Margaret Thatcher. IMO

So. I came back from Austria (very nice indeed, thank you for asking) and stayed in London a bit with my mucker Jane. And it does make me laugh that, while I could get on-line easily in the back of beyond, up a mountain in Austria (when I was in a fit state to use it, of course), Jane doesn’t have any wifi so I was pretty much gagged.

But, before I was logged off I went on Twitter (as you do) and checked on a few people I like to RT from time to time and…what?  And old friend I was apparently no longer following? And he not following me? Twitter playing around again?  So I clicked Follow and it told me I’d been blocked.  Blocked?  Nobody has ever blocked me before.  Or maybe they have but I just never realized - in which case – ca ne fait rien. 

And, I freely confess, I felt hurt, very hurt.  I mean, this is someone I’ve known online for a fair few years now, and have supported pretty staunchly IMO.  But that's by the by - what surprised me was that he never seemed the blocking type.  It seemed a petty action to take and he'd not struck me as petty.  

And I puzzled…why?  And I thought back and remembered that our last exchange had been over Margaret bloody Thatcher. I’d tweeted that I was logging off for the night because my timeline was starting to sicken me.  That, while I might hate Thatcher’s policies, I could never feel delight at any human’s death. I could never dance on a grave. It’s not Thatcher per se. I felt the same about Osama bin Laden.  About Saddam Hussein. Would I feel the same about someone who had killed people I know personally and love?  I can’t say for sure but I suspect so.  I just can’t delight in death.  Anyone’s death.  And dancing on the grave of a senile 80-something?  It’s…infantile and petty. IMO.

Should we be spending 50 million on her funeral?  No.  IMO.  Should the BBC play Ding Dong the Witch is Dead?  Yes. IMO.  It’s called freedom of speech.  Should Thatcher be feted?  No.  IMO.

And that’s the thingy.  In MY opinion.  Your opinion could be very different and, hey, that’s fine.  What I don’t get is why people want everyone to think and feel exactly the same way they do.  How bloody boring is that?  I often see opinions I disagree with on social media – but do I race off and block the owners of those opinions?  Nope.  I just think, ah well, horses for courses. And I’ll look at what they’re saying and see if maybe my views are ripe for changing. Sometimes they are, sometimes not.  But the opportunity is there, which would never happen if I only followed people I agreed with 100 percent of the time. 

Then I ask myself – but what if you saw someone cheering at, for example, that poor girl who was raped and then lashed for adultery?  Well, okay, I might unfollow for that.  So, I guess, maybe for some people Thatcher arouses equally strong passions.  Hey, I don’t know.  It’s certainly sad that, even in death, she manages to divide people. And I do just wonder if there would be this depth of feeling if she had been a man. 

But, hey, gender aside, she’s a useful scapegoat. A place to pin feelings people don’t like to admit in themselves. I've written about scapegoating before -  here and here - and I still find it a fascinating topic.  There’s a seething undercurrent in the UK and Thatcher has provided a focus for it. You could argue that it’s actually healthy – that it allows an outpouring of frustration and anger which people feel unable to do in any other way – that it provides a focus for feelings of helplessness. 

What could be transforming would be if people looked at why she arouses quite such intense feelings in themselves?  Not because of what she did but for what she stood for.  What does she mean to you and how many of those qualities might you deny in yourself?  It’s a thought, huh?  But that’s a big ask – and for most people it will just be visceral, an animal instinct.

But still, it’s interesting, no?  

Regarding my erstwhile friend, I feel no ill-will.  The loss of friendship is always sad but some things run their course and then you must just bless them, let them go and move on.  Otherwise they just fester.  And festering – like immoderate sustained hatred - is seriously counter-productive because the only person it harms is you.  IMO.  :-)

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?  

When life is shit...

Life feels intolerable sometimes.  It can feel like we’re being torn in half, ripped right down the middle.  No matter what we do, no matter how hard we try, nothing seems to go right. 

I dreamed a constant stream of blog posts last night, each one more convoluted than the last.  None of them helpful.  Shit, I am exhausted this morning, I truly am.  But then, curled up in my rocking chair, listening to music, I realised what's needed.  The Mandorla.  It’s been nudging me in dreams and visions for a while now but I haven’t paid it enough attention.

Cos, see, when we can’t keep the contradictions of life at bay, the mandorla offers a space to hold the opposites.  Cos we’re not superhuman; we can’t be.  We are divine but we're not superheroes. 

Do you know the mandorla?  It’s the almond-shaped segment that occurs when two circles partly overlap.  It signifies the overlap of opposites – the overlap of heaven and earth; ego and shadow; good and evil; dark and light; male and female. It's an inbetween place; a holding place; a threshold; a place of faith.

Read T.S. Eliot. Read Little Gidding.  Eliot knew.  The fire of transformation and the rose of rebirth are one and the same.  Poetry bridges the circles – it creates the mandorla. So too can music and dance and art.  When they are used properly, with truth and honesty.  ‘All good stories are mandorlas,’ says one of my favourite Jungian writers, Robert Johnson.  ‘We like to think that a story is based on the triumph of good over evil; but the deeper truth is that good and evil are superseded and the two become one.’

He says, and I feel he may be right, that when things become intolerable; when we say we can't stand things any more, that this is precisely the time when we have to possibility to shift. ‘When the unstoppable bullet hits the impenetrable wall, we find the religious experience. It is precisely here that one will grow.’ Or, as Jung said, ‘Find out what a person fears most and that is where he will develop next.’

Think of the bush and the fire; the bush that burned and burned and yet was not consumed: and the fire that would not damn well stop burning.  When the clash of opposites comes and neither will give way to the other then, oh then,  the numinous (call it ‘God’ or whatever you will) is present.   This is the liminal, the place that is neither this nor that…the shoreline inbetween tides, the space between one room and the next, between one world and another.  It's where we try - usually unsuccessfully of course - to hold the paradoxes.

‘Our own healing proceeds from that overlap of what we call good and evil, light and dark,’ says Johnson (yes, I re-read him on this this morning).  ‘It is not that the light element alone does the healing; the place where light and dark begin to touch is where miracles arise. This middle place is the mandorla.’  And yes, Christ is the mandorla – not for nothing did the early Christians scratch out the fish symbol which is, really, yup…one of those…  
Christ?  Yup, Christ.  I’m not going to say this – I’m going to let Johnson take the rap… ‘One can view a human life as a mandorla and as the ground upon which the opposites find their reconciliation.  In this way every human being is a redeemer, and Christ is the prototype for this human task.’ 

Christ.  The divine alchemist.  Hmm.. Alchemy. Another of my preoccupations right now… Can’t go into it in huge detail but again it’s all about facing the shadow, recognising our projections, holding the opposites.  The major stages of the alchemical process:  the nigredo (the descent); the albedo (the brightening); the rubedo (the discovery of passion); the citrino (the golden warmth of the sun).  And finally?  The pavanis, the peacock’s tail, the rainbow bridge. 

Right.  That hasn’t made any sense at all, has it?  Never mind.  J  


Next post will be about dog food I promise. 
Next post will be about dog food I promise.  And yeah...that was what I said above, when my PC decided it would talk in symbols...WTF???  I tell ya, the world is weird, weird, weird. 

Soft Toy Serial Killers

Everyone has an unpretty side. A part they don’t like to admit.  A dark side of the moon.  I can be a crappy person, I really can. I look at myself in the mirror and I don’t like what I see. I’m a crappy mother; I’m a crappy wife. I’m a lousy daughter-in-law; a rubbish aunt; a shitty godmother (whatever possessed them to choose godless me?) and I’m not always the best of friends, no matter how hard I try.  I was a damn good daughter though, and I sometimes think that sucked the goodness and prettiness out of me – it was so damn greedy it left me parched. 

I try, I really try but sometimes I just feel like I’m stretched too thin – pull me a little further and I’ll snap into two and the parts will float away, straggles of skin reaching helplessly towards one another as they vanish into the ether.

But then I suspect other people feel that way too.  And this isn’t a ‘me, me, me’ post – it’s not remotely asking for validation; for comfort.  It’s just an observation. 

And, anyhow, what does it mean, this crappiness?  That we’re not perfect?  Well, what human is?  We’re so quick to judge, so quick to condemn, aren’t we?  Some of us judge ourselves; we all judge others.  And what is it we judge?  Why, surely just our own shadow sides, displayed in other people?  A conversation at Zumba last night showed the point.  Someone I know gets a lot of grief in town – she’s the ‘bad girl’, the ‘transgressor’, the ‘scarlet woman’.  Tongues wag; people turn away, they give her filthy looks. And they are so perfect, right? They are so righteous?  I’m not one for biblical references but, by heck, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”   

I suspect she constellates their shadow – their dirty laundry, their fear.  Jung said that the shadow is the part of us that contains our secrets, all the forbidden feelings and ways of behaviour that lie hidden from our consciousness.  The shadow comes to us most strongly in dreams, as the frightening “other” – the harlot, the murderer, the thief, the zealot, the overbearing teacher, the pathetic wimp, the whining child, the down-and-out.  The shadow carries everything we push aside in waking conscious life, all those qualities that don’t fit with our ideal image of ourselves.

You wanna find your own shadow?  Think about who winds you up.  Who really really annoys you?  What is it about them that is so so so….fecking annoying, irritating, plain wrong?  Ten to one it’s your own shadow being reflected right back at you.

Anyhow… 

We’re all a bit crappy, okay?  Yeah, even the Soul Puppy.  Most of the time he is soft and biscuity and winsome.  But, every so often, he breaks into serial killer mode and chews the faces off soft toys.  He gouges out eyes; he bites off noses; he chews on cheeks.  Always faces.  Honestly, I have a pile of eyes sitting on my desk.  Can’t help but be reminded of my demon, Samael.  He’s a face biter too.  Tellingly this was an aspect of the book that editors couldn’t handle (along with the hacking off of zombie heads with spades L).  The face biting had to go.  But – see – he chewed off faces to reveal people; to show their true selves; to splice aside the façade and show the shadow…  

And, hmm, maybe people just aren’t ready to do that…


Lest We Forget: Those Who Have Fallen....

Badger: full facial removal

Panter: eye, nose excision

Snowy: eye removed; ear lost

Just a few who have fallen to the dark side of the SP....and no, we don't go for very imaginative names in this house... :)