Bullying, racism and the Shadow...

'Mum? Can I talk to you?’ James in serious mood last night. I nodded and we sat on the edge of the bed, looking ahead, cos it’s easier to discuss tough stuff when someone isn’t looking straight into your eyes, isn’t it?

‘It’s school.  They say I’m black.  They call me ‘Blackman’ and say I come from Nigeria.’

‘Huh?’

‘It’s cos I tan so easily, cos my skin goes so dark.’

Seriously, I didn’t know where to begin, whether to be more pissed off at the bullying or the inherent racism in the little shits. Or to laugh at their sheer fecking stupidity. Anyhow, we talked it through; about how people who bully do so out of low self-esteem; about how people project their shit onto other people (via racism, homophobia etc); about how you deal with bullies (pretty much the same as you deal with internet trolls really) and so on.  But really I just wanted to go into school and pick ‘em up by the scruffs of their sorry little necks and bang their stupid little heads together.  And, seriously, don’t you just wish that schools taught the basics of psychology? Or that parents could get their own shadows under control and not pass them onto their children?  Yeah, right.  Like I’m so perfect! *hollow laugh*

Projection. A psychological defence mechanism where we plonk our subconscious thoughts or emotions onto other people – either one person or a group of people.  Psychologically it's supposed to reduce anxiety by allowing us to express our unconscious impulses and desires without owning them in conscious thought.  In our generally spiritually barren society, in which we generally turn away from the healing power of myth, more and more people project their inner potential, their ‘kingdom’ and ‘queendom’ onto celebrities. It’s heart-rending.  And our shadows?  The parts of us that shame or scare us?  We project them all over the place, willy-nilly – we scapegoat.

Interesting word, scapegoat.  Apparently it’s a mistranslation (ez ozel = the goat that departs = the ‘escape’ goat or ‘scapegoat) of the word Azazel.  Azazel was a demon; also the name of a hill from which sacrifices were thrown.  But anyhow. 

We project our shadow onto individuals (the child who is ‘different’, the ‘whore’ down the road, the drunken tramp, the crooked politician etc) but also onto groups. Men on women; whites on blacks; Christians on Muslims; socialists on capitalists (and, of course, all vice versa and every which way).  War erupts from collective shadow projections – look at any war and you see devils and demons dancing straight from the human unconscious.  

Curiously, the more creativity and ‘sophistication’ in a society, the deeper and darker the shadow annihilation that will loom up in its wake. 

But, see, the shadow isn’t all bad.  We project our darkness but, interestingly, we also project our light.  In the shadow lies power – it’s just that we misdirect it.  

William Blake talks about exactly that in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

“Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”

Heaven for form, hell for energy – marry the two and you find the highest form of creativity.

How do you deal creatively with the shadow?  I guess that's another post - though I read somewhere that there are language schools that teach by getting you to adopt an identity entirely different from that which you use in your normal life - causing not only swift learning but also great eruptions of energy.  Interesting, huh?

Ah heck.  This is getting a bit complicated for a blog post, isn’t it?  But really, I go round in circles at the moment. 

Back on the bed, I hugged James.  I also said a few things that made him laugh like a drain but which probably aren’t terribly good examples of ‘proper parenting’ so I won’t repeat them.

‘What can I do, love?’ I asked, after we’d stopped laughing (cos really, you have to laugh, don’t you – or you’d just end up sobbing all over the place). ‘What would you like me to do?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It just feels better having talked about it really.’

And, in a world where often there really isn’t anything you can do physically, cos really, it's all crap, it really is - sometimes talking is all there is. 

But then - if you can't find the right words?  If words only make things worse? Then what?  Shit huh?  

My life mapped in scars...

Scars interest me. Fate’s branding of the body.  Skin torn open, the wound exposing the flesh beneath; then closed but a fissure still remaining where the defences were breached.  A line.  Sometimes criss-crossed with stitches; sometimes knot.  Yes, scars interest me. They change a body forever; they mark it; shift it; alter it.  Tattoos?  Studs and bolts? Implants? Nah. Not so much. Because those alterations are man-made, voluntary, decided, chosen.  A tattoo says ‘This is me!’ but a scar says ‘This is what happened to me’. Scars are the mythic debris of archetypal wounds, rites of passage, life drawing on your skin. The gods scribbling. Yes, your choice maybe - but at a far deeper, unconscious level.  

When I was young I craved a ‘proper’ scar – one that zig-zagged down my face. Why? No idea. I thought it was romantic.  I had a strange idea of romance. *smile*  And there are scars and scars, of course, and some  make us shy away, as if we know the person who received them has been in a perilous place, one we fear we might visit by association. Foolish us...

My scars, however, are not seen by the world.  They are private wounds. Sometimes I look over my body and I examine them – to see if any have faded away, have integrated, been taken back inside.  And, for those that haven’t, I ride the memory-horse back to when they happened.  Can you map your life by scars?  Funny little snapshots of those moments when Fate (often combined with stupidity, has to be said) poked you in the…wherever…

Here are mine…

1.      It’s barely there now, the burn on my hand, my adult hand; that happened to my two-year old hand, pulling down a hot pan. Remembering my mother telling me of how guilty she had felt that she’d let it happen. A tiny link to her vast love, still here now she is gone.

2.      A small scar on the underside of my heel.  Dancing wildly in our front room, aged seven.  Treading on a needle which snapped off inside my heel. ‘It’ll work its way out,’ said the doctor. It didn’t. Instead it buried itself deep and had to be dug out. My Achilles’ heel. 

3.      The rose scars on my inner thighs.  Only the faintest traces of one or two remain, slim silver scythes.  Seventeen and vaulting over the rose bushes at school when a rogue bramble caught me and I fell into the thorny heart of the rose.  Taken to the school nurse with blood pouring down my thighs to have 33 thorns plucked out of my flesh – the virgin deflowered. J 

4.      The deep puncture wound on my finger joint where a dog bit me during a school holiday stint as a kennel maid.  Artemis bitten by her hound (in the shape of a miniature poodle).  I nearly lost the joint… Lesson: never trust a small dog.

5.      The deep ‘tick’ on my left forearm.  Drunk (again) as a student in Manchester, having an argument with my friend Mike. I swung a punch: he swung the door. The one with the glass panel.  Lesson: don’t punch when drunk.  *puzzled* why did I punch with my left hand when I’m right-handed?

6.      The scars of conflict that pucker my belly.  Thin skin stretched beyond its endurance by the growing life within. No matter how taut my muscles, no matter how much I work out and stretch and tone, my stomach will always remain a battleground. I struggled with the idea of motherhood, shrank from pregnancy (my tarot card was always the High Priestess, never The Empress) and my body reflected my fear and reticence.  It’s the part of me I love the least; that still makes me wince to look at, to touch.  But it is what it is…the outward sign of an old battle, of my mind at war with my body.

7.      The long slash across my pubic bone.  Not a C…a line, an El. Where once again, I shied away from motherhood, couldn’t embrace the birthing. Fourteen hours of labour and we got into dangerous waters, my boy and I.  We were nearly lost, nearly ran away together back to the void.  So they cut me open and realised, too late, that ours had been the impossible battle.  A 12.8lb baby was never going to fit through that narrow bony gate. 

Sooo….can you map your life through scars? Or are there other ways?  Inner scars, you say?  Ah, those are something entirely different…