The words that grace the moving beyond

The last eight lines from a poem called '90 North' by Randall Jarrell:

'Where, living or dying, I am still alone;
Here where North, the night, the berg of death
Crowd me out of the ignorant darkness,
I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darkness—that the darkness flung me—
Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
And we call it wisdom. It is pain.'




I'm working through an essay on the symbolism that is recruited by a self-harmer in acts of self-mutilation. In psychoanalytic theory, a thread from Klein through to Segal through to Woodruff runs, addressing this question, the detailed accounts of the traumatised psychotic patients seeming to me to become more sensitive, more astute, through these women's accounts, over time, through history. Psychoanalysis is not a well established academic field, and it's a field that does not lend itself easily to models and systematisation, at that. Offerings made available through journal articles in this field speak of a uniqueness that is perhaps an outcome of this un-trammelled corner of human expertise - the papers tend  to have a feel of direct transmission from the author's fingertips, and seem free, in some ways of the overbearing APA standardisation procedures that I'm now accustomed to.


The modelling that is valuable for me, here, comes directly from the practitioners, not neat Venn diagrams and statistical significance at alpha 0.05. The modelling comes from the increasing emphasis through history placed in their own accounts of what is occurring, for them, as they work with, and beside, these patients. The most powerful accounts seem to arise through their explication of their involvement in countertransference, through the understanding of themselves, as they were, as they are, that they are brave enough to release to the world, in, of all places, academic papers.


[sharp change of subject]


These lines from Jarrell's poem grounds a place to work from, for me - it speaks not of annihilation but more of that continual starting over, the continual re-dressing that has to take place, as the world shifts through time, of what we thought we knew. Like these women who publish papers on the symbolism of inordinate acts of cruelty enacted instrumentally against the self, re-dressing and re-naming what was, and shifting to what is, into the darkness, is the work of being trully human, to me. 


Language is birthed as we break our symbiotic relationship to our maternal figure in human development. That question of whether all symbol formation, from the time we are small children onwards is an attempt to crawl back into the womb, in some ways, speaks to me of the unity discourse, the basis of so much of our spirituality.


Where be the One?


or should it be


Why be the One?