, ’ Tenth Annual E. F Schumacher Memorial lecture, Bristol, England.
62. Hillman, And Huge.
63. John Lukacs, 1994, Historical Consciousness (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction): 358.
64. George W. Lowis,1993, ‘Epidemiology of puerperal fever, ’ Medical History, 37:399-410.
65. Milner, An Experiment: 133-4.
66. Enrico Fermi, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi
67. Qur'an 17:36.
68. Bradley Steffens, ‘Who Was the First Scientist? ’ Ezine Article (www.ezinearticles.com).
69. Steffens, ‘First Scientist. ’
70. H. K. Beecher, 1955, ‘The Powerful Placebo, ’ in JAMA Vol. 159, No. 17.
71. D. H. Newman, 2008, Hippocrates' Shadow (Scribner): 134-59.
72. Hermann Joseph Muller (1890-1967), United States geneticist, who won the Novel Prize for Medicine in 1946.
73. Dr Marcia Angell, 2009, ‘Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption, ’ in The New York Review of Books, Jan 15 – Feb 11: 8.
74. Angell, ‘Drug Companies’: 12.
75. Angell, ‘Drug Companies’: 12.
76. Mxolisi Nyezwa, 2008, New Country (University of Kwazulu-Natal Press): 40. Courtesy the poet.
77. R. B. Bausell, 2007, Snake Oil Science (USA: Oxford University Press).
78. Turner et al, ‘Selective Publication, ’ 358:252-60.
79. http://clinicalevidence.bmj.com/downloads/25-03-09.pdf.
80. ‘Royal College of Physicians: Sir Michael Rawlins attacks traditional ways of assessing evidence, ’ 16 October 2008, www.politics.co.uk.
81. Jeffrey Bland, 2008, ‘Does Complementary and Alternative Medicine Represent Only Placebo Therapies, ’ Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine l4(2):l6-18.
82. Milner, An Experiment: 34.
83. Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Alchemy: 32.
84. Joseph Campbell, 1968, The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Pantheon Books): 91.
85. Mindell, Dreaming Body: 67.
86. Lyn Cowan, 2002, Tracking the White Rabbit: A Subversive View Of Modern Culture (Routledge): 20.
87. Hyde, Trickster: 123.
88. Christine M. Coates, 2011, from ‘Remembering Afghanistan, The Sol Plaatje EU Poetry Anthology (Jacana Media): 4. Courtesy the poet.
89. Cowan, White Rabbit: 14.
90. Anthony Storr, ‘The Significance of Music, ’ in Music and the Mind: 177.
91. Aaron Copland, 1952, ‘Music and Imagination, ’ Newton Lectures.
92. Barbara Kingsolver, 2002, Small Wonder (Faber & Faber): 229.
93. Joan Metelerkamp, 2009, from ‘Points on poems’, Burnt Offering (Cape Town: Modjaji Books): 17-18. Courtesy the poet.
94. Doris Lessing, 1996, Putting the Questions Differently (Flamingo (HarperCollins).
95. E. L. Doctorow, http://thinkexist.com/quotes/e._l._doctorow/.
96. Harold Pinter, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html.
97. John Fowles, 1997, Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings (Jonathan Cape Ltd.).
98. Al Alvarez, 2006, The Writer's Voice (Bloomsbury Publishing): 29.
99. Alvarez, Writer's Voice: 23.
100. Sondra Perl, ‘The Composing Process of Unskilled College Writers, ’ Research in the Teaching of English 13:317-36.
101. Milner, An Experiment: 52.
102. Rainer Maria Rilke, 1986, Letters To A Young Poet (Vintage Books): 34-35.
103. Theodore Roethke, 1974, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Random House): 49.
104. http://www.sheilachandra.com/albums/bonecrone.php.
105. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/dec/08/nobelprize.classics.
106. Rilke, Letters: 23-25.
107. Gus Ferguson, ‘Endgame’, Carapace 73. Courtesy the poet.
108. Paul Ashton, 2007, From the Brink: Experiences of the Void from a Depth Psychology Perspective (Karnac Books).
109. Stanley Greenspan & Stuart Shanker, 2004, The First Idea (Da Capo Press): 25.
110. Greenspan, First Idea: 37.
111. Greenspan, First Idea: 32.
112. Ken Robinson, 2009, The Element (Allen Lane): 8.
113. Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1930, from ‘At the Top of My voice’ (http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/1930/at-top-my-voice.htm).
114. Virginia Woolf, 1995, Killing the Angel in the House (Penguin 60s).
115. Ruth Padel, 2004, from 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, published by Chatto & Windus: 18. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
116. Seni Seniviratne, Beyond Reconciliation Conference, UCT December 2009. Courtesy Seni Seniviratne.
117. A. H. Modell, 1997, ‘Reflections on metaphors and affects, ’ Annual of Psychoanalysis, 25:219-33.
118. J. Gardner, 1993, Journal of Poetry Therapy, Vol. 6, (4):213-27.
119. I. Tegnér, 2009, Journal of Poetry Therapy, Vol. 22 (3):121-31.
120. W. B. Yeats, 1996, from ‘Byzantium, ’ The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Scribner): 248.
121. Ted Hughes, 1995, Winter Pollen (Faber & Faber): 25.
122. Robinson, The Element: 16.
123. Robert Bosnak, 2007, Embodiment (Sussex: Routledge): 41.
124. Bosnak, Embodiment: 41-45.
125. Jung, 1981, C. G. Jung, Collected Works Vol. 13 (Routledge & Kegan Paul): 50, para 75.
126. Mindell, Dreaming Body.
127. Hollis, Bad Things: 203.
128. Dawn Garisch, from ‘Into the valley’, Difficult Gifts: 30
129. Werner Herzog, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Werner_Herzog.
130. Lena Vasileva, 2008, Psyche and the Arts (Routledge), Ch. 8.
131. Greenspan, First Idea: 4.
132. Pert, Molecules: 183.
133. Pert, Molecules: 173.
134. Pert, Molecules: 26.
135. Padel, 52 Ways: 25.
136. Hyde, Trickster: 59.
137. Garisch, Difficult Gifts: 34.