Coming Forth By Day
Keith Hackwood
A reflection on self-harming
‘The hypothesis of the image is possibility’
- Jose Lezama Lima
Why is it that so many people, especially young people, regularly and chronically self-harm? That’s a question I have been sitting with for some months, faced (as I have been in my role as a counsellor within a large and ‘successful’ UK University) by the steady stream of students presenting this behaviour. I’ve read the books, talked with colleagues, chewed this one over in relation to my own experience, rationalised the phenomenon to death – but it does me no good. It still leaves me unsatisfied. Why is cutting so culturally prevalent? What does it say about a culture when its youth, supposedly its brightest and best, are collectively and individually compelled to draw their own blood in order to be?
I don’t pretend to answers but I’m more and more sure of the questions, and I intend asking them here. For instance, why does it feel as though the Sixties never happened? Why is it that the ‘Playstation Generation’ prefers txt-msg limbo to symbolist poetry? And why does it take the blood-real cut to un-numb the lost body and choke down enough of the thin gruel of ghostly soul to live another day?
I become aware of the bi-polar mania driving the collective experience of western culture, the endlessly mediating forces, from looping advert-babble on Lucifer’s dreambox to the 24 hour news drip, itself really just an advert for a broken but compulsory worldview, to this cyclopean computer I’m typing at, the glass stargate to isolation heaven. Does anyone even have feelings anymore, or is the real future for engineering not genetic but emotional, the evolution of the new human, homo rationalis? And yet it seems clear that the continuity of human pain continues to grow and flower in a superabundance of suffering fit for any phase of spinning samsara; what is lost perhaps, are our voices, our languages for expressing the torment and the unbearable crushing of soul under the tyrannic wheels of busy-ness. Is it any surprise that far from being alright, The Kids are cutting up – that is to say, speaking a new and fractured language in which the verbs are bright blades of decision dancing through a grammar of blood?
Raphael Lopez Pedraza notes in his essay ‘Cultural Anxiety’ that the ‘only god who is afraid and does not hide the fact’, is Dionysus, and that pertains here. This is a lead, if we care to follow it, since Dionysus is also ‘always the body’, the code to the homeostatic principle regulating well-being and pathology. How can Dionysus, so much misunderstood, help us to more clarity? We recall the twice-born Dionysus for his vivifying ekstasis, his sometime marriage to Ariadne (the hero Theseus’ ex-), and of course his celebrated dismemberment at the hands of the Maenads. He also granted King Midas his golden wish (interestingly, a wish Midas rapidly asked to have revoked) and was half-brother of golden Apollo, in whose name so much of our culture (and certainly that of the Academy or its debased form, the university) proudly polishes itself. For Pedraza the gift of Dionysus is a fear, not cowardly or defective, but tragically enlivening:
“What matters for present-day man’s soul is whether in his death there are a few drops of the Dionysian essences to bring a touch of joy to his dying”
Dionysus raises the possibility of connection, a possibility carried by the image in the knowledge of its own death. So much of our cultural energy is expended on the Promethean (and therefore Titanically inflated) project of avoiding death; indeed Prometheus (according to Aeschylus) admits freely ‘Yes, I caused men to no longer forsee their deaths’. Could it be that an opposition is helpful? That merely depriving death of its significance and stultifying it with management doublespeak or injunctions to put one’s faith in Apollonic whitecoats is actually a large part of the problem here? Death, whatever else it is, should not be boring – our lives depend upon it - yet tactically, that is what our culture attempts to constellate, numbness. Every spiritual tradition I know of includes death as its first step, its prima materia, its existential trope – it all begins with a meditation on the bloated corpse, one’s own. There it is clear that no ego can have any perspective on psyche, we are Self-overcoming in the poetics of the marvellous, unrepresentable moment – humbled and raised together.
But I was talking about young people and culture – about why so many student-clients have a history of medication (Ritalin, Prozac, Seroxat) and a perfect consumer’s relationship to their own feelings ‘I’m a happy person, why do I feel bad? It can’t be part of me – give me something to take it away’ (a request that functions more like a piece of game dialogue than real communication – a prompt to which the manically overstretched doctor responds, without looking up, with the appropriately coloured pill). And I was wondering why it felt like Feminism or May ’68 or psychedelia or punk or any of the cultural orgasms of the last century never happened! As the comic Shiva and Ur-Romantic, Bill Hicks put it ‘what kind of Reagan wet-dream is this?’
Yes, for hand in hand with the numbness and disconnection from the body, with the loss of soul and fractured, mediated sense of Self, goes an absolute indifference to the reality of suffering, especially that of others. As culture recuperates death back into its own spectacular process it flogs off the illusory ‘participation mystique’ from the compulsory boot-sales of reaction. ‘Take a loan. Get a mortgage. Own stuff. Drink your drugs. Do as You Are Told’ – these are the messages The Kids receive, and have received since the womb offered up its red pillow. So the world goes on being de-natured, humankind continues numbly in its will to dominate, whether in the blank white stare of Saddam’s Saruman or through the formless fiery eye of Sauron-Bush. The greening of the soul has come to this, the fatuous hard-on of the dollar-appendage. Who cares? In this place it is even easy to applaud as the techno-industrial-military complex rolls out its smartest new paraphernalia to bomb our hapless cousins back into the stone age. And yet even now the daughters of this bald power feel the sins of the fathers; they are taking razorblades to their pubescent titties, burning their thighs with cigarettes, their sons are pushing Stanley blades down their calves, we’re so close to everything that we’ve lost. Forgive my Da’wa al-Qaidimi, my Ancient Prophecy – but like Hakim Bey says, this is not a state we’re in, it’s a station - and its only old because its never been fully born.
Let’s get back to the image. It seems obvious to me that self-harm has a relationship to death, as do addictions of all hues. This is the ‘spectrum of catharsis’, the piece of hieroglyphic thinking that undoes all the hieratic mis-appropriations of money-machines (I’m thinking of machines in an Allen Ginsberg kind of way, ‘money, money, money,… owners, owners, owners… money of illusion, machinery of death’ in ‘Death to Van Gogh’s Ear’; or as Lorca saw it unfold 70 years ago in ‘The Poet in New York’.) People are unhappy and some of them know it. Young people are especially unhappy, but they have no context for exploring why this should be so. Our culture places a taboo around this – unhappiness equates with failure, and as we all know ‘failure is not an option’ for such as us. In navigating the extended adolescence our culture also promotes (typically up to about the Saturn Return at 28-31) young people remain dependent on the toxic Disneyland whitewash of their forbears, mastering niche-marketing and myopic cynicism or else nestling under an insulating ‘role-rep’ worldview, itself the junior edition of the invisible party line of western capital – to the victor the spoil. All spoiled indeed.
This is the context and the work. Of course the majority of young people probably never present in anyone’s counselling room (although anecdotal accounts among colleagues suggest a huge and ongoing rise in demand, born out by the swollen waiting lists and pressure to ‘produce results’ in a ‘time-limited’ way) but many, many of those that do bear the weals and new red scars of their pain like living screams, expressing more in flesh and blood than they can (often) even guess at with their minds. As one client said –
“I feel as if I am isolated, dead, the world is unreal for me. The blood tells me I’m real, that I can feel – but I need to see these feelings bleed away – I can’t cry, the blood is like tears for me”
Many studies of self-harm and mutilation note that the behaviour is ultimately an attempt to control what feels overwhelmingly chaotic, and that the body ‘keeps score’ – it remembers and reasserts itself, even in the lost wastelands of numb emotions and (often) medicated thinking. This is because the body is the soul incarnated, the blood is our will – this is no concatenation of hybrid fragments, no product of a synthetic genius – this is all memory reawakened, Dionysus torn asunder, or perhaps the unending starlight in the wings of the Ka of Osiris, bright star in the dark house of dying, of becoming. But how do we bridge the enormity of suffering meat between freedom and slavery? How do we move from Jung’s ‘hysterical platform’ against which ‘happenings’ rebound as though caught in an eternal DMT pinball machine, never connecting, reflecting or becoming experience?
Perhaps we can make merit and avoid monotheist guilt through following Pedraza into the ‘consciousness of failure’, where the Apollonic abstract collapses into the ‘slow median states of the soul’. Or perhaps by chasing after Lorca’s fairy footsteps, inviting the duende who, in enormously animated slowness, slows us down in turn, to turn and face ‘the arms I embraced you with, covered with worms’. Perhaps there are other ways, unique ways, as yet unknown ways to meet and be changed by the suffering that is ‘other’, yet is mine. Psychotherapy is, after all, a product of the psyche, a natural and fertile occurrence always-already in train, waiting for the one who recognises. There is much more that needs saying, more music and more heart to be poured upon the deepest wounds of all; we are human because we feel. And if I have failed in this attempt, as I have, then it is a failure-into-consciousness, a way of groping after the experience sweetly named by the South American poet Rafael Cadenas in his poem ‘Fracaso’ (Failure):
“You’ve led me by the hand to the only water that reflects me”
I will end with a reflection of the title of this essay, a poem (spell) from its ancestral line –the misnamed ‘Egyptian Book of the Dead’, or (more appropriately and more accurately) the ‘Book of Coming Forth By Day’, a prayer for seeing our own coming forth into animating ripeness:
From Spell 55 - ‘The Knot of Isis’
“ At the ends of the universe is a blood red cord that ties life to death, man to woman, will to destiny. Let the knot of that red sash, which cradles the hips of the goddess, bind in me the ends of life and dream… … Let my thoughts lie together in peace. At my death let the bubbles of blood on my lips taste as sweet as berries. Give me not words of consolation. Give me magic, the fire beyond the borders of enchantment. Give me the spell of living well… … We are bound mind to Mind, heart to Heart – no difference rises between the shadow of my footsteps and the will of god. I walk in harmony, heaven in one hand, earth in the other> I am the knot where two worlds meet. Red magic courses through me like the blood of Isis, magic of magic, spirit of spirit. I am proof of the power of gods. I am water and dust walking.”
