Conversations with a Soul (30 page)

Sharon Olds captures the cry of many a man and woman in her poem,
Saturn
.

He lay on the couch night after night,

mouth open, the darkness of the room

filling his mouth and no one knew

my father was eating his children. He seemed to

rest so quietly, vast body

inert on the sofa, big hand

fallen away from the glass.

What could be more passive than a man

passed out every night – and yet as he lay

on his back, snoring, our lives slowly

disappeared down the hole in his life.
⁸³

Another one of my many selves is one we might call,
the Fearful Self,
a self always afraid that there will never be enough. Afraid that
the money will run out before the last of the bills have been paid, afraid that the food will run out before the last of the guests have been fed, afraid that the resources will prove inadequate. Maybe this self is the offspring of a wounded self where the fear of there never being enough was well justified.

My father never believed in paying child support, even though he knew we lived in poverty. Instead, he proffered some product, some free hand-out from the company for whom he worked at the time, and who may or may not have known about their generosity!

One day my brother and I came home clutching a
gift
of white coveralls because, at the time, he worked for a dairy supply company. Fortunately, we never wore them to school where we would have provided an endless source of humour. On another occasion we were presented with a box of canned food, the “gift” from another employer. The cans had no labels on them and so for as long at the canned goods lasted we began each day by shaking a can so as to try to determine its contents. Sometimes breakfast consisted of tomato juice, sometimes baked beans, sometimes canned meat; sometimes (the jackpot) slices of orange or a fruit cocktail.

My fearful self sometimes needs to be reminded of these humorous 'adventures' for they provide me with a powerful antidote to fear.

There is a
Pollyanna
self, amongst my many selves who seems to believe that if only I could work hard enough and smart enough I could fix the world! When that doesn’t happen I feel depressed and a failure (the nemesis of many clergy persons). My
“Merlin”
self loves the mystical and the magical possibilities that lie behind every encounter. I believe that the good will always overpower the bad but when that doesn’t happen I’m in danger of losing faith and hope.

There are numerous selves that inhabit my persona. Sometimes they are easy to identify and they speak with clarity. Sometimes they are in conflict with one another and argument and counter-argument leaves me undecided and at war with myself.

I suspect that there are other selves perhaps in a bag, which need encouragement and patience and with whom I need to open a conversation.

The influential Jungian therapist and teacher, Marie Louise von Franz suggests that one way in which we honour our shadow selves is to engage them in a conversation.

. . . she suggests that we regard our anger as a person and talk to it. Rather than acting as a conduit for our own anger, and focusing it on another person, one turns one’s face and body to the anger itself and asks: ‘What do you want from me? What do you want of me? That is honouring the anger, just as we honour everyone whom we turn to face.

We can ask our sexuality: ’What do you want from me?’ We could ask of our infantilism: ‘What do you want me to do?’
⁸⁴

Before the invitation is withdrawn, and the shadow self buried too deep for there ever to be an encounter and an honouring of the orphaned parts of ourselves, we are often nudged and pushed by the shadow self. We experience a 'rattling' in the bag as though parts long denied life and acknowledgement want to come out of the darkness and be embraced
in
the light. Sometimes the shadow draws attention to itself by projecting on others the pain or anger that lies within. Sometimes the shadow startles us by recalling a dream dimly remembered yet the memory of which is strong enough to send us on a pilgrimage.

Joseph Campbell described the awakening of the shadow as
a call to leave the Wasteland.
We awake one day to find that what had once looked like a full, satisfying life has suddenly, or gradually, become a wasteland, sometimes without our noticing the transition.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
⁸⁵

Life in the Waste Land is merely existence while all about the evidence of an encroaching death is clear. Arid and lifeless parched for any sign of vitality primarily because it is a life structured
by
and lived
at
the insistence of others. Living a wasteland life is the antithesis of living an authentic life, and a denial of the gift of life.

Of course, if we  choose, we can refuse to acknowledge the call and do our best to bring a little comfort and accommodation, or better yet, resignation to life in the wasteland, but there will always be a sense that our lives were put on hold; that we have forsaken our dreams and goals and our own uniqueness so as to be and live what others want us to be.

This crisis of authenticity is a crisis faced by men and women alike, although, generally, we have tended to focus our attention on men. Colloquially, we’ve designated this upheaval as a
mid-life crisis
and assigned to it a certain imbalance of character which sometimes reaches tragic-comic proportions.

The sudden appearance of a rotund, 50 year old man wearing gold chains and flashy rings, at the wheel of a sports car and in the company of a woman, half his age is a sure sign that the balance has been disturbed!

A good friend chortled as he recalled reading about an advertisement that offered  '
a hardly used red motorcycle for sale!' 
Presumably placed by someone who had worked his way through the crisis to the point where he no longer needed to risk life and limb in pursuit of a new identity.

Yet, notwithstanding the bizarre behaviour of people caught up in a mid-life crisis, the crisis is a real one and may indicate a desperate and even final attempt by the
shadow self
to break free from imprisonment and be acknowledged.

This journey of engagement is no mere jaunt through the curiosities of the mind. Learning to honour the shadow leads us to shake the foundations of our being, or, alternatively, playing with the shadow and converting the shadow world into an intellectual game, results in the closing of a door and the slow reduction of the soul until we arrive at a point where it is too late to change.

Already the ripening barberries are red,

and the old asters hardly breathe in their beds

The man who is not rich now as summer goes

will wait and wait and never be himself.

The man who cannot quietly close his eyes

certain that there is vision after vision

inside, simply waiting until nighttime

to rise all around him in the darkness-

he is an old man, it’s all over for him.

Nothing else will come; no more days will open;

and everything that does happen will cheat him-

even you, my God. And you are like a stone

that draws him daily deeper into the depths
⁸⁶

While the term, 'mid-life,'  is widely used, and firmly cemented to this experience it really has little to do with a biological milestone. Rather, it seems like awakening to the discovery that our personal stabilities, the things that have defined our lives and claimed our energies, simply no longer work for us. There is something powerful and inescapable that must somehow be accommodated from this point on if our lives are to have any meaning. Or, alternatively, we need to reach an accommodation, in Rilke’s words, that  '
it’s all over for him.'

Sometimes the impetus for the crisis is the simple recognition that we’ve worn out the goals that sustained us and which no longer have the power to satisfy us or ignite dreams; or the time has come and gone and now there is not enough life left for those dreams, or in
“Shadow”
terminology something demands that we pay attention to an inner yearning that has been sacrificed and now demands to be faced. Either way, a mid-life crisis is about having our lived stability severely impacted.

The shadow self calls out in many different ways!

Of course all this can be very frightening for the persons who share our lives and who have come to depend on the very ways of being that we now want to change! Perhaps this is why separation and divorce sometimes follows the recognition of our shadow lives and the introduction of new directions but we ought not to assume that the two go together.

Not everyone going through a mid-life crisis is seeking a return to youth and hungering after patterns of courtship and sexual prowess that were appropriate at twenty-five years of age. There’s something much deeper going on in persons living out, or living through, this transitional experience. Yet it is not accidental that sexuality seems to play a significant role in many people’s experience of this crisis.

Men, in particular, discover that sexual intercourse has lost much of its meaning.

In point of fact it may be that the dissatisfaction they feel is simply the awakening to a life-long yearning for intimacy which has never been acknowledged or acknowledged, has been thwarted by a dominant male mystique. We don’t even have a vocabulary for this most intimate of all human engagements and resort instead to expletives with which we cuss misfortune or express anger.

While the culture demands from men that they engage in 'conquests', deep within, often pushed down into the bag that contains our shadow selves, is a yearning to experience intimacy. The crisis then becomes one in which we want to reach for levels of intimacy, but we don’t know how, and we sense that the journey will be a long one.

Sometimes, when the light is just right, I catch a glimpse of what others have called the
Shadow Self
and I wonder about that
other
me. Then the wondering and the searching and the questioning grew into a prose poem:

I think that in the beginning there was only one.

It was impossible to tell us apart. Fathered by the same man, conceived in the same woman, we shared a common birth and from the same breasts drank the milk that gave us life. We, he and I, opened our eyes simultaneously in the morning and in the evening, struggled against sleep in a single act of resistance. We shared the wonder of discovery and made the acquaintance of pleasure. Together we drank the life-giving moments of acceptance and inclusion and together discovered the terror of rejection. Twinned, perhaps, in the moment of conception, in the beginning we shared a common life and understood ourselves to be one.

Then, later, we started to part.

At first the movement was barely discernible and were it not for the greater wisdom of those who had given us life I would not have noticed that we were two and not one. The lessons, however, were not to be missed for they were delivered with consistency and resonated in those parts of my being where, mysteriously, I yearned for acknowledgement. Thus what had once been one life slowly evolved into two and inexorably the differences between he and I were made clearer. Although there were still times when we clung to each other and shared a mutual perspective, for my own sake, I was told, we each needed to grow in our separate ways. At first the lessons took the form of subtle hints written in a raised eyebrow or some other sign of disapproval. Later the lessons grew in intensity and seemed always to warn of the withdrawal of all that which I most needed for life. Then, when I learned the lesson and shunned his company, my tutors were generous with their rewards.

Slowly I learned to reject him.

Occasionally we still played together and despite the fear that his company ignited within me, there was something about him that attracted me. He would recklessly climb a tree and cling precariously to the top most branches, while I, mindful of my frailty, could only stand paralyzed with fear. He was not afraid to engage in a fight while I tried my best to avoid them even at devastating cost to my own self-respect. Once he slipped his hand under a girl’s blouse and told me how good it felt while I was left with overpowering remorse and guilt. There were good moments when we seemed to offer each other the richness of which we were both capable. Such times left me with an inner strength in which laughter came easily and I could feel the blood rise within me. At such moments he too seemed affected by something I, unwittingly, gave to him and I saw the loveable triumph over the demonic. Yet the influence of those who feared his wild ways and seemingly uncontrollable urges saw the effect he could have on me and they made a decision.

He would have to die.

We might have made it, he and I, were it not for the decision to have him killed. Since no one was able to get close to him and I alone knew where he hid it was decreed that I was the one who would do the actual killing. Each promised me that the rewards for plunging the dagger into my twin’s heart were more than I could imagine and that freed from his influence all of the deepest hungers that plagued me could and would be satisfied. Each time I protested and made an appeal to the common blood bond between us they strengthened my resolve and straightened my confused mind by the careful medication present in guilt and shame. The words they used made the murder seem reasonable and they reminded me that it was the likes of him that had betrayed the son of God and nailed him to a cross.

To this day I am not sure why he would not die.

As God is my witness I tried to kill him. With sheer determination and strengthened by confession and prayer I plunged the dagger home again and again until I thought him dead. In the language of hymns and amongst the prohibitions of religious folk I found the courage and resolve to try again and again. Yet for all my efforts he would not die and like some caricature of the resurrection he would come back to haunt my dreams and invade my resolutions. But that is not to say he was unaffected. It almost seemed that in direct proportion to my efforts to kill him, or at the very least banish him to some place where he would starve to death, he, my twin, began to change. What before I saw as recklessness now, having been wounded became terrifying in his willingness to defy order and reason. What had once seemed like impatience now became a raging torrent of anger that threatened to sweep aside even reasonable caution. What had once lain beside me and giggled with abandonment at some irreligious joke now came to cast a shadow over the places where I laboured and even my sleep was interrupted by his derisive laughter

I have stopped trying to kill him.

I have learned that I cannot kill him without dying myself and that his refusal to yield his life to my dagger is, in some measure, a graceful act. Now, having set aside the weapons with which I once planed his death, I have discovered both a strange longing to be reunited with him as well as surprise when I stumble over signs of his presence. Perhaps my inability to control his entries into my life is why there lingers a measure of fear. I don’t entirely understand what that means and, perhaps, there is no need of reason and carefully constructed explanations. What I have noticed of late is that he seems less terrifying now and I more willing to look at the world through his eyes. What I have noticed of late is that he seems to understand in some instinctive way that I no longer wish him dead. He is, after all, flesh of my flesh and once we were one. Maybe tomorrow we will meet again, and having shared with each other what the years have taught us, we might be brothers once more
.
⁸⁷