WOUNDED BEING and PHYSICAL LIFE
The arising of wisdom and beauty out of suffering is comparable to a process in nature, to the birth of the valuable and beautiful pearl. For the pearl is born from the sickness of the oyster, from the destruction inside the pearl-oyster. As the beauty of the pearl is born out of disease and suffering, so are knowledge, noble human nature and purified human feeling born out of suffering and pain. Fabre d’Olivet
In preparing one of my essays in 2016, I wanted to include a picture of a wounded angel and chose Hugo Simberg’s 1903 painting, Wounded Angel.[1] I went to Wikipedia to get a little background to Simberg’s life and perhaps at the same time learn how he came to make this poignant image. I received a shock when I read this passage:[2]
Simberg himself declined to offer any deconstruction, suggesting that the viewer draw their own conclusions. However it is known that Simberg had been suffering from meningitis and that the painting was a source of strength during his recovery. This can also be read metaphorically: meningitis is known to cause neck stiffness, lethargy and light sensitivity, each of which is exhibited by the central figure. If read as lungs rather than wings, such a diagnosis even explains the minor injury, as tubercular meningitis causes abrasions to the upper lungs.
You won’t know what I found shocking until I tell you a story—a story that begins with a dream. The story concerns woundedness, terror, death, and a breakthrough into creative action and this inceptive dream, appearing in 1994, along with some subsequent companions, unfolded as my life’s history, and as this story, over a period of thirty years:
A black dragonfly sitting on my shoulder, big and threatening to sting unless I sing! I am also in a fish factory, singing to the workers there, standing on scaffolding stark naked. A vicious angry man emerges from the crowd and chases me out. He meant to do me some real harm, I think.[3]
This dream captures a deep conflict as which I lived for many years: an imperative to “nakedly sing” in the public sphere, coupled with a terror of being killed for doing so. This complex ruled the expressiveness of my life. I would be drawn into public speaking, for example, only to be mortified or humiliated afterwards, from fantasies springing up around my “naked” exposure to the “judgmental” eyes of others. When I wrote my dithyrambic dissertation, I became terrified that it would not be accepted, that it (and I) would be killed off. I wrote my dissertation in the style of “music” or “poetry”, comprising an overture, four movements, and finale. I composed it in a state of ecstasy, over a period of ten days, and afterwards I was certain it would be judged a cacophony, or inarticulate babble.[4]
My dream also of course is future-oriented. A future was being prepared and I was meeting this necessity with terror–at bottom, a terror of death! And so, the dream moment finally arrived when I was brought to the necessity of uncompromisingly facing death. In 2010, I dreamed:
I lost my job. I am looking for new work as a maths teacher. Surely someone needs me. I am on a motorbike going along a street the wrong way. It is one way the other way. Someone indicates so and I acknowledge. Now I notice my right leg. It is almost eaten away around the bone, which is quite exposed. Flesh is hanging off. It has obviously been this way for some time. Well, there is no going for work now. That is over! I am under a tree and a dog comes, sniffing. He goes for my leg. At first I am alarmed then realize it is only food for him. A horse comes by. Now, some people come. They are from the organisation that assists with the passage across. I am relieved and I start weeping. Memories come and I finally remember my son Chris, I wish he were here but not to be. I lie there quietly. I see a skull. It is mine but how can that be? As I turn it slowly in my hands I marvel at how at one time my brain was in there. Now the time is close I feel my breath going and I ask to be taken under the tree to go quietly. …
(a following dream …)
I decide to kill myself. A bullet in the head, but it does not kill me only knocks out brain functions. So now I am alive but in a very different way. I see Viv, (who committed suicide in waking life) who tells me that meningitis is next. I move into a flat in an inner city area, almost slum where I will become “The Sage of Underwood” or some such. Kate, the actress from Underbelly sings nearby to me and the song is beautiful, just beautiful.
The mood of these death dreams is one of finality—ineluctable “physical” death. No escape, no running away, no pleading. I was being taught to overcome my terror of death by the presence of death itself. Furthermore my earlier dream’s character as preparing the future seems to be further refined in this dream which shows me now being “alive but in a very different way”, a radically different style of living that my earlier form of existence could only imagine as death. And this mode of living is accompanied by, of all things, beautiful singing! During this critical time, I became afflicted with a crippling inflammatory response that led to my retirement and rendered me prone for about a year.[5] I also produced my Poems of Death during this time.[6] [7]
Perhaps you noticed a small detail in this “death” dream that connects it to my research into “The Wounded Angel” and shocked me. It is the dream speech, “meningitis is next.” Simberg’s angel, I discovered five years later, is his symbol for meningitis![8]
At the time of my “death dream” the mood of finality was so strong and pervasive that my re-awakened terror, exacerbated by the inflammatory response covering my entire body, took over everything. I lay in terror, day and night, for a year. In rare moments of relative calm I returned to my dream and began to focus on this strange dream-speech claiming, “meningitis is next”. I learned that meningitis is an inflammation of the meninges, the membranes that cover and protect the brain tissue. There are three layers of the meninges: the pita mater, arachnoid mater, and dura mater—tender mother, spider mother, and hard mother.
My inflammation is thus associated with the brain, “mother”, and terror of death. At the time, I wrote this summary:
My entire brain, my thinking depends on, and is protected by, these three aspects of the mother. This quite ordinary form of “brain-thinking”, i.e., reflective knowledge is always “of the past” because it is reflective. And this knowledge is thus petrified, frozen, not living. Of course! Petrifaction and reflection irresistibly invoke the image of the gorgon, Medusa who lies behind all such knowledge and its petrifying effect on living processes.
The empty skull, which once contained my brain, along with the image of meningitis, points to a death of “brain-thinking” (thinking about things), the kind of thinking that kills living processes and preserves the past. And this death also leads to a new life but “in a very different way”, as my dream says. As illuminating as these reflections were at the time, I knew even then that I was still engaging my “death dream” with brain-thinking, i.e. reflections, and thinking about—the very way of being that my dream wants to overcome through an initiatory experience of death, as preparation for a very different mode of living.
I thus remained unsatisfied, or rather, something else remained unsatisfied and this dissatisfaction focussed on the strange image of meningitis appearing in my dream. I began to live with the uncertainty of meaning. A preparation clearly was taking place within the psyche—a preparation for an entirely different way of living. This dream in 2010 was further refinement of my early dream in the nineties—a future is being prepared and it requires a path through terror, and an initiatory death of a habituated form of thinking (the reflective mind).
I finally recovered from my illness and entered the “retired” life. A strange thing began to happen. My writing began to flourish and it had a musical feel to it. I published several books and many essays. In all this production I felt joy as the primary mood. I was now “singing” and the terror of being destroyed receded into the background, presumably having done its work.[9] I can even begin to describe this very different way of living a little now by continuing with the story of “meningitis”.
As I said, I read about “The Wounded Angel” while writing my essay, Wrath of Love, and discovered that Simberg was suffering from meningitis during the time of the painting. He had pictured a wounded angel exhibiting the symptoms of the disease. Apparently he found this picture to be a source of strength. The shock of the re-emergence of the image of meningitis, five years later on from my “death” dreams, along with its deepened reference to a “wounded angel” is instructive.
Meningitis, a physical disease characterised by inflammation and bacterial or viral infection, is now to be thought in terms of a wounded angel.
An image of wounded Being!
This phrase shouts out at me as I write. I am being asked to hold a thought that links physicality with angelic being and woundedness. Wounded Being and physical life are one and the same, or two ways of viewing a unity! An experience of this unity leads to fresh questions about out future.
How is another future being prepared, even as the destruction of physical life accelerates before our incredulous eyes? A new way of living, based on the felt unity of physical life and wounded Being, has pressed itself on me over all these years, and is, in my view, also a preparation for that future named as The Coming Guest—Love![10] But this totally new and unprecedented form of love can only come into existence when some individuals have accomplished a certain preparatory work that is, at the same time, an initiation. The initiating power is the psyche, which has reconfigured itself once again.This new configuration has “lost interest” in any disjunction between “inner” and “outer”, as well as a host of other pairs of opposites that have determined our culture for millennia.[11] As such, this new configuration brings about a corresponding new set of appearances, which require a fresh understanding of knowledge (what it is to know) and correspondingly new cultural practices.
My experience with “meningitis” is a small illustration of the world that can open up to the human being who can “hold” ambiguity and uncertainty long enough for the Coming Guest to speak further. My books and many of my essays go into this question of how the real appearances change when the inner/outer disjunction is dissolved. You might say that my task is to somehow speak what such a world would look like, and I have tried many ways of saying it over the years, under the guidance of the psyche.
In my judgment, after thirty years of living this question of an alternate possible future seeking to come into existence as a new form of love, the only way out for us lies in a path that cannot separate, in experience, the empirical world from wounded being. At present these two “categories” are conceived within a fundamental separation between “inner” and “outer”—a disjunction that the deeper determinative background of our existence no longer supports.[12] This being so, the entirety of our Western cultural practices, rooted as they are in the inner/outer disjunction are now supported by habit only—a habit of thought that could kill all physical life!
A different future, one supported and expressive of the Coming Guest, will give us the eyes to gaze upon the things of the world and into their “within-ness” at the same time. We would thus be disabled from treating the things of the world as mere resources to be used for the twin purposes of enhancement and efficiency. We instead would feel something if we merely crush a cockroach or casually destroy one another in cyber-war, or poison vast treks of land or ocean. It would be a feeling rooted in our unity with wounded Being and, because we are participating with Being, it becomes our wound as well. This would be a game-changer! And it is happening now, to more and more individuals who are undergoing the transformation from an existence as separate units to an existence as participants in the woundedness of Being, yet do not know how to language the momentous transformation which has already occurred in the background determinant of existence, the living psyche, and is now emerging into actuality as the Coming Guest! Such individuals cannot circumvent the necessity of an encounter with Death as this alternate future approaches. And when I consider that we are supporting a culture that is utterly obsessed with eliminating suffering and death, the stakes rise frighteningly high as all the dire warnings are saying with respect to the end of physical life.
It is now nine years (March 2019) after those dreadful dreams and another twist is introduced to this story. I have been diagnosed with an acoustic neuroma, which is a tumour situated in the brain. According to one theory of its genesis, this type of tumour originates through inflammation of the myelin sheath of the vestibular nerve, grows slowly until it presses on the brain stem, upsetting balance along with other symptoms. Meningitis is a risk factor in the operation to remove the tumour.
While I wait for the surgical procedure (in April) I pay attention to my dreams, as usual. A few days ago I dreamed:
The surgeon operates on me and extracts a pearl from my head, my brain. She holds it up for me to see it: a shiny white sphere. Recovery is swift, the ordeal is over and my depressed mood lifts to one of joy.
We are often given a glimpse of a softer imagined future, when fear is too strong in the present and indeed, for a while I did feel more buoyant (just before the American Indian genocide, their Shamans introduced a “Ghost Dance”, which carried a mythology of the future as a kind of Paradise).
At the same time, the image of the pearl suggests a creative process born from an irritation, an inflammation that the organism strives to respond to (the oyster secretes layers of mucous until the pearl is formed). Furthermore this creative process is very slow, taking years. Once again I am plunged into the great unknowing and once again I am brought to see how an outer physical process (my inflammatory responses over many decades) and an inner one (my dreams) are two sides of the same reality.
Whatever comes next, I can no longer experientially separate my personal fate from that of our species. The terrors I feel from time to time are mine, to be sure, but are also those of the greater Being, the Wounded Angel, if you like, who is desperately trying to “get through” to us and turn this environmental disaster around. This angel, as I have been shown, is Love, i.e. it is US, you and me, as archetypal Love, a new definition of who we are![13]
Do you dare to love that much?! Our species depends on our becoming so….
FOOTNOTES