The Cerebral Mum

I am trying to extricate all the puzzle pieces.

I am thinking about archetypes and the shadow and the ego and the persona and I cannot entangle one from the other, if I even recognise them at all. I have an inkling that my masculine side, a strength I grew, has gained too tight a grip on me. I feel, but I feel in principle. I feel and express those feelings rationally. I manage them. As I write this, it doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me. I wonder if it is?

I wrote this excerpt not very long ago, a part of a post I did not finish which meant to make a comparison between Big Sis’ and my way of dealing with strong emotion…

My mind works in a way that conceptualises, intellectualises my emotions. My emotions are filtered cerebrally. I am not without passion though, and if my emotions pass through these filters (clearing the debris of petty, narcissistic, self-aggrandising or self-destructive ones hopefully) I express them. The principle I work on is this: It is either important enough to be addressed or it isn’t important enough to hold on to.

Obviously, this kind of negotiation within myself involves trying to determine the motivations of the person I am responding to as much as trying to understand my own. In any given situation, another’s intentions or needs may be more important, even if my feelings are justified. For me, relationships are an endless cycle of these types of negotiations. I have no expectation that people should always behave toward me in a way that suits my needs, but I chose to act when a line is crossed. My intention is not necessarily to change the other person’s behaviour; it is to make them aware of how their behaviour effects me. At worst, I then learn that they don’t care. At best, I succeed in communicating.

Is there something wrong in my thinking? I think perhaps it is that “thinking” has too tight a grip on me, that my filtering system is making parts of me feel voiceless.

The possibility of that is painful. Because I think (I cannot stop saying I think…) that this rational strength, this reasonableness, was the boon I brought back the last time I went into the dark wood. How awful that I have corrupted it. Just… how awful.

I have to ask myself, all those years ago, did I not grow at all? Did I just change modalities?

Last night, when I wrote the word connection, something I wrote in my novel came to my mind, but I could not find it to quote. As I was searching, I realised how unpalatable my protagonist seemed to me - although I love her. I realised that I did not want to reveal her here, in this context. I realised that she engendered shame in me. As a literary character, I am proud of her. How does she stand in relation to me?

The shadow embodies all that is repressed, pushed aside, locked up, forgotten-not only the seven deadly sins, but also the introvert’s extraversion, the intuitive’s sensing side, the thinker’s feeling function, and the emotional person’s thinking side. The shadow contains what we left behind in childhood, our wishes, and our dreams. _{The Third Eve}

Once, I considered her character a shadow, and I learned from her as I began to write her story. She is a far, far from evolved person. She struggles with her identity as a woman, a daughter; she seeks power and is destructive toward men, she drives one man to suicide, aborting her child, acting out in opposition to the mythology of her childhood. She is the Shadow in control.

I’m sure in the beginning, I identified with her in some ways. After all, she came from within me. She did not appear out of thin air. I remember that not long after I gave those first few passages to my boyfriend to read, our relationship began to circle the drain. I always thought the two events were connected.

She frightened him.

It was obvious at the time that she frightened him. That he felt emasculated by it. I made strong arguments about the distinction between a character and an author, yet his visceral response remained. Perhaps his instincts were correct. When I look back at that relationship, I see a story being acted out. I played the fey maiden needing to be saved, and he played the role not, as he thought, of the knight in shining armour, but of my loyal page.

I used him as a mirror to show me my Self as beautiful. I used him to make me feel safe and with that safety, I grew. My growth shifted the power structure in that strange play of ours, until he was faced with the untenable fact that his role was not the one which supported his ego. So childish was our bond; it could not be sustained.

But where did that Shadow go? The one who was first beautiful, then strong, then frightening? I think I danced with her for years. Perhaps I never really incorporated her. Perhaps I just chose parts of her that I could shape at will. With my rational mind. If so, perhaps she is roaring again.

Perhaps my “protagonist” can provide me some clue as to what is going on beneath the surface of my world. I don’t like that now, in my virginal state as Mother, I will need to dig symbolically into my relationship with the masculine. But I think it is that screaming Lilith and that remnant Persephone who have been restrained for too long.

Maybe. I wonder how clearly I’m seeing. Everything is blurred. Dark and blurred. I think my eyes are white. I think I am blind.

STORY

Blindman, will you be my lover
will you love all that you can see
will you be my analyst, my piano-ist
and unlock the shape of me

I thought it was you who sat at my head
held my mind in your white-vice eyes
and called me child

I thought it was you who kept me fed
drank my tears and never told lies
and called me child

Blindman, will you be my lover
will you love all that you can see
will you be my analyst, my piano-ist
and unlock the shape of me

I wanted it to be you who made me forget
who lost my age in a glass palace cage
and called me child

Blindman, will you be my lover
will you love all that you can see
will you be my analyst, my piano-ist
help me dance across the keys
and unlock the shape of me

And a voice says…
I saw you once upon a time
when your skin was still green
and your hair was still gold
and I cradled my voice in the
flame of your hair but I
can’t untell you child…

My head is held
I can’t untell you child
My head is held
I can’t untell you child
Call me child
I can’t untell you…

I need a blind man.

[Original Lyrics - 199?]