Iam finally interested in blogging again, after being unwell and at the same time preparing for a renovation that Karima and I are having done to our apartment. It’s been a strange period, everything taking its normal but exhausting course at the level of day to day activities, yet below the surface taking a very different, solitary course, one of hyperthyroidism (caused, it appears, by a mercury detox that was insufficiently monitored by the doctor).
The phenomenology of hyperthyroidism was for me centred on the heart, the thoughts being whether that heart could be trusted, what it wanted of me when, thumping hard, it woke me at 1:30 am each morning. Although I felt heat, at a deeper level I experienced icy chill, an existential heart, a cold stranger that seemed completely unconcerned for my sleep and for my well-being in general. I learned something of this stranger: as James Hillman says, sickness can be a vital way for the soul to learn.
Some quotations from Hillman (A Blue Fire, p262 – 263) come alive, seem appropriate not only to my recent experiences, but to psychotherapeutic endeavours in general:
The descent to the underworld can be distinguished from the night sea journey of the hero in many ways. We have already noticed the main distinction: the hero returns from the night sea journey in better shape for the tasks of life, whereas the nekyia takes the soul into a depth for its own sake so that there is no “return”. The night sea journey is further marked by building interior heat (tapas), whereas the nekyia goes below that pressured containment, that tempering in the fires of passion, to a zone of utter coldness.
Therapeutic analysis remains incomplete if it is satisfied with bringing balm to burning problems. It still has to venture into the frozen depths that have so fascinated poets and explorers and that in depth psychology are the areas of our archetypal crystallizations, the immovable depressions and the mutisms of catatonia…
Here we are numb, chilled. All our reactions are in cold storage. This is a psychic place of dread and a terror so deep that it comes in uncanny experiences, such as voodoo death and the tostell [animal trancing] reflex. A killer lives in the ice…
We may recall here that the Styx is a river of icy hatred that protects the underworld and is holy and eternal as are the god’s oaths that they swear by that frigid river…
The icy chasm of Christianism’s shadow is a realm of radical importance that cannot be reached with Christianism’s bleeding heart. An archetypal approach to this zone follows the homeopathic maxim: like cures like. The nekyia into hell’s ice requires coldness. If any connection is to be made, we must be able to work with the cruel extremities of ice itself…
The heart has a coldness, a place of reserve like the refrigerator that preserves, holds, protects, isolates, suspends animation and circulation, an alchemical congelation of substance. The cruelty and mean despising are the surroundings of a private sense of ultimate deepening. Maybe in my ice is my fairy-tale princess, whom ego psychology wants to kiss into life; but maybe she is otherwise engaged in her frigid stillness, deepening toward the Ninth Circle, below everything moving; a detachment and stability reminding of the cold body of death…
What occurs to me is that there’s an “art” of psyche-making, an art that’s an ongoing way to live with what is given us (rather than limiting art to what is depicted or presented in form); which gives a deepening to life, a recognition of certain shades that haunt our homes.
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Hi Ron. Just quoting a few of your words before adding in my comments: “What occurs to me is that there’s an “art” of psyche-making, an art that’s an ongoing way to live with what is given us (rather than limiting art to what is depicted or presented in form); which gives a deepening to life, a recognition of certain shades that haunt our homes.”
I agree that there is an art. And, as with all art, the process of creation/revisioning/recognizing both changes the ego and the deeper self. The art process becomes life itself, a way of being in both the inner and outer worlds. The destination is irrelevant, it is the journey as art/artist that is important. The destination waits regardless of our intent or agenda.
nicely put Robert!