Dragon girls: wildness, creation and new tales of female power
OUTLINE:
- Introduction
- 1. a (brief) story about dragon tales
- a. Chinese
- b. Middle Eastern and Hebrew
- c. Western European pagan and medieval Christian
- i. Norse
- ii. Greek
- iii. Early Christian
- iii. St George
- iv. Melusine
- d. historical dragon values summarized
- 2. a story about a female writer and her relation
to dragons
- a. Tehanu and revised dragon history
- b. Orm Irian
- c. The other wind
- d. dragon values in Le Guin's later work, summarized
- 3. a story about psychological/physical dissociation
and integration
- a. the land of the dead
- b. dissociation
- c. what women dissociate
- d. signs of dissociation
- e. what integration means physically
- 4. a story about creative work as integral
- a. somatic processing
- b. truth-telling
- c. passion and dispassion happening together
- 5. a story about female power and the larger self
- a. Le Guin herself as dragon
- b. Dragon powers in women's work
- c. an I that is girl and dragon and more
-
- Dragon girls bibliography
- Appendix 1. Fifteen year old girl's poem about becoming a dragon
- Appendix 2. Excerpt from Melanie Rawl's paper
Introduction
This workshop is particularly indebted to Ursula Le Guin,
whose work has been inspiring me for many years, to my Gestaltist teacher
Joyce Frazee, to my friend Louie Ettling, to a couple of recent essays on
Le Guin, and to students who brought questions and contributed parts: Deidre,
Emilee, Melody, Deena, Kri, Jaes, and the many others with whom there has
been ongoing conversation about how to be powerful authentic women.
There are five strands of story in this workshop, and two
questions implicit through all five: "What is an archetype?" and
"What does 'I' mean?"
1. a (brief) story about
dragon tales
Dragon. 1. a fabulous monster represented as a gigantic
reptile having a lion's claws, the tail of a serpent, winged and wingless,
and a scaly skin. 2. a large snake or serpent. 3. A fiercely vigilant or
intractable woman. The American Heritage Dictionary
Dragon according to the Oxford
English Dictionary is derived from the Old French dracon (serpent),
which in turn derives from Latin, which in turn from the Greek spakov
(serpent), or (an alternative version?) pakelv from the Greek stem
spak meaning strong.
Another suggested etymology relates it to "spakelv
(to see clearly) and many other ancient words related to sight, Sanskrit
darc (see), Avestic darstis (sight), Old Irish derc
(eye), Old English torht, Old Saxon torht and Old High German
zoraht, all meaning clear, or bright."
Dragons and similar monsters go a long way back (creationists
on-line are using the ubiquity of dragon lore to argue that humans were
contemporary with dinosaurs).
a. Eastern dragons
In China dragons are present at the beginning of recorded
history (also in Japan and Korea) and associated with power, fertility,
and well-being. In the early I Ching literature they are dynamical forces,
associated with masculinity. (Thanks Justin.)
Eastern Dragons are beautiful, friendly, and wise.
loved and worshipped. Temples and shrines have been built to honor them,
for they control the rain, rivers, lakes, and seas. Most Eastern Dragons
live in water.
In many early mythologies from Asia we find dragons
as either gods or messengers to the gods. Again like in earlier Middle
Eastern stories the dragons are most often associated with water and wisdom.
But unlike the Mideast and later European stories we find little to no
fighting and killing of or between dragons & gods or normal people
and dragons.
They are closely associated with the divine right of emperors:
Both male and female dragons are said to have mated
with humans. Their descendants became great rulers. The Japanese Emperor
Hirohito traced his ancestry back 125 generations to Princess Fruitful
Jewel, daughter of a Dragon King of the Sea.
b. Middle Eastern and Hebrew
From the start Dragons were seen as guarding treasures,
holding back the floods, and dispensing knowledge. They also are battled
by gods or heroes from the very beginning.
- Gods versus monsters/dragons before creation and heroes
versus monsters/dragons after creation.
Earlier myths often have a god, usually a storm god
or a god armed with thunder and lightning bolts, chasing a dragon that
has something to do with water. Examples are almost all of the Mesopotamian
stories, the Egyptian sea dragon/serpent Apophis and pursuer Re, and even
many early Semitic stories.
In the Babylonian version called the "Enuma elish"
the dragon Tiamet is one of the original pair of god and goddess at the
founding of the universe. From these two all later creatures, good or bad,
came into creation. This goddess is in effect the "mother of all."
In the beginning of the tale Tiamet defends her offspring
and all of creation from all the minions and forces of evil. But later,
when her husband Apsu is killed, she apparently goes mad and decides to
end all creation in her grief. This irrational action pits her against
all the other gods and one of her offspring, named Marduk, is talked into
opposing her.
In the fight that ensues Marduk finally kills her by
shooting an arrow into her mouth as she tries to swallow him. She is a
shape shifter as most or all early dragons are assumed to be so fought
him in different guises.
After the battle he uses her dragon body to form the
earth and from her death we have life and substance.
The first story of a hero fighting and killing a dragon
is in the epic of Gilgamesh.
The word translated as dragon
out of the Hebrew of the Old Testament is tannin, sea or land monsters.
The earliest of these mentions is in a book written approx 2000 BC.
In the sacred Hebrew texts the Serpent or Dragon was
the source of sin and death.
Satan as dragon:.
Out of his mouth go burning lamps, and sparks of fire
leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a seething pot or
caldron. His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.
(Job 41:19-21)
b. Western European
In Western European versions dragons are definitively
associated with a feared unknown. "As late as 1600 A.D., maps were
decorated about the borders of unknown regions with drawings of dragon-like
monsters and the inscription 'Here be dragons'."
i. Norse
Vikings dominated the northern seas in ships with carved
dragons heads on their prows. Their shields bore painted dragons.
ii. Greek
Greek heroes supposed to have slain dragons are Hercules,
Apollo, and Perseus
iii. early Christian
In the early Christian tradition which derives from the
Hebrew they are associated with Satan and exiled:
And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels
fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed
not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon
was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth
the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast
out with him. (Revelation 12:7-9)
iv. Medieval Christianity in England - St George
The word dragon is first used in English about
1220 A.D. It was used in English versions of the Bible from 1340 on.
Medieval Christianity has a plethora of hero tales in
which dragons are slain.
Beowulf takes on the power of evil and paganism in
his final battle against a dragon. Arthur, Tristram, and even Lancelot
the "beau Ideal" of Medieval chivalry were all dragon slayers
Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur, had a vision of a dragon that was
considered a mighty omen. Uther began a tradition of using their war like
and terrible effigies as standards, carrying them into battle to "strike
fear into the hearts of the heathen."
Saint George, who became the patron saint of England,
is a major phallic dragon-slayer. One version of the tale goes like this:
there is a town plagued by a murderous evil dragon. The people believe
they will have to sacrifice a virgin princess to rid themselves of it.
George, who has recently converted to Christianity, charges the dragon
with his enormous steed and kills it with his lance.
Another version goes like this:
Here St. George came along and rather than slay the
young and ignorant beastie lectures him on the evils of eating people and
the values of Christianity in general. He and the princess then put the
tame but confused dragon on a rope and lead him back to the town where
he is officially converted to Christianity, leaves the area, and troubles
the town no more.
d. Melusine
in deserts, in forests, in ruins and tombs, in empty
vaults, and by the shores of the sea without rational souls, in fantastic
bodies, nourished by the mere elements unless they be married to a man.
Maureen Duffy in The erotic world of faery
Melusine legends are especially connected with the northern,
most Celtic areas of Gaul and the Low Countries, where Melusine is connected
with fairies who guard water sources and are dangerous to humans, especially
men. In all the variants of this story, Melusine marries a mortal man on
the condition that he respect her privacy in some particular way, such
as not coming into her room on a Saturday or not seeing her in the bath.
He violates her condition and she flies away in the form of a dragon.
There's a French medieval tale, for instance, in which
Melusine forbids her husband to see her in the bath. They have children
who each have some strange feature, like a very large tooth or one red
eye and one blue eye. When one day her husband does see her in the bath
he notices that she is a serpent from the waist down. She flees and is
never seen again, but on the day any of her children dies a dragon is seen
flying over the castle lamenting. Her descendents are said to include the
royal lines of Cyprus, Armenia, Bohemia, and Luxembourg.
Images of Melusine appear in French heraldry. She is sometimes
seen with wings, or with two tails. The two-tailed version became an emblem
of alchemy's quest to unify opposites.
e. dragon values in summary
Dragon is an excellent example of the emotional power,
extraordinary multivalency, and ambiguity of an archetype.
Dragon is numinous. It is as if there is a primal maelstrom
of cognitive charge, and all sorts of mythical flotsam is thrown up out
of the whirlpool. How any culture organizes this charge tells us a lot
about that culture.
What are some of the themes that have spewed themselves
out of this mythic charge?
- Dragon as wisdom and authority
- Dragon as divine consort of human
- Dragon as source of fertility and well-being
- Dragon as water being
- Dragon as fire being
- Dragon as guarantor of human order
- Dragon as wrath
- Dragon of wanton destruction, source of evil and death
- Dragon as mother
- Dragon as nature
- Dragon as wildness
- Dragon as shadow
Core values that are stable: dragons are numinous, ancient,
powerful.
Dragons often seem to be something to do with what Jung
calls shadow: they are wild, angry, fierce, supernatural, alluring, fantastical,
amoral, vital, hungry.
Christian hero stories can be said to be stories about
ego in pursuit of its ego ideal and at war with aspects of body. In a Christian
historical context fighting dragons seems to have had something to do with
defeating paganism and establishing a human order farther from the natural
order, thereby exiling much of the natural order into the human unconscious.
The range of dragon values hints that along with wishes,
feelings and knowledge unwanted by socialized ego, the unconscious also
includes a larger self.
There are easy associations of serpents and dragon with
Freud's ideas of phallic symbolism. One commentator says:
Both by tradition and modern dream interpretation the
serpent, of which the dragon is a sub-division, is acknowledged as THE phallic
animal.
But a less patriarchal view can reinterpret phallic symbols,
and especially snakes, as umbilical cord symbols, and such an interpretation
makes sense of association of snakes and dragons with water, and water,
in turn, with the unconscious:
Symbols of the shadow include the snake (as in the garden
of Eden), the dragon, monsters, and demons. It often guards the entrance
to a cave or a pool of water .
2. a story about a female
writer and her relation to dragons
A good deal about Earthsea, about wizards, about Roke
Island, about dragons, had begun to puzzle me.
Le Guin in Reconsidering Earthsea
The texts move from masculine hierarchy to feminine
web, from the tower to the house. Melanie Rawls
Ursula Le Guin, who is now in her late 70s, began writing
about dragons forty years ago. Her early books about Earthsea are primarily
adolescent initiation stories mostly featuring boy heroes and wizard men.
The first of these, A Wizard of Earthsea, was published in 1968 when
she was in her thirties and a housewife with three adolescent children.
In these books male heroes fight male dragons who are familiarly Western.
After three of these books Le Guin thought her Earthsea story was done,
but after an 18-year gap in which she wrote increasingly powerful adult
science fiction, she began to reconsider both women and dragons, so there
was a fourth book, and then two more, the last in 2001.
When I was beginning to research this workshop the web
turned up two journal pieces by women, about the evolution of Le Guin's
vision of dragons. (They're named in the bibliography.) Their work is incorporated
in what I say below.
a. Tehanu and dragon history
revised
The first book of the new series (Tehanu 1990)
has a woman hero rescuing a little girl half-destroyed by her parents.
The little girl, "so badly burnt that the bone has been laid bare
on her cheek," has lost one eye; one hand is a claw; and she has a
"soft, strange voice". And yet it turns out that this traumatized
silenced small being knows the ancient speech of dragons, and at the end
of the book she stands on the edge of a cliff and calls a dragon to save
those who have been good to her.
In Tehanu Le Guin completely revises dragon history.
It turns out that dragons and humans were once "one people, one race,
winged, and speaking the True Language ." There was an evolutionary
split. Those who became humans chose settlement and possession and lost
the True Speech of the Making:
gave up their knowledge of the Language of the Making,
and in exchange received all skill and craft of hand, and ownership of
all that hands can make
"The joy of making, shaping, our mastery."
"And our greed, our weakness, our fear."
Those who became dragons chose air and fire, wildness,
flight and freedom:
Or, as I am going to argue: dragons chose to be Nature
dragons chose to be the act, to be True Speech.
b. Orm Irian
Then, in "Dragonfly," a short story in Tales
from Earthsea, there is the amazing denouement described in the blurb
for this workshop.
When she is first seen, Irian, the female hero of the
tale, is described like this:
She was very tall, very sweaty, with big hands and
feet and mouth and nose and eyes, and a head of wild dusty hair. She was
yelling, "Down! Back to the house, you carrion, you vile sons of bitches!"
to the whining, cowering dogs.
The heroine finds her way off the farm to the island of
the mages and, good story very shortened, finds herself having to defend
herself against the Summoner, a dead-in-life male mage-school authority
who wants her gone. She challenges him to meet her on Roke Knoll, the hill
where things can only be what they truly are. This is how Le Guin describes
what happens next:
The air was darkening around them. The west was only
a dull red line, the eastern sky was shadowy above the sea.
The Summoner looked up at Irian. Slowly he raised his
arms and the white staff in the invocation of a spell, speaking in the
tongue that all the wizards and mages of Roke had learned, the language
of their art, the Language of the Making: "Irian, by your name I summon
you and bind you to obey me!"
She hesitated, seeming for a moment to yield, to come
to him, and then cried out, "I am not only Irian."
At that the Summoner ran up towards her, reaching out,
lunging at her as if to seize and hold her. They were both on the hill
now. She towered above him impossibly, fire breaking forth between them,
a flare of red flame in the dusk air, a gleam of red-gold scales, of vast
wings - then that was gone, and there was nothing there but the woman standing
on the hill path and the tall man bowing down before her, bowing slowly
down to earth, and lying on it.
When the others come up to him, he is only "a huddle
of clothes and dry bones and a broken staff."
As she went farther from them they saw her, all of
them, the great gold-mailed flanks, the spiked, coiling tail, the talons,
the breath that was bright fire. On the crest of the knoll she paused a
while, her long head turning to look slowly round the Isle of Roke, gazing
longest at the Grove, only a blur of darkness in darkness now. Then with
a rattle like the shaking of sheets of brass the wide, vaned wings opened
and the dragon sprang up into the air, circled Roke Knoll once, and flew.
- So here, very suddenly, from one moment to another,
we have an author subverting the West's subliminal equation of the female
body with a monstrous wildness to be slain or tamed, and claiming it as
fierce power and clarity.
c. The other wind
In the last of the Earthsea books there is a showdown
between humankind and dragonkind that comes about through trespass.
Wizards in Le Guin are the humans who have kept some of
the ancient knowledge of the time before the split. They have assembled
remaining scraps of the True Language of the Making, and those scraps are
their magical spells: they have the effect of commands. Inevitably some
wizards go bad and overreach.
The worst of these has used his wizard genius to cheat
death. The result is that humans no longer dissolve back into nature when
they die, but instead go into a walled-off realm of the living dead where
they drift as disembodied spooks in a sunless, lifeless land of dust and
stone.
In The other wind dragons have going on murderous
rampages, blasting humans, burning villages. Through the mediation of the
burnt dragon-girl, it is discovered that the dragons are marauding because
the territory walled off for the afterworld was stolen from them.
Do you think we dragons fly only on the winds of this
world? Do you think our freedom, for which we gave up all possessions,
is no greater than that of the mindless gulls? That our realm is a few
rocks at the edge of your rich islands? You own the earth, you own the
sea. But we are the fire of sunlight, we fly the wind! You wanted land
to own. You wanted things to keep. And you have that. That was the division,
the verw nadan. But you were not content with
your share. You wanted the wind! And by the spells and wizardries of those
oath-breakers, you stole half our realm from us, walled it away from life
and light, so that you could live there forever. Thieves, traitors!"
There follows a classic hero tale, a perilous expedition
by wizard and hero to undo the wall, free the undead, and give the dragons'
former territory back to sunlight and living air. In this version of the
tale, however, dragon girls and human women are central, and death is accepted:
We die to rejoin the undying world
"I think," Tehanu said in her soft, strange
voice, "that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me
live. I can give back to the world all that I didn't do. All that I might
have been and couldn't be ... I can give them back to the world. To the
lives that haven't been lived yet."
d. in sum: dragon values
in Le Guin's later Earthsea books
- Fierce energy of own mind, own feeling
- Playing with large winds
- Fantasy
- Wisdom
- Incisive perception
- Courage
- Freedom
- Unsentimentality, impartiality, the penetrating eye
3. a story about psychological/physical
dissociation and integration
a. the land of the dead
Jung dreamt a great deal about the dead, the land of
the dead, and the rising of the dead. These represented the unconscious
itself
hold parts of our experience as a "foreign body"
within ourselves Freud
The land of the dead is divided from the rest of Earthsea
by a stone wall. On the other side of the wall there is no sunlight, no
color, a grey murk, no plants, no animals, only dust and rocks; and there
the dead wander disembodied and isolated.
The dark, dry, changeless world after death of Earthsea
comes (in so far as I am conscious of its sources) from the Greco-Roman
idea of Hades' realm, from certain images in Dante, and from one of Rilke's
Elegies. A realm of shadow, dust, where nothing changes and "lovers
pass each other in silence." Le Guin, interview
in the Guardian
b. dissociation
Roth sees the moment of punishment for pleasure or
exploration as the moment of the Division (or the divided self, according
to Gilligan) [Student
packet]
Life becomes a living contradiction when we are conditioned
to battle against the most fundamental energy from the first time it arose.
The land of the dead is the land of deadness dissociation
- instances when the child, and later the adult, stop living in the moment,
stop knowing what's what, stop caring about what needs urgent care
all the kinds of deadness that can add up so we find ourselves living half
lives.
Dissociating: intentionally
or unknowingly using various means to cut off feeling or knowing that wd
otherwise be conscious.
So where is the land of the dead?
Where are unfelt feelings and unknown knowledge? The guess that makes sense
to me and to various people writing about somatic therapies is that they
continue a sort of exiled deathlike life in cut-off parts of the body.
Carol Gilligan's account of dissociation in The birth
of pleasure describes " a traumatizing of love that leads the
psyche to dissociate itself from the body, which then becomes the repository
of experiences that cannot be known or spoken."
Here's another of Gilligan's definitions:
Trauma is the shock to the psyche that leads to dissociation:
our ability to separate ourselves from parts of ourselves, to create a
split within ourselves so that we can know and also not know what we know,
feel and yet not feel our feelings.
What kinds of trauma can we mean here - birth trauma,
developmental traumas of early love as described by Gilligan, educational
traumas of being indoctrinated into cultural lies, social traumas of gender
and other exclusion, traumas of living separated from nature as described
by Paul Shepard.
So the land of the dead is among other things the walled
off or inhibited aspects of bodily structure, bodily ability to be lively.
c. what women dissociate
- Feared/unwanted feelings: anger, lust,
- Feared/unwanted perception
- Feared/unwanted comprehension
- Knowledge of losses - a way of holding a loss often said
not to be a loss
- Knowledge of attack
- Knowledge of jealousy, envy, spite, harm
- Knowledge of brilliance
- Sharp judgment
- High ambition
d. signs of dissociation:
what integration means psychologically
history that bears the marks of trauma: a heightened
vigilance, a loss of voice, the inability to tell one's story
a voice is seemingly lost or confused with another
voice that finds more cultural resonance and thus carries more authority.
"I don't know" often signaled the onset of
dissociation
patterns of relationship that mark a patriarchal social
order the silent mother, envy among women, the son's dilemma, the
law of the father
when we lose pleasure we idolize Pleasure, or else
we disparage it
Suddenly duty looms, work, obligation, law and order,
all the things that appear to stand in the way of pleasure along with the
internal obstacles, such as guilt and shame and fear.
- Sadness
- Powerlessness
- Confusion and doubt
- Fear and dislike of critical thinking
- Poverty
- Addiction
- Fantasies of transcendence
e. what integration means
physically
Trauma in Greek means "a
wound, a lesion, a structural breach."
Trauma physiology - dis-integration
structural segregation fragmentation structural alteration
that impedes functioning of body as a whole.
Many structural forms of dissociation: central nervous
system, endocrine, musculature right and left hemisphere disconnection,
language separated from sensory circuits - muscular rigidity - inhibition
of emotional chemistry, etc.
- Research on the physiology of post-traumatic stress disorders
- Gestaltists
- Goldstein
f. how to integrate
the individual's journey to psychological wholeness,
known in analytical psychology as the process of individuation
one must be able to go to these places, where the lost
fragments are
work they are attempting to do by going back, by going
in.
Very briefly: The usual pattern is, first, of a break
away or a departure from the local social order and context; next, a long,
deep retreat inward and backward, as it were, in time, and inward, deep
into the psyche; a chaotic series of encounters there, darkly terrifying
experiences, and presently (if the victim is fortunate) encounters of a
centering kind, fulfilling, harmonizing, giving new courage; and then finally,
in such fortunate cases, a return journey of rebirth to life.
Direct physical means - yoga
and linking
Focusing, somatic experiencing
All that seems to be needed is some education about
it, somatic processing, and then people have one session, feel the shifts
in their bodies and they are on it after years and years of other psycho-talk-therapy.
Levine feels that "body sensation, rather than
intense emotion, is the key to healing trauma." (pg. 12).
Containment/therapy
role of the witness
My experience has been that when I feel safely contained
by an other, a more fragile self can appear. When my teacher contained
me by understanding me better than I understood myself, I came to trust
her. When I learned to trust her, I was learning to trust. When I learned
trust I was also learning to trust myself. My sense of therapy, then, is
that the feeling of safe containment, rather coldly called transference
among the Freudians, may be essential to early stages (at least) of deep
work.
Stop doing what dissociates
Hard challenges
4. a story about creative work as integral
Wizards in Le Guin are humans who have kept some aspects
of dragon nature. They can shape-shift, and they have a special connection
with truth they are able to discern what people hide about themselves,
their true name. Wizards also have a mediating capability they meet
dragons cautiously always, but sometimes as temporary equals.
My sense of wizards is that they are artists that
magic has to do with what Le Guin herself does, something about spells and
evocations, risks, illusions, and creations marvelously out of the ordinary:
creation as the magical thing people are able to do.
In these last two sections I want to talk about how
a hard creative task a task like creating a packet or a graduating
product can be a means of calling dragons, opening the wall that segregates
the dead land, and at times springing into magnificent flight ourselves.
Below are some of the ways creative effort can integrate
bodies and make them more effective wholes. They seem to me to be related
to each other, just said in different ways:
a. effort, caring
When the task is hard and when we care a lot about the
outcome, a lot of energy is raised and that energy can either lapse into
fear and freakouts and spinning, or else it can become unusual focus and
intelligence. Raised energy raises possibilities for integration because
more circuits are alive and available to reconnect.
b. somatic processing,
'somatic experiencing'
I have noticed that when I am working well in any sort
of writing, academic writing as well as creative writing, the part of me
that is making sentences stops and consults something else, something silent.
Eugene Gendlin calls this something a 'felt sense.' My guess is that this
way of working builds wider, freer cognitive networks that contact both
sides of the body and span both hemispheres of the brain.
Gendlin, Eugene (1981) Focusing, Bantam Books.
c. truth telling
To lie habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact
with the unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep
but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak
to those who want something else more than truth. Adrienne
Rich
When Rich says the unconscious ceases to speak to those
who want something else more than they want truth I know what she means
but want to make sure it isn't taken as a kind of judgment on sin. It helps
to understand that 'the' unconscious is not just one thing. There are aspects.
In my experience there are nonconscious young selves who are like scared
kids, and the conscious self does have to win their trust.
There can also be a larger self, though, who knows more
than the conscious self and is more secure, so that it doesn't need to
trust the conscious self - it's more the other way around, the conscious
self needs to learn to trust it, which it does by listening to what
it says and testing what it hears. In my experience the larger self never
turns its back; it is always willing to speak. Listening to it is what
wanting nothing more than the truth means.
There is an experimental study by Hilgard, who studied
hypnotism in the 60s and 70s, that is suggestive about this larger self.
The interesting thing Hilgard discovered is that when the conscious self
had been hypnotized into believing false suggestions, there nonetheless
was a nonconscious part of the body that remained oriented in the actual
world that had not been hypnotized. (Sometimes we experience this
more stable self when we are drunk and notice there are as if two selves
present, a drunk self and a vigilant sober self.)
Hilgard E 1977 Divided consciousness: multiple controls
in human thought and action John Wiley & Sons
My guess is that whenever we tell difficult truths we
strengthen connections between the conscious self and nonconscious true
knowledge. This also applies to packet work and final products. The more
we are willing to say, the more we find ourselves able to know.
d. passion and dispassion
happening together
In any of the difficult human skills, for instance poetry
or parenting, raw energies have to operate alongside an informed, discriminating
technical mind. Emotion and detachment have to exist together. The coming
together of passion and detachment is a precondition for good work, because
feeling gives the work drive and experienced judgment gives it quality.
The coming together happens because the work needs it, but at the same
time this coming together integrates the worker, reconnects the
worker's body.
Sometimes the work is so difficult it can't be done by
the limited conscious self, and then the effort may accidentally evoke
dissociated circuits for example, dissociated younger feeling may
become conscious. In these moments the conscious self, if it knows what
it's doing, can skillfully relate itself to emotion so the dissociation
is permanently undone. The ghosts can dissolve into the sunlight, no longer
held in the land of the dead.
And when the conscious self doesn't know what it's doing
and fears being swamped it can ask the larger self for help. Either way,
integration happens.
5. a story about female power and the larger self
Here is a paragraph from Adrienne Rich's Of woman born:
In arguing that we have by no means yet explored or
understood our biological grounding, the miracle and paradox of the female
body and its spiritual and political meanings, I am really asking whether
women cannot begin, at last, to think through the body, to connect what
has been so cruelly disorganized - our great mental capacities, hardly used;
our highly developed tactile sense; our genius for close observation; our
complicated, pain-enduring, multipleasured physicality."
In this last section I want to bring the story back to
the girl who became a dragon and jumped into the sky. Can any of us turn
into dragons and fly on the other wind? When we say 'I' can we mean a dragon
self?
a. Le Guin as herself a
dragon
the lore, the runes of power, the spells, the rules,
the raising of the forces - that was all dead to me. Somebody else's language.
I used to think, I could be dressed up as a warrior, with a lance and a
sword and a plume and all, but it wouldn't fit, would it? What would I
do with the sword? Would it make me a hero? I'd be myself in clothes that
didn't fit, is all, hardly able to walk.
Ursula Kroeber grows up in a distinguished household.
Her parents are anthropologists at UC Berkeley. Her father is the most
famous anthropologist of his generation and her mother publishes a book
about the last member of a California tribe.
At twenty five she marries Charles Le Guin who becomes
a historian at the University of Oregon in Portland. She never has a job:
she bears and raises three children and keeps house for them all like the
most ordinary housewife. When you see her at readings she's (now) a humorous-looking
little biddy, who talks like any ordinary middle-class grandma.
But in her lifetime she has written a series of books
for adolescents that is in every library in every English-speaking nation,
and translated in many others. And at the same time she has written adult
science fiction in which she plays with the largest themes of space and
time, and invents whole anthropologies for invented planets.
In The dispossessed she credibly creates a physicist
in the process of discovering how to accomplish faster-than-light interstellar
travel, and an anarchist society whose founding philosopher is a woman
called Odo. In The left hand of darkness she invents a planet on
which no one has any kind of gender except when they're in heat, and then
they can morph into either male or female father a child in one cycle
and mother one in another.
In other words, Le Guin, in her writing, jumps into the
air and flies on the dragon's wind. She is continually thinking about the
largest wholes: whole planets, whole galaxies, a whole universe in which
Earth can be seen as it will be eons from now. She has intervened powerfully
in the lives of the young, without ever bothering to wear a suit or run
for office. She has made herself a friend to hundreds of thousands of lonely
minds isolated in their own communities. She has strenuously defended clarity
and sanity, lucid mortality, beauty and sweet-heartedness, skill and realness,
freedom and integrity, within a dominant culture where all of those are
under attack. She has found a way to succeed without playing along with
the corrupt, banal culture that surrounds her.
b. dragon powers in women's
work
In Earthsea Revisioned
you write that dragons are what is not owned
In this MA program I see women scared to know what they
know, scared to open the can of worms, scared to challenge authority, scared
to know authority isn't looking after their interests, scared to say This
is what I see, this is what I know, scared to have negative thoughts,
guilty about negative thoughts, scared to write critical papers because
they're scared of negative thoughts. Scared of anger. Scared to know the
worst, scared of chaos and failure. Scared no one will love them if they
show how large they are.
I also see women wanting to breathe fire.
- So what would it mean to call a dragon, to jump off
the cliff and become a dragon?
- Fierce energy of own mind, own feeling
- Playing with large winds
- Fantasy
- Knowledge
- Incisive perception
- Courage
From a student packet last semester (thank you Deidre):
my emotions made a radical shift from grief to rage
It reminds me that in the world as it exists, it is not safe for women
to be vulnerable. That's not right. It's not right because it's only through
vulnerability that one can truly and fully experience love and joy and
pleasure. It makes me so angry when I think about it
a vicious dog off to the side of me. His mouth was
open and I could see his sharp teeth and feel his fierceness and anger.
I was compelled against my better judgment to place my hand in its mouth.
Amazingly, it did not bite my hand off. When I awoke, I felt a body shift
such as I can feel when my thoughts precisely match my emotions. My first
thought of the day was, "What if everything I have been taught is
false?"
And this passage about Susan Griffin's Women and nature:
"We say that we are part of what is shaped and
we are part of what is shaping. We sleep and remember our dreams. We awaken.
We tell you we feel every moment; we tell you each detail affects us."
This is where I begin to realize that my stuckness is not because I am
alone it is because I never realized that I am not. Other women feel this,
and it is because I am a woman that I feel this so intensely. Griffin supplies
words where I could not. But she does not stop at the point I have: she
presses through it and says, "We allow ourselves to be overwhelmed.
We allow ourselves ecstasy, screaming, hysteria, laughter, weeping, rage,
wonder, awe, softness, pain, we are crying out. (There is a roaring inside
us, we whisper.) WE ROAR." (197)
c. an I that is girl, a dragon and more
There are things in the psyche which I do not produce,
but which produce themselves and have their own life.
Being open to the voice within you is how your life
happens. Again and again, it plunges you into the unknown. What is required,
it seems, is a willingness to commit yourself to the whole known,
unknown, and unknowable and trust the path your indwelling truth
is showing you.
My conscious personality is most secure when it feels
in control. But if it encounters the Self it finds that it is only a small
part of a larger whole.
What does 'I' mean?
Jung distinguished the ego complex and the Self, and talked
about individuation as the project of a lifetime.
Psychic process, for Jung is individuation, the cultivation
of a running dialogue between ego and self · Self is the unconscious
center of one's entire organism · It is organismic process, the
principle by which all the parts of every living being, from the protozoa
on up, work together for the good of the whole · Ego is reflective
process, whereby one constructs a narrative me which knows only part of
the wholeness of its own organism · Individuation is the process
which arises from the tension between self and ego
[Haule ch 6 summary]
We have a choice in how we mean 'I', and it's necessary
to make the choice consciously.
We can mean the limited conscious sense of self, or
we can mean the whole body and its whole self, the unconscious parts included.
|