The Rider, The Elephant, The Rhino
Using poetry to connect all kinds of awareness
I’ve never doubted there is a subconscious, though I understand the reasoning that lies behind the belief that every perceived cause is actually—merely—the product of the mental gymnastics of justification.
I think this—therefore I believe this—therefore I feel this.
I guess thinking that everything we feel is a byproduct of a constructed narrative could make a person believe we humans can take control and save ourselves from the output of the cultural software installed in our neurons: if you don’t think it, you can’t believe it, and, therefore, you won’t feel it.
Everything is logical. To understand is to justify.
Eugenio Ionesco. Rhinoceros, 1959
It’s all very logical. As is the belief that talk therapy will allow a person to deconstruct feelings, beliefs, and thoughts to disconnect, disarm, or “heal” trauma. As if there is a chain of cause and effect that has to be interrupted. And once interrupted our interior life will run as smoothly as we believe our bodies will after a cancer has been successfully excised.
This hasn’t been my experience of mind/body realities. We forget—to our personal and political peril—that all of our if/thens are mental constructions. Some will run parallel to the world’s events, and we’ll find comfort in our collective sense of control. But others will send us reeling towards poetry.
(After all, which God doesn’t speak to us through poetry?)
It has been a year since the tumors were taken out of my body. There is no mechanism for the surgeons to double-check their work: they sew you up and send you home. A year later, they do another mammogram to see if something has come back.
While the technician is positioning the huge machine (by pressing the switch with her foot, causing the two planes to move toward each other, while she squeezes what is left of my left breast into place, pushing my shoulder out of the way), she glances at my face.
“Are you all right?”
I have no cognitive awareness that my vision has been closing in, and that I’m about to collapse. My body is aware of and responding in a way that has bypassed my brain: no thoughts, no beliefs… and in fact, no feelings.
Once I understand what is going on, I laugh out loud. I have a macabre cartoon image in my head of the majority of my body lying on the floor bleeding, having fallen away from the part of me squeezed tightly between the two planes of the machine. I can’t draw, and I can’t explain it, so it stays my own private joke.
Now there is a third woman in the room, who stands behind me, her feet wide, braced to hold me up while the machine does its job. I stare at the Joan Miro graphic hanging in a cheap frame on the opposite wall. Wobbly tear-drop shapes that look like flattened, distorted breasts. It’s funny/not funny.
I know that, no matter how many sessions I use to talk about this with my psychiatrist, this will happen again in one form or another. My body is a lovely beast. I’ve lived with her long enough to know that I’ll only—maybe—be able to “justify” her responses, to mechanically graft a logical framework onto what already exists.
And regardless, I’ll never be able to control her. I said I believe in the subconscious, but I believe that the term is a misnomer. It isn’t a sub-function of consciousness, but a concurrent awareness wholly unto itself.
It is what it is.
And if I can love my weirdo dog Leonard without understanding him, surely I can accept this her/me thing that isn’t reliant on an if/then thought process. Maybe I will do better to hold her, live with her, and stop trying to fix her. To fix me.
Hell: Faint if you want to faint, Baby.
Some psychologist came up with the metaphor of our mind being made up of a rider and an elephant. I accepted this metaphor for a long time, believing the elephant represented both the emotional and the somatic experience, as though they were one and the same.
The body can express both thoughts and feelings, sure, but why should that exclude it from possessing its own form of awareness that is unrelated to either? Feelings can take their cue from the body. Thoughts can as well. Why not consider a triad of discrete awarenesses, that sometimes justify one another.
Yesterday I asked my colleague if he thought that we can only teach when we are not trying to teach. That maybe most of what we are putting effort into is the illusion sugar-coating (for our egos), masking the real mechanisms of how we all learn.
Maybe our efforts beyond opening the door are incidental. At best. All our pedagogic theories in learning strategies still beg the question that all knowledge is ultimately in service to, or subordinate to, the rational mind.
This year I am co-directing/teaching the students’ final production. We’ve agreed on doing a deconstruction of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People. I still don’t know how I feel about it. I find it difficult to get around the pro-fascist aspects of the text. But I’m excited to hear/see what the students think/feel/express physically working with the material. I trust that will be the way around my own thoughts.
Fragments of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros keep popping into my head when I think about Ibsen’s play. The philosophical connections, yes, but more than these thoughts, I am led by a tactile memory of rough hide, of densely compacted fibers that make up a horn that can skewer a man. I have no idea when I would have touched a rhino hide or horn, but this memory is here in the pads of my fingertips. And I am not going to bother to deconstruct that, nor justify it for anyone.
I mean, what would be the point? I know, eventually, I will need to graft some kind of justification for the allusion. But I also know it will be random, and more of a hinder than a help in the creative process.
Last year, while I was on leave, the team introduced a new model for final productions, one that is far more instructor-led than before. I’m experiencing feelings that seem disconnected from the thoughts I have about it. And I am curious-as-Hell about how my body will respond in the working space, when we meet with the students next week.
Something has freed itself in me.
I learned today that rhinos have very sensitive skin. And a symbiotic relationship with the Oxpecker (which has long been a personal metaphor for my inner critic).
That has to mean something, right?
Daisy: I never knew you were such a realist-I thought you were more poetic. Where's your imagination? There are many sides to reality. Choose the one that's best for you.
Eugenio Ionesco. Rhinoceros, 1959
Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’ll be back later this week with an audio poem. And again on Sunday with another Process Journal Entry.
Until then, have a great week!
Warmly,
Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World