Part 11 of Dark Matter

from Writing the Bright Moment – inspiration & guidance for writers

Hello my friends

Some of you know that I am, and have been since 1991, primarily a writer and holistic course and retreat leader. My courses, always involving writing, have drawn together creative and reflective writing with eco-writing, therapeutic writing, and the psychology of myth (for which I had ‘a name’ back in the ’90s). Always they contain a drawing together of what has been described as ‘the culture of nature’, and soulwork. My passion is transformation: of each of us into all we may be; and, equally significantly, a re-visioning of our relationship to the more-than-human world and the web of life.

If you have signed up for the writing side of my work, here is a post for you.

However, my time is now split between that, and our current project, an experiment with veganic subsistence gardening and reforesting, out of which is arising a vegan cookbook. If you have signed up for following our adventures on the land in harmony with the other species whose patch we share, there’ll be another post for you very soon. (I also promised some more vegan recipes a while back; I’ll attend to those soon, as well.)

Meantime, here I’m following on from where I left the Dark Matter 1 post a little while ago. Here’s the second excerpt from that chapter in my book Writing the Bright Moment. (Scroll down.)

DARK MATTER 11

(In Part 1 I spoke of C G Jung’s work on the Shadow, that subconscious part of us that reveals itself in dreams, unguarded moments, projections onto others etc.) The Shadow, though, is not all darkness. In the Shadow, too, also live aspects of the beautiful, the loving, the kind, the compassionate, in inverse proportion to how we recognise in ourselves and live out these things in our conscious life. A rule of thumb for recognising Shadow material, light or dark, is by the strength of our emotional reaction to these qualities in others. If something about another person makes you mad, or envious, or engulfed with admiration, it may be that you need to acknowledge and work on that quality in yourself.

The Shadow has enormous vitality. Our impulse to change and grow comes from the Shadow. Our instinct to survive dwells here, along with all the parts of us, as above (earlier post), which are repressed and in exile.

‘Civilisation’ tends to squeeze the vital life out of human beings. Inasmuch as we learn not to act out our homicidal or suicidal or promiscuous instincts this is just as well; but in keeping the lid on these we also make access to our juicy creative life harder; and ironically the transmutation of these impulses into creativity (as opposed to acting on them) is a fruitful and healthy way of processing Shadow material; so we lose out twice.

Just so long as we don’t get ‘stuck’ in the Shadow, our acquaintance with it rounds out our lives, makes us wholer, more creative, more compassionate, wiser. It makes our lives solid. ‘My being would be a skeleton, a shell, / If this dark passion... / Did not forever feed me vital blood,’ said Claude McKay.

What’s more, we know from much research that writing about emotionally-charged issues can reduce their debilitating effects on the psyche; and the physiological effects of this kind of writing are well-documented: it can help decrease blood pressure and heart rate, improve immune function – white blood cell count – and reduce rates of minor illnesses.

All of us fear at times, and maybe many of us all the time, looking our demons in the eye. I guess this is because we are afraid we may not be able to handle it; and maybe we fear their unleashing. Is this why our Western life is so addicted to busyness, one of the reasons why we avoid solitude and silence?               

I think it’s important not to be afraid of the dark matter of the heart. We need to be willing to approach our feelings. As one of my course participants, Terry Glover, put it:

Space to bleed. For me,
I think, a necessity
in forging my (he)art.

We think of dark as evil, and we use the word ‘demonic’ to mean ‘diabolic’. But ‘daimonic’ in its archaic sense was closer to the notion of ‘genius’, or presiding spirit. To the Greeks, daimon (or daemon) meant ‘divine power’, ‘fate’ or ‘god’; the daimon was also seen as spiritual advisor or mediator between humans and the gods. Psychologist Rollo May suggests that in their concept of the daimon the Greeks achieved a union of good and evil; one in which personal consciousness integrates the daimonic.

Whether we like it or not, it is a truism that ‘the deeper pain carves into our being the more joy we can contain’. We all have places within us where the scars of past hurt, loss, grief, rage still itch, or throb, or ache. Our survival instincts might wish us to keep apart from these feelings; and there are times when this self-protectiveness is entirely appropriate for healing. But if you turn away, consistently, from the ‘dark’ stuff, your soul will suffer; and so will your life; and your writing. There will be a deadening where there should be something quick and vital.

In Western culture, where we so often think in polarities, we can tend to relate to our personal demons, our difficult feelings, in one of two ways. Either we repress those feelings, because we’re ‘nice people’; or we indulge in them by letting rip at whoever ‘caused’ them. Much of the time, we veer between the two.

In fact, neither of these two ways is about ‘relating’ – to feelings or anything else. What is hard for most of us is to recognise, honour and then find a good way, a healthy way, to relate to our feelings and our instinctual nature; a way which doesn’t involve the projection of our darkness onto others by exploiting, manipulating or blowing other people out of the water, and doesn’t involve simply shoving these difficult aspects of our nature back under the lid again.

There is an enormous amount of energy stored in these feelings. When we ‘blow’ at other people, we dissipate it. When we suppress or repress our negative thoughts and feelings, the effort involved in holding them down, even – or maybe especially – when it becomes a modus vivendi, uses up so much emotional and psychic energy that little is left for living creatively: our life-energy, eros, our libido, too is repressed.

I also think that sometimes when we hit ‘writers’ block’ we may be on the cusp of uncovering, or recovering, something shadowy but important. At times like this our obvious fear, clearly, is of the blank page and the sometimes-overwhelming sense of our responsibility for filling it, for finding the ‘right’ words to do the subject justice. And it is often also about where we have to go in the process of uncovering it.

Writing can offer a container, a safe – harmless – way of expressing this material, which will also allow us to process it. This Shadow material can then be used to fuel our creative writing – look at the work produced by writers such as Plath, Woolf, Solzhenitsyn, Neruda, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, D H Lawrence, Lorca: Shadow writers all of them; sometimes uncomfortable but always authentic. You can see the taproots of their writing dripping with mud and blood.

Robert Bly, in his A Little Book on the Human Shadow, suggests that all literature ‘can be thought of as creations by the “dark side” to enable it to rise up from the earth and join the sunlit consciousness again.’ He tells us that unless the Shadow informs a piece of writing that work will remain lifeless. Living with our spiritual and intellectual lives split off from our physical soulful lives can breed nothing other than schism.

‘If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things,’ says Ben Okri, ‘of things that we can effortlessly digest and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?’

^{© Roselle Angwin 2005/2024}

Thank you my friends for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts; and I’d love it if you shared this post, too.