ENDING THE COSMIC WAR

AMAZEMENT, AND OTHER MONUMENTAL FAILURES OF MENTALIZATION

Recently I have had to put the project of Ending the Cosmic War on hold, because of an ongoing personal crisis. I still lack the ability to study as much as I need to. However I have continued to think about ways through this polycrisis, and better ways of thinking about the world. I have recently been involved in Active Hope Foundations training, which is run by Chris Johnstone and Joanna Macy. It seeks to find genuine responses to the problems of the world, and ways through them. It is a course you can do for free, based on online lessons that are sent to you weekly. It is best done in a group, but it can be done as an individual. It heavily emphasizes gratitude at the beginning of the course.

I have also had enough space to be able to consider one hopeful thing. Here is is, fairly roughly, to begin with.

A person has a fight with their partner and the partner leaves. They watch, crying, as the car pulls away, and then they fling themselves into the traffic. Someone calls the police about them, because they are thrashing about on the road, and the police bring them to see me. What else could I do, the person says. I had no choice. Another person can only find quiet from their distress while fully restrained in a cell. Another pretends to have a seizure in the doorway of the emergency department waiting room. Now, this one is telling. Another person in a similar plight says to me, but what do you do when you are upset? I tell them, I cry a bit, and I eat chips, and I sit on the bed for a while. They think about this. But, they reply, it’s not enough.

When is it enough? When is there finally congruence, when the distress, outrage, despair, and grief, is finally matched by the response of the world? This need for congruence can be endless. No, it’s not enough.

A couple of things. I have not mentioned mental illness, gender or diagnosis because this is not that. The stories are real. By “the response of the world” is often directly meant particular people or particular situations. A person texted their ex-partner “the shottie’s locked and loaded” and was very upset when the ex-partner called the police, because they thought this text would elicit a reconciliation. That was weirdly specific. But I think behind this is a deep desire for a congruent response from THE WORLD. People. Everyone. Society. The environment. The situation. The weather. The World.

Surely, when I cry it could at least rain.

Here is WH Auden’s famous poem.

'Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone'

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W H Auden

Auden is right! The World should mourn with me! When I cry, shouldn’t it at least rain?

When I had my first sexual experience, I thought the next day that it would show. People would know. Not just the girls at school, but people in the street would somehow know. It should have been obvious. I had nudged the world somehow, and it had nudged back. The lack of response from The World taught me about that clumsy term, mentalization. The World does not respond, because it does not know. If I wanted it to know, I would have to tell it.

When I cry, this is why it doesn’t rain.

Magicians know better. They can make it rain by an effort of magical Will. They can nudge the rainy bits of The World and the rain comes. They can Speak to the rain spirits and the rain comes. They can slide into the spaces where the rain lives and coax it by probability into existence. We love this stuff. When a service magician does this work, we love it, because they are working in congruence. The community needs rain, the rain can save lives and crops. It is a kind of community congruence. The need is great, the desire is great, it is congruent with the magical action, which is difficult and involves a considerable spending of magical energy, and the World responds in kind. I have not been taught weather magic. It is not ethical for me. There are always consequences, damnable things.

What I have been taught is that all this is very childish. It is the way children think at about five or six. It is a monumental failure of mentalization. That’s a clunky term that roughly means being able to think about the thoughts and feelings of oneself and others, and being able to balance the self and others, external and internal thinking, and feelings of others and oneself. To mentalize well, we need to be able to imagine our own thoughts and feelings and those of others. We need to “read the room” of life. Failures of mentalization are caused by stymied upbringings or stress or mental illness. Small failures happen all the time, with misunderstandings, but we can usually set them right. Bigger failures include thinking others can, or should, know our thoughts, or that we can influence others by thinking. All the examples given above are failures of mentalization, where people could not navigate misunderstandings and could not mange their feelings, and where feelings became overwhelming needs for congruence.

Auden’s poem is a monumental failure of mentalization, a grandiose, childlike demand that the World see and know his pain. We know better, as adults. We know that nobody can see and know our feelings. We cannot nudge the World with magic. We are small minds, and the World does not care and does not respond to our distress. The drive for congruence, for a response that matches our distress, leads us nowhere and is endless and destructive.

In the faith tradition I came out of, I was taught that detachment was a vital virtue. We should not be reactive to the world, because the world is worth as little as the black in the eye of a dead ant. We should not attend to the problem of congruence. The world does not respond to our distress because it is not worthy of us. We belong to God’s kingdom. Therefore, we need not get distressed about the world, but trust God instead. Our thoughts and emotions are petty things, and we are contingent beings.

I want to meet the problem of congruence in a different way. Let us consider that we are all part of the World and the World is part of us, and that we belong here just as we are, loved and loving, in a perpetual call and response with the World. And by the World I mean all realities, ordinary and non-ordinary, and all the spirits in them, and all the life in death and death in life. Except as we are small and the World is big, our call and the response of the World is never even; we always receive more than we can give. Thus our proper response should be one of gratitude and amazement. And our giving should be inspired.

When I am feeling this kind of divine entanglement with the World, I am very porous. I can stand in a place, I have such an enhanced sense of place at these times, and I can feel the lives of those who have gone before me, and the Story the buildings and the land are telling me. All these lives pass through me and leave something with me as they do so. It’s not pure. I have been known to give offerings to the stranger urban spirits, the spirits of ally ways and the warped trees that grow in the gutters and the drains. Such small rites contain the sense of porousness and stop me getting too full, and also honour it.

What can possibly be wrong with gratitude and amazement? For a start, gratitude and amazement are hardest to access when most needed. I cannot expect someone in the depths of a mental crisis even to begin. Other work needs to be done first. This is what you think about when you are out of the hole of despair. Moreover, it is entirely apolitical. It does not make any account of injustice. It is plainly trite to expect children who are victims of war or disaster to do gratitude exercises. We clearly need a hefty dose of justice and the politics of inclusion. I agree that an injury to one is an injury to all. I suspect privilege is a diminishing thing, however, over the next fifty years it will mean less to most of us. The very useful concept of kyriarchy has points of oppression harming all of us, just some a lot more than others. Within our difficult and terrible situation, I am still not wrong. We can be held, we can have our pain met where it is and healed, we can fulfil our righteous outrage, we can find comfort in grief, all without damaging ourselves mentally. We can engage in this wondrous call and response with the World.

The photo is of an ally way off Cuba St in Wellington. It is a place of power. There are many such places. Be amazed!