Day 44 - 13th Feb
MARBLE SHERPA
She comes and goes,
A different ball of wool each time,
Unspooling,
Schooling you.
Back arched,
Broken and beyond yourself,
Mouth agape,
Agapic.
What comes in after final exhumation?
What squatters go against the traffic and live within?
Stories,
Before the body is committed back to itself,
Ossified into a marble altar.
You don't get to choose yours,
Just whether or not you kneel
Of your own accord
Or are brought to heel
After much discord,
For you
And all those around you.
Another flight,
Beasts in the night,
That's where the spirit goes—
To some new Nazareth.
And you,
As Joseph,
The ultimate schmuck,
Not knowing what the fuck
To do.
Surplus.
Pointless.
But not faithless.
Never faithless.
‘Niall Campbell
This poem was inspired by Frank Hinder’s amazing painting Flight into Egypt, part of the Form and Feeling series at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. This excellent exhibition focused on technique and process, exploring the differing approaches to line, shape, contour, and materiality by some masters of their craft.
Many of the works had a biblical inspiration, and what I find fascinating is how central these motifs from the Judeo-Christian tradition are, even in the work of people who do not consider themselves religious. Without going too metaphysical or theological, I think anyone who works with people in creative recovery or as a psychotherapist will—if they are able to hold space for this—bear witness to how the deepest work will often ground out in some sort of application of the triad of father, mother, and child.
I say to clients, and I'm not being cute about this, that in my role as a psychotherapist I deal with three things—like a handyman who only does a handful of repairs.
I deal with:
mother wounds,
father wounds,
or both.
Reflexively and totally in spite of their condition, personal stories, etc., clients will self-categorise into this taxonomy. Far from being reductive, it has the sort of parsimonious elegance of those broad-brush categories: flora or fauna. Omission or commission. Mother wound, father wound, or both.
I stand like a Sherpa pointing at a peak. I have made that climb with and for others. It is no less arduous each time, and the risk of death is there—you will enter a spiritual death zone above 8,000 feet. It is better to decide very early in the therapeutic relationship if you wish to make that attempt at an ascent. I can do it, but I don’t wish to carry you back down to base camp if you lose all sense of yourself halfway up the slope. Psychedelics and other profound experiences can offer a heli ride to the top, but the person becomes a tourist in their own wounding and gains no lasting change as a result. No one can stay up there for long. One must commit to the climb or be content with a life at sea level. But there is something in the human spirit, with the mother wound in particular, that cannot rest until it is restored.
The layers people go through usually emerge in their attempts to understand why things aren’t working out for them in current fractured relationships. But of course, they are mapping something primordial onto something local. The relationship simply cannot cope with that weight. Then, the person will often try to fix the issue at the source, to regress and relive their childhood—to find their actual mother and love her, throttle her, reach out for her, impress her, reject her, scream at her, even be her sometimes.
But therein lies the job—the cosmic job. You have to connect back to the source and heal the wound from a level of transcendence, with something even deeper than the mother-infant bond. And that is an incredibly deep stratum of what it means to be human. No wonder so many people with attachment wounds go off the deep end into various healing modalities. This is especially difficult for those with rigid and dogmatic religious backgrounds to comprehend and come to terms with, because often their mother was physically present but imprisoned in her role—trapped by conformity, suffering in silence. She could not fulfil what was needed of her. Is it any wonder?
Michelangelo’s Pietà speaks to the bliss and horror of motherhood. To conceive and bring a child into the world knowing they will suffer and die. The Pietà, a masterwork, is otherwise known in my head as The Crucifixion of Mary. This is not a religious statement. This is deeper than Christianity. I think it speaks to an absolute ground truth. Not material, but relationality. We are supposed to experience that as love. To taste a mother’s love is a birthright. Children quite literally die without it.
If they don’t die outright in early childhood, they will experience its devastating loss pervasively throughout their life. They will hide it in plain sight from themselves.
They need to be made to feel safe before they can accept their own crucifixion. To experience—not in the dribs and drabs of mental illness or a lifetime of situational fuck-ups and failed relationships, broken marriages and fractured relationships with children, underachievement, psychosomatic conditions, or inexplicable rage—but to feel the full weight of this loss. It is experienced as the ultimate pain. I have borne witness to it.
Be very, very careful before you judge the misdemeanours or decisions of others. There is no pain like it. Pain specialists generally don’t understand it, because they have colluded to believe that the science of pain is complete—that it is modulated and therefore testable at the level of the synapse. It isn’t. It operates at the level of the soul. We experience earthly pain at the level of the synapse. We experience this type of pain at the level of the soul, and it then will find somatic entry points that indicate that soul work needs to be done—work that falls completely outside the conceptual reach of modern psychiatry or physiological medicine. One paradigm subsumes the other. The soul workers, the artists, acknowledge the role of the synapse in all of this, but the synapse workers are frightened by and therefore repudiate the soul level. I see people with decades’ worth of chronic pain, and when I ask them about their bond with their mother and father, it is quite clear that the myriad of specialists have never bothered to ask after such trivial matters. I never, ever, ever get the answer that things were awesome. Never.
To those attempting this climb, who feel the air get more and more rarefied, and walk past the corpses of others on the mountainside—frozen, stuck in their yearning for mother—I salute you.
When you scale that peak, you will look around and find the Sherpa gone, away back down the mountain to help another lost soul. And you will find a woman crying, for a reason you cannot yet understand. She will embrace you, and you, exhausted, will lie back in her arms.
You will complete the statue.
And as your head tilts back in agony and love, the part of you that has felt alone will die—but you will live on. You are the love itself. And as you draw your last breath, you will forgive her and, in the moment of death, reclaim your birthright.
Then you will descend down the mountain, a Sherpa now for the next man.