A Proper Typhoon Theory: From Part VIII

Exerpt:

Part VIII. Chaos: ‘A Proper Typhoon’ Theory: “loop’d and window’d raggedness”

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these?                     (King Lear, III, iv, 30)

Do not adjust your mind, reality is at fault.  (Graffiti)

       Introduction: I Come to the Garden Alone

A young mother and a tiny, blonde toddler graced the green carpet in the morning sun.  She directed me to the garden entrance. 

Now who would have imagined that a garden entranced the summit of the cliffs of the North Face?  Not I said the field mouse to the stoat.  Even a swallowtail chimed in on this dialogue as she lackadaisically winged past in her random flits and dance.  The subsonic hums of the flowers beneath the roar of the upper spring waterfall feeding the pond can only be felt slowly. 

A surprising serenade from the roses at the lower gate to the steep slopes bid me follow the steeper path.  Breathless at the tea garden gazebo, surrounded by fitting Alpine wonders, I was met by a stone ax cloven in the middle, almost like an arrow-shaped heart.  The heavy silence of the stone was a heated impasse in the crescendo-ed oeuvre unfolding. I followed Alice’s path from the empty tea space, fleeing into the upper bushings through to the well, much too small for me.  The well encased by the granite wall was eerily silent.  I noticed two mothers pushing their baby carts below me as they entered the garden.

I then glanced above and was startled to see the dark granite tops of the north cliff, jutting proudly in the sunlight.  It would never have occurred to me that the summit was so near.  I passed the lazy whistling white lilacs and hovering insects.  As I climbed a cascading torrential song filled the spaces around us and then before me, a waterfall and the oval pond directly beneath the summit.  I wearily sat down on the granite wall and wept profusely. 

The paths for descent were overgrown from the recent rains and I was confused as to the direction to return to the front gate.  Then a young gardener came into view as he pulled out weeds and trimmed the overgrowth.  We chatted and he pointed to the best way out.

   It was not an easy descent.  Many parts of the trail were very steep and treacherous, but I soon reached the front gate.  I rested on the garden bench to drink in the completed journey.  Then I noticed a plaque on the stone wall identifying the name of the ivy: “Weeping golden bell.” 

       Canto 1: A Proper Place in the Typhoon

§         “I felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that would put all that elemental fury into its proper place.”  (from Conrad’s author’s note on Typhoon, 1919: it. added)

       What's In A Name

     ‘Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and the most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.’ ~ Apsley Cherry-Gerrard (National Geographic Adventure, 2002)
Ironies of power (for Christians believe in an almighty God who took on human flesh, and whose “weakness” is stronger than our greatest enemy, death); ironies of love (for man seldom knows whom to love, or how, or even whom it is that in the depths of his heart he loves best)…~ Anthony Esolen, Ironies of Faith

 Canto 2: Soundings: The Malady of Not Marking

Empathy  Ch. 6

 I see it feelingly…Look with thine ears.   (King Lear. IV. vi. 150)

 Your ignorance, which finds not, till it feels.  (Coriolanus, III. iii. 127)

 He is looking at me.  He don’t say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk.  I always say it ain’t never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he looks at you.  It’s like he had got into the inside of you, someway.  Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes.  (from As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner)

 For maybe we are all the same

   Where no candles are.   (from The Three Bushes, W. B. Yeats)

…make passionate my sense of hearing       (Loves’ Labours’ Lost, III. i. 1)

It is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking, that I am troubled withal.   (Henry IV, II, I. ii. 122)

 A student social worker was asked to write on a post-card what she felt about an offender-patient’s
disclosure in a group.  ‘I wrote one word…fear.’  She was not afraid of the patient but she felt the
patient’s fear.  This is empathy.  (Anon. 1977)

To look at…to look into…to look out of…Empathy is a sine qua non …[hesed]…Conrad, in Heart of
Darkness, writes:  ‘And the girl talked, easing her pain in the certitude of my sympathy; she talked as thirsty
men drink.’…’I like you enough to fight with you’…Negative transference, or overt reality-tested
hostility, cannot take place unless an empathic substrate holds…them…together…in ‘the field.’ 
Empathy is more than listening….’vicarious introspection’ …Nevertheless, what these machines can never
do is to convey to the patient that they know what it is like to stand in his shoes.  Ezekiel (3.15) ‘came to
them of the captivity…and sat where they sat’.  He was not a captive, but he remained with them
…differential response is likely to be associated with the amalgam of personal life experience, weltanschauung,..

 ’Using his own mortality as another starting point he needs to find references of hope or possibility in an
almost unimaginable future’ (Berger and Mohr, 1967).

 Chagall and Art: …scenes of childhood so indelibly in one's mind and to invest them with an emotional
charge so intense that it could only be discharged obliquely through an obsessive repetition of the same cryptic
symbols and ideograms...

The radical generosity of the translator:  Turning on the Key, Timing: Firing the Exact Piston
Stroke, Setting the Cycle in Motion

Ringing Bells: Resonance

These phases and phrases almost paraphrase those describing the ‘Translation’ …Each brings …his own emotional assets and liabilities and, in the complex matrix of interaction which forms…life…empathy develops slowly.
"Delicate Grasses"/ In a field I looked into going past

I cross a field on my daily walk.  In that field I have worn a path.  Six months ago I was walking the path on a cold afternoon when suddenly a curtain of snow swept across it off of Puget Sound.  The wild grasses were grey and fallen.  I was deep in a wintry Robert Frost mood at that time, and I remember thinking of lines from his "Desert Places":  "Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast/In a field I looked into going past."
Now, near summer, the grasses in the field are four to five feet high in places.  I have to search to find my old path through the swaying stalks.  It brings back memories of walking down rustling rows of tall corn in Minnesota when I was young.    [From First Known When Lost blog]
                    Delicate Grasses
Delicate grasses blowing in the wind,
grass out of cracks among tiered seats of stone
where a Greek theatre swarmed with audience,
till Time's door shut upon
the stir, the eloquence.

A hawk waiting above the enormous plain,
lying upon the nothing of the air,
a hawk who turns at some sky-wave or lull
this way, and after there
as dial needles prowl.

Cool water jetting from a drinking fountain
in crag-lands, miles from any peopled spot,
year upon year with its indifferent flow;
sound that is and is not;
the wet stone trodden low.

There is no name for such strong liberation;
I drift their way; I need what their world lends;
then, chilled by one thought further still than those,
I swerve towards life and friends
before the trap-fangs close.         ~Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (1963).

Desert Places

… The loneliness includes me unawares.

 And lonely as it is that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be less—

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow

With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars--on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places     ~Robert Frost

The most difficult thing for most people is the acceptance of ambivalence:  In fact there is no relationship without ‘drive’ and there is no purpose for drive without ‘relationship’.

As I have written elsewhere (Rubens, 1992), the desire to deny change, and thereby to deny the experience of loss, is one of the deepest of human resistances.

       Canto 3: Constellations and Crystallization:  ‘poiesis’

                              “The frame of things”  (Macbeth III.2.16)

The Frame of Things:
fixed orientation point…points of reference,…definitions…themes which recur… cyclical patterns…progressive over time …in form of spirals...prevalence of paradox...ubiquity of ‘such shaping fantasies’...relationship between structure and process,...together with certain issues coming under the rubric of ‘apologia’...encouragement to keep options open...poetic energy keeps us ‘upstream of foreclosure’...sense of direction

We close in the evocative company of Bottom and the awareness of the importance of the bottom line…the ultimate outcome or the ‘final common path’

Poiesis….not sequential…simple to complex…Rather it is polycentric…simultaneous crystallization

Water, with its fluidity and creative energy, is one of the many metaphors which aptly convey the continuous process of poiesis which surfaces in these pages…from Tracy (1981, 107)…

The Analogical Imagination: ‘We are suddenly confronted with a challenge to our ordinary mode of thinking; we are surprised by the sudden, event-like disclosure of the genuinely new; …Poiesis usually is startling.  That ‘something else may be the case’ seems to be in the same magnetic field as the question addressed by Prospero to Miranda and, indirectly, from Shakespeare to us:

                         ‘What seest thou else

        In the dark backward and abysm of time?’  ~Shakespeare(The Tempest I. 2. 49)

             …he looked like the afternoon shadow of somebody else.  ~Dickens

       Depth

…identity.  As in the interpretation of dreams, one might view a constellation of Shakespeare’s characters as representing different aspects of a single mind.  This would reveal facets of an inner world, at both a conscious and an unconscious level.

Hillman (1983, 53) representing archetypal psychology, reverses this…’Personality is imaginatively conceived as a living and peopled drama in which the subject “I” takes part but is neither the sole author, nor director, nor always the main character.  Sometimes she is not even on the stage…..  [Again: both-and is more fitting.]

acc. to Shakespeare as prompter:   the individual as ‘sole author’ ; the individual as not being ‘director’, , the individual as not being able to express himself or act in the way he wants, not knowing his lines (language and disowned knowledge) and finally, following Hillman, we borrow the metaphor of Jaques: ‘All the world’s a stage’ (As You Like It II. 7. 139), and consider how we interact in this universal theatre (object relations and transference).

   Theatre and therapy are both concerned with potential space, the term which Winnicott (1980, 36) used to refer to an intermediate area of experience that lies between fantasy and reality.  This space between symbol and symbolized, mediated by an interpreting self---an interpreting cast---is the space in which creativity becomes possible and in which we are alive as human beings, as opposed to being simply reflexive, reactive robots.

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God is the author of time.  For Him there is no beginning, middle, or end.  There is no space where He is not.