[Warren 6 year old & tipi]
"The longest road? From the mother to the front door." - I heard this in the 80's when I stumbled into a black and white "art" film (my tv was still black n white) from some Nordic country. Just images and then a male voice making statements. The above quote was almost immediate upon channel hopping into the film. I often attribute the quote to Carl Jung who wrote similarly regarding the male's initiation into mature masculinity marked by his shifting relationship to the personal mother (and known or not known, the Mother archetype).
The quote below is from Norman O. Brown's book (Brown is not Jungian but Freudian) of aphorisms/quotes, Love's Body, and has stuck with me since I read it years and years ago in my 20's. It still does. It sticks in my "craw" and at the same time is "crawl space" into some creative cave (mother = cave) dreaming around mothers and sons, mothers and men, and men's "fraternities" and "initiations" which serve to move boys out of the "mother tent" and into a more (one hopes, still hoping) mature relationship to mother/women. WARNING, Freudian language ahead. The first sentence is not by Brown but by Margaret Mead:
In the chapter "Nature", Brown writes:
...The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy is always with us, and gets us nowhere...
The fraternity is itself the mother. “The journey of initiation is ended. It goes from the mothers to the mothers. Although in reality the young man is henceforth to be separated from the mother, symbolically he is brought back to her…The young man is put into a hole and reborn--this time under the auspices of his male mothers.” Male mothers; or vaginal fathers: when the initiating elders tell the boys” we two are friends”, they show them their subincised penis, artificial vagina, or “penis womb.” The fathers telling the sons, “leave your mother and love us, because we too, have a vagina.” Dionysius, the god of eternal youth, and of secret societies was the twice born: Zeus destroyed his earthly mother by fire, caught the baby to his thigh, saying: “Come enter this my male womb.”…Male mothers; "shield bearing nurses", the political authorities...From the mothers to the mothers. The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy is always with us, and gets us nowhere.
The fraternity is itself the mother. “The journey of initiation is ended. It goes from the mothers to the mothers. Although in reality the young man is henceforth to be separated from the mother, symbolically he is brought back to her…The young man is put into a hole and reborn--this time under the auspices of his male mothers.” Male mothers; or vaginal fathers: when the initiating elders tell the boys” we two are friends”, they show them their subincised penis, artificial vagina, or “penis womb.” The fathers telling the sons, “leave your mother and love us, because we too, have a vagina.” Dionysius, the god of eternal youth, and of secret societies was the twice born: Zeus destroyed his earthly mother by fire, caught the baby to his thigh, saying: “Come enter this my male womb.”…Male mothers; "shield bearing nurses", the political authorities...From the mothers to the mothers. The transition from matriarchy to patriarchy is always with us, and gets us nowhere.
<><><>
Now, I had a dream during my Jungian analysis that my penis had a scar the length of it that was more than scar. I was non-plussed in the dream...what the? and woke up in mystery. I had no recall of the Brown quote above. My analyst, a Hindu/Buddhism scholar, used the word "sub-incision" and spoke of its symbolism throughout many cultures of the world, mostly amongst primal cultures.
Seems I was having an initiation dream, or had had an initiation or was going to undergo yet another one. It turned out to be the latter. I won't go into it here but the dream heralded a painful ejection from a "mother's tent" which still repercusses in me to this moment.
Exile
There is not a chapter titled "Exile" in Love's Body which I think Brown should have included.
What is most exile about exile out of the mothers is that the exile is into men, the Western male, mama's boys all, with all the wounding and immaturity, the violent swagger thereof. Never at home in this so-called father's tent, I have lived in limbo, in between. My unconscious middle-aged attempt to return to the mother's tent ended in eventual failure (and thank god it did). I got some golden things from that attempt (a more mature vocation by descending into several levels of hell disguised as Light). That failure was indeed an initiation out of the also wounded "mother tent" and into my nascent "monk" self which now knows that the psychological journey is indeed individuation = out of outer fraternities AND maternities and into more conscious, deeper relationship to what Jung calls the Self, the archetype of wholeness, which includes masculine, feminine and, most importantly, androgyny.
Woke up from a dream last year hearing this:
He's gone crow said one poet of another.
<><><>
This morning I dreamed of yet another friendly "hang" with Barrack Obama (for me, a most postivie father/brother embodiment), warmth, laughter, great conversation. Outdoor picnic. Then the dream switched to me teaching/leading a reading group where we were reading John Gardner's Grendel, a new edition which had underlined parts (segments) in between the original text. There were 2 Catholic priests/monks who had joined the group late and could not find the passage that was being read and discussed. I pointed it out to them. NEXT one of the priest/monks asked me if I was a Catholic and was on the verge of steering the group into an attempt to evangelize/convert all of us or, especially, me. I was having none of that. Not yet at any rate. And cut him short while trying to be respectful but he was not going to be deterred, which is disrespectful, so I lambasted him in good Grendel fashion.
Individuation in dreams. And who are these monk/priests in me? My Gardner/Grendel side (Grendel was a mama's boy, half human, who wanted to leave her and join the King's tent (the King was his father). He was half monster and so was rejected and hated by the father and his "sons")...
How to hold these opposites. Gardner wrote his Grendel story, Beowulf, from the monster's point of view, with Jean Paul Sartre's existentialism in mind. Most excellent. That 2 Catholics show up in the reading group makes sense to me as they represent the opposite of Existentialism. And thus the conflict between faith and doubt goes on. Essence vs Existenz. Yada Yada. But for me this conflict is not nada. Though nada is nothing and yet is not nothing but it somehow matters.
Blah blah...I meander. I, Meanderthal, most enthralled by it all, this journey lived "in and out of the garbage pail" (Fritz Perls)...good scrubbings (and drubbings) in between which is where I live, in between. Jean Genet wrote beautifully of the in between or, more accurate, on the edge viz his late writing about a "tight rope walker" (his last long term partner/lover was a young Algerian circus performer, a tight rope walker, who died by, of course, plummeting from the rope while attempting to perform somersauts that Genet insisted he do). Friedrich Nietzsche's famous tight rope walker passages underscore (as does Genet's tight rope walker) alienation and liminality which, Carl Jung underscores, is part and parcel to the path of individuation. One who becomes marginal to the collective suffers but it is not meaningless suffering as the goal, the drive, is toward individuation which is an ongoing, dynamic, intense intimate and life sustaining relationship with Meaning/Mystery-as-Source. Or what can be made (imagined) of the encounter of self with Self/Wholly Other.
Yes. There are women's mysteries. There are men's mysteries. Both are to be undergone for growing an ego, developing character, and once there is a self or self-enough, a deeper relationship to Archetypal Self becomes more conscious (or can) and some of Mystery is attainable in terms of integration and understanding but in the end Mystery remains. Mystery may not be comprehensible but it is certainly apprehensible, grasped (prehensile) with ensuing articulations of that, as T.S. Eliots says, which is unsayable. Approximations. Hints. Glimpses.
Some days (and most nights, at least for me) are existential. And some other days and nights are validations/almost-verifications of individual essence/being participating in Greater Essence/Being. Initiations provide such encounters. Or set up possibilities. And, undoubtedly initiations are woundings out of one state of being into another, are threshold and crisis where some parts of us die. Some parts make it over to the other side with us whoever that us now be as a result of the ordeal of the crossing - Who/what dies? Who/what is born? and who/what remains, has been brought with and over from the other side? We do bring over our personal mothers and fathers and do that work for a lifetime (lifetimes?). Although we may complete around mother/father as history and complex we work it one way or other till the end. But what do I know? Just making observations from the vantage of the parentheses I live in.
And then there are fathers with great big fat mother complexes so what is his son to do?
And then there are fathers with great big fat mother complexes so what is his son to do?
Turning Thighs To Diamonds
Or what man is there among you, of whom if his son
No blame shall stain us now, father.
The heavy ball you hit to me is never caught,
a floppy glove always falls from a hesitant hand.
Mars in you still storms the makeshift diamond.
Each base of cardboard weighted with stone
is still our house; a bat, a ball, a mitt,
hard rules of the game undo all lust
for dark heaven shunning shining girls.
I was reaching for god then - not your fault - a lavender
boy early befriended by crows, already resigned to what
was given and what was to come, a softball between the
eyes, your attempt to guide me toward those diamond
thighs which, you often repeated, were everywhere waiting.
I blink still before you, head down, focused on Lion's Teeth.**
I am your hard mystery, and soft, not so fast for I am fat
and cannot round the bases quick. I am your inherited meek,
a burden to shake into a sliding man furious for home.
At four I pluck a wild strawberry you point to,
all authority and accidental grace. Revealing much,
still dew wet, sticky to the touch, opening sourness
deserves my frown. You laugh at my dawning smile
for its sweetness slowly yields a surprise gift
for what will always unite us, your fear that I too
will suffer your fate, untended desire gone to wildness
brought low beneath branches, slow embrace of
cradle-gentle boughs entangling legs and light
between the greater shadows,
and shadows shall win the day.
Still, these essential things are caught
for all our mostly wasted days of practice,
wild sweetness is a stolen base,
the tongue an untended garden.
**Dandelion
No comments:
Post a Comment