CHAPTER 6
The Paradox of Our
Shadow Self
Carl Jung came up with
the word shadow in his study of the human personality. In his essay “On the
Psychology of the Unconscious” he speaks of the shadow as the other in us, the
unconscious personality of the same sex, the reprehensible inferior, the other
that embarrasses or shames us. “By
shadow I mean the ‘negative’ side of the personality, the sum of all those
unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently
developed functions and the content of the personal unconscious,” says Jung; which
makes the shadow “both the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering
redeemer who can provide it,” as the editors of Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams describe the
hidden dark side of our personality.
In a word, our
shadow self is who we are not that desperately wants to be who we are.
It is our paradoxical self that we don’t
want to acknowledge. It is the hidden, repressed dark side of our conscious ego
personality, and just because we refuse to acknowledge our dark shadow self does
not mean it does not exist. We behave as though it doesn’t, but it
exists despite our refusal to acknowledge it. This is why Jung said that it
takes great moral courage to see our shadow, which points to the imperative of One Rule to Live By: Be Good—the
redemptive power of the most noble virtue.
But it’s much too soon yet to get to the point of my imperative,
both personal and literary. I need sufficient context to make the point
relevant, let alone credible. So, let me quote a spiritual musing that I posted
on my blog Saturday January 20, 2018 that speaks to the reality
of the self that is who we are not but desperately wants to be who we are:
The Eyes Behind Her Eyes
“The poet is the seer; the poem is the act of appropriation.”
SOUL at the WHITE HEAT
—Joyce Carol Oates.
I
knew I was being called to write a poem as I watched an interview with the
writer Iris Murdoch on the program Modern
Philosophy on YouTube, hosted by
the eloquent professor of philosophy and author Bryan Magee, the topic being
“Philosophy and Literature,” but I wasn’t called by what the Oxford professor and
novelist Iris Murdoch had to say about philosophy and literature, but by the
beguiling look of her eyes, a look that I often see in deeply shadow-afflicted
people, but never as pronounced as it was in Iris Murdoch’s wary blue eyes that
inspired my poem “The Eyes Behind Her Eyes” that I’ve been summoned by my muse to expand upon in today’s spiritual musing—
The Eyes Behind
Her Eyes
She
had four eyes, two eyes
to
look, and two eyes to see,
and
she could not tell which
eyes
were which.
Oxford
Professor, writer, wife,
and
childless by choice, a fluid
woman
like no other, and the
breach
of her eyes grew wider.
Tutoring
young Oxfordian
minds
by day, she stalked the
corridors
of culture by night
to
appease her hunger.
Danger
abounded as she looked
for
what she could not see,
and
the harder she looked, the
more
the danger grew.
Novel
after novel, essay after
philosophical
essay, but the
breach
grew wider and wider
as
her mind grew darker, —
And
she died of Alzheimer’s.
The magic of
poetry is its power to see into the mystery of life, and I had no idea what my
poem was trying to tell me; all I knew was that the first two lines came to me
unbidden and I had to work out the rest of the poem, which I did. I went online
and researched Iris Murdoch’s life, and then I did some thoughtful editing and
rewriting; but this did not alter the essential insight of my poem which had to
do with giving visual clarity to the Jungian concept of the shadow that I saw
in Iris Murdoch’s eyes, it only enhanced the poetic imagery. This is how the
cognitive mind works with the writer’s creative unconscious.
Actually, the
first two lines of my poem were not what they turned out to be in the finished
poem; the first two lines went like this:
“She had four eyes, /two up front, and two in the back.” This is how my
muse captured Iris Murdoch’s shadow, which was so obvious to me that I could see
her shadow as another personality with its own mind and emotions and distinct identity,
hence the four eyes; and when the first lines of a poem come to me, I have to unpack them to see what my muse
is trying to tell me. Nonetheless, I had to change the first two lines, because
they created the wrong impression of having a set of eyes at the back of her
head instead of having eyes within her eyes which was more accurate.
As I came to see
after years of writing, our creative unconscious is infinitely wiser than our
cognitive mind, but the cognitive mind has to do the work, and when the first
lines of a poem come unbidden (sometimes, though rarely, a whole poem comes to
me unbidden and nearly word perfect like my poem “What the Hell Is Going on Out
There?)), I have no choice but to explore the given lines with thoughtful
reflection, because if I don’t I will jeopardize my gift for writing poetry;
which only means, really, that I’d have to work harder to pry out of my
unconscious the glimmer of an insight.
But not with “The
Eyes Behind Her Eyes.” This poem was easy to write once I had the first two
lines, because they told me everything I needed to say about the shadow that I
saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes. Which isn’t to say that I was specifically given a
poetic imperative to explore Iris Murdoch’s shadow, which I did anyway by
researching her life online, but because the creative imperative of my poem was
to introduce the idea that the shadow can be seen in a person’s eyes, and I had
never seen the shadow as distinctly as I did in Iris Murdoch’s eyes. That’s why
I had to write “The Eyes Behind Her
Eyes.”
So, how did I know
that she had such a distinct shadow personality? What made it stand out for me?
What was its most distinguishing feature? What gave her shadow away?
This is almost
impossible to answer, but I will try; and the best way to resolve this mystery
would be to provide a context that allows for the shadow to be seen in a
person’s eyes, a context that took me years to work out and which I creatively
explored in my literary memoir The Lion
that Swallowed Hemingway and its sequel, My Writing Life: Reflections on My High School Hero and Literary Mentor
Ernest “Papa” Hemingway, which brought my relationship with Hemingway’s
paradoxical personality to resolution.
In effect, then;
like a mystery writer who knows the solution to his mystery before writing his
novel, I will resort to the old saying that you can always tell a tree by its
fruit. Let me say up front then, with all the gnostic certainty of personal
experience and all the reading and writing and years of stalking the elusive
shadow (my own primarily): the shadow is the unconscious persona of
one’s most private, most selfish nature; and it follows that the more
self-centered and selfish a person is, the more shadow-afflicted they will be.
This is what inspired The Lion that
Swallowed Hemingway and its sequel three years later, and what also gave
Iris Murdoch’s shadow away in her conversation with Bryan Magee.
Selfishness is the
essential nature of our shadow, and all of its consequent behavior (the most
bitter fruits of the shadow tree are self-deception, vanity, and blind
insensitivity), which I saw in Iris Murdoch’s eyes that set free the first two
lines of my poem; so, I wrote my poem while I was in the grips of my daimon and then went online to research
her life so I could flesh in my poem with biographical details that would
confirm and expand my intuition, like the telling detail that Iris Murdoch had
numerous sexual affairs before and after her marriage to the novelist and
literary critic John Bayley, casual and passionate affairs with both men and
women which were later verified by her posthumously published private letters.
I learned that
Iris Murdoch was “gender fluid,” so I added the phrase “a fluid woman like no
other” in my poem to reflect this detail of her private life, a critical detail
that spoke to her voracious sexual appetite that compelled her to gratify her
sexual desires over, and over, and over again.
“Memoirs by her husband, John Bayley, and
Richard Eyre’s film Iris, in particular, defined her life around
the poles of her defiant insistence on following her sexual desires where they
took her,” wrote Sarah Churchwell in her review of Murdoch’s novel The Sea, the Sea. Which isn’t to judge her morally; all that
mattered to the imperative of my poem was the selfish nature of her private
self, because the more rapacious one’s shadow is, the more distinct its
identity will be, and I could see Iris Murdoch’s private shadow self as
distinctly as I could see her erudite, sophisticated ego personality.
In my online
research, it did not surprise me to learn that the basic themes of all her
novels were “good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of
the unconscious,” because the more shadow-afflicted a person is, the more
morally-conflicted they will be, and Iris Murdoch was a very conflicted woman
which was revealed to me by the “breach of her eyes,” as I wrote in my poem, the
distance between her two sets of eyes that was later confirmed by my research
on her life, both private and public.
“Iris Murdoch is an odd and difficult subject. Both in
artistic and personal terms, she is a one-off. She does not fit comfortably
into any literary history and her life was a series of contradictions,” wrote
Bryan Appleyard in his review of Iris
Murdoch: A Life, by Peter Conradi, which is a perfect description of a
deeply shadow-afflicted person, which Iris Murdoch’s eyes revealed to me.
Ironically, I’ve
never read any of her novels or essays; but I did see the movie Iris based upon John Bayley’s first two
memoirs of his wife, starring Kate Winslet as the young Iris and Dame Judi
Dench as the older Iris who was ravaged and died of Alzheimer’s, a poignant
portrayal of a philosopher/writer’s life who creatively explored truth through
her novels, as novelists tend to do; and all I wanted to do with my poem was to
give the reader a glimpse into the creative process of truth-seeking through
poetry, which can be eerily revealing when inspired because there is often much
more to a poem than even the poet can see; and in “The Eyes Behind her Eyes” I
caught a faint glimmer of an insight into the possibility that Alzheimer’s
disease may be as much psychologically induced as it is biologically based, an
insight that is far beyond the scope of today’s science and far more telling
about the shadow than even the most daring poet wants to imagine.
Suffice to say then that I wrote my poem
because it came to me unbidden to catch the shadow out, because the shadow is
next-to-impossible to see. Only the inspired sight of a poet or mystic can see
that the shadow is who we are not, the repressed and unresolved karmic energy
of our ego/shadow personality, and what creates the “breach” between who we are
not and who we are was what my muse was trying to tell me with “The Eyes Behind
Her Eyes,” which I was called to expand upon in today’s spiritual musing.
——-—
There we are,
then; a perspective on the shadow self from that state of consciousness that
poets and mystics have access to. But who in the hell wants to believe that our
shadow self is as real as our ego personality? And yet writers have always
explored the shadow side of the human personality, like Dostoevsky did in his
angst-ridden novel The Double; and as
Oscar Wilde did in his soul-baring novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray; and Robert Louis Stevenson in the
best-known novel in the world on the deepest, darkest aspect of the human personality
in his shocking tale of The Strange Case
of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Those are the most
obvious examples. But exploring the shadow side of life makes for the most compelling
reading, and this theme can be found throughout literature; like in James Joyce’s
Dubliners, specifically his story
“The Counterpart,” or in Ernest Hemingway’s much more nuanced story “The Snows
of Kilimanjaro” that he said was his most autobiographical story, but which I
seriously doubt because Hemingway was dangerously more revealing of his
self-serving ego/shadow personality in his
most criticized novel Across the River
and Into the Trees in which he projected
his own pathetically besotted love for a 19-year-old Venetian girl called
Adriana onto Colonel Cantwell’s infatuation with an 18-year-old Venetian girl
called Renata, and I explored Ernest “Papa” Hemingway’s shadow-conflicted personality in my book The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway that I sent to Professor Jordan Peterson,
followed up three years later with my sequel My Writing Life in which I brought to resolution my understanding
of my high school hero and literary mentor’s paradoxical personality.
I’ve been studying
the shadow every since I became aware of my shadow in high school (around grade
ten I began to sense my own falseness), and I’ve become very familiar with the
psychology of the shadow self; but it’s next to impossible to expose the shadow
to the light of day. I tried with my first novel What Would I Say Today If I Were to Die Tomorrow? and I paid
dearly for my effort. My hometown was so disturbed—like an angry dog that had
been rudely awakened—by my novel that Penny and I had to relocate to Georgian
Bay for peace of mind; so, I know what it can cost a writer for exposing the dark
shadow side of life in one’s writing. Look at what happened to James Joyce, who
not only turned his home town of Dublin against him with his stories and novels,
but his whole country; and now they celebrate him as one of Ireland’s greatest
writers. Resentment runs deep, but it runs dry eventually.
This is why I admire
professor Jordan Peterson for taking a stand and speaking truth to power to
defend our inherent right to free speech and putting himself out there with his
personally wrought 12 Rules for Life: An
Antidote to Chaos that scares the bejesus (the archetypal shadow) out of the
nefariously mischievous spirit of postmodern nihilism and political correctness;
but like everyone whose path can take them no further on their journey to wholeness
and completeness, he was called to a higher path; and being painfully true to
himself, he heeded the call and became a hierophant for today’s crazy world…
No comments:
Post a Comment