The Hostage (Issue #7)
Three Parallel Stories about the Role of Surrender in Trauma, Addiction and Creativity
It’s been nearly three weeks since my last post. For those who’ve pledged monthly subscription funds and others who haven’t but have been following closely, thank you for your patience. In the future I will try to post some kind of snippet or acknowledgement if an issue runs longer than a week.
I am extremely excited and have been at the tablet at every available opportunity working on this issue. It’s about multiple subjects, each of which keep me inspired to share the work I get to create. If you’ve been reading over the last ten weeks you know that my goal has been to articulate the content of my dreams and daydreams (or images I’ve witnessed in states that Carl Jung called “Active Imagination”.
But this week you’re getting three narratives remembered from actual conscious experience.
WARNING: The following contains images that suggest acts of violence and cruelty and may be triggering to some viewers.
Each of the three stories starts at the top and flows down.
The Hostage
Blind and naked Ignorance gives birth to devotion
Rural idiot walks out into savage Gotham
Bedeviled over bottled possibility
Doesn't see the thunderhead
Or feel the dropped barometer
The doom prophet flea squeaks through a megaphone
But the newcomer sleepwalks through his alarm clock
Cerberus opens the door, surprise
Tramples and reduces the clown down to size,
Under the whims of the merciless three-headed hound
In the darkness at the bottom of the barrel
Has the inner man finally come to his marrow?
They turn him into a mendicant
Make him pass the hat for the next living moment
How could he be so naive and inflated
That he eclipses the truth
And now believes the promise of thieves
That he'll die at the hand of professionals
Another example of unmet demands
But they leave him a lost living corpse, alone
Gasping for air behind a crack in a chemical window.
Found by the underground beast and bound
Asphyxiates on the coward's fix
Then a formidable lover, horned and possessed
Steals his reflection, collects him, obsessed
A grateful slave now unburdened of sorrow
The gravity of choice
To exist in a world to loud for the voice
A man with an antidote can
Get back to business
Rise from under blankets of belief
When death was distant planet
Embers smolder for the young who long for terror
Who dream the roar of an awesome fire
Plastic peace hides the strife
All the elders have already offered their necks
They doubt what destiny’s razor decides
In comes the daimon from out of the blue
To bring its willing heart
Both divine and diabolical
By virtue we try to ply them apart
But more than most, the artist seems to live a double life
Rilke was right, each angel is a twin
To discard one's devils is to fall deaf to the trumpets of truth
That say stay and call out the good
By his pen he ploughs a new path
Out of the procession of sots
Who appear by way of shortcuts
Mediocre monomaniacs
Those that expect religious emotion
And transact euphoric escape
Every step forward toward something neverending
But though he knows he'll never see his destination
He still shows up to the chair
Relieved to inch closer to the idea
That his heart be a tenament
When the storm touches down
While the hordes hit the interstate
Where the road runs out
In this way he keeps the wound open
At a table in a room
Breathes deep in the middle of the mess
Because the story of the wounded is the best medicine
Curse become gift
When willing to ignite sparks as a witness
Dig for the spring of the imagination
Reflections on The Hostage
I recently discovered the work of Jungian analyst, author, and recovered alcoholic, Linda Schierse Leonard. Her book, The Call to Create (Harmony, 2000) was one of those books I read nearly all in one sitting and didn’t want to return to the library. It was a book that helped me know what traits I might be able to use to bring more balance to areas of my creativity that seemed locked in the tumult of polemics. I’m so grateful to Lisa Marchiano from This Jungian Life Podcast for mentioning Leonard’s work. But it was another title of hers that inspired the issue you are reading now.
Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction (Shambala, 1989) is a journey through the parallel archetypes that confront the darkness in addiction, recovery, and creativity. This describes a poignant intersection for me and in the book she gives language to states of being that I have only ever felt and struggled to articulate. Those who have had this experience with other books will understand how empowering it can be to finally have words for lived experience. It is part of connecting with others, and asking for help, and can therefore be life-changing.
I used to think, although it makes me cringe to admit, that drugs, alcohol, and altered states of mind and body gave me some esoteric insight to creativity. I idolized the artists I saw as the most misunderstood and mysterious, the stars, so distant perhaps, that no person seemed to be able to reach them. I really wanted that kind of admiration from afar from others. I wanted you to love me but to be unable to ask or expect anything from me. I wanted you to include me but never to call on me. I thought if I went far enough, meaning if I got high enough, did large enough quantities (and didn’t die), it would make me interesting beyond what I could produce unaffected. I couldn’t see until decades later, that it just made me an asshole. And I had to be at death’s door, at the limits of my own willpower to see that.
It took having my identity crushed for me to open up to a lot of help from people who had already learned the hard way that self-centeredness was miserable, and that selflessness was freedom. I owe so much to these people who’ve walked beside me and supported me unconditionally throughout the last three years. This includes many of you who are reading right now. You’ve been there to show me how to keep going when I let the going get impossible. And many of you woke me up to an idea. It’s an idea I think many people grow up with, one that was offered to me regularly from an early age, but one that I wouldn’t accept. Which is probably how I got so lost to begin with.
The idea was that maybe I’m not in control the way I think I am. That even in my rare sober and rational moments, I was not the great designer of lifestyle that I thought I was. What if life, because it’s something I was given(?), does not belong to me outright? What if my perception of the world and my role in it has been my problem? The simplicity of this idea, that I’m not God, basically, is laughable. Yet my behavior for twenty three years at least would show that I believe, on some level, that I am. I have always been selfish enough to justify immoral, unethical, and illegal behavior as a response to irrational fears. I conditioned myself to behave this way, and I wrecked a lot of relationships in doing so.
Getting sober, it became vital for me to seek and apply the powers of good that lie beyond my own will. I haven’t followed one specific religion. I’ve simply started to pay attention to my spiritual life, meaning that part of my life that isn’t intellectual, physical, or social but is more about how I relate to myself and the world around me, and maintaining the tools to keep a wholesome perspective on daily events. I’ve also learned that being spiritually fit is not a static place one arrives at but rather a direction one is heading as long as it is backed up with constructive action. So I began seeking and that looked like me awkwardly and privately praying to “the air” every morning and night.
In the early convalescent phase of sobriety when my brain and body were doing a lot of healing, I didn’t have the fortitude to revisit my creativity, at least not in typical modes. I felt it was potentially dangerous to dig through my emotions, that I was somewhat fragile without the “solution” of alcohol and the numbing of drugs. It took well into my second year for my life to get stable enough that I could sit in front of a sketchbook or at the piano. But I started a practice again and occasionally felt inspired in familiar ways, but I was still wary of beginning any “projects”, formally. I feared getting lost in the details, unhealthily attached to the creative product and my definitions of success. In my active addiction I squandered hours of my life and other people’s time in anguish over unfinished work that I thought I should be able to make perfect. I knew that was a toxic attitude but I couldn’t help it.
Recently I learned how unreasonable it looks for an artist to hate themselves and still expect to love what they, themselves have expressed as art. The spiritual condition has to come before any of that. Which is backwards from how I used to think, that great art might redeem my misdeeds. That led to putting off the maintenance of my relationships to self and others indefinitely. My life became totally unmanageable. I put friends and family in the position to have to draw lines in the sand, which was unfair and left me feeling isolated. And the worse my condition, the greater the pressure to produce something worthy of redemption. That’s an unnatural degree of priority to place on art. It doesn’t work. And it’s equally ridiculous to expect people who are upset with you to be interested in your artwork.
As I began to seek spirituality through daily practices of prayer, meditation, spiritual readings, phone calls with like-minded seekers, and meetings for fellowship, something unexpected happened. I began to love myself. (No, not in that narcissistic way of self-obsession) I saw myself taking actions in service and began to develop a healthy self esteem. I thought about myself less and less, and eventually loved ones began to ask me about my creativity and encourage me to set aside time to explore it. In the meantime my seeking led me to storytelling and mythology as a way to communicate with the unconscious parts of my soul and the souls of others. That led to re-discovering the Collected Works of Carl Jung and his theories about the “Self” vs. the “self”. The idea that the unconscious goes through stages of development the same way humans develop consciously, and that the goal of that development has always been becoming whole, or integrated, a unified human being.
These ideas meshed well with what I’d applied through twelve step recovery, the tools I credit for helping save my life, and I began to see that creativity had always been about accessing and expressing the images that makeup the language of the soul. I concluded that I need not separate creativity from spirituality and recovery but rather combine the practice of spiritual disciplines to the making of art. The result was life-changing. It became ok to make mistakes again, a critical component to a healthy creativity. For the first time I can remember I became patient enough to leave a project and faithful enough to know I would return to finish incomplete work. I stopped taking credit for every aspect of my work, and made it a habit to recognize the role others played in the process.
Underneath all this was a principle I learned in the rooms of recovery, “You have to give it away to keep it.” While I think a certain degree of frivolity is good when playing in an artistic space, there is also the intention behind the practice. This is like the fuel that drives ambition. Having a sense of purpose for my life has, I hope, enriched my art, and also been comforting when I might’ve otherwise been dismayed by the inevitability that what makes it onto the canvas will never perfectly match the initial inspiration.
So the message through all of this I think is that if you are feeling stuck in cycles of living or a lifestyle that doesn’t suit you; if you feel at the edge of your own capability to grow or improve, or be happy for that matter; start paying attention to your dreams, your daydreams and fantasies, your fears and resentments, and anything that lives below the surface. The substance that can only be found in darkness often contains the gold. The darkness of my past, when I’m willing to share how I got through it, has become my most valuable asset. If I don’t find a way to use it for good, it’s liable to consume me with guilt, grief, remorse, and shame.
This issue is entirely devoted to the first chapter of Witness to the Fire: Creativity and the Veil of Addiction by Linda Schierse Leonard (Shambala, 1989).
The only video I could find of Linda giving a talk.
P.S. The illustrated narrative in the first column of the above artwork depicts something that happened to me in October of 2010. I’m lucky that my mother was there in the following days to take me to see a therapist who specialized in acute trauma treatment. I did neglect the power that experience had over me as I spiraled further into addiction later, but eventually went back after getting clean and sober and reached a point where the effects of PTSD do not run my thought life today. If you or someone you know has been traumatically affected as the victim of a violent crime, help is available and it’s worth talking to someone.
Also I’d love to hear from you! Please reach out and tell me what you think of the direction of the content thus far!