sacred listening

it’s the strangest thing —
the psychotherapist’s fee
just doesn’t add up
— the transaction is suspect
All hail, meaningless money!

I enjoyed writing this poem. It was quite problematic cramming so many thoughts into a short space. I dreamed of a turd that had been deposited on the floor and it was my job to clean it up. Awake, I thought of yesterday at work when we received some training about charitable fundraising. It was quite interesting and the trainer is a likeable guy. But I wondered this morning after the dream, whether a fundraiser’s job is basically to pick up shit (money) deposited by charitable donors. The symbolic equivalence of money and shit was just about the first idea I ever absorbed from psychoanalysis, at quite a young age, perhaps twelve, from my father’s patient explanation. He himself was merely interested in the idea, rather than being totally sold on it (or on psychoanalysis in general). He later became progressively more and more hostile to the whole notion of psychotherapy, as my mother became more and more committed to it. The practice of paying someone to listen to you, is really very challenging indeed, at some level of the mind. I am curious, indeed desperate, to think it through properly, but I can’t. No-one has ever solved it. Why do we baulk so badly at the thought of money changing hands in exchange for listening? Should we trust that instinct? I tend to think it’s just the edge of a much larger issue, which is whether money itself makes any sense at all. On the whole I believe it doesn’t, and that the future of humanity lies in the direction of abolishing money. Looked at from that perspective, the jarring effect of the idea of paying somebody to listen to you, actually arises not from the fact that the listening isn’t worth the money — nor from the fact that listening is sacred and ought not to be tainted by being exchanged for money — but from a misguided investment in the idea of money as a meaningful signifier of value. The contradiction actually at the root of that jarring effect, is that a therapist helps you find meaning, while money is inherently meaningless.

buddhahood

without attachment
there’s no possibility
of loss — without loss,
there’s no finding and without
finding — no world, no being

Almost the only image I could recall from last night’s dreams, was of a container full of papers. They were precious memories, mementoes, and they were being upended and scattered downwards into a bottomless void. I dislike the highly abstract nature of the poem, but there we are. I suspect there is some kind of connection with having heard Bowlby mentioned in a talk yesterday evening. I know little about Bowlby except he is famous for attachment theory.  And I don’t know much about attachment theory though I am disposed to believe it because it arose out of Freudian thinking. It’s very odd indeed to observe my own willingness to believe two utterly different sets of theories about attachment — Bowlby’s and the Buddha’s. Neither of which I can claim to have studied. I know somewhat more about Buddha’s ideas on the subject, and yet I have the sense of psychoanalysis as my true cultural home in contrast to the exotic, imported flavour of Eastern wisdom. Why am I so ready to accept an external source of knowledge (in this case, Bowlby and/or Buddha)? I feel I must be some kind of naive schoolboy, still, at heart. Treating the whole world as though it were some kind of academic test. Crazy. The broad difference between Bowlby and Buddha seems to be, Buddha claims attachment can be (and needs to be) transcended, while Bowlby does no more than observe how it actually works in practice. The idea that Buddha succeeded in transcending attachment altogether, leaves me simultaneously sceptical and excited. What a wonderful vision! The Tale of the Man Who Achieved the Impossible. I only know it’s impossible for me, and that I’m unable to accept on faith that it’s even a wise goal to strive for. Of course Buddha said accept nothing on faith. But how on earth can anyone strive for an impossible goal except through faith? But the vision stands. And I’m pleased with my poem as an attempt to capture that vision.

back story

I don’t want to be
part of whatever this is
— I don’t understand —
why are you all behaving
as though we know each other?

Reading Jung in the seventies, I came across the terms endogamous and exogamous. Specifically with reference to libido, which can be endogamous or exogamous. In the context of psychoanalysis, it’s a way of distinguishing between the energy — emotional, sexual, psychological — which derives from one’s earliest incestuous fantasy-feelings towards members of one’s own family (endogamous libido), on the one hand, and on the other, the energy which reaches out beyond the family towards actual sexual partners — in other words (at its most gross interpretation) strangers. Normal, friendly social interaction outside the family cannot really happen (from what I’ve observed in myself) unless it manages to incorporate an astonishingly powerful component of endogamous libido. In other words in social groups, we make an unspoken, unconscious mutual contract — whereby we agree each to treat the other, in some small measure, as though they were ‘family’. These ponderings formed a large part of my mental life in my twenties, when shyness was really a problem for me. In my dream last night, I felt alarmed at being treated as a long-lost buddy by a couple of young men whom I didn’t know at all. It turned out they were in therapy with the same analyst as me. I was then left with the problem whether that was a good enough reason to accept their premise of brotherhood. On the whole I felt extremely suspicious and disinclined to play ball. There was something not right about it — eventually transpiring to be that the analyst was treating each patient as a sexual partner — so we were bound together by mutual collusion in this situation. All part of my ongoing forty-year-long struggle to decide what I think of psychoanalysis. I still don’t know.

existential prayer

— and human beings —
helplessly slotted into
the machinery
of the universe — please God
may this not be all there is

I watched a repeat of an old TV nature documentary last night, called One Million Heads, One Beautiful Mind. It shows a herd of zebra being picked off by crocodiles as they try to swim across a deep river. In my dream last night there was an evil enemy who might have been Freud. Freud certainly figured in the dream, and a sense of menace or threat from some very powerful evil intelligence. It was like being the prey of a predator. About ten years ago I had two years’ worth of Jungian psychotherapy. It was a bit disappointing, overall, but we had some good conversations and one of them was about crocodiles. I related a memory of going to the zoo as a teenager and being mesmerised by the glint in a crocodile’s eye. We joked whether the analyst himself (who was very old) was a bit like a crocodile. In writing the poem, I was very conscious also of the bits of science I have been absorbing over the last few years. Another TV programme as a matter of fact, about Einstein. Black holes, in particular, seem relevant to the subject of predators. It’s impossible to avoid the impression that cruelty is somehow built into even the inanimate operation of the universe. It made me want to question whether the universe is really as much like a machine as it seems to be. Because the monotheistic religions paint ‘God’ so implausibly, as ‘loving’, and above the laws of nature and able to ‘intervene’ — as a Westerner and a Christian I feel condemned never to be able to integrate the ‘machine’ view of things with the ‘personal God’ view. But somehow it’s all the same problem, and that is just quite simply — the fact that we and the world exist at all. Wonderment at that, can never be satisfied by the ‘machine’ view. But the personal God is just as much of a lie. In the poem I resort to that lie anyway. Please God is such a powerful phrase. It transcends the person using it.

I

calling my own name —
John — this simplest of all acts
— this spontaneous
ordering of the world — this
narcissism — this ego

In my dream I was calling my own name and expecting it to have an effect, on a bunch of people down in the well of a balconied courtyard (probably based on having visited the house of Cervantes’ birth in Madrid, which was just like that). It hit me, awake, that calling one’s own name is an act of narcissism. Yesterday I attended a talk about Sikh spirituality which I enjoyed greatly, and there was talk of ego as something bad, albeit something bad with a good aspect. When Jeanette Winterson’s book Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal came out a few years ago I seized eagerly on her mention of a psychoanalyst named Neville Symington whose books had been part of her ‘redemption journey’ (my term not hers). But then I drew a blank when I tried reading him. From Wikipedia I got the idea that Symington’s ‘thing’ is narcissism. This did chime with some elements in my own journey way back in the seventies. But for me narcissism was something positive, while Symington believes it to be the cause of all our problems, apparently. For me, the narcissism of the ego is probably what enables it to hold itself together in the face of all the other disintegrating tendencies of madness. At least, that seemed to be the lesson of a particular dream of mine, in the seventies, which was very helpful at a time when my life and ego were well-nigh fully disintegrated. My dream of calling my own name last night brought all these issues back for me.

witch doctor

explain Nazism
as mass psychosis (thank you
Jung) — what in that case
is our mass denial of
climate change? — mass suicide?

The witch doctor of the title is Jung hinmself of course. The term sounds quite archaic these days, but was common as I was growing up, usually referring to African traditional healers. It was what sprang to mind as I tried to think of a neat summing up of that pose Jung adopts in his writings when he turns his attention to humanity as a whole and tries to psychoanalyse (or in other words, to ‘doctor’) his contemporary society. Simultaneously there popped into my mind the memory of Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, where roughly a third of the novel, from what I remember, is set in a ‘primitive’ society, exploring a past life of the novel’s hero, when he was the village witch doctor. I dreamed last night of the opening sequence of the movie Dr Strangelove which (in the dream) consisted of various shots of a nuclear mushroom cloud. I felt apprehensive because there was heat radiating from the screen, and I wondered if I would suffer radiation burns. I don’t know whether Jung’s ‘doctoring’ of the human race is anything better than a pose. But the problem of climate change is so unthinkable. Any strategy, even playing the doctor, must be valid, faced with the possibility (or indeed likelihood) that humanity is committing mass suicide by business as usual despite rising carbon emissions.

somewhere…..

there’s a truth buried
in psychoanalysis —
to do with piecing
together the stories of
our own lives from shreds of dream

To treat dreams as shreds of evidence leading to a more complete narrative of our own lives — can be very difficult indeed — not only the effort of the venture itself, but also keeping alive the belief that it’s a worthwhile, viable, meaningful project at all. Part of me considers it the highest value in this life I am ever likely to encounter. Another part of me scoffs at the notion of any ‘High Value’. And another again is unbelievably disillusioned with the cultishness of the whole psychotherapy industry. Confused? Me too.

This morning it’s back to work after the UK August Bank Holiday yesterday. The temptation for me, waking up this morning, was to ignore those shreds of dream and let them sink back into oblivion as I myself rose from bed. I clung onto just two images: a tube journey where I felt uncertain which platform went in which direction. And the feeling (in the dream) of lying on my stomach and feeling my erect penis between me and the bed. Gradually, as I persevered with trying to write a poem, several other forgotten dreams from last night came back to me. But what on earth do they “mean”? What, oh what, oh what?

evaluate

I’d give anything
for somebody to tell me
what to think of Freud —
only thing is, whatever
they say, I won’t believe them

I’ve been reading Don Paterson’s Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets which includes the sonnets themselves. Few better ways of forging some brand new neural pathways (if that describes the feeling of having your brain stretched). My own little poem is like my brain snapping back into a familiar shape. But I’m pleased to have articulated a problem I live with, and to realise just how insoluble a problem it is. What to think of Freud? How long is it now since Shakespeare lived? We’re surely going to need something like that length of time in order to evaluate Freud in anywhere near an objective kind of way. I can evaluate him subjectively now of course. But what’s that worth? I don’t know. Hence the circular nature of the problem, because if I don’t know what my evaluation is worth, then I haven’t really evaluated him, have I? There are so many things wrong with psychoanalysis it’s difficult to know where to start. But it speaks for itself I suppose, that I believe we’ll still be talking about it in 400 years’ time. Last night I dreamed of stroking my father’s hand. In the dream, there were definitely some mild erotic implications, even maybe some very mild erotic feelings. I found this quite embarrassing when I came to write a poem about it. But I found it helped enormously to remember the Freudian perspective, according to which we are all polymorphously perverse.

logic

my fantasy of
world domination tells me
I feel powerless

This is the kind of insight I imagine psychoanalysis must entail. I am never quite clear how much of a literal believer I am, though. Do I ‘believe’ that dream analysis is ‘scientific’? Surely a science that requires faith isn’t science. The theory goes, that dreams are to be read as a natural (biological, almost) compensation making up for deficiencies in our self-awareness. I dreamed last night that I was consciously and deliberately trying to start a new religion and a social revolution. The dream therefore tells me that I have a desire for world domination which I’m not normally conscious of. But, as a fantasy of power, it also logically implies the opposite: I must be feeling powerless in my life, in reality, if I feel such a need for a fantasy of power. Personally I regard this logic as sound enough, even though it leads in two opposite directions at once (I have an unconscious desire for power and an unconscious feeling of powerlessness). But is it science? Were the pioneers of psychoanalysis guilty of trying, consciously and deliberately, to start a new religion and a social revolution? I think kind of yes. Although why that’s a matter for guilt is another question again.

the Well

a glass of water —
how does this simplicity
measure side by side
against the whole edifice
of psychoanalysis?

The Well is one of the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching (no.48). I dreamed I was enjoying drinking water — the spirituality and purity emphasised by the vessel, a wide-brimmed bowl which felt ritualistic and special, and also by the fact that I was sharing the water with a spiritual brother. The man in question feels somewhat like a spiritual brother in real life, but I’d normally tend to dismiss that feeling. Partly because I don’t know him very well and only come into contact with him occasionally through my work. I also dreamed of a certain stretch of pavement on Kilburn High Rd. In 1994, my mother was living just the other side of Kilburn High Rd, in Brondesbury Rd. I slept one night in a shop doorway opposite the end of her road, and had a very bad nightmare about drinking water from the toilet cistern which was somehow more like hair gel than water. Through the eighties and nineties I used to take a weird pride in my frequent nightmares and in my ability to tolerate them. Arrogantly perhaps, I felt I was someone with a special ability to gaze without flinching into the very worst recesses of the human psyche. On this occasion however (the only such occasion), upon waking I gave way completely to fear. Compelled involuntarily, I ran from where I was sleeping, to my mother’s front door in the middle of the night, and started wildly ringing the bell, seeking some kind of comfort. I had regressed momentarily to childhood. She wasn’t in. Looking back, I feel inclined to suppose I was under the influence of the suggestive power of the idea ‘Oedipus’: I fell headlong into the Oedipal dynamic and acted it out, just by virtue of the suggestion exerted by the geographical location at the end of my mother’s road. Tree-lined Brondesbury Rd often looked to me just a little like a beckoning womb even in broad daylight. The archetypal Well is another womb symbol of course, too. In the preface to Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, Jung writes of hexagram 48 The Well. For him, the well symbolises the I Ching itself, and by extension the unconscious itself — and so, by extension perhaps, psychoanalysis itself. Freely available water = freely available wisdom. Just how freely available the wisdom of psychoanalysis actually is, is debatable of course. In practice, it tends to be for the educated middle classes only. It talks their language, and it takes their money.